A Great Idea at the Time

by Alex Beam

  As evening gathered, Maude Hutchins invaded her husband’s office with her baby daughter in a perambulator, took the men home, and started pouring martinis. The subject of evidence was soon forgotten. Years later, Adler remembered a Proustian moment in his first encounter with the beautiful, “lithesome” Maude: “She exuded the pungent scent of the plasticene that she had been modeling. The whiff of this odor produced a state of embarrassed excitement in me, even to the point of my blushing.” Adler explained to the couple that he was reminded of a bygone love affair with a sculptress. The odor took him back.

  “The immediate consequences of that Friday in New Haven were many and various,” Adler later wrote. “The ultimate consequences changed the whole course of my life.” Hutchins offered Adler a Yale Law School professorship. Adler, while not particularly happy at Columbia, couldn’t bear to leave New York. He continued to work on evidence, and even coauthored two books on the subject. Hutchins had other irons in the fire. Within the year, he had been offered and accepted the University of Chicago presidency, and he again reached out to Adler. At a fateful meeting in the Manhattan Yale Club, Adler recalled, “Bob confessed to me that, in his career so far, he had never given much thought to the subject of education. He found that somewhat embarrassing now that he was president of a major university.”

  Well, yes. Hutchins told Adler, and later wrote in a famous essay, “The Autobiography of an Uneducated Man,” that he hadn’t learned much of anything at Oberlin and Yale. His time in New Haven, he reported, was spent “wandering aimlessly around and cutting up frogs. I don’t know why,” he added:

  I can tell you nothing now about the inside of a frog. In addition to the laboratory we had lectures. All I remember about them is that the lecturer lectured with his eyes closed. He was the leading expert in the country on the paramecium. We all believed that he lectured with his eyes closed because he had to stay up all night watching the paramecia reproduce.

  Hutchins claimed to have finished one of the country’s finest law schools “with some knowledge of the Bible, of Shakespeare, of ‘Faust,’ of one dialogue of Plato, and of the opinions of many semi-literate and a few literate judges.” When he taught in Lake Placid, he recounted, he couldn’t believe how uninterested students and teachers were in learning. Then as now, they just wanted to score well on those darned college exams.

  Well then, said Adler, who was teaching the John Erskine books at Columbia and at the People’s Institute. Have I got a great idea for you.

  THREE

  THE GREAT BOOKS IN THE GRAY CITY

  THE UNIVERSITY OF CHICAGO was unlike anything Robert Hutchins had ever seen. This was not Oberlin College in agrarian Ohio, thirty-five miles from the nearest city, where students and professors dreamed of a more perfect world. Likewise, Hyde Park was a far cry from the gentilities and elm-shaded walkways of New Haven, Connecticut. Chicago in 1929 was like the Incredible Hulk, America’s second-largest city, bursting out of its carapace, swollen with immigrants, capital, hustlers, poets, muckrakers, ideas, world-beating architecture, and enviable energy. Historian Mary Ann Dzuback writes that in Chicago, “[p]olitical and economic power was divided unevenly” among a corrupt Democratic political machine, “bootlegging gangsters whose most notable representative was Al Capone,” and the wealthy industrialists of the downtown Loop: the Marshall Fields of department-store fame, the meatpacking Swifts, the reaper-rich McCormicks, and many others.

  In his twenty-year-long tenure at Chicago, Hutchins would bump up against the politicians who occasionally inveighed against “left-wing” professors when it suited them. He never met Capone, although he liked to point out that the two men shared a birthday. But he saw plenty of the downtown businessmen. In fact, it was Harold Swift, chairman of the university’s board of trustees, who hired him.

  There is the famous story of Swift telephoning Hutchins in his Yale Law School office at 7 A.M. Hutchins had mentioned during a preliminary interview with the U. of C. trustees that he liked to get cracking early. The very next day, upon returning to Chicago, Swift rang Hutchins’s office to check. “Hutchins was mildly puzzled,” his friend Milton Mayer wrote, “because Harold Swift was known as a man who, like John D. Rockefeller, thought twice before making a long-distance phone call to say what could just as easily be said on a penny postcard.”

