PART SIX
CHICAGO (2)

27
The Great Books Industry

His disappointing encounters with adult legislators led Hutchins to a new emphasis on a theme he had largely ignored in his fight to reform college teaching and university research: "This pedagogical principle that subjects requiring experience can be learned only by the experienced, leads to the conclusion that the most important branch of education is the education of adults. We sometimes seem to think of education as something like the measles, mumps, chicken-pox, or whooping-cough: having had it once, one need not, indeed one can not, have it again.

"To say that humans should learn only in childhood would mean that they were human only in childhood. And it would mean that they were unfit to be citizens of a republic." Republican citizenship required the continual exercise of the citizen's intelligence to achieve and extend justice, peace, freedom, and order; "the ideal republic is the republic of learning, the utopia by which all actual republics are measured."^[1]

Education is not a matter for children: "Apart from mathematics, metaphysics, logic, astronomy, and similar theoretical subjects, it is clear that comprehension comes only with experience. A learned Greek"—the learned Greek was Aristotle—"remarked that young men should not listen to lectures on moral philosophy, and he was right. Moral philosophy, history, politics, economics, and literature can convey their full meaning only in maturity. When I taught Macbeth to boys in a preparatory school, it was a blood-and-thunder story, a good one, and well worth teaching, but a blood-and-thunder story still. Macbeth can mean what it meant to Shakespeare only when the reader has had sufficient experience, vicarious or otherwise, of marriage and ambition to understand the issues and their implications.

"A boy may be a brilliant mathematician or musician and I have known

several astronomers who were contributing to the international journals at the age of thirteen. But I never knew a child of that age who had much that was useful to say about the ends of human life, the purposes of organized society, and the means of reconciling freedom and order. It is subjects like these about which we are most confused and about which we must obtain some clarification if our civilization is to survive."^[2]

To the extent that it faithfully reflected the education of adolescents, adult education in the United States—in contrast, say, with the adult Folk School system of Denmark—was essentially a vocational program. It assumed that the student would work under the geographical and technical conditions under which he or she has studied: "Vocational agricultural training is given to students in the Dustbowl, who race for Chicago the moment they are through school. Mechanical training is given on obsolescent machines in Chicago to students who find themselves confronted with entirely different ones when they get a job."^[3] The place to train hands for industry was in industry, as the wartime training of airplane mechanics demonstrated; the aircraft companies produced better mechanics in an intensive few weeks than the schools could produce in years.

The curse of vocationalism in adult education followed from the vocationalism which had overspread the universities because of the difficulty of interesting young people in what were known as "academic subjects": "The whole apparatus of football, fraternities, and fun is a means by which education is made palatable to those who have no business in it."^[4] But every boy and girl had a business to have as much true education as he or she could absorb, without regard to financial capability—education interestingly offered through the employment of great books instead of textbooks, and discussion instead of lectures.

"The fact is that the best practical education is the most theoretical one. This is probably the first time in human history in which change on every front is so rapid that what one generation has learned of practical affairs in the realm of politics, industry, business, and technology is of little value to the next. What the father has learned of the facts of life is almost useless to his son. It is principles, and everlastingly principles, not data, not facts, not helpful hints, but principles which the rising generation requires if it is to find its way through the mazes of tomorrow"^[5] —and the application of principle to the facts of life if the risen generation was to find its way through the mazes of today.

Where it wasn't vocational, adult education in the extension divisions of the urban colleges and universities in the first third of the twentieth century was almost entirely remedial or recreational. It taught arts and crafts for leisure time or retirement, or it provided training in fields like

language for immigrants or for natives who had been deprived of childhood schooling. But there was another, almost forgotten tradition in adult education characterized by the old Chautauqua movement and a scattering of public forums that dealt with the liberal studies. One of these, in the 1920s, was the People's Institute of New York under Everett Dean Martin, where series after series of free lectures were offered to an audience interested in nonvocational self-improvement. One of the lecturers—who were paid a pittance—was young Mortimer Adler of the Columbia University psychology department.

In 1926 Martin, prodded by Adler, Scott Buchanan, and other of his lecturers, obtained a two-year grant from the Carnegie Corporation to introduce great books discussion groups around the city, staffed by rising young Columbians like Clifton Fadiman, Jacques Barzun, Richard McKeon, Mark Van Doren, and Whitaker Chambers (of later Alger Hiss case fame and infamy). These relative youngsters—two of them serving as coleaders of each discussion group—were all products of John Erskine's general honors course at Columbia, in which, instead of textbooks, the course materials were the classics.

The People's Institute experiment was a success, but there was no further funding for it. Ten years and more later, Adler and Hutchins, teaching the great books as a freshman honors course at Chicago, were moved to set up such courses for adults at the university's extension division downtown. The courses, taught by young members of the faculty, were not particularly popular in competition with the traditional evening school subjects. Then Adler concocted the scheme of establishing discussion groups around Chicago, much in the People's Institute manner of fifteen years before. The Chicago Public Library offered the use of its branches. The problem was to find a large enough number of group leaders, and Adler suggested to the university's dean of extension that the university train laymen to lead groups. Since the Socratic method involved the asking, not the answering, of questions and forbade lecturing, intelligent laymen might be ably trained to do the job and perhaps do it better than professional academics habituated to being experts and venting their expertise in lectures.

The effort, undertaken in 1944, was an immediate success. Other library systems, first in the Middle West and then all over the country, came into the program, and the University of Chicago found itself sending out extension faculty instructors to conduct training programs for lay leaders whose burgeoning groups met not only in libraries but in churches, factories, service and veterans' organizations, and in schoolrooms in the evening.

The burgeoning program was beset by two difficulties. Public libraries

could not lay their hands on enough copies of say, Dante, Plato, or Gibbon, to supply a group of twenty-five or thirty at the same time. Other agencies and institutions that sponsored groups were even harder pressed. Besides, the sponsors of the program urged group members to buy, rather than borrow, the books, since it was a Hutchins-Adler dogma that a book well read (and reread) was a book well marked. For the purpose of group discussion it was important that the participants all had the same translation of a given text and, if possible, the same edition for page referral in the course of discussion. Bookstores, like libraries, did not stock enough such copies of a required book to meet the simultaneous demand of twenty-five or thirty customers—or, as was often the case when there were several groups in the same community, for fifty, seventy-five, or a hundred copies.

That wasn't all. Lists of readings had to be developed for second-, third-and fourth-year groups—ultimately through ten years—plus readings for high school and junior high school programs. And the university extension division was soon over its ears in administering a nationwide undertaking. But it wasn't until the war ended that the Great Books Foundation was established as an independent entity with Hutchins as board chairman. At this point Lynn A. Williams, Jr., came into the picture. Trained as a lawyer and an engineer, Williams was an ostensibly roughneck industrial executive with a passion for the liberal education of adults without regard to their previous schooling. As vice-president of the Stewart Warner Corporation, running its Indianapolis plant, he solicited the university's assistance in setting up a great books program for his workers on company time, with Adler and another Chicago faculty man coming to Indianapolis to conduct the discussions.

The Chicago people, Hutchins included, were at once taken with Williams and his wrong-side-of-the-tracks facade. (Item: "You want to give the competition a pasting? You hire their best salesman, send him to Maine, and fire him." Item: "Don't can the guy who's no good; can the guy who hired him.") Hutchins offered Williams the presidency of the Great Books Foundation—and later the vice-presidency of the university—and Williams quit industry and became an academic.

In the last months of the war and the first postwar years the nationwide great books discussion program took off like a modest wildfire. The six- or eight-session training of volunteer leaders was almost invariably successful, with laymen on the whole readily mastering the art of intellectual inquisition. With group members required to argue from the books themselves in conjunction with their own common sense and common experience, and the one-upmanship of the better schooled thus excluded, groups soon came to consist of a remarkably broad social mixture. Men and

women who had never before mingled socially discovered that mingling intellectually was a lively introduction; the corridor hummed during the coffee-break in the middle of the two-hour sessions, and groups often regaled themselves with end-of-the-year social gatherings. The program, holding its participants from year to year, went far to confirm an old Hutchins thesis: persons of the most limited backgrounds and commonplace occupations were as susceptible to an exciting kind of self-education as their more liberally educated fellow citizens.

In the course of a long, prophetic lifetime Hutchins made two prophecies that the late Fiorello La Guardia would call beauts. In 1920 two of his undergraduate friends at Yale came to him with the mock-up, or dummy, of a projected weekly magazine; he told them it would never go and advised them to forget it. (The two friends were Henry R. Luce and Briton Hadden, and they did not forget it; the projected weekly was Time. ) The second of the two beauts is dated 1947, when Hutchins was chairman of the board of the newly established Great Books Foundation. In the last years of the 1940s the great books program for adults acquired strong momentum across the country. Seeing it as a tool to help pry the whole of American education away from vocationalism and "presentism," Hutchins and Adler flogged it (as the term would be a generation later) with an immense amount of hype (as the term would be yet another generation later). Articles appeared not only in the highbrows but in publications like Life . Public demonstration discussions were mounted in major cities. Hutchins and Adler packed three thousand people into Chicago's Orchestra Hall for a panel session on Plato's Apology , and the city's semiliterate mayor proclaimed a Great Books Week. Carried away by the hoopla, Hutchins prophesied that fifteen million people would be involved in the great book program within five years.

He was wrong by something like 14,957,000. The movement peaked in the flush of the first postwar years to a maximum of some 43,000 enrollees in some three hundred communities—a not inconsiderable achievement. Then it leveled off, perhaps coincidentally with the onset of McCarthyist anti-intellectualism in the 1950s. It never recovered its sensational early steam, and Hutchins and Adler drifted away from it. Thirty years later it was still in business nationwide (and Lynn Williams was its board chairman). It was still the nearest thing the country had to liberal education for adults.

With the university out from under the administration of the program after 1947, money to support the independent Great Books Foundation had to be come by elsewhere. Paul Mellon's Old Dominion Fund kicked in. So, later, did the short-lived Fund for Adult Education (a Ford Founda-

tion subsidiary set up by Hutchins after he had left the university for its associate directorship).

But the necessity to obtain the books in quantity provided the solution of the financial problem. The foundation published t paperback sets of eight or ten readings for each year's program and sold them at a modest profit to the participants. (There was no tuition fee; the lay leaders were unpai and the meeting places were provided without cost. The book profits, plus continued grants, also supported the travel and salaries of two or three leader trainers and an office staff.)

Supplying cheap paperback reprints to the community in the libraries and churches was one thing; supplying them to the Fat Men was another. The Fat Men were—or was—the brain child of Vice-president Will Munnecke, late of Marshall Field's. In the spring of 1943—oh yes, there was a world war on—Munnecke bethought himself of a little scheme on which he sounded out a few of the trustees and other Chicago nabobs with whom he was on good terms socially. The response was gratifying, and he went to Hutchins with the proposal that there be an invitation-only great books group of leading (i.e., financially corpulent or fat) Chicagoans and their wives to meet once a month at the posh University Club downtown, with Hutchins and Adler as its coleaders and Milton Mayer as water boy. And so the class continued, with a necessarily changing constituency, for thirty years. (Adler was delighted, when Hutchins left the university, to go on conducting the class solo, and uninterruptably, in violation of the ironclad tradition of two leaders for each group. He subsequently set up his own Men's group in San Francisco, and another one as an "executives' seminar" at the Aspen Institute for Humanistic Studies. A similar elite class was organized, with Adler and Mayer as its leaders, in Indianapolis, and it was as a member of this group that Lynn Williams moved into the great books circle.)

As "the generals" took more and more of his time and energies, Hutch-ins was ever harder pressed to pay attention to the things he cared about and the things he had to do at the university. He cared about the great books program, made speeches about it, and took part, with Adler (and occasionally Mayer), in public demonstration discussions of sure-fire items, like the Declaration of Independence and the Communist Manifesto in combination, in well-filled auditoriums across the country. But he had to leave the administrative work to Adler and the people at the extension division. Adler, with no generals on his back, was eager to jump into the expanding program and serve as its powerhouse.

Hutchins tried hard to show up for the Fat Men's class, for obvious reasons. It included a few of his influential friends among the one-third of

his board who joined it. None of his most obdurate enemies on the board took part, though they were invited to. And apart from trustees it included some donors to the university and a few influential lawyers. The atmosphere of the meetings was saucy and refreshing, with the Gold Coast elite submitting themselves to friendly inquisition on the sorts of political, economic, religious, and, to some extent, the personal phobia and mania that were rarely mentioned, much less argued, in their respectable circles. Had the meetings not been closed to the press, Colonel McCormick's Chicago Tribune could have reported some subversive discussion, with supposedly nice people (the town's very nicest) batting Marx, free love, atheism, and even the Republican Party around. The Hutchins badinage was a mite restrained among the rich, but it still provided an unfailing entertainment, and some real enlightenment. The Fat Men's was a good class, and a tactically useful one.

But the finding of the books for it was something special. The gentry were not given to scrabbling in the second-hand bookstores: they were given to getting what they wanted new and to getting it when they wanted it. This meant the Chicago bookstores turning up thirty-five or forty copies of a bit of Plotinus, Hume, or Faraday in a hurry. (Adler's reading list for this special group was independent of the list for the regular program.)

The book problem soon seemed to be insoluble. But there was one Fat Man who specialized in solving the insoluble, at, if possible, a profit and, if possible, a colossal profit. This was William Burnett Benton—who had shortened his name to William B. to save time, and then to plain William to save still more time—the Hutchins classmate from Yale who served as on-and-off vice-president of the University of Chicago and as publisher and one-third owner (he had given the university the other two-thirds) of the Encyclopaedia Britannica. Benton suggested to Hutchins and Adler that the Britannica publish a great set of the Great Books.

28
Ad Man

Of the publishing of book sets—including that perennial money-maker, Eliot's Five-Foot Shelf—there was no end.

The Britannica, since Benton had taken it over from Sears right after Pearl Harbor, by the middle of 1943 was beginning to produce what would soon be fabulous profits. Benton was looking for new ventures, primarily in publishing, and picked up Compton's Picture Encyclopaedia and the dictionary-rich Merriam-Webster Company. But the publishing business wasn't big enough to hold him. He staked his friend Bill Joyce to five thousand dollars on the latter's bet that shoes could be made in Los Angeles, and wound up partners of the five-million-dollars-a-year Joyce Shoe Company. He had considerable taste in art and left a significant collection of American paintings, having launched Reginald Marsh. As a young ad man he invented one musical abomination, the singing commercial on radio; as a seasoned entrepreneur he got in (and out, at an immense profit) on the founding of the "musical wallpaper" of Muzak. (Introducing him on an informal occasion, Hutchins said that he ought to apologize for the things he'd invented.) He persuaded his boss at the Lord and Thomas advertising agency—the same Albert D. Lasker of the University of Chicago board—to propose to Pepsodent that they sponsor the local Amos 'n' Andy show on NBC. Ten years later he persuaded Alfred P. Sloan of General Motors to subsidize the University of Chicago Round-Table of the Air, and the two programs became the most widely heard of all radio shows in entertainment and in education.

Not everything was dross. As board chairman of Britannica he took the EB into the new field of educational films in the 1940s, buying Erpi Classroom Films from Western Electric and merging it with Eastman Kodak's Classroom Films Division (which Eastman gave him, just as Sears gave

him the Britannica, reaping a greater tax advantage by giving away rather than selling the operation). He expected to operate Encyclopaedia Britannica Films, Inc., in the red for several years, but the Benton touch betrayed him. Within a few years it was bringing $300,000 a year to the university and more than $100,000 to Benton.

As vice-president at Chicago he used his position to put himself on the Round-Table on such diverse subjects as censorship, cartels, aviation, American-British relations, the common man, and the conditions of peace, achieving an instant quasi mastery of all such grand subjects, and carrying that mastery into the Truman administration as assistant secretary of state, where he concocted the Voice of America propaganda broadcasts to Communist Europe. And he was statesman enough, on appointment by his old partner, Governor Chester Bowles, to serve two years in the U.S. Senate from Connecticut and there rise alone, in 1951, to propose the expulsion of Senator Joseph McCarthy.

Like all senators he never quit being "Senator" though he was defeated, by the McCarthy forces in Connecticut, for election in 1952. A decade later he was the first American ambassador to UNESCO in Paris. He had been one of the largest contributors to John F. Kennedy's presidential campaign and had let it be known, unavailingly, that he was available for the plum appointment to the Court of St. James. (He was fond of saying that American foreign-service people should speak the language of the country in which they were stationed; and he spoke an overflowing brand of English.) The United Nations Educational, Scientific, and Cultural Organization was not then (or thereafter) a very significant international agency, and the appointment to it was largely honorific, involving three or four brief transatlantic trips a year.

When he died, a friend of his was talking about him with Maude Hutchins. The friend said, "I hear that Bill died in his sleep." "If he'd been awake," said Mrs. Hutchins, "he wouldn't have died." He respected time more than he respected anything else (including persons), and his pursuit of it was relentless. He would say, "I think I'll sleep for twenty minutes"—and sleep for twenty minutes. Shortly after he joined Hutchins at Chicago, he heard of two time-savers and went after them pell-mell. Physiologist Nathaniel Kleitman was reported to be conducting experiments in the hope of cutting two hours out of the normal night's sleep. "Think of it," said Benton, hurrying over to Kleitman's laboratory, "two hours. Two hours that I'm throwing away."

One day Hutchins walked into Benton's office while he was dictating a letter to his mother, beginning, "Dear Mother. Colon. How are you. Question mark." Hutchins said, "How are you , question mark?" Benton

wanted to know all about everything, provided he could find out about it in a short memorandum right away. He never stirred, or sat, without his dictaphone, rarely turned it off, and still more rarely wrote anything. One of the first American businessmen to fly regularly between Chicago and New York, he was never quite able to make up his mind on the time-saving advantages of the plane trip. A classic picture had him seated in the barber's chair on the Twentieth Century Limited, with a drink and his dictaphone in one hand, a manicurist working on the other, and an assistant sitting on a stool next to him taking notes.

When Hutchins, hearing of his resignation from Benton and Bowles, offered him the Chicago vice-presidency to beef up the university's public relations, Benton dictated a whole book for thdelectation of the trustees, suggesting (among other things) that the university change its name so that it would not be taken for a public institution. Hutchins had the book distributed to the trustees, most of whom professed amazement at Benton's quick acquisition of knowledge about the institution. But one of them, the arch-conservative Sewell Avery, board chairman of Montgomery Ward and Company, "made a series of speeches of the usual type," as Hutchins wrote Benton, "from which I was able, by hard work, to gather that Mr. Avery thought the University was Red and that our public relations could not be improved by anybody until the administration had cleaned out the radicals. Mr. Swift"—the chairman of the board—"took a very strong line in reply to Mr. Avery with the result that Mr. Avery said that if the University was not Red your appointment was a fine idea."^[1] Benton spent six months a year at the university for ten years, eventually leaving for the State Department.

