Robert M. Hutchins

American educator

• Born: January 17, 1899
• Birthplace: Brooklyn, New York
• Died: May 14, 1977
• Place of death: Santa Barbara, California

By working to reform higher education, directing foundation programs, and heading study centers, Hutchins helped preserve, during the twentieth century, the Jeffersonian concept of an educated citizenry in a participatory democracy.

Early Life

Although born in Brooklyn, Robert M. Hutchins was descended on both sides from old New England families. In his introduction to Freedom, Education, and the Fund (1956), Hutchins states that his father, William James Hutchins, a Presbyterian minister (and later president of Berea College), came from “a long line of Connecticut doctors and ministers” and that his mother, Anna Laura Murch Hutchins, came from “a long line of sea captains from Maine.” Thus he was born into the sturdy New England tradition of independence and individuality.

In young Hutchins the family tendencies were given further impetus by Oberlin College, where his father became a professor of theology when Hutchins was eight. Oberlin College, then “a Puritan island in the Middle West,” prided itself on its abolitionist past, its nonconformist spirit, and its dedication to “poverty, work, service, and . . . Rational Living.” “We seriously believed,” Hutchins continues, “that the greatest thing in the world was to lay down your life for your principles.” These principles were rigorously debated on campus and within the family circle.

After attending Oberlin for two years, Hutchins, at eighteen, enlisted in the U.S. Army. He served with the Ambulance Corps in Italy, receiving the Italian Croce di Guerra in 1918. He continued his education at Yale University, taking a B.A. with honors in 1921. In that same year he married the sculptress Maude Phelps McVeigh. He taught history and English at Lake Placid School in New York (1921-1923), served as secretary of Yale University (1923-1927), and meanwhile studied at Yale for his law degree. Extremely bright, articulate, confident, and handsome (his slightly wavy brown hair then parted in the middle according to the fashion, emphasizing his high brow, brown eyes, regular features, and cleft chin), Hutchins received his LL.B. degree magna cum laude in 1925 and began his precocious rise in higher education. Teaching in the Yale Law School after graduation, he became a full professor in 1927 and was also appointed acting dean. In 1928 he was confirmed as dean. Then in 1929, at the age of thirty, he became president of the University of Chicago, founded in 1891 and already a leading university, arguably one of the nation’s two best.

Life’s Work

Inspired by classical ideals going back to Plato and Aristotle, Hutchins believed that education should above all prepare people to think and to exercise responsible citizenship. He therefore advocated a strong liberal arts education and opposed that which stood in the way of a well-rounded academic education overspecialization, vocationalism, emphasis on social life and athletics, lockstep methods, and a fragmented curriculum. He had already indicated his directions at Yale Law School, where he had widened the law curriculum to include other social sciences, raised entrance requirements and academic standards, started an honors program, and helped found the Yale Institute of Human Relations. At Chicago he used his preeminent position in American higher education to launch a reform program, starting with Chicago, whose example Hutchins hoped other colleges and universities would follow.

Dubbed “the Boy Wonder” (with various meanings depending on who was speaking), Hutchins set to work immediately. In 1930, he consolidated Chicago’s academic departments into five bodies: a college of general studies, covering the first two years of undergraduate work, and four divisions the biological, physical, and social sciences, and the humanities covering the next two years and graduate programs. The Chicago Plan for undergraduates began to emerge. It required yearlong courses in all four academic areas, plus freshman composition, mathematics, and competency in a foreign language, for a total of fourteen courses to graduate. It also emphasized discussion rather than lectures, abolished required class attendance, and gave credit for passing course examinations, administered at various convenient times by a special examining board. Chicago also used entrance and placement examinations. The system of examinations enabled students to progress at their own rate and, in some cases, to graduate from the university in less than four years.

Hutchins’s changes aroused excitement but also controversy. A number of Chicago faculty members resigned in protest. In 1939, when the university cut its intercollegiate football program, alumni howled. Hutchins’s most controversial reform, however, was a major redefinition of the bachelor’s degree. In 1937, the university decided to admit high school students after their sophomore year, provided they could pass the entrance examination. The students entered a four-year liberal arts program in the college of general studies and eventually earned a B.A. degree. Many educators deplored this somewhat mislabeled “two-year degree,” and some universities refused to recognize it. However, the degree covered approximately the same material and the same examinations as before. Hutchins merely wanted to cut out high school and college duplication and, on the model of the German gymnasium and university, to define clearly the different missions of the American college and university: the college should provide a strong, integrated liberal arts background and the university should concentrate on specialization and research.

Hutchins did not confine his efforts to University of Chicago undergraduates. The university’s graduate and professional schools adopted broader, theoretical approaches that attempted to integrate their disciplines with the liberal arts. A program of adult education offered courses in the so-called Great Books, out of which grew the monumental fifty-four-volume publishing venture, Great Books of the Western World (1952), of which Hutchins was editor in chief. Hutchins also served as chair of the board of editors of Encyclopaedia Britannica, and carried his message to the world via numerous articles, speeches, and lectures, which he collected and published in such books as No Friendly Voice (1936), The Higher Learning in America (1953), and The University of Utopia (1953).

Eventually Hutchins’s influence in higher education led to his activity in other areas. Before World War II he was a public spokesperson for American noninvolvement, but once the United States was involved he strongly supported the cause. The University of Chicago was one of the main sites where scientists gathered to develop the atomic bomb. They conducted the first nuclear chain reaction in the university’s football stadium on December 2, 1942. The university’s science programs, already outstanding, benefited tremendously from the influx of government money and scientists, some of whom joined the university after the war and established new institutes. These benefits did not prevent Hutchins from becoming an advocate of world government and international control of nuclear energy after the war. In 1945, he headed the Committee to Frame a World Constitution.

The postwar period marked a time of change in Hutchins’s life, perhaps a kind of middle-age crisis. In 1948 he and his first wife were divorced after twenty-seven years of marriage and three daughters; the following year Hutchins married Vesta Sutton Orlick. In his public life Hutchins began gradually to move away from higher education. He switched from president to chancellor of the University of Chicago in 1945, took a leave of absence in 1946, and in 1947 chaired the Commission on the Freedom of the Press, which issued a thoughtful report. Always an exponent of academic freedom, Hutchins became more interested in the issue of freedom as the postwar anticommunist movement heated up and led to government investigations, loyalty oaths, and purges (the University of Chicago was investigated repeatedly). Like many public figures, sometimes including even the conservative president Dwight D. Eisenhower, Hutchins felt that the anticommunist movement, exemplified by McCarthyism and Hooverism, posed a greater threat to American freedom than did communism.

Thereafter, Hutchins devoted his career to programs more directly concerned with democracy, the conditions favoring it, and its defense. In 1951, he left the University of Chicago to become an associate director of the Ford Foundation. There, in 1952, he was instrumental in creating the Fund for the Republic , which addressed the challenge of McCarthyism by providing financial support to organizations defending civil liberties. The fund also supported civil rights organizations in the South. In 1954, Hutchins became president of the Fund and in 1959 established the Center for the Study of Democratic Institutions, in Santa Barbara, California. The center sponsored resident scholars, conferences, and publications that debated the issues of democracy, social justice, and the conditions affecting these in the modern world. Hutchins was associated with the center as president (1959-1969, 1975-1977) and senior fellow until his death in 1977.

Significance

Hutchins died thinking that he was a failure. His educational reforms did not become widespread: Not many schools dropped football or adopted the Chicago Plan. Some of his reforms were dropped even at Chicago after he left. Meanwhile, from Hutchins’s perspective, higher education continued to deteriorate, with fragmentation, overspecialization, and vocationalism during the 1970’s causing a drop in academic standards. With education in decline, a fertile field was being prepared for future demagogues similar to Senator Joseph R. McCarthy.

However, the demagogic senator from Wisconsin had been finally defeated and McCarthyism itself thrown into disrepute, the word becoming a synonym for “witch hunt.” Through the Fund for the Republic and his outspoken opposition, Hutchins played a significant part in bringing down McCarthyism and inoculating the Republic against future outbreaks. In other areas, too, Hutchins’s successes were partial but highly significant. The Center for the Study of Democratic Institutions exercised an intangible but nevertheless strong influence both in the United States and abroad. In higher education, Hutchins’s reforms were not totally rejected. A few colleges most notably St. John’s in Annapolis, Maryland were inspired to build programs around the Great Books (whose richly bound volumes also found their way into aspiring households). Many other schools imitated or adopted variations of Chicago’s general studies curriculum; hence, the most obvious tribute to Hutchins’s influence is the liberal arts program college freshmen and sophomores are generally still required to take.

Hutchins had the greatest impact, however, in the world of ideas. He was an eloquent and controversial figure who stirred things up and got people to think. Regardless of whether his particular educational reforms took hold, Hutchins showed the need for reform. He also articulated an educational ideal, just as he helped define the various American freedoms. He did so in language that was simple, direct, witty, and sometimes caustic unlike the “educationese” of many fellow educators. Hutchins was a powerful public speaker, and his books continue to preserve the force of his language.

Bibliography

Botstein, Leon. “Wisdom Reconsidered: Robert Maynard Hutchins’ The Higher Learning in America Revisited.” In Philosophy for Education, edited by Seymour Fox. Jerusalem, Israel: Van Leer Jerusalem Foundation, 1983. Reconsiders Hutchins’s classic work in the light of conditions between 1970 and 1980. Says the liberal education advocated by Hutchins is still needed, with democracy threatened and career education promoted as a way to extinguish radicalism and questioning.

Boucher, Chauncey Samuel. The Chicago College Plan. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1935. A detailed description of the Chicago Plan by the dean of the college, complete with official documents, sample student schedules, and statistics.

Cohen, Arthur A. “Robert Maynard Hutchins: The Educator as Moralist.” In Humanistic Education and Western Civilization: Essays for Robert M. Hutchins, edited by Arthur A. Cohen. New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1964. A summing up of Hutchins’s thought and career, showing the connections between his concerns for law, education, and freedom.

Harris, Michael R. Five Counterrevolutionists in Higher Education. Corvallis: Oregon State University Press, 1970. The chapter on Hutchins summarizes the abstract theory, especially concerning reason and democracy, underlying Hutchins’s philosophy of education. It also briefly treats Hutchins’s efforts to apply the philosophy at the University of Chicago.

Hutchins, Robert M. Freedom, Education, and the Fund: Essays and Addresses, 1946-1956. New York: Meridian Books, 1956. A collection of miscellaneous statements on the Bill of Rights, academic freedom, freedom of the press, democracy, education, and the Fund for the Republic. The best introduction to Hutchins’s thought in general. The introduction to the book itself is also a key autobiographical statement.

‗‗‗‗‗‗‗. The Higher Learning in America. New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1936. This series of lectures at Yale is Hutchins’s classic statement on the restructuring of college and university studies around liberal education to combat specialization, anti-intellectualism, vocationalism, and what Hutchins sees as triviality.

‗‗‗‗‗‗‗. “Locksley Hall in 1988-89.” In What Is a College For?, by John D. Millett et al. Washington, D.C.: Public Affairs Press, 1961. An example of Hutchins’s wit: a tongue-in-cheek report on a perfect college with all of Hutchins’s requirements in a mythical state, Rancho del Rey, which now leads the world in intellectual achievement.

Kelly, Frank K. Court of Reason: Robert Hutchins and the Fund for the Republic. New York: Free Press, 1981. A detailed but rambling account of the fund’s second phase, when it was converted into the Center for the Study of Democratic Institutions. The author is a former officer of the fund who saw Hutchins almost daily for nineteen years.

Reeves, Thomas C. Freedom and the Foundation: The Fund for the Republic in the Era of McCarthyism. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1969. An absorbing account of the fund’s activist, controversial first phase, particularly its confrontation with McCarthyism. Well written and analytical, the narrative also includes biographical background on Hutchins.