  The University of Chicago differed from the Oberlins and Yales of the world in another important respect. It was less than forty years old. While architect Daniel Burnham had been building his famous, temporary “White City” along the shores of Lake Michigan for the 1893 Columbian Exposition World’s Fair, John D. Rockefeller was breaking ground for his Gothic limestone “Gray City” less than a mile inland, on lands donated by Marshall Field. “The good Lord gave me the money, and how could I withhold it from Chicago?” Rockefeller later commented. “It’s the best investment I ever made.” The setting was promising; both Burnham and Rockefeller were building on land adjacent to parks landscaped by Frederick Law Olmsted.

  In a few short decades Rockefeller and his first president, William Rainey Harper, created something astonishing out of nothing—nothing except money, that is. Harper trumped even Hutchins in the bright young man sweepstakes. He had finished college before his 15th birthday and had been awarded a Yale PhD in pedagogy and Hebrew Studies by age 18. With Rockefeller’s money and his own furious determination, Rainey had created a modern research university ex nihilo. Only two American universities had copied the research-intensive German model, which favored powerful graduate faculties in the sciences and humanities over the college, or undergraduate, curriculum. Those were Johns Hopkins in Baltimore and Clark University in Worcester, Massachusetts. By almost any metric, Chicago had eclipsed them and most other universities by the first quarter of the twentieth century. It had a law school, a medical school, a divinity school, a business school, and graduate schools of social service and of education. Its Philosophy Department, selected by John Dewy, whom Harper had personally recruited from the University of Michigan, had achieved worldwide fame. The Physics Department had two Nobel Prize winners, poached from Clark and from Washington University. The dyspeptic Thorstein Veblen became a national celebrity by railing against conspicuous consumption and the leisure class from the safety of the U. of C.’s Economics Department. In a 1925 survey of twenty university graduate departments, Chicago placed first in eight disciplines, and four of its departments finished second, well ahead of any Ivy League or major state university. Ten years later, a similar investigation of thirty-five academic departments nationwide ranked Chicago second after Harvard. Hutchins liked to recruit professors to Hyde Park with his trademark bon mot: “It’s not a very good university—it’s only the best there is.”

  Undergraduate education was not Chicago’s forte. For starters, the students lacked the sophistication, real or imagined, of the East Coast schools. Almost all of them hailed from the Midwest, and 70 percent came from Chicago. More than half of the students lived at home, not at the university. The notion of working while at college, which seemed exotic to the pampered Yale and Columbia men of the young century, was the norm on the Chicago campus.

  Chicago’s undergraduate men and women mainly attended large lecture courses, and did not follow common areas of study. Before Hutchins, historian John Boyer writes, Chicago had “a rather incoherent undergraduate curriculum, dominated by particularistic departmental interests and substantially staffed by graduate-student teaching assistants, [a setting that] offered little intellectual distinctiveness.” Hutchins’s friend and longtime university staffer Milton Mayer called the college curriculum “an accumulation of unrelated oddments, no sooner passed than past.” There was serious talk among Chicago’s senior scholars of doing away with the undergraduate college altogether.

  That would not be happening on Robert Hutchins’s and Mortimer Adler’s watch.

  When Hutchins became president of the University of Chicago in 1929, he invited Adler to join him. The offer was we
ll timed. Adler wasn’t wild about moving to Chicago, but Columbia wasn’t wild about keeping him on. He had been shunted among the psychology, law, and philosophy faculties. Upon receiving the summons to Hyde Park, Adler batted out his seventy-seven-page psychology dissertation in twenty consecutive hours at the typewriter. It was about the psychological experience of listening to piano music. It was the last piece of traditional academic work he would ever do.