He was not a frenetic man externally. He simply kept going all the time and kept everyone else going, in a steady frenzy. He was not a commanding figure, but he spent his life commanding and getting away with it, crudely, even brutally, but not ruthlessly. He exploited everyone he dealt with, intellectually, physically, and emotionally, but not financially. Secretaries were kept on half the night transcribing Benton memoranda and letters from his dictaphone tapes. If it meant leaving their families or admirers in the lurch, they and their families and admirers were all so handsomely compensated for the overtime that they didn't complain. (His personal assistant, John Howe, a Chicago boy, was once asked, when the pressure was especially intense in the office, if his boss had thought of hiring an additional "girl" to help out. "Bill doesn't hire a girl," Howe explained, "he hires a girl to hire a girl.")

"Bill," a longtime colleague explained, "thinks he's got 'muscle.' What he's got is money." He was not an inherently powerful person, simply a

brazen and insistent one who was very rich and hired very bright people all over the world who could not resist his lavish offers. "Ideas," he was given to saying, "are a dime a dozen." The men who had the ideas, and whose ideas Benton bought, were more expensive. ("I'd be crazy if I let Bob Hutchins out of my sight for sixty days at a time. Every idea he's ever had has made me a fortune.") His biographer tells how he hired Governor Adlai Stevenson—who, after his unsuccessful presidential campaigns, was going to resign as US Ambassador to the United Nations—to return to the private practice of law to get rid of some of his debts. Benton's enthusiastic biographer offers what must have been Benton's reconstruction of his proposal to his distinguished friend and traveling companion:

"You're too old to fuss with clients and their minor problems," Benton is quoted as saying. "I'll give you $100,000 a year and a $100,000 a year expense account if you will work for Britannica."

"Well," said Stevenson, "what would I do?"

"You would be the greatest 'working ornament' Britannica ever had," said Benton. "You could contribute greatly to our developing educational programs, and help expand our film company into a broad-based educational company . . . inspire our young executives and salesmen . . . help us expand into a world-wide publishing and educational force. . . . Your association with the company could arouse the interest of all countries in the new educational technologies—teaching machines, the new mathematics, the use of films, and audio-visual materials. And you'd still have time to play your key role as a world figure—because I wouldn't dare hope to take even 40% of your time."^[2]

Benton, or his money, was in the habit of being irresistible to men like Stevenson. After Stevenson's death and Hubert Humphrey's unsuccessful run for the presidency, he hired the latter as a consultant at $75,000 a year. He contributed large sums to the Stevenson and Humphrey campaigns and in 1968 baldly asked each of his board members to contribute $10,000 to candidate Humphrey: all but two complied. Stevenson and Humphrey were dime-a-dozen idea men par excellence, and their ideas stemmed from their own and Benton's Middle West populist backgrounds. (He was on close terms with Senator Bob and Governor Phil La Follette of Wisconsin). Like Benton, these were all men who never surrendered their primitive prairie radicalism. They were New Dealers before the New Deal, during the New Deal, and after the New Deal. They were all more mannerly than he was and at most levels much more intelligent—and they all needed money all their lives. His relations with such men were always symbiotic. They didn't lose, and he won.

He was the ultimate salesman, and in the Britannica (and later in the

Britannica's Great Books set) he had the ultimate item. Britannica (and the Great Books) advertised extensively, primarily through direct mail. It had no sales offices and was not stocked by bookstores; nor was its purchase arrangement ever advertised or given over the phone. It had a dozen or more prices, depending on the binding and the installment agreement. Its sole sales object was to get its salesman into the prospective customer's living room and have him deliver his pitch.

The quality of the Britannica had never again reached the peak of its famous 1911 edition; and, declining after the First World War, it went into a still steeper, steady decline under Benton, whose view (of which he himself was perhaps only half-conscious) was that what was between the covers of anything wasn't as important as the technique of selling the covers. Slashing the cost of everything but sales promotion, the new publisher reduced editorial correction and updating from edition to edition to the point where the shoddiness of the product inspired a serious critic to publish a book-length chapter-and-verse indictment of the dreadful inadequacies of the new and improved Britannica.^[3] Benton ignored the attack and stepped up the sales tempo.

The heart of the whole worldwide enterprise was the collection office in Chicago. ("The Encyclopaedia Britannica lives off installment buying," said Benton. "This is our whole business.") Soon after becoming Britannica's publisher, he inaugurated an annual matching companion volume to the set at $12.50, called The Britannica Book of the Year . By the time the Great Books of the Western World was published, ten years later, that little $12.50 item had produced such an immense profit that he had Mortimer Adler devise another $12.50 companion item, called The Great Ideas Today , to be sold to the installment purchasers of Great Books —and this one was also a small gold mine. Benton's explanation for the two ventures was that people who are making installment payments will go on making them until somebody tells them to stop; they might as well have an additional $12.50 tacked on to their regular notice.

The Britannica's selling methods and promotional practices were sufficiently notorious to have played a role (according to Hutchins) in the refusal of the trustees to put up the working capital and accept the EB as a direct gift from Sears Roebuck to the university. Some fifteen years after Benton took over its publication, the Federal Trade Commission ordered it to cease and desist from "deceptive acts in recruiting sales personnel, in gaining entry to the consumer's home, in selling its encyclopaedias, other books and related services, and in collecting debts."^[4] (Benton's biographer doesn't mention this sensational fact of corporate life.) A professor at the University of Colorado was interested in buying the fifty-four-volume set

of the great books and wrote to the company to ask the price. The reply was a foot-in-the-door great books salesman who delivered an oration on the educational advantages of reading the books and the social advantages of merely owning them. The professor tried to interrupt and say that he was acquainted with the advantages of reading books and had written simply to ask the price of the set; to no avail. In a fury, after he got the man out of the house, and still had not learned the price of the set, he wrote Benton and got a polite reply from a Benton assistant to the effect that this sales method, including the oration, had proved to be effective and the company did not allow its salesmen to depart from it.

Benton's suggestion, that the problem of getting the great books for the Fat Men's class be solved by publication of a set of them, fell on deaf ears here and there; but there were two ears that weren't deaf to it: Mortimer Adler's. Benton and Adler were—as Hutchins said admiringly—made for each other. The two men were consummate promoters of hot products—Palmolive soap and Thomism respectively. Their association grew closer as the association of both of them with Hutchins grew gradually somewhat more distant, and when Hutchins retired as the highly paid chairman of the Britannica editorial board, Adler, who had meanwhile negotiated a lifetime contract with Benton, succeeded him.

In the spring of 1943 Benton and Adler came to Hutchins with their project for the Great Books of the Western World. Hutchins was a bit bearish. There was a war on, in 1943, and nobody knew when, or, indeed, how, it would end. There might not be a ready market available—among other things—or even paper for the printing of what Benton and Adler between them envisaged as a stupendous aggregation of the noblest of all the works of the Western intellect, in every field, from Homer to Freud. (Works of the Orient were arbitrarily excluded.)

Besides, Hutchins was, as usual, to be the front man for the venture, its editor-in-chief; and he didn't see how he could conscientiously commit any of his own time to an undertaking of the scope that Benton and Adler proposed. No problem; Adler would be associate editor and fill in for Bob where it was necessary. It turned out to be necessary everywhere. The advisory board, which selected the books for the set—ultimately 443 works of seventy-four authors—was chosen by Hutchins. It consisted of Barr, Buchanan, Erskine, Mark Van Doren, Alexander Meiklejohn, Dean Clarence H. Faust (Hutchins' dean of the college), and the biologist Joseph J. Schwab (one of the younger Chicago scientists who supported Hutchins). The selection of the works took a couple of dozen weekend meetings over a two-year period and no end of reading and correspondence by the advisers. Hutchins, missing most of the meetings, which

were then chaired by Adler, manfully tried to read (or read in, at his usual phenomenal speed) the most earnestly disputed works. One-fourth of the authors included were mathematicians or natural scientists, and almost another fourth social scientists (including the great historians). The remaining authors were divided among the writers of imaginative literature and philosophers and theologians. The last four centuries were represented by fewer than one-sixth of the authors, and only Melville, William James, and the authors of the Federalist Papers were Americans. (With the possible exception of St. Augustine, there was no non-Caucasian author, and the list was 100 percent male.)

Apart from the enormous ballyhoo that attended its publication in 1952, the set was attacked, with varying degrees of justification, by those modernists who believed that the world began last Thursday; by the cultural jingoists, who believed it began in America; by the small cliques (in those days) of admirers of oriental, female, and Negro writings; and by the partisans of those great writers who were excluded, such as Cicero, Calvin, Nietzsche, Leibniz, Mark Twain, and the Brontës.

It was a classic undertaking, nine years in publication, all told, and the triumph of a vision as immense in literary and educational as it was in commercial terms. Apart from the special-interest carping, it was met with approbation. Gilbert Highet in the New York Times hailed it as "a noble monument to the power of the human mind." It was, in addition, a monument to the powers of William Benton and Mortimer Adler as promoters, perhaps more especially of Benton, who recognized the genius of Adler in proposing, and concocting, the two-volume Syntopicon that went with the set.

At the outset of the giant venture Benton demanded something that would appear more readable to the prospective buyer. Adler went into intense meditation and came up with an idea index that would guide the reader to the most significant passages of all the authors on any one topic and thereby realize the buyer's fondest dream.

The Syntopicon—Adler coined the term, "a collection of topics"—was to cost $60,000 and take two years to complete. It cost $1 million and took eight years. (Wars—with Germany, Japan, Korea—came and went.) Renting a large greystone residence across the Midway from the campus, Adler assembled a staff of fifty very bright young men and women (including the then unknown Saul Bellow), plus seventy-five clerical helpers, with a monthly payroll of $26,000. They read through 443 great books—plus the Bible, which was not included in the set but which was indexed. Indexed was every substantial reference to Adler's list of 102 great ideas, beginning with Angel and ending with World, and the three thousand

topics under those 102 ideas; all in all, some 900,000 decisions to include or exclude passages were made, with Adler, who dropped most of his teaching and lecturing operations, whipping his small horde along in the bowels of Index House in much the same manner as Benton pep-talking his Britannica salesmen. ("Aristotle and Aquinas are doing fine, but Kant, Descartes, and Plotinus must catch up. . . . Under Topic 2b, I find only three references to Aristotle and three to Locke. This can not be at all. Something has got to be done about this. . . . We can not rest on such a random collection with such a major topic. I am sure I am right. Don't give in.")

The Syntopicon was not an easy compilation to fault; its two-volume massiveness was superficially awesome, and serious scholars were not likely to check the references. It gave the lie to the canard that Hutchins and Adler had long since decided that there were only one hundred great books, and there was no serious ground for arguing that great ideas had been ruthlessly excluded (or included) among the 102. There had ultimately to be a degree of arbitrariness in their selection, but each of them was preceded by a lengthy essay, ostensibly by Adler, which associated them with other ideas; and there was an additional "inventory" of some 1,800 terms, comprising all the ordinarily imaginable subjects of nontechnical discourse and relating each of them to the appropriate reference section under one or another of the 102 capital-I Ideas. However, there was much that was academically arguable about the Syntopicon enterprise. Its very grandiosity was comical, and it certainly would have been subject, had they looked into it, to the choleric contempt of the scholars on the other side of the Midway.

During the nine years' gestation of the project as a whole, Benton found himself occupied with no end of other large-scale operations. He served as vice-chairman—Paul Hoffman was chairman—of the wartime Committee for Economic Development organized by the Department of Commerce to propagandize the nation's postwar business needs and opportunities in the changeover period to civilian production and distribution; and he was on the road more than he was off it. He paid no attention to the progress of the Great Books undertaking. Hutchins, too, immersed in the university's war program, was largely inactive in the project, except for persuading Paul Mellon of the Pittsburg Mellons to have his Old Dominion Foundation make a $250,000 grant to buy sixteen hundred sets for public libraries. A begging letter written by Adler and signed by Hutchins and Adler produced five hundred subscriptions of $500 each for a special set of the fifty-four volumes in an expensive almost-leather binding.

The whole job, including the financing and the sales promotion, wound

up in Adler's hands. When Benton's Britannica executives balked at going on indefinitely with the $26,000 monthly payroll at Index House, Adler ripped around the country to raise the money, brazenly, and successfully, bearding such storied figures as William Paley, Marshall Field, Conrad Hilton, Chicago Board Chairman Harold H. Swift, and, less successfully, H.L. Hunt of Texas (who asked Board Chairman Wood of Sears if Adler was a Communist, since Marx was among the authors in the set).

The Syntopicon was finished at last, its staggering staff disbanded and Index House abandoned, and the Great Books of the Western World was unveiled at a Founders' Edition dinner—for the five hundred individuals who had put up $500 each for the special set—on April 15, 1952, at, of course, the Waldorf Astoria with, inter alia, a covey of Vanderbilts and Rockefellers in attendance.

In the quarter-century after its publication the Great Books set sold something like a million copies, hitting an early peak of 49,000 in a single year. For two or three years it actually outsold the Britannica itself. But costs skyrocketed in the 1970s, and the profit on the venture evaporated—but not before no end of people got rich.

As residual beneficiary of two-thirds of the Britannica, Inc., stock in shameless exchange for the use of its imprimatur, the University of Chicago got enormously rich. Between 1943 and 1980 it received almost $60 million in royalties; and William Benton, the first recipient of Chicago's William Benton Medal (which he inspired) became a bigger benefactor of the institution than the founding father, John D. Rockefeller (who was not so busy that he had to drop his middle initial). Enriched, too, if insufficiently, was the corporate philosopher and genius of the enterprise, Mortimer J. Adler, who spent a million of the EB's total investment of $2.5 million in the great books of the Western world. Adler afterward testified with a touch of melancholy to his own genuflective experience at the noble monument, or trough:

"At one point, it looked as if the work I did on the set and the Syntopicon might reap a reward that would take care of my family and me in the years ahead. Bill Benton, in a moment of enthusiasm and generosity, talked about a royalty payment, which, if it had been no more than 1% of sales price, might have added up to a small fortune in the last twenty-five years. I reminded him, on several occasions, of what he said, only to learn the difference between a passing remark and a serious promise. Nine years of work on the set and the Syntopicon turned out in the end to be what it was at the beginning—a labor of love."^[5]

Love's labor, of course, was lost on the editor-in-chief, Robert Maynard Hutchins (who always turned over all his outside earnings to the Univer-

sity of Chicago). His contributions to the enterprise were sporadic and incidental, Adler standing in for him at every point. As it was actually published, the fifty-four-volume set included a slim volume 1, entitled The Great Conversation , an introductory essay by Robert Maynard Hutchins. It included no end of cut-and-paste-up passages from Hutchins' earlier writings, but it was obviously the work of a much more prosaic hand than his, perhaps the only occasion in his prolific career in which his name was signed to another's work. He had no time. While his associates pondered the profitable publication of the wisdom of the ages, he was running a war plant. And there was a war on, which he did his level best to help prosecute in spite of the wisdom of the ages that suggested that war and wisdom were not won by the same sort of study. "It is not," he said at the outset of the war, "the responsibility of the armed forces to give a liberal education. The test of any training program operated by the Army and Navy is whether it fits a man to fight, not whether it fits him to be free."^[6]

29
"Eat, Shirley"

Before the first year of the war was out, Hutchins realized that he had to quit teaching the honors course for freshmen, which he had been teaching with Mortimer Adler for ten years. He would never again have a close association with the young—never again come as close to having a good time. It wasn't that he thought the young were the hope of the world. He thought they were brands to be snatched from the burning. On those rare occasions when he had seen them outside the classroom—he once addressed a campus meeting for the purpose, he said, of "dispelling the rumor that I do not exist"—he was rejuvenated.

Convocation 1942, with five hundred students receiving their dip-lomas—bachelor, master, doctor—from the hand of the president in Rockefeller Chapel. The name of Wilbur Jerger is called, and Jerger, in uniform, comes forward to receive his law degree. One of the most argumentative of Hutchins' students, graduate and undergraduate, he reached for the outstretched parchment. But the president holds on to it. "Gimme that," says Jerger, tugging away. "What for?" says Hutchins. "You won't need it where you're going." "Gimme," says Jerger, "I earned it." "You did?" says Hutchins, and lets go of it. Jerger falls back and hits the national flag, which teeters on its pediment. The chapel roars. Forty years later Jerger recalled it, as did all who were there that day. Just as Attorney Clarissa Hutchins Bronson remembered her law school graduation at the University of California at Davis and the opening words of the commencement orator: "I have journeyed here from my jasmine-scented bower in Santa Barbara because I wanted to talk to my daughter when she could not interrupt me."

Year after year he gave the departing graduates an unrousing send-off with his ice-cold charisma, just as year after year he gave the entering

freshmen an unhearty welcome: "Let me direct your attention to a fact which may have escaped your notice: this is an educational institution." And after the graduate and undergraduate deans had sounded off on the subject of "these hallowed quadrangles," he rose before the bemused freshmen and said, "I hope you will not disgrace these hallowed quadrangles," and sat down.

A bright freshman in his honors course who at one moment was warmed by his magnetism would, at the next, be frozen stiff when Hutch-ins said, "You have favored us with a stirring oration. Would you mind telling us what it means? . . . But don't let me intimidate you, Mr. Smith."

Students were in some sense unawed by his combination of Olympian loftiness and postadolescent sass. He kidded the things they kidded and mocked the things they mocked. "If we should ask you in the final examination in this course whether you would rather have Aristotle's Politics or the Boy Scout Manual on a desert island, which would you say you would rather have and why would you say you would rather have the Politics? " He scorned what they scorned, and honored what they honored, intent on sending them forth (he was quoting Woodrow Wilson) "as unlike their fathers as possible."

Talking neither up nor down to them, what he tried to teach them was to be seriously disputatious, exemplifying the characteristic word and deed. A dean—not a Hutchins appointee—ordered a splinter-party Communist group off campus during one of the Red hunts across the country, on the technical ground that it did not meet the university's minimum membership requirement; Hutchins arbitrarily reinstated the group. He looked at the world the way the best of the young looked at it: normatively, "judgmentally." His nonchalance transparently covered a passionate concern with personal and social agonies. The young knew it, felt it, and they knew that this university was an involved man.

"It is literally true," said Bob Bork, '48, who became U.S. Solicitor General, "that in the dormitories, with bull sessions all the time, I can't remember a single session about girls or sex or sports. There was a lot of girl-chasing and drinking, of course, but the talk was serious. In the student body people were terribly serious about ideas. They may make some difference in later life—how quickly you sell out your ideas. Exposure to that life tends to make you more resistant to other people when you think their ideas aren't as good as yours."^[1]

"The atmosphere on campus"—this is University of Illinois Professor Bernard R. Kogan, of the Chicago class of '41—"was feverish. Students debated Plato versus Aristotle, Stalin versus Trotsky, Freud versus Jung endlessly and heatedly. Hutchins and his ideas, too, were argued at length

and freely. Expression was untrammeled, and this freedom, too, was part of the Hutchins plan in its largest sense."

The idea of stirring students to life brought to the campus, for short or long stints, a steady succession of credentialed and uncredentialed visitors such as Sinclair Lewis, Artur Schnabel, Thomas Mann, Thornton Wilder, Alexander Woollcott, Carl Sandburg, Socialist Norman Thomas, Communist Earl Browder. Always casting about for exciting teachings, Hutchins brought G.A. Borgese from Italy, Bruno Bettelheim from Germany, exiled president Eduard Benes from Czechoslovakia. He tried to get President Conant to leave Harvard and take over the natural sciences at Chicago. He held Gertrude Stein to her promise to return to the university and take on the freshman honors class: "And then I went to take over their class with them. So we all sat around a long table and . . . I began to talk and they not Hutchins and Adler but the others began to talk and pretty soon we were all talking about epic poetry and what it was it was exciting we found out a good deal some of it I used in one of the four lectures I wrote for the course I came back to give them. . . . Well we all came out and they liked it and I liked it and Hutchins said to me as he and I were walking, you did make them all talk more than we can make them and a number of them talked who never talked before and it was very nice of him to say it . . . and then I said you see why they talk to me is that I do not know the answer, you say you do not know but you do know if you did not know the answer you could not spend your life in teaching but I really do not know, I really do not, I do not even know whether there is a question let alone having an answer for a question. To me when a thing is really interesting it is when there is no question and no answer, if there is then already the subject is not interesting and it is so, that is the reason that anything for which there is a solution is not interesting, that is the trouble with governments and Utopias and teaching, the things not that can be learnt but that can be taught are not interesting. Well anyway we went away."^[2]

That was the idea, all over the campus and even in a few graduate areas such as the law school. The Daily Maroon must have been the only student newspaper in the country in which the curriculum was debated on the front page day after day. Associate Professor James Redfield (BA '54) recalled twenty years afterward: "The only time I ever took part in a student demonstration was on behalf of the College curriculum. That was the sort of thing we demonstrated about in those days at Chicago. For the first time in my life, I had actually come alive."

For several years a student group maintained an "Aquinas House," whose central preoccupation was the intellectual reconciliation of St.

Thomas Aquinas with Karl Marx. (This largely Catholic undertaking probably sparked the jocular canard that Chicago was "a Baptist institution where Marxist professors taught Catholic philosophy to Jewish students.") Chicago was a big-city "street-car school" for half of its students, and under Hutchins it had the instant and persistent reputation for religious (and racial) tolerance. The entrance requirements were stiff; the scholastic average of the entering freshmen was above 90. Most of the undergraduates were non-"collegiate." They were overwhelmingly with Hutchins in his campaign to get rid of big-time-big-money football. Some 65 percent had part-time jobs on or off campus. They weren't grinds. What they were was excited.

Shirley Shapiro was a street-car kid, whose West Side ghetto parents had scraped to send her to college to get the education they had never got. Mama and Papa Shapiro were Old Country Jews, who sighed more than they spoke. But their Shirley was full of beans, and on her way home after the Hutchins-Adler freshman honors class on Tuesday afternoons she would be so engrossed (and exalted) in revolving the four causes of things (first, formal, efficient, final), the divisibility of sovereignty (one world or none), or the nature of the passions (the rock covets the center of the earth), that she sometimes forgot to change street cars. She would eventually come bounding up the stairs to the little apartment above the Shapiro tailor shop, to share her fresh-paint perceptions with her parents. They had invariably finished supper by the time she got home, but they were still at the table waiting for her. She kissed her father—her mother, hearing her on the stairs, had gone to the kitchen to reheat the soup—and began talking a blue streak. Her mother brought the soup, and Shirley kissed her as she bent over and went right on talking. "And what," one of her friends asked her, "did they say?" "All they ever said," said Shirley, "was 'Eat, Shirley."'

"The whole business about education in a university," said Hutchins a quarter-century afterward, "can be summed up in a question: Has the institution any vitality? Is anything going on? Is there anything exciting about it? Young people understand. They know whether or not a teacher is simply earning a salary. They know whether he is trying to win the Nobel Prize or trying to contribute to their education. At Chicago the students did have the impression that we were trying to do something about their education, and that a big fight about a fundamental issue was underway.

"This awareness spread throughout the whole place. Everybody was involved in it, even the lowliest freshman. I think the reason for some recent difficulties in higher education"—this was at the time of the student

turmoil at the end of the 1960s—"is that the students feel that though they may be the basis for legislative appropriations, or the basis of tuition fees, the place does not exist for them and the administration and the trustees don't care about doing anything for them. I don't think the attitude of the students at the University of Chicago had anything to do with me. It was simply that there was no other place in the United States at that time where you could get the same kind of educational experience."^[3]

The young faculty determined the content of the course sequences. "Since the large staffs"—of the collegiate divisions—"brought together persons of diverse backgrounds and trainings," Professor Daniel Bell of Columbia wrote in The Reforming of General Education , "the courses, as I can testify from personal experience, were extraordinary intellectual adventures for the teaching staff; and perhaps this was its prize, if unintended, virtue, for what a teacher finds exciting he can communicate best to his students. Whether in the end the courses had the intellectual unity or theoretical clarity claimed for them is moot."^[4]

The intellectual adventure, for teachers and students alike, was supposedly on ice for the duration of the World War. But Hutchins chaffed increasingly after giving up the freshman honors course. Temperamentally he needed another kind of war than the one the country was fighting. In early 1944 there was one event that placed him at the head of a charge that led to victory. He won the Battle of Fifty-seventh Street.

The battle took place at the Quadrangle Club, the Georgian edifice on the campus that served as a faculty association—and wasn't one. It enjoyed free rent and utilities from the university, but it was independently incorporated and as many as a quarter of its members were non-university-connected gentlemen (most of them alumni) of the neighborhood. (Some years before, the Illinois Board of Tax Appeals had rejected its claim to tax exemption as a profssional, rather than a social, organization.) Half the faculty—and most of the senior professors—had lunch there regularly. Faculty and nonfaculty members used the three tennis courts, the periodical library, and the billiard and card rooms. Its private dining rooms served faculty committees for meetings at lunch or otherwise. The club was a stroll from their offices. All in all a most agreeable place.

In 1943 a tall young man named Gordon Dupee, who had been head waiter at the club, resigned that post to take a job in the university radio office. Dupee was not in uniform. He had a heart condition he'd tried unsuccessfully to conceal from his draft board; he was a conscientious objector to war and had wanted to be so classified. His pacifism was known on the campus and among the faculty. That wasn't all that was

held against him at the club. As a student employee he wasn't expected to be subservient, but he was expected to be a bit deferential. And Dupee—you couldn't put a finger on it—somehow wasn't. Instead, his manner had been stiff and distant enough to be annoying. Now, as a newly hired university staff member, he was eligible for membership in the club. He applied, and he was blackballed.

The word of the Dupee blackball spread inexorably in the club and on the campus. Among the younger members—more rarely among the older—were sympathizers here and there with conscientious objection or, at least, with its being covered by the principle of academic freedom. Among the older members, and not just here and there, Dupee's dim view of the war in progress was a reminder of Hutchins' dim view of the world war in prospect. It was, to be sure, a social club, but it was also a faculty club, and the only faculty club in the university. But the membership as a whole hadn't known that the club was possessed of a blackball process. It was generally assumed that any faculty or staff member who applied was categorically accepted. Not so, it seemed.

Dupee's application for membership had been presented by Acting Dean Ralph W. Tyler of the Social Science Division and Professor Stephen N. Corey of Education. His name had been duly posted for two weeks on the club bulletin board and then acted upon by the membership committee. It came out later that the vote had been five to one against him. A delegation of a half-dozen members waited on Hutchins to ask him what should be done about the Quadrangle Club. He indicated that their visit was not entirely unexpected. He had, he said, written Professor Tom Peete Cross, the club president, asking him if Dupee had been blackballed because he was a pacifist, and Professor Cross had replied that it was for "purely personal reasons." Further, Hutchins wrote Cross, he had just been notified by the grapevine that the club had instituted the blackball only three years before, when a Hutchins faculty appointee, a Negro professor of education named Allison Davis, had applied for membership and then withdrawn his application. He had also, he went on, just been notified that Physics Professor Henry Gordon Gale had some time back requested the removal of a chair from the club because the distinguished Indian astronomer Chandrasekar had sat in it. He had further, he said, just been notified that the Quadrangle Club did not admit women. Under the circumstances just come to light, he thought, he said, that honorable men could do no less than fight and win, or, alternatively, fight, lose, and resign.

"I am a member of the Quadrangle Club because it is convenient for my colleagues and me to meet there to transact university business. I did not

join on principle, and I shall not resign on principle. If, however, any of my colleagues resign on principle, and I can not, therefore meet them at the club on university business, I shall have to ask that they meet me elsewhere. Do I make myself clear?"

They thought he did. They asked him how many of his colleagues would have to resign before he would decline to enter the club. He was able to refer them to the eighteenth chapter of the Book of Genesis (where the Lord agreed to spare Sodom if as few as ten righteous men should be found in it).

The half-dozen righteous members then mobilized an opposition and demanded a meeting of the membership to review the by-laws. Three hundred of the five hundred members attended a closed meeting on the evening of June 11, 1945, and the discussion was genteelly acrimonious. The effective blackball of the Negro professor was answered by the bland assertion that the gentleman in question had withdrawn his application. The exclusion of women—there had always been many on the faculty—went unchallenged. The nature of the "purely personal reasons" was ruled out of order. A leading history professor said that the opposition ringleader was a friend of Hutchins in the habit of taking two desserts from the buffet table at lunch. But the burden of the defense was that the club was social in nature and the sole judge of its membership. The by-laws were upheld by a vote reported to have been 182 to 85.

The Chicago Sun quoted unnamed faculty members as saying that the whole affair "was confused by the injection of feelings for and against President Robert M. Hutchins." Neither at the June meeting nor later was the "Hutchins issue" ever given voice. But the Sun had reported correctly.

Ten righteous men (half non-university connected) at once resigned, and the next day Hutchins excused himself from a committee meeting at the club because some of his colleagues were not members; the meeting, and every subsequent meeting of the sort, was transferred to the nearest hotel, and guests could reach it from the campus only by rounding up transportation. (Hutchins attended in a chauffeur-driven livery car.) The drop of water was eroding the stone. But it was only a drop of water. The flood came not from the ten righteous colleagues, but from the students who admired the president who would not enter the club.

The day after the membership meeting the seventeen student employees of the club went on strike against what they called "discrimination against certain members of the faculty on the basis of race, sex, or political convictions." They called a student mass meeting and invited the club's officers to attend. (None did.) The meeting was advised of the results of the previous evening's events—the closed proceedings having been thoroughly dis-

closed by the strikers who had been on duty. Then they set up a picket line in front of the club, with fifty students carrying signs like, "Look Who Writes Our Textbooks." Hutchins rode by the picket line in his liveried limousine, and did not deign to turn his head to notice it.

Three months later a faculty group announced the organization of a new club "for educational and professional purposes, to enable every member of the University to join, regardless of his financial ability and regardless of color, religion, race, or opinion." It would be called the Faculty Club and would apply to the university administration for support. No word from the university administration, and the liveried limousine continued to drive by, followed by faculty committee members who wished to meet with the president. Three months still later, another membership meeting of the Quadrangle Club was called, to liberalize its admission policy to admit members by a majority vote of the club's council (the membership committee which had rejected Dupee). The blackball process was thus amended, but retained. The club's status as a social organization, judging the admissibility of its members, was reasserted. Still no word from the university administration.

But fewer and fewer faculty members went to the club, even among those who hadn't resigned. And one by one there were more resignations. And student help was progressively harder to get.

In March of 1946 a new set of officers of the beleaguered Quadrangle Club waited on Hutchins. The club, they informed him, was in some difficulty. He expressed his regret. Would the university administration consider helping it financially? Hutchins thought that it would be glad to and he referred them to Vice-president W.C. Munnecke. Mr. Munnecke took the matter under advisement for five minutes, then informed the club that the university would be happy to assume its financial responsibilities providing that membership was open to all faculty and staff members on a scale of dues within the means of the lowest paid member of the university.

It was the Quadrangle Club's Canossa, and it had come about through the connivance of president and students against resistant members of the faculty. The striking students had known they had the support of the president, who never turned his head to look upon them as he whisked by their picket line. It had been Hutchins' way of enjoying himself, impudently associated once more, if only episodically, with the impudent young.

With the Quadrangle Club incident, all the freshmen he had taught—and all those he hadn't—had another chapter to add to the Hutchins legend. It didn't take many myths to make a mythological creature of him. Any least encounter was enough.

One afternoon he was en route home—in the block along Harper Li-

brary between the president's office and the president's house—and a small group of students made way for him on the sidewalk, falling silent and covertly looking at him as he approached. As he went by them he said, without looking at them, "Tip your hat when the president passes." By the following day the story had fanned out across the campus, and it continued to be told for many a day and many a decade.

Many a year—and a decade or two—afterward, novelist Noel Gerson was having lunch at "21" in New York, and there was the idol of his undergraduate youth at Chicago. "He was standing at the bar with a couple of other guys, and he was looking and behaving like a normal human being, not like the great Greek god I had imagined him to be. That was the first inkling I ever had that he was other than an enormous figure. Many people came in and out and totally ignored him, to my astonishment and consternation."

The students he brought to life kept him alive, and after he decided that he had to quit teaching, with some possible premonition that he would never teach the young again, the Battle of Fifty-seventh Street briefly restored him. But only briefly. He once said that he could not think of a time during his Chicago presidency when he wasn't frustrated and furious. After Pearl Harbor he would confine his energies to the deadly and deadening business of the war. He kept his word for six miserable months, and his enemies smugly assumed that he would let things—and them—be, until it was over over there. But as the war went on, and as he thought he saw his gloomiest prophecies materializing and the prospective victory turning to ashes even before it was won; as the war went on and his administrative duties had less and less to do with the liberal arts, and more and more to do with the martial; as the war went on and he had less and less to do with fitting the rising generation to be free and more and more to do with fitting them to fight, he grew ever more furious.

30
Disturbing the War

In 1938, Hutchins had roundly deplored the University of Chicago's chaotic and ineffective administrative organization and suggested that he should be president in fact as well as in name. Under the statutes of the university the president had neither power nor responsibility. Nobody had. There was nobody at Chicago (or anywhere else) charged with asking, "What are we trying to do?"

His introduction of the question of power and responsibility had followed a 1938 vote of seventy-six members of the two-hundred-man university senate, who decided, forty-two to thirty-four, to investigate a complaint by the regional Association of University Professors that Hutchins and his deans had too much control over appointments, promotions, and salaries. They asked the investigatee to head the investigating committee, and nothing more was heard of it. But one of them was quoted anonymously at the time as saying that a large majority of the faculty "believe he has an insatiable lust for power."^[1]

The issue of presidential power had been simmering on the back burner since then, though he let it be known now and again that it was still on his mind. But it was clear with the country at war that nothing so radical, in terms of the university's long-run activities, would be brought forward. Nor was it—until in mid-July 1942 he prepared a sixteen-page memorandum to the board of trustees—not to the faculty, to the board. The memorandum proposed a revision of the university's constitution, something which "has never been done, here or elsewhere."^[2]

All he wanted to do was turn the organization of the institution upside down. After twelve years of bucking the faculty line, gaining a yard or two here, losing a yard or two there, he was attempting an end-run. The constitution of the university was the board's province. He condescend—

statutorily he needn't have—to suggest that the board send his proposal to the faculty senate and ask the senate to appoint a committee to advise with a committee of the board concerning it. (The board did so; the senate appointed its committee; and two years later he was constrained to observe that nothing had been done.)

Formally the proposal was couched in alternative forms. The structure of the modern university—Chicago included—was "confused and ineffective" as a consequence of its being modeled (with only minor changes) on the small college of the previous century. "If democratic government requires responsibility, then university government is undemocratic, for no academic individual is responsible for his acts as part of that government. . . . According to the [Chicago] Constitution the faculty controls educational policy. . . . But the President may refuse to appoint or promote members of the faculty"—and determine the range and diversity of the institution's activities in terms of its financial condition.

Thus the faculty "is for all practical purposes without a remedy against the use of these presidential powers to create an educational situation of which, if given a chance to vote, they would never approve. Though they participate at Chicago in the selection of a president, they can do very little about him after he is in office." On the other hand, "the powers of the faculty over education mean that nobody can be held responsible for education. The authority of the faculty is such that the President can not be held responsible. In no event could the faculty be. The members of a department could not be discharged because their judgment with regard to appointments proved to be bad or because their preoccupation with duties relating to part of a program led them to resist suggestions for the improvement of the program as a whole."

Could something fundamental be done? Could the University of Chicago be made orderly and democratic? Hutchins thought it could be—in one of two ways. Plan I (as it came to be known) involved "the abandonment of responsibility and efficiency as criteria of university government. We should simply say that these notions are inapplicable to the kind of thing a university is. We should hold that there are other values more important to a university and that these emerge in proportion as the community of scholars which is the university manages its affairs. On this theory all matters affecting the institution, its expenditures, its public relations, its plant, as well as its educational and scientific program, would be under the direction of the faculty." Under this plan the president would be the chairman of the faculty, simply a presiding officer who would also represent the institution at public events, like the rector of a German university, who serves for one year, exercises no power, has no educational

function, and enjoys the improbable designation of Magnifizenz . (But the German and other European universities so operated are ultimately answerable to a government ministry.)

Hutchins went on advocating Plan I as an alternative—"preferable to that under which we are now operating"—in the ensuing two years of controversy. But he was disingenuous in doing so. Not only was it not like him temperamentally or philosophically to countenance such a "democratic" structure; it was not like the faculty of a university, Chicago or any other, to want to undertake the role Plan I assigned to it. Hutchins as much as cut it down in his memorandum to the board: "Nor are the background, training, and duties of American professors such as to give much hope that they could manage the affairs of a great institution in the interest of the institution as a whole. For the most part they are selected because they are or are expected to become experts in their special fields. Their first duty is to become as great experts in their fields as possible. The votes of great experts in special fields do not necessarily add up to the best judgment on the policies of the institution as a whole."

He was not being derogatory here, except, perhaps, by implication, the implication being (as he said elsewhere in the memorandum) that "the President is the only educational officer whose sole duty is to the University as a whole, rather than to a department or a division. The great size of the University and the increasingly narrow lines of specialization in scholarship make it almost impossible for a professor to know all that is going on in his division, or in the University, or even, in some cases, in his own department."

This consideration led him to his Plan II, after his dismissal of Plan I because of the "fatal objections" he delineated (though he would continue to insist that it was a viable alternative). Plan II—this was Hutchins—was "a simple plan of administrative responsibility. This would mean that as long as the President had the confidence of the University Senate and the Board of Trustees he would be authorized to decide issues of educational policy. In addition to participating in his election the Senate would at any time be able to raise the question of confidence, and could, if it felt strongly enough, force the removal of the President.

"The President would be unable to proceed without the advice of the Senate and without that of a reorganized Senate Committee on University Policy. But when he had listened"—or, his opponents would say, pretended to listen—"to their advice, he would be required to decide, and take the consequences. The consequences might be an appeal from a small fraction of the Senate to the Board of Trustees to request the resignation of the President; the compulsory resignation of the President, which might or

might not be accepted by the Board; or the compulsory removal of the President. Since through inertia or timidity the faculty might not avail itself of any of these methods of showing its lack of confidence in the President, the President should be elected for a seven-year term." (The term of the chief executive of many European countries.)

"These changes would give the faculty protection against the President, protection which it does not now have. They would ensure the fullest expression of faculty opinion on all matters affecting the University. They would make the President responsible to the faculty and responsible in fact, as well as in theory, to the Board of Trustees. On the other hand, they would give a president who had the confidence of the faculty an opportunity to do something."

An opportunity to do something . To do "something" that Robert Maynard Hutchins had not up to then been able to do because of the checks on him by a majority of his faculty, or by an activist minority unopposed by a majority, or by a majority of the board, which legally owned the university and over which he had only the power of persuasion. In the closing pages of his memorandum he argued (and believed he had overcome) the objections that might be raised—including the unlikely objection in the current situation of the University of Chicago that the president would be sedulous to avoid antagonizing anybody or doing anything lest he fail of reelection at the end of seven years. The memorandum closed with the assertion that if Plan II—or, presumably, Plan I—were to be adopted, he would present his resignation, and the resignation of his deans, so that officers might be chosen in conformity with the new regulations.

What did he want? He wanted immense power—and immense responsibility to balance it. But the worst culmination of his assumption of the responsibility would be his mere dismissal, while the worst culmination of his assumption of the power might be a cunning and unconscionable succession of administrative actions which might injure, or even destroy, the university before the machinery to get rid of him was rolling. Or at least so his opponents might envision, and his opponents had had twelve years to come by the apprehension that he would, had he his way, make changes of a much more radical character than he had succeeded up to then in introducing. Way back there somewhere, when he had first got his college, he had said—and his enemies had long memories—"We are now able to teach the wrong things the right way." It was the right things his faculty had up to then forestalled.

A much milder man, or a forceful man without a program of his own, might have got some support in his faculty for his Plan II and some con-

siderable support among the businessmen on his board who knew what it was to assume responsibility, and its risks, along with power and its opportunity. Or Hutchins himself, when he was still relatively fresh on the scene and the opposition to him had not yet been hardened. But not Hutchins in 1942, and not Hutchins thereafter. And he could hardly help knowing it; he was an excruciating realist. What he sought was a cross between benevolent despotism and responsible autocracy, a parliamentary prime ministry as far as the vote of confidence was concerned, but without the restraints of the party a prime minister leads. He would have no party. He would stand alone. The board—where his power of persuasion was considerable—might refuse to accept his resignation, as the monarch sometimes does under ministerial governments. One of his friends said that he wanted to be a Benedictine abbot, serving with the advice, but not the consent, of the monks.

There wasn't a prayer of his getting what he asked. And he was bright enough to know it. And so was his board, including Laird Bell, who was probably the strongest man on the board and was not only Hutchins' strongest supporter but his personal attorney. Bell responded to the Hutchins memo as chairman of the board's Committee on Instruction and Research, but his response was (as was his wont) informal.

How would it work with a Chancellor Day—or whoever that Syracuse die-hard was?

Will you . . . get and hold . . . [faculty of the] highest calibre if they do not enjoy at least a measure of autonomy in their departments and schools?

Would faculties think they had much chance of getting you to accept the resignation of one of your own appointed deans?

Won't faculties believe . . . that the Board will back you up unless there is a sure-enough scandal?

Won't you stir up AAUP and radicals?

Any less radical way than one which suggests you want "dictatorial" powers?

I confess to a weakness for a not too definite blueprint of authority, and to checks and balances, God save the mark! You have in the end got, from the Board, most of what you went after.

All judgments on education and educators seem to me to be subjective. Is it the kind of field for a one-man judgment?

You have in the end got . . . most of what you went after . For which read variously: You aren't going to get this, or, You aren't going to get any more. It was the sharpest official rebuke Hutchins would ever receive, and he received it from a friend. If Bell was unsympathetic to Plan II—Plan I was not even discussed—the board as a whole would certainly be unsym-

pathetic. But Bell knew and the board knew that Hutchins was incapable of letting go. The man saw his administrative career as one of shameful compromise. In order to get things taught "the right way," he had yielded on having "the wrong things" taught; the liberal arts and the great books actually played a minor role in the undergraduate program. He had got the divisional organization and the autonomous college he wanted, but the university in its anarchical essentials was unaffected. Under cover of the war emergency he had got the "two-year" bachelor's degree (which would probably be revoked when the war was over). He had won a few skirmishes, such as the withdrawal from intercollegiate football and the severance of the Rush Medical School from the university and the incorporation of the university's own medical school into the new Division of the Biological Sciences. But twelve years had passed and he had been fought to a standstill on the central front: the exemplary reconstruction of the higher learning. He had, perhaps, meant to rest on his spear after Pearl Harbor and play the genteel role of an administrator of things as they were—or, now, as the wartime government wanted them. But it hadn't worked. He once said that he had the impression that his ancestors had been, on the whole, stubborn men and women. So, on the whole, was their descendant.

The Hutchins memorandum (of July 18, 1942) was marked Confidential. But it wasn't; board members had close friends in the faculty, and even an extremely able man like Bell, the busiest of lawyers, was unlikely to have undertaken to indite his response to Hutchins without considerable briefing from faculty friends. Certain senior members of the faculty were known to have the habit of going to board members with one or another aspect of "the Hutchins issue." While some of them had some effect, the habit had (as it always does) a tendency to backfire, too; university board members were generally administrators in their own fields of endeavor, and they preferred dealing with an able administrator rather than with professors. The Hutchins memorandum was followed by six months of board silence. At the end of December, the board sent a letter to the faculty senate, embodying the Hutchins alternatives and proposing a senate committee to discuss them with Bell's Committee on Instruction and Research.

The senate committee was appointed, consisting, of course, of senior professors, since only men and women of full professorial rank were senate members. That anything decisive would emerge from such quarters was itself most unlikely, in view of the fact that one of Hutchins' Plan II recommendations was that the size of the senate be radically reduced in the name of efficiency and its membership opened on a proportional basis to all ranks of the faculty. (His major strength, remember, was in the lower

ranks). The two committees met jointly on several occasions but made no apparent headway.

On March 10, 1943, Hutchins made his last stab, submitting to the board of trustees a memorandum—this one was not marked Confidential—painstakingly restating his proposals and dismissing Plan I as "requiring no elaboration." Moving immediately to Plan II he said, "I am not personally involved in the matter. We are here concerned with the proper administrative structure for a great university rather than with the amount of power Mr. Hutchins should have. The university should organize itself in the best possible manner and then seek for the individual who would be the best executive under that form of organization."

He went on, his passion concealed by his benign posture, to present an argument that was nothing less than tricky and transparently so: "The present organization of the University has broken down and is leading to a Presidential dictatorship."—The wolf crying, "Wolf, wolf."—"The President, without consulting the faculty, and often without consulting the Board, is deciding important educational issues himself because the speed and secrecy required make consultation impossible. I do not believe that this situation will be materially altered at the end of the war. The government will use the universities during the period of reconstruction as it has been using them since the emergency began. . . . The present president of the University is full of good will; but I think that no individual, however benevolent, should be permitted to decide crucial educational questions without such checks and safeguards as are proposed in Plan II." (The decisions which required "speed and secrecy" were, of course, war decisions which were either unrelated to crucial educational questions or were by definition temporary.)

Plan II hadn't a prayer. The well into which it sank appeared, as the months passed, to be bottomless. By the beginning of 1944, fattened by a steady diet of frustration and fury, he was ready to set his blunted spear aside and try his hand at throwing thunderbolts.

31
The Cannon

In Victor Hugo's novel Ninety-Three a cannon breaks loose on the gun deck of a French corvette under full sail, becoming "suddenly some indescribably supernatural beast . . . a monster . . . [that] rolls with the rolling, pitches with the pitching, goes, comes, pauses, seems to meditate, resumes its course, rushes from end to end along the ship like an arrow, circles about, springs aside, evades, roars, breaks, kills, exterminates. . . . In what way can one attack it? You can make a mastiff hear reason, astonish a bull, fascinate a boa, frighten a tiger, soften a lion; there is no resource with that monster, a cannon let loose. It continued its work of destroying the ship."^[1] ("We know our responsibilities as trustees," Board Chairman Harold H. Swift of the University of Chicago wrote in a form letter to complaining alumni in 1944. "We are working hard for the University, and we are working constantly for its continued advancement. I don't believe we will wreck it—nor let it be wrecked. . . . I am not sure that there is much I can say to you which will seem convincing. For the most part people either like Mr. Hutchins' educational philosophy, or they don't. . . . I know Mr. Hutchins pretty well. While he has strong opinions, I believe his desire is to make the strongest possible university in every field, and I see no evidence that he is sacrificing any division of the University.")

The quick winter evening of January 12, 1944, came in with a beatific glitter over the South Shore Country Club. The occasion was the university's annual gala, for which the club's grand ballroom was always rented: the trustees' dinner to the faculties. The preprandial bar at the club was laden with the best free drinks. The main course was the finest steak that money (or ration coupons) could buy. Board Chairman Harold H. Swift always presided at the trustees' dinner and always introduced the speaker of the evening, who was always the president. The faculty always ap-

plauded roundly when the president was introduced; it did not always applaud so roundly at the conclusion of his remarks, which were sometimes disturbing. It was, indeed, his wont to use the great dinner as a staging area for one or two awful assaults, on the ground, presumably, that his audience would not be able, when he moved the assault to the faculty senate chamber, to claim that they were taken by Draconian surprise.

There was nothing untoward to be anticipated this evening. The campus war plant was running smoothly and, as far as anyone could make out, successfully on every front. Whatever Hutchins would say, he would say it with that delicious laconic wit. And there was no real reason for any slashing, on this glittering evening when Hutchins would surely be entertaining.

And so he was, for the whole of five minutes. Observing that this was his fifteenth appearance at this annual festivity and comparing himself to the champion flagpole sitter whose distinction lay not in what he had done but in his having done it so long. Then he jollied them some more at, as usual, his own expense: "The fact is that as a university president proceeds up to and beyond the fifteenth year mark, his loss of knowledge, accompanied by the loss of health, hair, teeth, appetite, character, figure, and friends, becomes nothing short of sensational. Tonight, after fifteen years, I have only one point, and a very little one, to make."^[2]

And then he suddenly stopped jollying:

"My little point is that nothing has been done here in the last fifteen years. . . . We have been engaged in pushing over pushovers. And since some of them have been large, as well as old, their collapse has caused a good deal of noise. . . . We abandon the most archaic and irrelevant of academic irrelevancies, intercollegiate football, and congratulate ourselves on having slain the giant. The giant was dead on his feet before we pushed him over. Although nobody has ventured to say a good word for the credit, or adding machine, system of education in fifty years, we like to think that we pioneered when we made certain gestures toward overthrowing it. The excesses of the departmental system having been unanimously condemned for a generation, we did something about them in the reorganization of 1930, with a flourish out of all proportion as to what we did. Since we had contended that academic freedom was indispensable to the existence of a university, we can not take much pride in the fact that we defended it when it was under attack in 1935." As to the most recent "stirring action of ours," the award of the bachelor's degree at the end of the conventional sophomore year, it had been advocated by one of his predecessors thirty years before.

Whence, then, the University of Chicago's great reputation for pioneering on the frontiers of education and research? It was due chiefly to the terrible state of American education. "A turtle, if it is in motion at all, will seem to whizz by a stationary object; and if the stationary object ceases to be stationary and starts slowly sagging downhill, the turtle will appear to be climbing at a terrific rate. The difference between us and the rest of American education does not lie in our intelligence, courage, and originality. It is simply a slight difference in tradition. The tradition elsewhere is to agree that something ought to be done, but that nothing can be. The tradition here is to agree that if the consensus of all literate men and women through the ages is that something ought to be done, perhaps we ought to try to do something about it."

But that something had not been enough. The credit, or "adding machine," system still prevailed in many of the university's divisions and schools; only the college and the social sciences division had got rid of it entirely. So, too, the course system, which was interwoven with the credit system. Reading lists, a tutorial system, and general examinations "constitute the only defensible educational combination. . . . The passion for courses, like the passion for textbooks, rests on the assumption that you can not educate in an American educational institution. . . . We are told that [the young] can not learn anything outside the classroom, especially not from good books. . . . Of the pushovers that still obstruct us, I hope that the course system, and the adding machine system dependent on it, will be among the first to fall."

The preprandial and prandial delights had given way to the same old scolding, the same old belittling, the same old taunting, and the same old demands. After fifteen years of watching him intently, his audience was still underestimating the intensity of his frustration and his fury. After fifteen years of a wild and woolly tenure, he was unwilling merely to add insult to injury; he was bent on adding injury to injury. He had just begun to fight.

"We are still entangled in the farce of academic rank. It performs no function except to guarantee a certain constant measure of division and disappointment-in the faculty. Tenure means nothing. New members of the faculty are guaranteed permanent tenure after ten years of service. Salary means something. Of salaries I shall speak in a moment. Rank means nothing except trouble. We should get rid of it."

The proposal to abolish rank was staggering. Everybody was to appear to be the equal of everybody else. The only instantly visible distinction among scholars was to be junked. It was—it was—it was—socialism, that's what it was. Some sort of socialism. In the great university where

everyone was a Doctor, everyone was called Mister and no one was called (or called himself) Professor. But everyone knew who was a professor—and by that exclusionary fact, a member of the faculty senate. The titles were writ small, but indelibly. (And what about the president?—Did you hear him say anything about doing away with that title?)

Of salaries I shall speak in a moment . Now the glow of the evening was wholly dissipated. Rank—and salaries—were important. The professorial diners were sitting up. (And so were the trustees.) They all knew that the wisecracker had once been quoted as saying, "A businessman may have ideals, but a professor will do anything for money."

Now the phrases came measured: "As academic rank divides the academic community, so does our tendency to regard that professor as most successful who has the greatest number of paying interests outside the university. The members of the faculty should be put on a full-time basis; they should be paid decent salaries; and they should be free to engage in outside activities they like. To make sure that the ones they like are the ones that are good for them, they should be required to turn over all their outside earnings to the University. (Here at longest last the face of tyranny was unveiled: To make sure that the ones they like are the ones that are good for them, they should be required . . . . )

"We should promote the sense of community within the University by reconsidering the whole salary question. The only basis of compensation in a true community is need. The academic community should carefully select its members. When a man has been admitted to it, he should be paid enough to live as a professor should live." (And who would say how "a professor should live"? Plainer and plainer, the face of tyranny displayed.)

"This would mean that a young man with three children would have a larger living allowance than a departmental chairman with none. Under the present system the members of the faculty who get any money get it when they need it least and starve and cripple themselves and their scholarly development because they get nothing to live on when they need it most.

"These things are obvious and are all on the pushover level."

The only basis of compensation in a true community is need . ("Neither was there any among them that lacked: for as many as were possessors of lands or houses sold them, and brought the prices of the things that were sold, and laid them down at the apostles' feet: and distribution was made unto every man according as he had need." Acts 5:34-35.)

Bolshevism.

The president went on talking for another ten or fifteen minutes, but his hearers had been stunned into inattention. He brought up the issue of organization again, saying (again) that all that had to be done ("it is time

we did something") was to elect a short-term president, require him to ask the faculty's advice, and compel him to decide and take the consequences. To his now inattentive listeners, the decisions that would be made by this president would come down to socialism and bolshevism.

And to what all else? "A university president is a political leader without patronage and without a party. He should have neither. He should be the responsible officer of a high-tension democracy."

A high-tension democracy.

"An academic community is not an end in itself. Neither is academic democracy. They are both in their turn preliminary steps."

To what?

"They are means to the accomplishment of the purpose of the University."

And the purpose of the University?

"And the purpose of the University is nothing less than to procure a moral, intellectual, and spiritual revolution throughout the world. . . . The whole scale of values by which our society lives must be reversed if any society is to endure. We want a democratic academic community because we know that if we have one we can multiply the power which the University can bring upon the character, the mind, and the spirit of men. Among the kinds of institution called to this crusade the specific task of the university is the development, release, and direction of intellectual power. . . . The total resources of the University must be focused on the problem of raising the intellectual level of the society which it serves."

The whole scale of values . . . multiply the power . . . the spirit of men . . . this crusade . . . the total resources . . . . . A cannon let loose . . . .

"We have the only rationally organized college in the United States. . . . Since it is the only one which can do it, it is under a duty to reform, or rather to introduce, liberal education in this country. This requires the members of its faculty to figure out what a liberal education is, to get one themselves, and then reveal it to the world."

Get one themselves .

"If we are to show the way to liberal education for all, we shall have to get ready to educate the teachers who are to undertake this task. We may have to found a new organization for this purpose. At that time we shall have to reconsider our advanced degrees and think once more whether we ought not to award the PhD to those who have prepared themselves to teach through a new Institute of Liberal Studies."

Intermittently since his inaugural address fifteen years before, he had called for the award of separate PhDs for research and teaching. He had never before called for a new organization.

"It all comes to this. The University of Chicago has greater opportunities and greater obligations than any university in history, even greater than those which fell to the lot of the University of Paris seven hundred years ago. It is perhaps too much to hope that as the University of Paris moulded the civilization of the Middle Age, the University of Chicago can make a civilization in the Twentieth Century. But it can try."

The faculty that was going to lose its rank and its competitive wages was aghast. The board members scattered among them at the dinner tables in the ballroom were aghast at the prospect of introducing socialism and bolshevism into what was, after all, legally their property and their responsibility. The ballroom sat silent, mesmerized by the human cannon run amok among them.

"I must confess"—he drew a breath—"I must confess that I have never liked the motto of the University—Crescat Scientia Vita Excolatur. Let Knowledge Grow That Life May Be Enriched. In the first place, it seems incongruous and affected for those rugged and unsophisticated pioneers of the Nineties to think up a Latin slogan for their raw, new university. In the second place, 'enriched' is ambiguous. I do not like the materialistic interpretation to which it is open. Therefore I suggest a new motto for the University, one which will express its spirit and its purpose as it sallies forth to battle in the revolution that must come if men are to live together in peace. The new motto I suggest for the University is a line from Walt Whitman. It is this: 'Solitary, singing in the West, I strike up for a new world.'"

He sat down, as obviously unshaken as Hugo's cannon was. The applause was perhaps the least deafening he had ever received. But there was one segment of the audience which could not restrain itself completely. It was composed of "the young men with three children," the instructors at the very bottom of the totem pole to whose ears the proposal of full-time service with compensation on the basis of need sounded sweet indeed. ("They'll breed like rabbits," said Dean William Taliaferro of the biological sciences division.)

32
Brooks Brothers Bolshevik

As the faculty and trustees poured out of the grand ballroom of the South Shore Country Club that evening of January 12, 1944, they were sharply aware that the only thing their president had said that he hadn't said many times before was that "the only measure of compensation in a true community is need." He had caught them all—friends and enemies—off base. For fifteen years he had talked education and nothing but education (except when he had taken to the microphone in 1941 to talk war and peace). Of an unforeseeable sudden he had thrown moral and social philosophy at them.

The moralist demanded the application of the moral principle of social justice to a capitalist institution in a capitalist country. He could not have taken the University of Chicago to be the true community of which he spoke; it must have been that he intended to make it one. But it wasn't his university, and he had no statutory voice in the economic basis on which it operated. That was the sole prerogative of the trustees, who, if they were not capitalists in principle, were nothing. The Hutchins proposal, that storied evening, was some sort of bolshevism. His offhand projection of a family allowance combined with abolition of rank suggested that the faculty members of a great university, from the most renowned to the most obscure and unpromising, might all be paid the same salary by a board no one of whom would dream of running his own business that way.

It wouldn't work, of course; when did bolshevism ever work, and why wouldn't it succeed, in this case, in simply driving the best professors away and deter the best professors in other universities from coming to Chicago ? ("I don't believe we will wreck it—nor let it be wrecked.") Who, if he had a chance to go elsewhere, would stay, besides the incompetent, the half-competent, the nonproductive, and a few young idealists who were more

interested in utopianism than they were in their work? Who would want to come? Again, the same sort of utopian and the same sort of none too promising men and women who would exert all their energies to get taken on and achieve tenure with nothing further in view than being sustained in the Life of Professor Reilly their lives long.

Plainly, Hutchins had at last flown from the rock-hard reality of human nature and human society. There were some men and women—certainly in a university—who wanted other things more than they wanted money. But where were the men and women to be found who didn't want money, too, and not just enough money to keep them alive at a level determined by Robert M. Hutchins or his subalterns? Where were the men and women who didn't want a new car or a bigger house even though the old car and the old house were, however unsatisfactorily, still serviceable? And where was the governance of such a society that didn't come down, in the end, to arbitrary and capricious tyranny?

What was the man up to?

Interviewed by Donald McDonald for the Columbia University Oral History Project twenty-five years after the event, he dated the final faculty onslaught on him from that speech. He insisted (perhaps disingenuously) that he was actually surprised when his socialist proposal "struck terror in the hearts of many members of the faculty." The terrified were, of course, the old. They stood only to lose, the great men who in the largest sense make or break a university. Again, they saw Hutchins appealing against them to the lowly young.

The greatest of the great men had access to one or another of the trustees socially. They went to their friends on the board and "appealed to them not to listen to me any more. They did not suggest that I retire or resign, but they thought it would be nice if the Board were less attentive."^[1] The Hutchins proposal was double-barreled. It would focus the whole attention of the professors on their proper work, and it would achieve something he had been trying to get from the board for several years past: a salary increase for the lower ranks of the faculty. (In the interest of disarming opposition in the higher ranks he had asked the board for an overall 25 percent increase.) It was appropriate, and inevitable, that the president of a corporation ask his board for wage raises for the employees who had no one else to represent them. But a wage raise, however steep, would not threaten the principle of differential compensation as long as it was proposed on a percentage basis. That wasn't bolshevism. This was.

He had, to be sure, been making radical noises, off and on, all his life and making them in public. As long ago as his speech to the Young Democrats in 1932 he had urged social legislation more radical than FDR's and

had indicated his support for the Socialist presidential candidate Norman Thomas.^[2] Again and again down the succeeding years he had emerged to fire a fine salvo at the ship of state laden with its inequities and iniquities. But he had never left the high-minded road of generality and got down to cases. He had never carried responsibility for the social order into his own back yard.

Neither his enemies nor his friends supposed he ever would. He was, after all, the chief executive of a great corporation and, as such, a man whose genteel sybaritism was so deeply ingrained as to be unconscious. What about his need and his family allowance? True, he had cut his own salary exemplarily during the Depression and had always turned his outside earnings over to the university (a practice he hadn't advertised); but who was to decide, and on what basis, how much he needed to support his three children, his wife, her studio and the family's summer sojourns on the Connecticut shore or in Europe? Or the servants at the university president's house? How could he set up a scheme that would level gross differentials in compensation and do away with the invidiousness on which the money-making world turned? In the first place, he seemed to be talking (and later said that he was) about earned income. Now professors A and B had gone about as far as they would go in biology and history respectively, and they drew down, it was understood, low wages at their already attained ultimate level of associate professor. But they lived lavishly in large houses, when leading professors were living in unpretentious apartments. A and B had married money. What kind of family allowance was A or B to get to maintain three children? What about professors C and D, who were themselves heirs? The earnings of such men were the least part of their income. At a faculty meeting on the subject someone asked what Hutchins would be expected to do with the money if he won a Nobel Prize of (at that time) $46,000. "Keep it," said Hutchins airily—as if such an exception wouldn't invalidate the whole scheme. The likely abuses were endless.

Reflecting long afterward on the immediate effect of that historic speech of his, Hutchins acknowledged that his hearers that evening could well have felt themselves threatened by a proposal as casually and cryptically presented as that one. Would a department head with no dependents actually be cut, and an instructor of no particular promise doubled in salary to support his three children—or more to support his six? But these were the least of the scandals that threatened the very fabric of the institution.

Hutchins had already broken the back of the scandal of scandals: medicine. The scheme in America was the affiliation of an independent medical school with a university, in Chicago's case the Rush Medical School,

whose wealthy men in white treated many of the university's wealthy trustees and donors. Hutchins mounted a crusade to establish a new medical school integrated into the university's biological sciences division and succeeded, over the years, in persuading his board to accept this proposal over the agonized protest of the free-enterprising Rush faculty and the medical profession generally.^[3]

The new medical school proved to be the most durable and exemplary of Hutchins' achievements, elevating Chicago to the forefront of medical research. But in economic terms the adoption of a full-salaried contract, eliminating private practice, constituted an outrageous invasion of the sacred and sacrificial halls of medical care. It was denounced by the doctors as the most arrant sort of socialism. Its opponents, said Hutchins afterwards, "were sagacious enough to foresee what eventually happened. They foresaw the ultimate abolition of their own school because of the establishment of the new one." The medical establishment never forgave him, and the University of Chicago doubtless lost the financial support of many who took their family physician's advice regarding benefactions.

But the practice of medicine was only the most egregious form of outside earnings that diverted faculty members from their research and teaching. The scandal lay in the academic moonlighting in the private sector. It was a perquisite of the academic trade if you happened to be in a field where your services might enrich a business or industrial firm—a biologist moonlighting for a pharmaceutical firm, a geologist for an oil company, a physicist or chemist for a steel or chemical combine. Consider the professors who wrote textbooks for the great textbook houses, walking away with colossal royalties. Department for department, the most prolific offenders were in the business school (called commerce and administration at Chicago). But the practice turned up everywhere.

Socialism—"in one country," at that—was ridiculous. It wouldn't work. It never had.

But the capitalist board of the University of Chicago adopted the full-time contract reform. In a letter to alumni who wrote in to ask about it, Board Chairman Swift said that the prevailing opinion of the trustees was at first unfavorable, but subsequent consideration turned the board around. He cited, in particular, the fact that all fourteen of the deans and all eight of the senior administrative officers supported it. What Swift did not advert to was the faculty opposition to it. Because it wasn't an educational issue but an administrative matter having to do with financing alone, the trustees saw no reason to listen too closely to the muttering of senior professors, many of whom saw their financial prerogatives jeopardized.

In the event, their prerogatives weren't jeopardized by the proposal as it

came to the trustees (and as they adopted it). It was not compulsory to come into the scheme except for instructors after their four-year probationary terms, when they were advanced to assistant professorship or dropped. The plan was voluntary for faculty members with the rank of assistant professor and above. It wasn't, in a word, the imposition of all-out socialism but, rather, its imposition on the lowly and an invitation to the exalted. As for the abolition of rank, Chairman Swift told the alumni that it was in the exploratory state and would not be hastily undertaken. "My guess," he wrote, "is that it will not be done." He was right. It wasn't.

Swift had not, he said, expected as many as fifty applicants for full-time service. He was amazed to find that 115 had applied and been accepted. (Several had been rejected, "these being people who had few outside contacts and who probably thought a permanent increase in salary might be affected thereby.") The idea, he went on, was to take into the plan "many of the younger and most capable men and pay them enough to live comfortably so that outside money-grabbing will not be necessary." If, on the other hand, the professor who came into the plan felt that his outside activities were valuable to his professional development or to the university, there was no objection to his continuing them as long as the money went to the university. "The idea is not so much an attempt to control the individuals, but rather to control conditions so that they can give their chief time and attention to the things they want to do, and so that they will not need to deviate from them for the sake of making a living."

Because the term "socialism," in one form or another, had been widely used in the press in connection with the proposal, conservative alumni had come to the board in considerable number to express their concern. The board chairman assured them that the program was experimental, and that careful observation would be made of all aspects of it, including "whether desirable persons from other institutions hesitate to come to us."

The experiment was a middling success; in the course of a very few years a great majority of the lowest ranking faculty came into the plan, validating, in the view of the older men, their suspicion that the plan was one more Hutchins device for pitting the younger faculty members against the older. Even some people in the higher ranks came into it, and there was no indication, in the ensuing years, that able young men and women hesitated to join the Chicago faculty as instructors because they would be faced, four years later, with entering the program if they were to be retained.

But it did not change the character of the University of Chicago or catch on elsewhere. The higher learning in America remained a free-for-all bastion of free enterprise, and as the moonlighting proliferated both in avail-

ability and reward, and as both the cost and the conception of living went up in the succeeding decades, more and more college and university professors found themselves drawn to money on the side and away from the modest wages they had once been paid for having chosen the life of the mind. So the salaries of professors went up competitively, and nothing more was heard about need as the only basis for compensation in the true community or, for the matter of that, about the true community.

Hutchins' socialism—or bolshevism—in one part of one country was done away with after he left the university, seven years after it was initiated. It was a famous victory—but more famous than it was victorious. And it was the last one of any consequence he was to have as a university president.

One sunny Santa Barbara day, thirty years or so afterward, I sauntered into his office and reminded him of that icy Chicago evening in January of 1944, when he had proposed that members of the University of Chicago faculty be put on a full-time basis and be required to turn over all their outside earnings to the university. "The only basis for compensation in a true community is need." How much of an aberration (if it was one) was his assertion? If that proposal wasn't some sort of socialism, what was it? But he had lived like a capitalist all his life. I told him that before either of us lived any longer I wanted to know his view of the free enterprise system in the abstract. "Tell me why what you were trying to do was in essence different from socialism as the proper organization of society as a whole."

"What I was trying to do was to organize and operate the best university I could. . . . The specific measure that you refer to had nothing to do with my ideas of social, political, and economic matters in general."

"Tell me about your ideas of social, political, and economic matters in general."

"Well, I have a very strong belief in justice, and I have a very strong feeling that the present economic, social, and political order in the United States is unjust."

"Why is it unjust?"

"It is unjust because men are unjust, and because the institutions we have created are unjust, and because the procedures that we follow are unjust. . . . You may say there is no hope as long as we have the economic, social, and political structure we have now. And this is a serious question."

"Have you a serious answer?"

"My serious answer is that in my lifetime I have seen a tremendous amount of improvement in some respects and a tremendous amount of failure in many others. In some ways we were worse off . . . and in some ways . . . better. And I'm unable to decide whether if we had a major

revolution we would be any better off than we are likely to be if we kept working away at trying to obtain justice, if it can be obtained under the present system. For example, the Fourteenth Amendment. . . . And there are various other things. . . . As long as we have tremendous concentrations of private power we are not going to have the kind of country we ought to have."

"But the fact is that the Constitution doesn't say anything about the economic order. Is justice possible under capitalism?"

"I don't know. It is necessary everywhere. But not inevitable under any system. I think that the possibilities of obtaining justice under our system are far from exhausted. At the same time we can not assume that injustice will ever be completely wiped out as long as men remain in their fallen condition. And I take their fallen condition to be congenital. The object, then, is to try to make whatever system you have as just as you can."

"Is there anything inherently just or unjust in capitalism or socialism?"

"Well, I would doubt it. I think there are some very serious questions raised by Marx's theory of surplus value.^[4] I may say that I don't like the words 'socialism' and 'capitalism' because I don't know what they mean and I don't know how you would identify any existing state. Is Russia a socialist state? Is the United States capitalist? From some points of view Yes, and from some points of view No. . . . The question is, what can be done under given circumstances with given people at a given time? I merely say that ours is not a system that one could describe as altogether a free enterprise system, nor is it a socialist system however one defines socialism. We should take the United States as it is—forget whether it's capitalist or socialist—and say what's good and bad about it, what can be done about what's bad, what can be done to confirm what's good, and how you try to make it a better system. . . . I don't believe that I could recommend any existing economic system as it stands."

And so it went. He said nothing that would scandalize the rich beyond their bearing; he was an eccentric one of theirs, but still one of theirs. The establishment's antiestablishmentarian. If it wasn't the system that made the difference, if it was the men; and if the men were in a fallen condition, and the condition was congenital; then how could the men be expected to improve the system? How could congenitally unjust men be expected to "keep working away at trying to obtain justice"?

The vicious circle was obvious to him. In the pinches, the lover of grand abstractions about the true community abandoned the abstraction for reification.

33
Showdown

The convulsion precipitated by Hutchins' speech at the trustees' dinner in January 1944 did not subside in a day or two, or a week or two, or a month or two. It mounted in ungloved intensity during the whole of what was, after all, a year in which people might well have had more cataclysmic things to think about. To read that year's record of the Battle of the Midway—the Chicago Midway—with its increasingly impolite exchange of charges and countercharges, is to lose track (as the contending parties themselves appeared to have lost track) of the rising climax in Europe, Asia, and Africa of history's most stupendous and devastating conflagration.

The rank and salary proposals of the trustees' dinner speech certainly struck bellicosity, if not terror, in the hearts of the faculty opposition, but neither proposal was so much as mentioned during the controversy the speech engendered. The struggle turned on the loftier points the speaker had made with reference to the structure of the university, the character of the degrees it offered, and the power of the president. None of these issues was new. Maybe it was the long weariness and tension of the war, maybe it was a widespread feeling that the campus had simply had enough of the president's cannonading. In any case, the speech served to consolidate the camps of the enemy—camps, not camp, for there were all sorts of reasons why people loved or hated the man.

"Loved" and "hated" were, in general, much too strong to be said. As he himself observed in retrospect, there was no indication, not even when the opposing forces were most ferociously engaged, that there was a substantial movement in the faculty to get rid of him. Few colleagues disliked him unqualifiedly. A colleague who deplored his medievalism applauded his uncompromising fight for academic freedom; a colleague who resented

his prewar isolationism admired his ardor as a war plant manager; a colleague who disliked his deprecation of science lauded his scientific appointments; a colleague who disliked his philosophy of teaching liked the higher student standards his administration had achieved. What his consolidated opponents wanted to do—were at last determined to do—in 1944 was to stop him.

And stop him they did.

The twenty-year Battle of the Midway ended when the board, in response to the gathered clamor of his enemies, was at last forced to step in a year after the trustees' dinner speech and put an end to the finish fight by making a Solomonic award to the two sides. The award was an actual defeat for the perpetual revolutionary, a defeat that effectively ended his campaign to transform the institution into an exemplary university. But the board's decision was framed in evenhanded terms.

It could not have been otherwise. The contending forces were too evenly divided. By January 1944 Hutchins seemed to see that a showdown could no longer be deferred. Some sort of united front was said to be in the making, with a committee of senior professors at its head. The time had come for the Stop Hutchins movement to take on a formal character.

He decided to carry the fight to the enemy, and a month after his January speech he broke his restricted speaking schedule to accept a local invitation from the Northwestern University chapter of the American Association of University Professors. Attacking "the colossal frivolity" of higher education in America, he added that "the existing higher educational structure of the country could be closed without affecting liberal education in any way." He elaborated on his full-time service proposal of a month before, saying, in that connection, that a university was a "consecrated community," in which all distinctions of faculty rank should be abolished as inimical to comradeship and cooperation. The president should have full responsibility for generating the program of the university. He should be the responsible executive of a high-tension democracy. He should be fired "if he starts to go to the dogs."^[1]

This elaboration of his January proposals was put forward as the recipe not for one university, but for all. He was issuing a nationwide indictment and making a nationwide demand. He was calling for reorganization and reconstitution—and "consecration"—everywhere in the land. This was news, formidable news even at the height of the world war. The press picked it up nationally and the Chicago papers gave it front-page billing. He had done what he did with his Saturday Evening Post series five years earlier: he had gone to the country at large, using a shotgun attack on his own constituency. If anything, the offense in the use of such a technique

was greater, since he lumped his own institution with all the rest. Faculty members were interviewed extensively; and the respected Chicago Daily News began its column-and-a-half story by its leading reporter, with the headline: U. OF C. FACULTY IN UPROAR —Fear Recent Proposals to "Communize" Staff Are Power Grab.

"There is a large measure of both mystification and suspicion on the University of Chicago campus. Few faculty members below the rank of dean profess fully to understand their president's motives and objectives. Others profess to see in them implications that they find profoundly disturbing. . . . Dr. Hutchins, they assert, is a master of alluring generality; but when one attempts to pin him down to a definition, he invokes the Roosevelt technique and turns the query aside with a wise-crack. . . . These terms—'a consecrated community,' 'the basis of need,' 'high tension democracy,' 'authority commensurate with responsibility,' 'a very short term,'—are susceptible to varying interpretations. They may mean much or they may mean little. Some faculty members feel that they add up to something approximating the pattern that Sinclair Lewis had in mind when he wrote It Can't Happen Here . Some, recalling Huey Long's seizure of Louisiana State University, profess to see a danger of the University of Chicago coming under absolute control of a man whom they regard as no less ambitious than Huey and far abler and more subtle."^[2]

The Hutchins rhetoric had at last hit the fan. The rhetoric had been exasperating people for fifteen years—people who didn't adore him and didn't like his sass. He reveled—no mistaking it—in riling up the animals by kidding them; but the kidding had an edge to it. Of course he didn't mean that "the faculty isn't much good , but the President and the students are wonderful"—or did he, maybe? Of course he didn't mean that "business men may have ideals, but a professor will do anything for money "—or did he, maybe? Older professors weren't used to being talked to that way, certainly not by a university president. They didn't—couldn't—cotton to his leprechaun humor. It had a touch of scorn in it; it had arrogance, it had contempt. His opponents didn't hate him; but they resented the purposively elfin terms in which he offered his views as deeply as they resented the views themselves.

The muted conversations in the Quadrangle Club dining room and corridors culminated a few weeks after the trustees' dinner speech in the formation of a spearhead group of six senior scholars, of considerably riper years than Hutchins', representing, among them, the social sciences, the natural sciences, and the humanities. They were designated by one of their number "the Burghers of Calais" (after the fourteenth-century incident, portrayed by Rodin, in which six citizens of the besieged city offered

their lives to the English king in a petition for clemency toward the rest). In the first of their "letters" to Hutchins—the whole exchange was public—they said they had become "aware of a deep and widespread feeling of alarm concerning the present and future course of affairs in the University."

"Toward the close of your speech of January 12 you state that 'the purpose of the University is nothing less than to procure a moral, spiritual, and intellectual revolution throughout the world' and you refer later to 'the crusade to which we are called' and 'the revolution which must come if men are to live together in peace,' a revolution which you say must involve 'a reversal of the whole scale of values by which our society lives.'" It seemed to the burghers that these words implied a conception of the university which conflicted basically with the function of "advancing knowledge by freely determined research and teaching . . . [demanding] some kind of common institutional adherence to a particular analysis of what is wrong with the world and hence to a particular hierarchy of moral and intellectual values."

They were all the more seriously concerned, they said, because of his suggestions that the PhD "might well be so redefined as to make it a degree primarily for the teachers you think are needed to discover and introduce liberal education for all," that the PhD thus redefined be awarded through a new Institute of Liberal Studies, and that the university be reorganized to provide for electing the president for a very short term, requiring him to ask the faculty's advice ("but not its consent") and to make decisions and take the consequences. This last proposal, linked with the suggestion that the senate be reduced in size and made elective by and from all members of the faculty, seemed to the six burghers to have "profound implications for the intellectual as well as political future of the University as a free republic of scholars and teachers."^[3]

Hutchins replied, a few days later, that he did not plan to impose a program upon the university, first because he didn't want to, and second, because he couldn't do it if he did. But "I have long since made it plain that I do not regard 'the advancement of knowledge by freely determined research and teaching' as an adequate statement of the purposes of the University." He had given his reasons, he said, as long ago as 1936 in The Higher Learning in America . As for the proposed creation of a new Institute of Liberal Studies, the creation of such an institute lay wholly within the prerogatives of the trustees, to whom he could have gone any time during the past fifteen years to propose the foundation of any new department, institute, or school without reference to the faculty. With regard to presidential powers, he had recommended to the board that the senate be

asked to elect a committee to advise the board on his suggestions that the president should become either chairman of the faculty or a responsible executive.^[4]

Two weeks later the six burghers replied, saying that they were "unable to see how such a revolutionary crusade" as Hutchins appeared to have in mind "could become effective without committing the University, as an institution, to a particular doctrine." They continued to be disturbed, they said, by his announcement of a unifying mission for the university "which could so easily be incompatible with our essential function of advancing knowledge by responsible research and teaching unhampered by any official ideology or philosophical dogma." If, as they inferred, he meant to use his present powers, and such further powers as the trustees might give him, to promote the series of changes he had outlined, they thought the faculty should know it.^[5]

He answered them a week later, repeating that he had no plan to impose his personal views on the institution: "If the University is ever committed to a particular doctrine, it will be because the faculty has agreed upon it." The faculty would be consulted, as it had been in the past, on any measures to be taken toward the realization of a general educational plan; but, he added, many of their colleagues felt that the senate, its membership confined to the full professors, did not fairly represent the faculty. His suggestion for reorganizing the administration—either to drop the president and have a chairman of the faculty, or to make the president a responsible executive—"would increase the participation of the faculty in the formation and execution of educational policy."^[6]

The controversy was getting nowhere, and bad temper, less and less effectively veiled, continued to rise on both sides. The exchange of letters ended with Hutchins' of March 25, but the campus continued to seethe. The burghers were unmollified, and the insouciant king (to whom they were not surrendering the keys to the city) had conceded nothing and offered them an unsatisfactory sort of bland, indeed, amiable reassurance that they had nothing to worry about. Deciding on open warfare, they asked for a meeting of the university senate—which had not met for more than a year. The meeting was held on May 22, with uniformed police barring the doors and windows and admitting senators by special pass. It was attended by some 135 of the 195 senators, a monstrous turnout. The three-hour meeting, from which the press was excluded, was reported via the grapevine to have been stormy; but Vice-president Will Munnecke, who was present ex officio, recalled thirty years later that Hutchins conducted it "without any visible show of emotion or anything more than passing interest." The principal item on the agenda—the only item of

consequence—was a "memorial" to the board of trustees setting forth the grievances of the opposition.

The 120 signers of the memorial were close to two-thirds of the university's senators, including the overwhelming preponderance of the natural scientists. Hutchins was proposing an elected presidency, with the president removable by a senate vote of no confidence; he had not got the presidency he suggested, but he had already got the vote of no confidence (by, to be sure, a senate representing a small minority of the faculty). A noncommital statement issued by the senate after the meeting recorded the fact that there had been a proposal tabled to reorganize the senate to include associate and assistant professors. There was, of course, no knowing how such a body would have voted; but its age would have averaged some fifteen years younger.

The senate vote to adopt the memorial was reported to have been 94 to 42. It is doubtful if the 42 nays were all pro-Hutchins men; some of them may simply have objected to the adversarial procedure. With some statistical confusion between the signers, an additional thirty or thirty-five anti-Hutchins senators didn't sign because they didn't like "trouble." On balance, there may not have been more than thirty or forty of the university's 195 full professors who were actually Hutchins supporters. In any case the fifteen years' war had reached its climax. His enemies had gone over his head to address their case directly to the men who constituted the legal university, and to address them on such matters as administrative reorganization and the creation of the new Institute of Liberal Studies, which were strictly board business, in which the board might be expected to consult the faculty—but not the faculty to lay a case before the board.

The men who prepared and lobbied the memorial in the senate were attentive to Hutchins' strength in the board. Their language was as temperate as their injury permitted. Though they may have felt otherwise, they insisted that they "could not believe that the President would not attend to the friendly advice, on matters of educational principle and policy, of the men upon whom he must rely for the execution of his plan, or that he would be reluctant to reveal his purposes in detail to those who would be called upon to fulfill them. . . . The Senate, recognizing the authority and responsibility of the Board of Trustees and believing that the Board would share its concern at the difficulties the University now faces if it were fully cognizant of them, appeals to the Board for its active assistance, with the President and the Faculty, in developing a comprehensive plan which . . . would explicitly safeguard those basic principles . . . without which . . . the University cannot continue great or free." But the memorialists—speaking as the senate—were sticking to their guns, re-

questing that the university "not be committed to any 'purpose' which would tend to subordinate. . . the free choice of principles and methods of research or teaching, to any particular formulation of moral, social philosophical, or scientific values."^[7]

Accepting the memorial, the trustees noted that the president "has no intention of committing the University to any particular philosophy."^[8] Chairman Swift added an expression of the board's confidence in Hutchins and a recognition of "the educational achievements of the University during the fifteen years of his leadership"; with what might be read as a gently ominous overtone, the chairman added that the board "expects him to continue to administer the affairs of the University in accordance with the existing Constitution and Statutes, until they are changed."^[9] Asked about the memorial, Hutchins observed that the organization of the university, "which is neither efficient nor democratic, has been under study since January 1943, by a committee of the Board and a Committee of the Senate. . . . It is the duty of the president of a university to formulate and state his conception of the purposes of the institution. Nobody has to agree with the president's statements. The imposition of a particular doctrine would be a violation of the perfect academic freedom which the administration of the University of Chicago has always guaranteed."^[10]

Everybody was publicly polite, but the strain was visible in all three parties—now that the board was fully involved—to the dispute. A majority of the board, some of whom certainly did not see what the shouting was all about, was disposed to support Hutchins both on the educational and the administrative issues. The first did not appear to be all that critical, and his position on the second reflected the mental set of most of the trustees. But here were the full professors of the university—all the greats, with a handful of exceptions—putting the board's feet to the fire. While the horrors that aroused the memorialists may not in themselves have aroused many members of the board, a majority of trustees (so informal polls indicated) had always found the Hutchins rhetoric much too high-flown; there was in all probability not one of them who saw the need of a moral, spiritual, and intellectual revolution in the world, or of a new purpose for the university whose faculty members had been following the gleam (or the dozens or hundreds of vagrant gleams) contentedly until the young president had come charging along.

There did not appear, after the submission of the memorial, any way in which Hutchins' and the senate's terms could really be accommodated, any way in which Hutchins could accept the "free choice of principles and methods of research or teaching," any way in which the senate could accept the university as a revolutionary crusader. What the board would

have to do—if it could—was fudge the issue. And Hutchins appeared to be convinced that it would. He was now in a frame of mind that the board had not seen before, not once in those fifteen years they'd known him.

The board had had the senate memorial before it for less than a week when Hutchins handed Swift a memorandum enigmatically headed, "Personal Aspects," with the request, so Swift informed the appropriate board members, that it be distributed to the members of the board committee that had been meeting, on and off, with a senate committee for the past year and a half to consider Hutchins' proposals. The memorandum read:

Omitting minor absurdities, like the claim that I did not call a Senate meeting and declined to consult the faculty, and passing over the systematic campaign of character assassination which has been carried on in the Quadrangle Club for the last four months [since his trustees' dinner speech of January] the principal charges are:

1. That I am seeking to impose a particular philosophy upon the University.

a. I have denied this in writing.

b. The record shows I mean it.

c. It is my duty to have and state a purpose for the University.

2. That I am threatening academic freedom.

a. No university president has done more for it.

3. That I am seeking a dictatorship.

a. From the beginning I have stated that I would resign if the theory of organization upon which I was elected were changed.

b. Neither of the two plans I have proposed resembles a dictatorship in the slightest degree.

4. That I am exceeding my powers.

a. Everything I have done has been approved by the Board, or the Senate, or both.

5. That I have sacrificed research to teaching.

a. Research has never been as well supported as it has during my administration and is nowhere as well supported as at the University of Chicago.^[11]

One of Hutchins' characteristically wry remarks, which his friends ascribed to his supposedly unhappy domestic situation, was, "I'm so busy feeling sorry for myself that I haven't time to feel sorry for anybody else." In his memorandum to the board committee he was feeling so sorry for himself that he wrote in an angrily uncharacteristic way. He had never accused his opponents of offenses ranging from minor absurdities to character assassination. (He could scarcely have been imagined using the latter expression on his own behalf.) He defended himself by a combination of

flat denial—"Not guilty"—and unsupported declarations which, unsupported, sounded like braggadocio. The claims that he made in items 2 and 5 were classics of overstatement by a man who was justly famous for classic and consistent understatement. After fifteen years of being urbane, Robert Maynard Hutchins was reduced to a crude outburst. He had often said he was "frustrated and furious"; at last he plainly was.

The memorandum called for no reply and received none. But the frustrated and furious president asked for the opportunity—in spite of the press of war work—to address the faculty and students of the truncated summer quarter on the subject of the organization and purpose of the university. The date of the convocation was put at July 20—sixty days away. The address was a very long one, its tone one of carefully modulated anger, but anger still. It began, "During recent discussions . . . I have had to remain silent. But in view of the misconceptions of my position scattered abroad during these discussions it now seems desirable, as well as proper, for me to try to state what my position is."

He went on to a Hutchinsesque apology to his audience, lightly concealing its bellicosity under a matter-of-fact cloak: "I am afraid that I shall be saying nothing that is new. But I have to admit that I have not for many years said anything in that category." He then proceeded to a full-scale review of each of his proposals and the faculty charges they inspired. On a hot summer's day, relieved by the shadowed cool of the university chapel, and before an audience of his own choosing on his and their own grounds, he was obviously speaking for the purpose of making a record. He could only have supposed that, if he replied in painstaking detail to everything that had been said against his proposals and his actions, the enemy would come penitently forward and respond to the altar call. But the address was as solidly packed as it was energetic, as elegant as it was precise. It turned out to be his last hard try. The date of that last hard try, July 20, 1944, was seven whole years before he resigned from the university.

Ignoring the possibility, indeed, the likelihood, given the sweltering weather, that his audience might grow restless, he plunged ahead, taking up the issues point by point and presenting their analysis and his own case. By way of supporting the board's power to establish new institutes, schools, and departments without reference to the faculty, he reminded his hearers that there were developments in education "now universally regarded as desirable [which] could not have taken place if the professors whose particular interests were involved had had the decisive voice as to whether these developments should have been started"—a polite way of saying (as he had once said) that the great achievements in American education had been made over the dead bodies of countless professors. He

referred in passing to the Chicago board's elimination of the Rush Medical School in favor of the salaried faculty integrated with the university's division of biological sciences.

Then he rolled up his sleeves and went solemnly, patiently, and thoroughly to work on the issue that most persistently galled both him and his opponents. "I have lately heard"—he had been hearing it for fifteen years—"that I am seeking to impose a particular philosophy on the University. This is in a sense a highly complimentary suggestion, because it implies that I have a philosophy. I suppose everybody has a philosophy, in a way. We are all metaphysicians"—he couldn't resist it—"whether we know it or not and whether we like it or not. For we all act all the time on certain basic assumptions in regard to the nature of the world and of man. To say that freely determined teaching and research are the object of the University is to state a philosophy for the University. To say that no other philosophy is possible is to seek to impose it on the University.

". . . I could plausibly say that the particular philosophy which the majority of the senior members of the faculty share has therefore been imposed by them upon the University.

"I do not say that this is so. I say that it is much more nearly so than the charge that I am seeking to impose my philosophy. If I have not in fifteen years succeeded in moving the established philosophy an inch, it would seem likely that I am not trying to move it, but am merely endeavoring to prevent the established philosophy from being imposed on me, on those members of the faculty who may agree with me, and on all new appointees. . . .

"Is the call for a moral, spiritual, and intellectual revolution throughout the world the statement of a particular doctrine? I should call it the statement of a very general doctrine indeed. Wherever I have said this I have been attacking materialism, the view that wealth and power are the aim of human life and human organization. Since almost every philosophy and every religion take the same position, this hardly seems the statement of a particular doctrine. This general doctrine should, moreover, be very popular in a university, for men who regard wealth and power as the aim of life seldom select a university as the field for their ambition. . . .

"I suppose that a university could be unified through the imposition of an official dogma. I repudiated that method long ago. The university must find a way to be an agent of harmony and unification without suppressing the vagrant intellect or violating the claims of freedom. The way to do this is through a common training and a common purpose. A university becomes an understood diversity through a common training by virtue of

which the members of the community may at last make themselves intelligible to one another. . . .

"The university cannot fashion the intellect of the modern world if it proclaims that the fundamental disorder of the modern world is indifferent to it as a university. . . . To fashion the intellect of the modern world is to raise insistently the great issues and to press urgently for answers to them. It is to hold before the people of the world a vision of what the world might be. To argue that this is no concern of a university and even that it is contrary to its purpose is to reject responsibility for the decisions which must be made as to the use of the knowledge and power accumulated by a university.

"To say let us gain knowledge and power and our ends will take care of themselves is not to fashion the intellect of the modern world, but to submit to it, for this is what the modern world is saying. Here the university abandons the task of intellectual leadership and mirrors, symbolizes, and justifies the great reversal of ends and means which is the underlying disorder of our society. And it does so at a time when all we have to do is to look around us to see that the growth of knowledge and power gives us no hint as to how to use them; for the world has reached at one and the same moment the zenith of its information, technology, and power over nature, and the nadir of its moral and political life. . . .

"In the moral, intellectual, and spiritual conflict which I foresee the university may take whichever side it pleases. It may endorse the scale of values by which our society lives; or it may join in the effort to reverse them. The only thing it can not do, as it seems to me, is to stand apart from the conflict on the theory that its function places it above it. This is to doom the University to sterility. It is to renounce the task of intellectual leadership. It is to deny at a great crisis in history our responsibility to mankind."^[12]

He had said at the opening of his address that he would be glad to answer questions. There were none. There were none because his hearers either accepted what he said—this segment of the audience might include most of the students present and some of the younger faculty—or rejected it. The older men and women could not help but reject it. They could not help but reject the view that the university had the obligation to fashion the intellect of the world or place itself in the vanguard of a moral, intellectual, and spiritual revolution. They did not, indeed, see what was meant by "the university" in this unified, purposive, consecrated sense at all. The university—any university—was not a community. It was an aggregation of men and women whose only object was (as the Six Burghers of Calais

said) freely determined teaching and research. Beyond this airy objective, which did not unite its myriad votaries housed in the same quadrangles, it had, and could have, in their view, no other. The practitioners of freely determined teaching and research in those quadrangles did not know one another; likely a majority did not even know one another by sight. How could the university take "whichever side in pleases" in the moral, intellectual, and spiritual contest for the world? There was, in that sense, no such thing as the university .

He could not have been sanguine about the effect of that address; it contained nothing that was new except a great many flourishes of sculptured elegance. But there it was—all of it. It was indeed his hardest try. It was indeed his last one. He had spoken for a solid hour. He had spoken for the record. But as far as effectiveness was concerned, after five, ten, or fifteen years of the same thing, he had spoken to the wind. The University of Chicago, to the extent that there was a University of Chicago, was neither going to endorse the scale of values by which our society lives nor join in the effort to reverse them. What it was going to do, then and thereafter, like every other free university, was exactly what he said it couldn't do; stand apart from the conflict.

34
Denouement

It went (as it had always gone) without saying that his resignation was on the table. ("The administrator must be in a perpetual mood of resignation, by which I do not mean mournful acceptance of the universe. I mean he must be perpetually prepared to get out.")^[1] His board knew it, and he knew it. Hutchins spelled it out when he first submitted his two alternative proposals for presidential powers; should either of them be accepted, the administrative officers of the university would resign in a body, so that the new role of the president could be implemented de novo. He, at least, took the offer seriously; and in the next few months, while the board and senate committees met regularly in response to the senate memorial, he considered quitting in any case. He had gone all out in his speech of July 20, 1944; there was nothing more he could do; he was palpably tired of perpetual pushing. He had often discussed resigning and discussed it over a period of years. He had discussed it with a few of his friends—and with his father (who was, as usual, worried about his impetuosity and urged him to wait and see what the board did).

On December 1, 1944, he sent a note to Chairman Laird Bell of the Board Committee on Instruction and Research. "I can not emphasize too strongly," he wrote (somewhat prayerfully), "the effect on the faculty of a definite, clear-cut decision by the Board. The faculty should not be asked; it should be told. It has leaked out"—the leak proved to be inaccurate, its inaccuracy indicating that Hutchins and the senate were both left in the dark on the state of the board's sentiments—"that the Board has decided to have a small, representative Senate. The bitterest members of the opposition are now busily engaged in formulating its constitution. They are Adjusting themselves to their Environment!"^[2] He was being blithe,

complete with an exclamation mark. It wasn't too much like him. Was he whistling in the dark?

Whether or not he was whistling, he was in the dark. The board, as of the date of that note, had already completed its work and made its decisions. They were announced three days later by Chairman Swift, in the form of six points:

1. The University Senate will be broadened to include associate and assistant professors who have been on the campus for at least three years. This will mean that the roster will be increased from 195 full professors now comprising the Senate to a total of 350.

2. A council of forty members will be elected to act on educational issues which will meet at least quarterly.

3. An executive committee of seven will be elected which will be continuously in touch with the president.

4. The council will take affirmative action on educational matters and has the right to disapprove of proposals of the presidents, but the president can veto the council's action. In case of a stalemate, the decision will be up to the Board of Trustees.

5. The president may recommend faculty appointments to the Board without the approval of department heads.

6. The Board can create or discontinue departments and divisions at its own discretion.

So Hutchins would get his more democratic senate, but it would be even more cumbersome than it had been, with its membership almost doubled. The council and executive committee might—or might not, if they reached a stalemate—facilitate decision-making, without the president's having new powers. Point 5 was a modest Hutchins victory, actually a reaffirmation of traditional procedure. Point 6 simply confirmed the university's established practice.

The new program was presented as a device to "establish a better exchange of ideas and information than present procedures permit." It provided clarification, but provided it at a much lower level than Hutchins had sought. The real differences between the president and the opposition were simply ignored. No choice was made between his alternative proposals of the presidency as a faculty chairmanship, on the one hand, and as the responsible repository of power on the other. No mention was made of his repeated and insistent call for a moral, intellectual, and spiritual revolution with the university in its vanguard. This call underlay his educational reforms, and he had been making it with increasing emphasis ever since he had come to the university. Ignoring it, the trustees were in effect saying

that they regarded it as unworthy of notice. They were slapping him down and handing the opposition its validation.

True, he had moved the board to make decisions in areas such boards had always avoided; the senate had raised educational issues that college and university governors were unaccustomed to, and this body of governors faced at least the secondary, if not the primary, issues. Ordinarily the solemn custodians of conservatism, the Chicago board had issued (said the Chicago Daily News ) a "declaration against the old fogeyism which had been the badge of trusteehood for two hundred years." It wasn't all that aggressive, but there was a real sense in which, where nobody traditionally ran a university, Hutchins had forced somebody to make a few gestures in running this one; and the faculty had, going with him to the board, awakened the board to responsibilities that were traditionally considered the professors'—or nobody's—prerogatives.

The University of Chicago would never again be quite the institution it had been before his advent. But its resemblance to the institution he wanted would be very slightly increased. He had fought hard for fifteen years and more, and had now been beaten. He had got his college at the very outset of his administration, and perhaps a fourth of all the courses offered at all levels bore his stamp, however lightly, as regards content and method. (Their twin hallmarks were the Socratic discussion format and the use of original writings instead of textbooks.) In the twelfth year of his administration he had got the award of the bachelor's degree at the end of the sophomore year of the college (a scheme that would be rescinded when he left the university). But the place was fundamentally the same, for all his fulmination, all his unrelenting effort at home and abroad. The divisional organization had not diminished the power and independence of the departments. The old anarchy abode. There wasn't—nor would there be—any community of scholars, at Chicago or anywhere else.

How much did the fact that the protagonist was Hutchins—that rarest of presidential birds—have to do with his failure to effect any fundamental and durable change in the character of the University of Chicago and of the higher learning in America?^[3] Probably very little. Probably nothing at all. He had neither the temper nor the posture of the classic reformer, alternately glowering, shouting, threatening, pleading. He came through as a phenomenally frisky man of phenomenal lineaments who endeared himself in the first instance to men who themselves were frisky, who found friskiness (and lineaments) attractive. But he came through, too, as a thoroughly serious man who meant—underneath the friskiness—what he said, who did his homework and stuck by his guns. His opponents nearly all

respected him or in time came to. But after fifteen or twenty years they were not to be dazzled by his splendor (including the splendor of his rhetoric) or, alternatively, repelled. It is impossible to go on being astonishing, outrageous, or enchanting to people you have to higgle and haggle and huckster with again and again, year in, year out. The charm and the annoyance both wore off, giving way to considered support or considered resistance.

His opponents came to understand him, by and large; to understand that he was not a bundle of whimsical contradictions and elevating or denigrating wisecracks, but a man with direction who wanted a change (however radical) of emphasis, not of educational principle. He was arguing about method, content, structure, not about the purpose or meaning of education. Again and again he insisted: "We are discussing a question of emphasis. . . . If you are running a steel company, you may run railroads and coal mines. You may have an extensive plant and an investment portfolio to look after. Yet your principal business is manufacturing and distributing steel." Again and again he insisted that he was not insisting on a particular method, structure, or body of materials, as long as the student mastered the liberal arts and the great tradition. "If he can do it by going fishing and taking the general examinations whenever he is ready to, that's just peachy." Again and again he insisted that he was arguing only that "there are other means of obtaining knowledge than scientific experimentation." But his academic listeners would not listen to his insistence that he was not insisting, and his depreciation of the mythology of science kept persuading them that he would consign empirical investigation to the playpen, along with the pragmatic achievements with which it had changed the face of the world. His insistence that he was not antiscientific, antiquarian, medieval, dogmatic, reactionary, and authoritarian was invariably couched in such provocative terms that his enemies could get away with scouting his claim that the issue was only an issue of emphasis.

He was an unyielding absolutist, not on method, material, or structure, but on one point: that there were such things as changeless, universal values—"courage, justice, temperance, these are still the virtues"—whose investigation commanded the adherence of a university committed, as a university must be, to the moral, intellectual, and spiritual renewal of society. And his opponents drew from this uncompromising absolutism an across-the-board adherence to everything they rejected. In the climactic debate of 1944 the redoubtable Quincy Wright wrote that "the values for which universities stand are so long run and so general that they can not be stated except in terms of process and methods. Truth itself is a process which can not be circumscribed in a formula or imagined in a Utopia.

Recognition of the limitations of all truths, of the fallibility of all formulations, of the relativity of all values is the characteristic which distinguishes a living civilization."^[4] This comforting view of a world in flux, with every opinion as well entitled to adherence as every other, and all of them teetering, invariably included, as it did in Wright's case, a snide or condescending lip service to undefined, indefinable, and ephemeral values—or at least to the term. Chancellor Harry Woodburn Chase of the University of New York firmly asserted that "we need a keener sense of values. All knowledge is not of the same worth"—and at once leaped to the pleasant, popular highland of infirmity: "But again, values vary with individuals and with environment. By what universally valid criteria can we judge?"^[5] —By none that Chancellor Chase went on to suggest; he rested his case right there.

So deaf to the Hutchins claim of emphasis was—and remained—John Dewey that at the age of eighty-five, in the same climactic summer of 1944, he wrote in Fortune magazine that "we are familiar with [Hutchins' view] from early childhood. It is a conventionally established part of a large portion of our training in family and Sunday school. Nevertheless, it is the expression of a provincial and conventional point of view, of a culture that is prescientific in the sense that science bears today." The problem of making "this and that definite factory and field operation . . . contribute to the educative release and growth of human capacities, as well as to production of a large and reasonably cheap supply of material goods . . . is one that, by its own terms, can be dealt with only by the continuous application of the scientific method of experimental observation and test"^[6] —as if Hutchins had been saying or suggesting that factory and field operations be submitted to Aristotle or Aquinas for explication or validation. In the last venerable months of his life Dewey was still (in the phrase of Sean O'Casey) "'arpin' on me dotter," and Hutchins was supposedly still condemning the rising generation to the provincial, conventional, and prescientific horrors of family and Sunday school.

Emphasis was what Hutchins was talking about, but the magnitude and complexity of the emphasis were too much for most of his colleagues. It came down to the thought-through substitution of one set of profound predilections—nothing more than predilections—for another. Most academics were not all that interested in thinking through predilections or in asking themselves what was scientific and what was prescientific. For teachers generally, at whatever level, being a teacher is a grinding occupation that wants a steady man or woman of the incurious sort. Hutchins was a stirrer-up of people who had no great interest in being stirred or in stirring, most of whom began the school year just sufficiently refreshed and ended it very tired, and had no great zest for an unrelenting succession of

challenges. Being a teacher is a hard living, and a living that is not generally highly enough paid to free the practitioner from the financial problems that nag most people and divert them their life long from the contemplation of the verities. As it does to most people, the teacher's personal life usually means a great deal more to him than his job. His job, if he teaches in a university, is first of all research; and if he is susceptible to being excited by his job, it is his research that excites him. The routine of teaching and the grip of research pretty much exhaust his professional energies. The faculty at Chicago—like the faculty of any solidly established institution—could not and would not be kept at the incessant ready to do something about Education with a capital E , except for that minority (mostly the younger and least influential of them) who felt themselves called to crusade with the Boy President. By 1944, at forty-five, he had pretty well run out of boyishness.

Looking back at it all, Hutchins would insist that he might have done much better than he did at Chicago, that, with patience (which he ridiculed in the first years of his administration) he might, he thought, have done a great deal more to achieve a consensus—"that unfortunate word"—instead of relying on getting a mere majority, "which I constantly got and constantly relied on. This is not the spirit of an intellectual community, to proceed by majority votes, particularly by narrow votes, to say nothing of proceeding by tie votes."^[7]

"I think that one has to say, on the other side, that the kind of patience that is required is almost superhuman. You have very little effective power. That is, you can't tell anybody to do anything. You can't threaten anybody, if only for the practical reason that in a university environment that would be a boomerang. If it became known that I threatened a professor, it would have had catastrophic results. By the same token, you can't reward anybody. That is, you can't reward anybody for being in sympathy with you. You can reward him within the limits of your budget and the approval of your board and the concurrence of his department, for his distinction in his field. But if I left a faculty meeting and recommended an increase in salary of a man who had done something to put through a program that I was interested in, this also would have been a dreadful boomerang. . . . [A university president] must rely entirely, therefore, on his powers of persuasion.

"Well, if you set out to try to persuade the same people over and over and over again, year after year, the charm of your personality, and even the fluency of your words, is likely to diminish. And this was another reason, of course, that I finally resigned. I felt that somebody else could come in and give the place a new and certainly a different impetus. I simply

felt that I was losing what a university president who takes his position seriously has to have, namely, the power, the endurance constantly to keep at the job of persuading people."^[8]

The power, the endurance—and the appetite. He tried, half-heartedly, to display the appetite to persuade. He recalled what seemed to him, years later, to have been an infinity of what he called hand-holding sessions. "You see one man after another. You talk to groups, you talk to anybody you can get hold of because you . . . have no power. . . . If anybody were to ask me how to run a university, I would—at least as far as the board and the public were concerned; this may not be necessary with the faculty—I would reply with one five-letter word: LUNCH . You've got to keep on having lunch with people. You get indigestion in the process, but you can sometimes do better missionary work under these circumstances than any other."^[9]

Might he have been able to do more, or to do things more durably, if he had had more lunches, if his rhetoric had been less combustible, if his patience had been less easily exhausted, if he had made even more compromises than he claimed he did? Probably not; "the problem of time is insoluble."—This in 1945, while he was still on the job.—"The administrator should never do anything he does not have to do, because the things he will have to do are so numerous that he can not possibly have time to do them. He should never do today what he can put off till tomorrow. He should never do anything he can get anybody to do for him. He should have the largest number of good associates he can find; for they may be able to substitute for him. But he should be under no illusions here. The better his associates are, the more things they will think of for him to do."^[10]

Ten years later, with Chicago five years behind him, he asserted his conviction that "the existing structure [of the university generally] is impossible. . . . Administration by persuasion and agreement, which is the only kind that brings lasting results, can not be conducted in the vast chaos of the American university. If I had it to do over again I might have begun in 1929 with a proposal more basic than any I ever advanced. I should have proposed the reorganization of the University of Chicago along the lines of Oxford and Cambridge. The University should have been reconstituted into a federation of colleges, each representing among its students and teachers the major fields of learning. These colleges should have begun their work with the junior year, resting on the foundation of the College of the University, which terminated its work at the end of the sophomore year. That college was intended to be the equivalent of the humanistic gymnasium or the lycee or the British public school. The change could

have meant that basic liberal education would have been followed by compulsory communication with the representatives of disciplines other than one's own throughout the whole educational process, and, in the case of teachers, throughout their lives. Such colleges, with 250 students and 25 faculty members, would be of manageable size. Each one could have an administrative officer who could be expected to lead the way to improvements both numerous and lasting. The University as a whole should not have a permanent, full-time head. The ceremonial, representative functions of the university president could be performed, as at Oxford and Cambridge, by a temporary official."^[11]

There was the pipe dream of all Hutchins pipe dreams for you. In the light of his failure to get the modest changes he fought for at Chicago for twenty years, it is not difficult to imagine what would have happened—and what would have happened to him—had he made any such totally radical proposal as this for the dismemberment of the university and its reconstitution as a collection of small colleges with "compulsory communication with the representatives of disciplines other than one's own throughout the whole educational process, and, in the case of teachers, throughout their lives." What would have happened to so mad a proposal would have been its instant and outraged dismissal along with the fiery resignation, within a few months of its being made, of its mad proponent. He would have made a point, but a point of no wide or durable interest; and not one of the things he did achieve over those two decades (in however inadequate and evanescent a form) would have come to pass or have even reached any considerable nationwide or worldwide attention.

They did. They came to be known, and imitated, in most of the nation's universities and many of its colleges, peripherally, to be sure, and transitorily, to be surer. They were argued all through the higher learning, not only in America but in Europe and in Asia. The name of Hutchins was universally heard, and some comprehension of his position expressed at every level of education over that twenty-year period. And it would remain the one name—after Dewey's—to be known at every level of education in the decades that followed. Fifty years after he came to Chicago, the collapse of the whole schooling process, elementary, secondary, and collegiate, aroused a great clamor to return—as if they had ever been there—to "basics," and in the 1980s there were still, in every university, faculty members and faculty movements tracing their heredity to Hutchins. And there were no end of teachers everywhere who, though they might only know his name, were his disciples via that animate heredity.

He maintained privately, and broadly implied in public, that he had failed as an educator. Of course he had failed. He had failed to change

American education for the better. So had everybody else. American education had changed, all right, but it had changed for the worse. So had a great many other things in the general demoralization and disintegration of the social order. The presidents, premiers, and packagers all failed of their ambitions, President Hutchins among them. Sinners innocent of some sins, including some cardinal sins, but guilty of the cardinal sin of pride. Bob Hutchins had read Faust (in German) in a pup tent on the Italian front in 1918. In the introduction to Faust he had read that the Lord asked Mephistopheles how His favorite creature on earth was getting along, and the Devil replied, "Der Mensch bleibt Mensch "—"He's still the same old man."

35
Denouement (2): Maude

They were as unlike as two peas in a closely examined pod. Their likenesses were obvious: she was almost as tall as he was; the way they carried themselves and their sense of dress stamped them as forerunners of what would one day be the beautiful people. Arch, casual, immensely self-possessed, immensely inattentive to the passing scene (they were the passing scene), they were both of them offhand in the way they handled money, having the air of two people who had never known what it was not to have money, though both of them had grown up without much of it; he the son of a parson professor who reared a family on two thousand dollars or so a year. (Her family, Phelpses, McVeighs, were genteel New Yorkers, her father a well-paid editor of the Sun .)

He must have got his toploftiness about money at Yale, where, without a bean, pushing a broom, waiting table, tutoring, he had made his name and fame among the best-padded young men in the land. Somewhere, somehow he had learned to pick up the check without ostentation or a quaver, to the manner born. All his life he sent back letters on the stationery of the George V in Paris, the Hassler in Rome, Claridge's in London, and Excelsiors and Grands all over the world without, plainly, ever supposing that anybody anywhere would say, "What does he do for money?" Possessed of the small-time bourgeois trait of being utterly closemouthed about his finances, he nevertheless let it be known among his close friends that he was in debt down the years, down all the years. He was forty when, damping down a friend's suggestion that he let his name be put forward for the United States presidency, he wrote, "But I could use the salary." He was seventy-five when President Edward Levi asked him to return to Chicago to deliver a series of lectures, and he said, "On what?" "On your reflections," said Levi. Hutchins: "I have never reflected on anything ex-

cept how to pay my debts." And, again at seventy-five, he said to a friend, "I have always declined to write my autobiography. But if somebody would want to help me pay my debts by advancing $50,000, I'd do it." (The friend asked around; nobody would.)

"I never made any money," he said. He didn't have to. He was able to turn over to the university all the money he got from his lectures and books and still survive in style on his $25,000 wages (more or less), until he jumped to $35,000 at the Ford Foundation in 1950. He was able to survive in style in part because of the expense-account life he led from his early twenties on—remember, he was a law school dean at twenty-eight—and in part because the rich were always thrusting things on him, from summer houses to cars to, in Benton's case, great amounts of money for limited services to the Britannica operations. Still he was always heavily in debt, living not so much sumptuously as carelessly, the unselfconscious sybarite going blocks out of his busy way to buy himself a single pair of socks at Sulka's. Once, if only once, he revealed a passing self-consciousness: in his syndicated weekly column in the Los Angeles Times he wrote, in 1963, "Never in history has it been so easy for one group in a community to go through life without any awareness of the existence of others. Highways, trains, and airplanes take me quickly around or over sights that might shock my sensibilities or move my heart to compassion. I can travel from my agreeable home to my pleasant office and on to luxury restaurants and hotels serene in the assurance that I will meet nobody, not even a waiter, who looks much worse off than I."

The unselfconscious sybarite was an unselfconscious snob. Once Paul Jacobs and he were late for an appointment in New York and they couldn't get a cab. Jacobs suggested that they take the subway, and Hutchins said, "I never use public transportation in New York."^[1] And once, when he had a 12:30 luncheon date downtown in Chicago, and I was going to ride with him in the livery car that carried him around, and the car didn't show up, I suggested that if he hotfooted it to the Illinois Central suburban station he could catch an express that would land him at the Chicago Club in time, and he said, "I have never ridden the IC, and I never will."

On at least one occasion his unselfconscious snobbery played a mean trick on him. A New Yorker of his acquaintance was going to be in Chicago briefly between trains en route home from California. Hutchins was anxious to talk to him and they made a date at the university. But Hutchins was also going to New York that day, and it was agreed that they would travel together and continue their talk. The New Yorker would be boarding the train in downtown Chicago, Hutchins at the out-

going Englewood stop near the university. Hutchins duly boarded the extra-fare Twentieth Century Limited (which he always rode) at Englewood, but he couldn't find the New Yorker. The reason he couldn't, he learned later, was that by "the train," the New Yorker meant the slower, regular-fare Commodore Vanderbilt on the same line. The New Yorker was John D. Rockefeller, Jr.

Hutchins could not plead, and did not attempt to, that he had no competence in personal finances—that his mind was on higher things. His mind for the last fifty and more years of his life was on lower things a great deal of the time. As an administrator, first at the Yale Law School, then successively at Chicago, the Ford Foundation, the Fund for the Republic, and the center in Santa Barbara, he knew who got how much money and why, and spent a great deal of his time listening to people who wanted more and deciding whether they should get it. He knew all the Eleusinian mysteries of a thousand families' finances (or what was presented to him as family finances). Men who would talk freely about their religion, their politics, and their sex lives could not be got to talk about how much money they made or had or spent—except by the boss to whom they were applying for a raise on the ground, always, of need. He knew all about poor-mouthing and had to indulge in it himself when, on extremely rare occasion, he went to his boards of trustees to get a raise for himself; extremely rare because his to-the-manner-born manner moved him to an apparent indifference to the sordid concerns of the workaday world.

It was an expensive life, partly because he lived it that customized way, partly because, as the big money earner, he was always a generous donor to members of his family near and far, including the three daughters he'd had (and regretfully said he'd had) too little time for. Plagued by his self-proclaimed neglect of his children—the claim was an honest one—he tried more than a little naively to compensate for the neglect by his financial generosity to them. Between Maude's work and her demand on his attention and his own work and weariness, their daughters were nearly always left to the mercies of nannies. They were not happy children, and the lives of the two oldest reflected childhood distresses. They were all three very bright. The oldest, Frances ("Franja") was thrice married, the last time to an orthodox Jew whose religion she adopted; she and her husband both died of cancer in early middle life. The second, Joanna Blessing ("Jo-Jo"), lived alone in Berkeley pretty well alienated from the family. Only the youngest, Clarissa, married to a Brandeis University faculty member, and herself an effective public-service lawyer in Cambridge, both stood up to her parents and fulfilled the hopeful role of the academic's child. But even bold and perceptive Clarissa, who said she regarded Hutchins as "a great

guy rather than a great man," had grown up in relative isolation from her art-centered mother and her job-centered father. In 1965 an outfit called the National Father's Day Committee designated him Father of the Year (an honor awarded to Spiro Agnew in 1972), and he said it must have been to present the world with the world's most horrible example. The son of a strong father and a docile mother, brought up with two brothers, he had no early training in dealing with women and was never able to come to terms with them, whatever their proximity, whatever their age or his. He was infinitely polite, infinitely careful to see to it that they were appointed to posts and recognized in discussion, and infinitely capable of masking what may well have been a deep-seated scorn of their not unusual demand for special recognition as a sex. His attention, and attentiveness, to them was meticulous and faultless; it was clear, to those who knew him well, that it was not the attention or attentiveness given recognized equals. Incapable of recognizing their due, and of giving it because it was their due, he gave to them in the futile spirit of largesse.

It didn't work, not with women who wanted their due as due them. It didn't work, above all, with Maude Hutchins. He tried to buy her satisfaction for twenty-seven years, and had finally to acknowledge failure—without being able to acknowledge his failure as the consequence of his trying, for want of another way, to buy her satisfaction by buying her the things that money bought. Maude Hutchins was as rare a bird as he was; rarer. Her talents were several, each of them considerable, all of them aesthetic. She was, purposively, illiterate on social issues (including education) and as indifferent as she was illiterate, likely because of her resentment of him, just as likely because of her intense preoccupation with her variform artistic enterprises. She was a fine sculptor, a very good pen and pencil artist, and a hurry-up novelist (or novellaist) of parts. (Her published fiction was all of it embarrassingly racy, both for him and for the 1930s and 40s. Her Diary of Love^[2] was characterized by the Chicago police censors as "purple.") But she was much more than her aesthetic capacities. Much, much more.

If he was imperial, she was imperious; imperious and impervious to what (and who) went on around her, as he never was. Hers was a nose-in-the-air posture which he, whatever his inclination, was foreclosed from maintaining consistently by virtue of his job. The two of them were born to trouble with one another as the sparks of their intercourse flew sideways. Their fiercely competitive—and exhausting—wit was singular to each of them; his saucy, hers caustic. (As when told Ruml was quitting the social sciences for Macy's: "Exchanging ideas for notions, eh?" or encountering one of her husband's friends after many years: "You're as ugly

as ever.") Their public conversation was diamond-cut-diamond, their tête-à-tête imaginably acrid behind the forbidden doors of the president's house on the campus.

Those doors closed behind him at five minutes past five every weekday; and the man who had a hard day at the office every day, and before the day at the office a stretch of writing between 6 and 8 A.M. , was under the imperious duty to be entertaining. He did not succeed very well or very often. He wanted to read, or work, for an hour after drinks and dinner and before his preferred bedtime of nine-thirty (better yet, nine). It wasn't vouchsafed him (as it isn't many men) to do so. He spent thirty years angrily yielding. At six in the evening, even six-thirty, he might phone one of three or four intimates in the neighborhood and ask him to come over—without his wife —for a lap dinner. A shameful command performance on the inviter's part, a shameful acquiescence on the invitee's. These gatherings à trois were as luxurious and uncomfortable as the well-staffed dinner parties, where she went through the ironic motions of scintillating and he repressed his distress and his tiredness and did his dutiful best, at so late an hour, to unbend. The dinner parties were infrequent, mingling an occasional trustee or an even more occasional donor or prospective donor with one or two close friends who could be counted on to help keep the iron ball rolling. With Maude as the unvoiced alibi, no more than a handful of senior faculty—still fewer junior—ever saw the inside of the president's house during the Hutchinses' twenty years' residence.

He would not, of course, complain, beyond lifting his eyes to the hills when a friend asked him, vaguely enough, how things were going, or replying, "You know how things are going." Or if the friend asked, "How are things otherwise?" "There isn't any otherwise." Or, if the friend was close: "None of your business." He exploited his intolerable situation: he could, and did, reject invitations he didn't want to accept by saying, "I'm sorry" without having to say why he was sorry. It was widely and long understood that things were rough at home behind those doors, with marvelous Maude serving as his lightning rod, no less effectively than she served as his lightning. Yielding to her bolts or, sufficiently sharply jolted, hurling one or two back, he did himself and the relationship no good at all. The suspicion that the world had, of an isolated hell behind those doors, proved in the end to have been completely valid. Pastor William James Hutchins and his wife had not brought up their sons to be divorced; and their second son, until he was, could not have believed that a Hutchins ever would be.

None of the yielding could have done any good, and none of it did, however scandalous the lengths to which he carried it. None of those

lengths was more scandalous than the one that involved a half-dozen carefully spotted friends who he knew would do anything for him within—or without—reason, and to whom he could go unblushingly. A few months after I went to work in the president's office I discovered, to my fiscal horror, that I had been admitted to this shameful circle. He was willing to employ his silent, shrieking agony not only to duck engagements, not only to generate a generalized sympathy ("poor Bob"), but to get his hands on money to keep his wife "quiet"—as if Maude Hutchins were in want of repeated sedation and solicitousness.

There were probably half a dozen—maybe more—such coconspiratorial victims of the ridiculous keep-Maude-quiet or keep-Maude-busy campaign strategy. Mortimer Adler was one (like the Mayers, the Adlers, too, wound up with a bronze head of the Mrs.) Millionaire Bill Benton was another, whose three children were all headed. Benton was angrily willing to play the game, but his anger overcame his willingness after he was persuaded to commission Maude to do a life-size bronze statue for the garden at his home on Long Island Sound. As Will Munnecke later recalled it—the statue was real and the story too, no doubt—Maude hired the model, made the plaster statue, and had it cast and delivered to the Benton home all within the space of a week, complete with an invoice for $7,500. It was the end of a friendship, between Mrs. Hutchins and Mr. Benton, that had been really warm—but it had kept Maude "quiet," "busy," for a week at a cost of only $7,500.^[3]

Tried and truest of the sycophantic friends who served as accomplices to the Hutchinses' domestic melodrama was Mortimer Adler, whose role as public and private associate went all the way back to New Haven, where, on his first visit to the young dean, he was taken up by Maude. By the time the Hutchinses were a year or so ensconced at Chicago—with a costly studio added to the president's house at the president's expense—Adler was ensconced in the law school (having been disensconced from the philosophy department). Though he lived across town on the near North Side, he served as domestic end-man to the Hutchins menage more regularly than any other member of the progressively less charmed circle. Maude had been invited to speak before the ladies of the Friday Club, and she showed them a series of her steel-point anatomical drawings, which characteristically had bodies toting their own heads. She explained straight-faced that her work was "nonnarrative and nonrepresentative." "It is incidental that the human form may be recognized in them," she told the clubwomen, who suspected that their legs were being contemptuously pulled. "The forms you see are not necessarily people." She showed Adler—and, willy-nilly, Hutchins—the drawings on one of those à trois

evenings and asked him if he could work up any nonnarrative and non-representative texts for them. He could. Some years before he had written a paragraph to illustrate the senseless use of sensible syntax: "We have triangulated with impunity in order that sophistication would neither digest nor slice our conventional drainage. Examples of serious solicitude, cleared away with dishes after dinner, leave some of us unfaithful to the beach and others of us unprepared to skate. You, perhaps, individually have bounced in isolation, careless of benefit derived from saracens, but not wholly too late for the Sunday papers."

The Adler syntactical nonsense was just the ticket. He collaborated with the nonnarrative, nonrepresentative artist in the preparation of a book of her nonsensical drawings with a collection of his nonsensical texts variously entitled "Prayer," "Invective," "History," "Definition," and so on, and Adler's friends Bennett Cerf and Donald Klopfer at Random House published the joint spoof in a volume of 750 copies called Diagrammatics . The two producers made appearances on and off the campus in the early 1930s to present and defend their skit, earnestly arguing what Adler called "the significance of form divorced from significant matter in a work of art." After Adler dropped out of the fun, Maude went on with it annually, as she prepared her exorbitant Christmas cards, usually with an extravagant but intelligent and able version of a biblical text, but on at least one occasion with the nude figure of a going-on nubile girl holding a Christmas candle—the model was sensationally reported around town and gown to be the Hutchinses' fourteen-year-old Franja.

Long before the curtain was rung down on the twenty-seven-year run of the Hutchins Follies, one of their friends, the plainspoken wife of a trustee, said, "They're a bore"—something she would not have said of either of the performers singly. They would have been less of a bore if Hutchins had been able to talk—even to the modest extent of saying why he had to make a last-minute change in plans, instead of grimacing, when his interlocutor was simple enough to say, "What's the trouble?" But down, at last, the curtain came, one spring evening in 1947, at the very peak of his multifarious preoccupation with world affairs. He appeared at the door of a close friend who lived just off the campus and said, "May I come in?" The friend might have made a stab at guessing what "the trouble" was; nothing like Hutchins at the door, any door, in the night had ever happened before.

He laid his underarm carrying-case on the living-room table and accepted a chair. He did not, however, accept the invitation to remove his coat. He said (in the same flat tone he used on the platform), "I've left home." The friend—whose wife was present—murmured something intended to sound sympathetic and be unintelligible, and added, "Where are

you going?" "Downtown," said Hutchins, who was then working at the Encyclopaedia Britannica on the leave of absence he had taken to see (as he said once, and only once, to a very few individuals) what he could do about his domestic situation. He asked to be allowed to phone for a cab, and left after a silent handshake.

The friend he walked in on that night said later, "At last Bob Hutchins had been caught up with by the things of the sort that make people human. He was human that night, off his demigodly perch—and he could look it, for once. Life, just for a moment or two, had cut him down to size, pulled him down to the level where the rest of us lived."

He took a room in one of the big hotels within walking distance of the Britannica offices and did not return to the President's House to get his things until arrangements had been made for Maude to be out. He said he would never speak to her again—and he never did. The lawyer—there was only one, retained by friends—was more than mildly surprised, even though he was an old friend of the family, when Hutchins declined to argue his wife's high demands. They were enough to strap him the rest of his life; for twenty-seven years he had tried to get himself, not peace and quiet, only enough quiet to do his work. He had used the most insulting and ineffective currency to buy it—giving her whatever she "wanted," whatever, that is, she wanted that could be bought. The last time around, after those twenty-seven years, he did it again; but this time the purchase would be permanent. The uncontested divorce settlement—the formal charge was desertion—awarded Maude $18,000 a year combined alimony, child support, and insurance premiums, but Hutchins was reported to have made an out-of-court contract bringing the total annual transfer to something like $30,000. The $25,000-a-year man was bankrolled by Bill Benton, whose Britannica Hutchins would go on serving, in one role or more (usually more) all his life.

It had not been an amusing marriage, the marriage of those two stunning figures out of F. Scott Fitzgerald. It was not an amusing divorce. It was a calamitous surprise, if not to the two parties or their children, to their friends who found them the kind of bore that would go on until death did them part. It was a calamitous surprise to the two families from the Calvinist parsonage of Brooklyn and the settled world of Oberlin. There were, indeed, no end of marriages made in 1921 that proved to have been made elsewhere than in heaven; but nearly all people stayed married, "whatever."

Maude Hutchins was no helpmeet, and Bob Hutchins was no help. He was hyperbolizing—but not lying—when he said that he never had time to think of anything beyond what he had to do in the next half-hour. He tried

to be and do too much, more than a man can try to be and do who has professional standards that do not permit him to shuffle off some, or most, of his work on others. This was a man who felt that he had to have time for every student who wanted to see him—with three exceptions: his daughters Franja, Jo-Jo, and Clarissa. And their mother was unwilling to be the kind of mother his and her mothers (and theirs) had been. The mismating of these two rare birds, so much alike, so colorful of plumage, so piquant of song, may have forced Maude Hutchins to behave shrewishly, but she was none of your ordinary shrews. She was as much of a person as he was, and as much of a woman as he was a man; in some respects, doubtless, more. But his public position was immeasurably higher than hers, and no matter what she achieved, or said, or did, she remained the talented wife of, the brilliant wife of, the artistic wife of, the great man. She could not overcome her resentment of him, or even check it (it grew visibly greater with the years)—resentment of his business, his importance, his independence of her, and the general adulation he had and doubtless enjoyed; the adulation that moved Scott Buchanan to say, "Bob has made homosexuals of us all."

If they were both ridden by the customary devils, and one of the customary devils that rode them both was duty—hers was duty to a hard master, art; and his to a master no harder, the Cause that an Oberlin boy brought to Oberlin with him from the parsonage and carried away to Yale and beyond. The great and terrible factor, the factor that may have held the union together for twenty-seven years instead of seven (or seven months) was the now bent figure of William James Hutchins. He had always counseled Robert against impetuosity; Robert had now to persuade his father that breaking the marriage vow—to which his father had sworn him—was not impetuous. He later insisted that going to his father now was the hardest thing he had ever had to do.

Mother and Father Hutchins survived, as mothers and fathers do, and even then did. (Everybody involved survived, more or less handsomely, as they usually do, and even then did.) Maude Hutchins has survived her ex-husband by many years, and until her old age was writing (and publishing) and sketching; she would not discuss her ex-husband; she said, thirty years later, that "it still hurt too much." Nor would he discuss her or his marriage. The mistakes he made—like those we all make—he would likely make again. His hope was that he would not again be thrown into such hopeless circumstances. Nor was he.

When he left home, his leave-of-absence boss, Bill Benton of the Britannica, instructed the Britannica office manager to furnish him with the brightest and best-looking secretary to be found anywhere. Little Vesta

Sutton Orlick, twenty years his junior, was a head shorter than he—he always called her the little corporal. She was the divorced mother of a small daughter, and very bright and very, very good looking. She was soon promoted to be Hutchins' secretary in his office as chairman of the Britannica board of editors, and a year after his divorce in July of 1948 they were married—by the Reverend William James Hutchins.

Vesta Hutchins was no Maude. Neither she nor her requirements were anything as flamboyant as her predecessor and her predecessor's. She wanted the things that a very busy man could provide—expensively, to be sure, but he was used to that—and provide for a woman who was devoted to him and his work and affected none of her very own. They lived quite privately as he and Maude had done (but without the ô trois accessory); entertaining little, and leaving parties as invariably early as ever. She was ailing a good deal, but she was much younger than he and survived him busily on their 90-acre estate in the Santa Barbara hills. She wrote no lively novellas, sketched no nude models (or nonnarrative, nonrepresentative figures), sculpted no sculptures to be sold to friends; she didn't need to do much more than travel with him, peripherally participate in his work, and look after the management of the house and garden.

During his twenty-seven-year marriage to Maude, he had never had time for his wife and children. He had never had time, period. But the last twenty-seven years of his twenty-nine-year marriage to Vesta found him differently situated. Once he left the university he was relieved of the intense pressures of the job there and left with the pressures that were within his own power, those that he put on himself. He was a very busy man between 1951 and his death in 1977, but never again as desperately busy as he was in the years at Chicago, never again too busy to pay any attention at all to the kind of life he was living and the kind of trouble that that kind of life entailed for him and others.