  Hutchins thought he could parachute Adler into Chicago’s Philosophy Department, but they didn’t want him, especially when they learned he would be earning $1,000 a year more than they were. Adler had been making unflattering remarks about the Chicago philosophers at cocktail parties in New York (“slop and bilge . . . goddam Dewized bunk”) and the word got around. Hutchins had to stash Adler in the law school instead.2 In the same vein, Hutchins tried to appoint three of Adler’s cronies to a specially formed Committee on the Liberal Arts, created to circumvent faculty scrutiny. But the Faculty Senate fought back, and clipped Hutchins’s wings for good measure. Two of the cronies in question, Scott Buchanan and the improbably named Stringfellow Barr, known as “Winkie,” stomped off to found St. John’s College, the oldest and most prestigious all-Great-Books-all-the-time college in the world.

  Even before Hutchins set foot on campus, the faculty was proposing to reform the undergraduate curriculum. Hutchins seized on the program, which immediately became known as the New Plan, or the Hutchins Plan. This divided the university into a two-year undergraduate college and four Upper Divisions: Biological Sciences, Physical Sciences, Social Sciences, Humanities. Especially promising high school students could enter the undergraduate college after tenth grade, if they passed an entrance exam. The New Plan inaugurated yearlong general courses on a pass-fail basis, with students not required to attend lectures or seminars. (Counterintuitively, freshman attendance rose 1.3 percent in the Plan’s first year.) In lieu of written exams, the students had to pass comprehensive oral exams administered by professors outside the U. of C. system.

  The tenured faculty could rule the Divisions; Hutchins concentrated his attention on the college. “The purpose of higher education,” Hutchins thundered, “is to unsettle the minds of young men, to widen their horizons, to inflame their intellects.” He loved Woodrow Wilson’s line, that a university should produce young men “as unlike their fathers as possible.”

  But the 1930 reforms were only the beginning, in Hutchins’s and Adler’s view. The problem with undergraduate education was that kids didn’t really learn anything. Whereas nineteenth-century colleges had once celebrated a liberal arts education—liberal here derived from the Latin adjective libera, or “free”; a liberal education was deemed to be one that freed students—now it just prepared students for the professions, or for nothing. To Hutchins and Adler, specialization meant vocational education, which was not education at all. Far from freeing students, it locked them up, treating them as objects of production. It was all very well for upper-class children to study English and History at Harvard and Yale; their ticket into the professions had been printed at birth. But the sons and daughters of Middle America, almost all of them the first generation in their family to attend college, had other goals. They were working their way through college, in many cases, to become the first member of their family to hold down a white-collar job.

  For the first two years of college, Hutchins and Adler had far bolder ideas than those of the New Plan. Startlingly, they began talking up the medieval Trivium—grammar, rhetoric, and logic—and the Quadrivium—arithmetic, geometry, astronomy, and music—as the true basis of a secondary education.3 Cribbing

  When he published his educational summa, The Higher Learning in America, in 1936, Hutchins put all his cards on the table. The true subject of undergraduate education should be metaphysics, which, following Aristotle, he called “the highest science, the first science.” “The aim of higher education is wisdom,” Hutchins wrote. “Wisdom is knowledge of principles and causes. Metaphysics deals with the highest principles and causes. Therefore metaphysics is the highest wisdom.”

  How can students achieve wisdom? Not by sitting in a classroom listening to teachers lecture, and not from textbooks, either. Enter the Great Books, and the John Erskine pedagogy of Socratic, or shared, inquiry between teacher and pupil: “If he uses the great books as the material read and discussed,” Hutchins wrote, “even the ordinary teacher (if he properly regards himself as a student of the great books along with his students) can perform the Socratic function and service—can ask questions which are genuinely questions in his own mind, because he is still himself a learner in the presence of the great books.”

  So the children of the Midwestern bourgeoisie were going to learn metaphysics, whether they wanted to or not. Hutchins, at heart a freethinker, hated what passed for freedom in undergraduate education. “The free elective system as Mr. Eliot introduced it at Harvard and as Progressive Education [read: Dewey] adapted it to lower age levels amounted to a denial that there was content to education,” he sneered. From his perch atop Columbia University, Dewey declared that Hutchins’s autocratic views on basic education smacked of fascism. This kindled a lifelong exchange of impolitic comments from the two men, with Dewey reserving special contempt for the Great Books educational formula: “The idea that an adequate education of any kind can be obtained by means of a miscellaneous assortment of 100 books, more or less, is laughable, when viewed practically.”

  Hutchins intended to prove his critics wrong. He would teach the classics to his undergraduates, and he would do it himself.

  For the fall semester of 1930, Hutchins’s first full year at Chicago, the following entry appeared in the catalog:

  General Survey

  General Honors Course 110—Readings in the classics of Western European literature. Limited to 20 by invitation. This is a two-year course, one two-hour class session each week. Credit is deferred until completion of the course.

  The students knew that Hutchins himself would be teaching the class, and the limited enrollment added cachet to the unusual experiment. Eighty students applied for seats in what would quickly become one of the most famous undergraduate courses in the country. One of the first students was Katharine Meyer, who would become famous as Kay Graham, owner of the Washington Post. Meyer had transferred to the University of Chicago from Vassar because she had spotted Hutchins’s “young, handsome, dynamic” picture in Redbook. As the students cowered around an oblong table, she recalled: “For the whole two hours, the two men hammered away, bullying us unmercifully—‘Well, Miss Meyer, tell us in your own words what Aristotle thinks about this.’ ‘What do you think about what he says?’ ‘Do you really think that good behavior follows from good values?’ ‘What are good habits?’ What are good values?’”

  “The methods they used often taught you most about bullying back,” she added: “about standing up to Hutchins and Adler, about challenging them and fundamentally pleasing them by doing it with gusto and verve, so that they were amused.”

  “What we gained was knowledge that we would never have gained ourselves,” Graham’s friend and contemporary Sydney Hyman remembers. “These are writers we never would have learned about in a million years: Quintilian’s Rhetorical Exercises? St. Thomas Aquinas? I was raised an Orthodox Jew. It was a world we never would have known.”

  “Never were egos so quickly deflated,” alumnus George McElroy reminisced for the university magazine:

  We had been supposed to start with The Iliad but Hutchins could not make it that week, so we had it and The Odyssey together. Adler had told us that he tended to go around the table calling on students, while Hutchins preferred to go down the class roll. The first name Hutchins noted was Dick Cragg.

  “Mr. Cragg,” said Hutchins, “there has been some discussion as to whether these two books were written by the same person. Do you find them alike or different?”

  Dick’s newly grown Adam’s apple bobbed. “Well, they both have a lot
of fighting—someone’s always crashing someone over the head.”

  “Then,” asked Hutchins, his right eyebrow cocking in what we came to know as his devilish-amusement warning (he had wrinkles slanting up over that eyebrow from its frequent use), “Mr. Cragg, when you pick up a book and find that, in this book, Soldier A ‘crashes’ Soldier B over the head, you exclaim, ‘Ah, this is Homeric!’?”

  “Hutchins liked to play such games,” McElroy remembered, “often asking some unusually tricky question and then leaning back and blowing eloquently perfect smoke rings while a student floundered.”

  The critic Susan Sontag, who arrived in Hyde Park a few years after McElroy and Graham, came to Chicago for similar reasons, after reading an article about Hutchins’s college in Collier’s magazine. It was “about this eccentric place, which didn’t have a football team, where all people did was study,” she later recalled, “and where they talked about Plato and Aristotle and Aquinas day and night. I thought, that’s for me.”

  Sontag married Philip Rieff, one of her teachers, and when he landed a job at Brandeis, she transferred to Harvard. “Harvard was a superb university,” she said, “but still, an ordinary university, with a big menu, and no ‘right way.’”

  Keeping Hutchins amused was of paramount importance, and the Great Books classes achieved this. Hutchins loved controversy, and he loved the querulous reaction of mainstream aca-demics to the news emerging from Chicago, that the undergraduates were “dialoguing” with the ancient greats. Nothing could have pleased the young president more than to confront a gray-bearded Chicago classicist on the neo-Ivy walkways of Mr. Rockefeller’s university: