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| See: | William McNeill, | Hutchins' University: A Memoir of the U. of Chicago, 1929-1950. | |
| Milton Mayer, | Robert Maynard Hutchins : A Memoir. | ||
| Also: | Short biography of Robert Maynard Hutchins | ||
| History of the University of Chicago | |||
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For a complete list of Amazon's books on Hutchins' University of Chicago, click
here. For a bibliography of books and articles discussing liberal education, click here. |
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| "I think the one place where I have been that is most like ancient
Athens is the University of Chicago." (Alfred North
Whitehead, Sept. 10, 1941). Dialogues of Alfred North Whitehead: As
Recorded by Lucien Price (Little Brown & Co., 1954).
"The University of Chicago, as far as philosophy is concerned, is about the best I have ever come across." (Letter of Bertrand Russell to Gilbert Murray, 1938). |
The LIBERAL ARTS are not merely indispensable; they are unavoidable. Nobody can decide for himself whether he is going to be a human being. The only question open to him is whether he will be an ignorant, undeveloped one, or one who has sought to reach the highest point he is capable of attaining. The question, in short, is whether he will be a poor liberal artist or a good one.
The liberal artist learns to read, write, speak, listen, understand, and think. He learns to reckon, measure, and manipulate matter, quantity, and motion in order to predict, produce and exchange. As we live in the tradition, whether we know it or not, so we are all liberal artists, whether we know it or not. We all practice the liberal arts, well or badly, all the time every day. As we should understand the tradition as well as we can in order to understand ourselves, so we should be as good liberal artists as we can in order to become as fully human as we can.
-- Robert Maynard Hutchins, president/chancellor of the University of Chicago (1929-1951)
From a review of Robert Maynard Hutchins' The Higher Learning in America (1935) --
Another academic who defied the tenor of the age in American education was Robert
Maynard Hutchins, a brilliant administrator who, at the tender age of thirty, was elevated in
1929 to the presidency of the University of Chicago. Hutchins, who was to spend the
remainder of his life crusading for educational reform, commenced his career at Chicago
with the declaration that the learning available in even the most prestigious of American
universities was singularly inadequate. Hutchins was convinced that Eliot's
elective system had robbed education of any central purpose. To redress the balance he
introduced administrative and curricular changes at Chicago that aroused controversy at his
own institution and nationwide.
Hutchins decries "the service-station conception of a university," under which the institutions of higher learning see their role as catering to the "passing whims of the public. If the public becomes interested in the metropolitan newspaper, schools of journalism instantly arise. If it is awed by the development of big business, business schools full of the same reverence appear. If an administration enlarges the activities of the federal government and hence the staff thereof, training for the public service becomes the first duty of the universities." Similarly, a "state university must help the farmers look after their cows."
In place of that hodge-podge arrangement, Hutchins advocates, first, that "collegiate and
university work" be separated.
The role of the college -- which Hutchins thinks students
should attend during what is now the last two years of high school and the first two years at
the undergraduate level -- would be to provide to all students the same general curriculum.
Hutchins would adjust teaching methods to meet the differing aptitudes of college students,
would allow them to proceed at their own pace, and would confer the bachelor's degree
upon successful completion. However, the university would be open only "to those who
have the interest and ability that independent intellectual work demands. The university
cannot make its contribution to democracy on any other terms."
Another source of the university's decline, according to Hutchins, is a descent into vocationalism: the belief that the purpose of education is to help one earn a living. Against this notion, Hutchins proposes that only those professions having a "core of creative thought" be accorded a place in the university curriculum; moreover, that the practical aspects of even those professions be learned in separate institutes -- or, in the case of physicians, hospitals -- subsequent to the completion of academic work.
As still another
"major cause of our disorder" Hutchins cites "an erroneous notion of progress." From the
fact that great progress has been made in science and technology, men reach the erroneous
conclusion that the past has nothing valuable to say to us. "Our erroneous notion
of progress," Hutchins writes, "has thrown the classics and the liberal
arts out of the curriculum, overemphasized the empirical sciences, and made education the
servant of any contemporary movements in society, no matter how superficial."
Consequently, a student who entered the university would find a "vast number of departments and professional schools all anxious to give him the latest information about a tremendous variety of subjects, some important, some trivial, some indifferent. He would find that democracy, liberalism, and academic freedom meant that all these subjects and fractions of subjects must be regarded as equally valuable. It would not be democratic to hint that Scandinavian was not as significant as law or that methods of lumbering was not as fundamental as astronomy. He would find a complete and thoroughgoing disorder."
Hutchins advocates at the collegiate level
"a course of study consisting of the greatest books of the western world and the arts of
reading, writing, thinking, and speaking, together with mathematics, the best exemplar of
the processes of human reason. If our hope has been to frame a curriculum which educes
the elements of our common human nature, this program should realize our hope. If we
wish to prepare the young for intelligent action, this course of study should assist us; for
they will have learned what has been done in the past, and what the greatest men have
thought. They will have learned how to think themselves. If we wish to lay a basis for
advanced study, that basis is provided."
-- from Joseph Baldacchino's review of The Higher Learning in America (1935),by Robert Maynard Hutchins (new edition 1995).
I took some mathematics at Chicago, but lost interest soon after my courses got past
the material I had half learned in high school. I did not have the nerve to major in Physics, which is what
you did at Chicago in those days if you thought you could make it. The real excitement for me was in the
liberal arts core of the Chicago College, courses from the Hutchins era with names like
History of Western Civilization, and
Organization, Methods, and Principles of Knowledge[earlier called OII].
Everything in these
courses was new to me. All of them began with readings from Plato and Aristotle, and I wanted to learn
all I could about the Greeks. I took a sequence in Ancient History, and became a history major. Though I
had no real idea what a professional historian does, I had learned that one can make a living by pursuing
one's intellectual interests and writing about them. I began to think about an academic career.
-- Robert E. Lucas's autobiographical page , Nobel Prize in economics, 1995 (A.B. Chicago, 1959).
The POST: What did you study at the University of Chicago?
DAVID BRODER: The undergraduate college was a strict, straight liberal arts program. The president of the University of Chicago then was a fellow named Robert Maynard Hutchins, who believed that there were, you know, a set of great books, classic writings over the centuries that educated men and women ought to be familiar with, and that, by reading those books and subjecting them to critical analysis in the classroom, you could learn to read anything critically and skeptically. It ... basically taught me how to read.
-- radio interview (1996) with David Broder, author and Washington Post journalist (A.B. Chicago, 1947).
SEYMOUR HERSH: The truth is, it's so ironic. The best information we
may get about this election [2004] may come from a combination of The Control Room, Fahrenheit 9/11,
John Sayles, the nightly news from Jon Stewart, if some of you watch that. At
the height of the prisoner abuse stories, Jon Stewart had one of his mock news
broadcasters say very seriously to the camera, on the Stewart show, he said, "The
important thing is not that we commit torture and abuses, it's that we're a country
that doesn't condone torture and abuses" [laughter] -- that's a wonderful line.
I can't make you feel happy about where we are. We've got a very important election
coming up, probably the most important since, what, 1860. I think it is....
So here we are. The bottom line is, by the way, I'm in a tough position because I'm
not done reporting on all of this. It's a tough position because there is more
to the story....
-- keynote speech before the ACLU (July 15, 2004), by Seymour Hersh, investigative reporter (My Lai massacre, Richard Perle corruption, Abu Ghraib scandal), New York Times and The New Yorker (A.B. Chicago, 1958).
The one-year University of Chicago [history] course was not
successful simply because of the quality of the students taking
it. I entered the University of Chicago in 1948,
and I took the History survey when it was still
being fine-tuned by its author, William H. McNeill. You must remember
that the College of the University of Chicago under Hutchins'
Plan was open to qualified students of any age, so that there were
fifteen- and sixteen-year-olds in most
discussion sections,
many of them having entered the College immediately after their
sophomore year of high school. So it was not the students'
background that made the course work. Although the students were
generally intelligent, intelligence is relatively ineffective
without learned information with which to work.
The Hutchins Plan's curriculum consisted of sixteen full-year courses intended
to be taken four at a time, and the entire grade for each
course depended solely on a six-hour comprehensive final
examination drawn up by an anonymous outside board. "Orientation
Week" involved taking compressed versions of fourteen of these
"Comps," and students were "excused" from taking
any course for which they had passed the final
examination. This ensured that none of the students in any given
course possessed a previously acquired grasp of the subject.
Finally, the "classes" were in fact discussion sections in which
the ignorant would lead the ignorant and in which the faculty
discussion leader would intervene only to squash conclusions that
could not be supported or to pose problems for the discussants to
consider.
What made the History course work as well as it did for those of us who took it was that it was not an independent course of study, but was thoroughly integrated with all of the other courses that comprised the curriculum. Physical Science began with Aristotle's Physics, while Social Science II kicked off with Plato's Republic. By the time the History students had made their way through Herodotus (who came up frequently in Social Science discussions, especially later in the year, in comparison with Montaigne's "Cannibals," Benedict's Patterns of Culture and Conrad's Heart of Darkness), they had already developed some background in the way some Greek authors had gone at things.
Based on my own recollections, I would say that the integrated
nature of the curriculum was of fundamental importance. The fact
that all students in the College took the same courses (more or
less) and read the same books and so could talk to each other
even outside of the classroom was also an important factor. Since
College and Graduate School students mixed rather freely, what
one thought that one had finally figured out was often turned
upside-down, and one went back to the drawing boards. Perversely
enough, I believe that the general naivete of the College
students was also a contributing factor to the success of the
Plan. We had no idea of how much studying a college student was
expected to do and so made our way as best we could through a
mass of reading that would be considered incredible by today's
standards.
-- Lynn H. Nelson (A.B. Chicago, 1950), Professor of History, University of Kansas, from a bulletin board message exchange.
[When a senior in high school, Carl Sagan wanted to become an astronomer and
needed to choose a college. He]
was intrigued by the catalog from the University of Chicago. "Inside was a picture
of football players fighting on a field, and under it was the caption 'If you want
a school with good football, don't come to the University of Chicago.' Then there
was a picture of some drunken kids, and the caption 'If you want a school with a
good fraternity life, don't come to the University of Chicago.' It sounded like
the place for me." He applied and was accepted. Sagan graduated from high school
in June 1951, and that autumn entered the University of Chicago.
In the late 1950s, C. P. Snow attracted attention for his theorizing on what he called the Two Cultures -- the sciences and the humanities. Between them, Snow feared, yawned a chasm.... [Sagan's] career as a science popularizer was a struggle to bridge that chasm, to show poets and thermodynamicists that they had something to say to each other. To bridge this gap required special men and women. They had to have open minds and uncommonly broad educations in both sciences and humanities. They needed to know history -- in particular, each culture's centuries-old debts to the other. Sagan fulfilled these requirements, thanks to all he learned at the University of Chicago.
Sagan was one of the last beneficiaries of its controversial "Hutchins program" of classically oriented education. The program was named after Chancellor Robert M. Hutchins, who left the year Sagan enrolled. The program in its heyday was an intellectual feast, and it transformed many students' lives. They could not pick and choose classes as they pleased, like the hors d'oeuvresof today's college catalogs. Rather they were required to study a fourteen-part curriculum built around classical works. The teaching was implicitly historical. If one was to study, say, Newtonian physics, then one began by reading Newton's original writings. Science was presented not as a separate discipline -- as a royal road to truth, independent of other disciplines -- but as part of the larger culture; in Sagan's words, "as an integral part of the gorgeous tapestry of human knowledge. It was considered unthinkable for an aspiring [Chicago] physicist not to know Plato, Aristotle, Bach, Shakespeare, Gibbon, Malinowski, and Freud -- among many others."
The program conveyed a crucial wisdom: The long saga of science is not
a steady, dramatic march to truth. Rather, that saga includes many episodes when
researchers wandered down blind alleys. Our ancestors were not
idiots; they had perfectly good reason to believe what we now recognize
as nonsense. "In an introductory science class," Sagan said, "Ptolemy's
view that the Sun revolved around the Earth was presented so compellingly
that some students found themselves reevaluating their commitment to
Copernicus." Sagan's future wife Lynn Margulis temporarily
accepted the eighteenth-century phlogiston theory. Another Chicago
student, Sagan's friend Peter Pesch, an astronomer, observes that many
of his scientific colleagues today are intellectually "very, very narrow."
By contrast, "the kind of education that we got at Chicago made it
possible for Sagan to do things like Cosmos."
When Carl Sagan entered the University of Chicago in the autumn of 1951, he was sixteen years old. He brought to Chicago all his high school enthusiasms -- science fiction, space travel, astronomy. His dorm room at 141 Burton-Judson Courts was jammed with science-fiction magazines.... Atop Ryerson Hall, he and a band of future astronomers learned (with the guidance of the astronomy club adviser) how to operate equipment in the campus observatory. Sagan ran the astronomy club's "theoretical" section, and arranged speeches by famous professors such as Subrahmanyan Chandrasekhar.
Enthusiasm and raw intelligence were not enough, though; Sagan had to
study. The Hutchins curriculum was grueling. Sagan had been
"Class Brain" at Rahway High School,
but at Chicago he was just another
bright kid amid hundreds. Four decades later, secure in his fame, he
admitted having entered Chicago "with profound gaps in my education."
He knew very little about the arts, had not read much world
literature. In a program
with so much emphasis on the humanities, he had serious catching up
to do.
His major was physics, a logical choice for a would-be astronomer....
Even for a future astronomer, the physics curriculum was challenging. One
physics class was so intellectually daunting that Sagan's friend
Ronald Blum hung over the entrance a sign that read: "Relinquish
hope all ye who enter here.... It was like boot camp." Philosophy class [OII]
was rough too, Sagan recalled. Philosophy professor Joseph Schwab
"used to throw erasers at me every time I said something he thought was
stupid. Some days I was covered with chalk dust."
The stress of class work was severe for many students. Pesch agrees: "Some people couldn't
adjust. When you've built your ego strength around being a 'brain', and then
discover you're not as big a brain as you thought, it's tough to take." Indications
are that Sagan too felt this stress, and that he had to work hard. Says Blum: "I think
he did a lot of reading." Pesch recalls that "we met every night for homework
sessions before tests; we'd study together. Our
'socializing' was around
meals and studying." The university had a minimum social life;
when the kids took a break, they played Ping-Pong, at which
Sagan excelled.
[After he obtained the Hutchins A.B. and went on to concentrate in physics, his evolutionary biology and chemistry courses held at least as much interest for him as his physics courses.] The Hutchins program gave Sagan the confidence to straddle disciplines. Millions of readers would later enjoy the results: prose from a hyper-polymath conversant with astrophysics, biology, neuroscience, primate communication, atmospheric physics, geopolitics, nuclear strategy.
-- Keay Davidson, Carl Sagan: A Life,pp. 33-41.
Jerome I. Friedman, A.B. 1950. Nobel Prize, Physics 1990
While I always had some interest in science, I
developed a strong interest in physics when I was in high
school as a result of reading a short book entitled Relativity,by
Einstein. It opened a new vista for me and deepened my
curiosity about the physical world. Instead of accepting a
scholarship to the Art Institute of Chicago Museum School and
against the strong advice of my art teacher, I decided to
continue my formal education and sought admission to the
University of Chicago because of its excellent reputation and
because
Enrico Fermi
taught there. I was fortunate to have
been accepted with a full scholarship. As my parents had
limited means, my university training would not have been
possible without such help.
After finishing my requirements in
an highly innovative and intellectually stimulating liberal arts
program (established by Robert M. Hutchins who was then
President of the University), I entered the Physics Department
in 1950, receiving a Master's degree in 1953 and a Ph.D. in
1956. It is difficult to convey the sense of excitement that
pervaded the Department at that time. Fermi's brilliance, his
stimulating, crystal clear lectures that he gave in numerous
seminars and courses, the outstanding faculty in the
Department, the many notable physicists who frequently came
to visit Fermi, and the pioneering investigations of pion proton
scattering at the newly constructed cyclotron all combined to
create an especially lively atmosphere. I was indeed fortunate
to have seen the practice of physics carried out at its "very
best" at such an early stage in my development. I also had
the great privilege of being supervised by Fermi, and I can
remember being overwhelmed with a sense of my good
fortune to have been given the opportunity to work for this
great man. It was a remarkably stimulating experience that
shaped the way I think about physics.
F. Sherwood Rowland, Ph.D. 1952. Nobel Prize, Chemistry 1995
[I obtained my undergraduate degree from Ohio Wesleyan.]
My father had studied for his Ph.D., and all of us took it
for granted that
I would, too. Furthermore, both my parents
had firm convictions that the
University of Chicago, which each had attended, was not just
the best choice for graduate work, but the only choice. So I
applied to the Department of Chemistry at the University of
Chicago for Fall 1948, and was duly admitted.
At that time, the Chemistry Department of the University of
Chicago had a policy of immediately assigning each new
graduate student to a temporary faculty adviser prior to the
choice of an individual research topic. My randomly assigned
mentor was Willard F. Libby, who had just finished developing
the Carbon-14 dating technique for which he received the
1960 Nobel Prize. Libby was a charismatic, brusque (on first meeting, "I see you
made all A's in undergraduate school. We're here to find out if
you are any damn good!") dynamo, with a very wide range of
fertile ideas for scientific research.
I settled automatically and
happily into his research group, and became a radiochemist
working on the chemistry of radioactive atoms. Almost
everything I learned about how to be a research scientist
came from listening to and observing Bill Libby.
The first nuclear reactor had been built by Enrico Fermi in 1942 under the football stands at the University of Chicago, and the post-war university had managed to capture many of the leading scientists from the Manhattan Project into the physics and chemistry departments. This was an unbelievably exciting time in the physical sciences at the University of Chicago. My physical chemistry course was taught by Harold Urey for two quarters and in the third quarter by Edward Teller; inorganic chemistry was given by Henry Taube; radiochemistry by Libby. I also attended courses on nuclear physics given by Maria Goeppert Mayer and by Fermi. (The chemistry student grapevine said, "Go to any lecture that Fermi gives on any subject"). Urey and Fermi already had been awarded Nobel Prizes, and Libby, Mayer and Taube were to receive theirs in the future.
Harry M. Markowitz, Ph.B. 1947. Nobel Prize, Economics 1990
From high school, I entered the University of Chicago and took its two-year Bachelor's program which emphasized the reading of original materials where possible. Everything in the program was interesting, but I was especially interested in the philosophers we read in a course called OII: Observation, Interpretation and Integration.
In 1972, I had an offer to go to Chicago [as professor of history], which I might have done. However, I
was worried that my family would not adapt to the American way of life. Of
course, there was no chance to ever come back to Germany: the German
academic system is too rigid in this respect, unlike the English and American
ones. Nowadays, I regret that decision for I still consider Chicago University a
great place with a particular scholarly ethos unsurpassed by any German
academic institution.
--
interview
with Wolfgang J. Mommsen, Prof. of History, University of Düsseldorf.
Wolfgang J. Mommsen talks about the University of Chicago.
Joseph Epstein writes of The University of Chicago's "Intellectuality".
-- from
Snobbery: The American Version, by Joseph Epstein (A.B. Chicago, 1959), editor American Scholar.
One of the most astonishing things of all was that the University of Chicago was not founded
on status -- which is also to say, on snobbery -- at least not as I had been hitherto accustomed
to it. People were not ranked by physical beauty, or athletic skill, or wealth, or family
connections. None of these things seemed to matter. All that did was intelligence -- or more
precisely, intellectuality, which I would define as the ability to deal in a sophisticated
way with the issues, questions, and problems presented by art, science, politics, and things
of the mind generally. Since my own intellectual quality was then of a low order, my status
as a student at the University of Chicago was commensurately low. Hiding my ignorance as best
I could, I looked on, fascinated. Here was a new game, and one I felt, if then still somewhat
inchoately, I wanted to play.
At fifteen, Rorty went off to the University of Chicago to get his bachelor's degree
at the so-called Hutchins College, which permitted precocious students to enter
in the middle of high school. There he studied a classical curriculum under
scholars like Leo Strauss and Richard McKeon and alongside students like the
future classicist Seth Benardete and cultural scourge Allan Bloom.
-- Richard Rorty (A.B. Chicago, 1949),
Professor of Philosophy & Literature, Stanford
University, "The Quest for Uncertainty," Linguafranca, Dec 2000-Jan 2001, from the
biographical page.
Richard Rorty is a product of the Hutchins College.
"To Hutchins," Rozin says, "a college degree represented a level of
intellectual sophistication and understanding, not the
number of years spent at a particular institution. His
focus was on learning to think rather than on learning
facts."
Rozin entered Chicago's undergraduate program [in 1952] at
the age of 16, after only two years of high school...
Almost half of the
entering class that year had no high school diploma,
and some students were as young as 14.
Under Hutchins, the University of Chicago's curriculum was a writing-intensive program in which students read original sources, the "great books," and were taught by faculty in small classes; there were almost no textbooks or lectures. The undergraduate curriculum consisted of 14 one-year courses distributed across a variety of fields, with a written exam at the end of the year. If students could pass the exam without taking the course, they were released from the requirement. "Within two weeks of being there," Rozin effuses, "I realized it was the smartest intellectual decision I had ever made. My whole first two years of high school seemed trivial after just a few weeks in these wonderful courses. I got a real education."
Musing on the decisive effect of his undergraduate experience at the University of Chicago, Rozin declared, "All this has been very formative in both my research and my teaching, so I value it enormously in my life. It's why I'm a strong proponent of general education -- because I saw how it opened my eyes."
-- Paul Rozin (A.B. Chicago, 1956), Professor of Psychology, University of Pennsylvania, "Rozin's Research and Teaching at Penn", in Penn Arts & Sciences, Fall 1997.
Never were swollen egos so quickly deflated. We had been supposed to start with the Iliad but Hutchins could not make it that week, so we had it and the Odyssey together [Date: 1932, when Hutchins and Mortimer Adler were testing their Great Books plan on gifted fifteen-year-olds]. Adler had told us that he tended to go around the table calling on students, while Hutchins preferred to go down the class roll. The first name Hutchins noted was Dick Cragg.
"Mr. Cragg," said Hutchins, "there has been some discussion as to whether these two books were written by the same person. Do you find them alike or different?"
Dick's newly grown Adam's apple bobbed. "Well, they both have a lot of
fighting -- someone's always crashing someone over the head."
"Then," asked Hutchins, his right eyebrow cocking in what we came to know as his devilish-amusement warning (he had wrinkles slanting up over that eyebrow from its frequent use), "Mr. Cragg, when you pick up a book and find that, in this book, Soldier A 'crashes' Soldier B over the head, you exclaim, 'Ah, this is Homeric!'?"
I can't recall the exact sequence of questions thereafter, but after most of us gave up on authorship we went on to form. It's an epic, someone said. "What is an epic?" Well, it's a long poem. The next year Adler and Hutchins got a girl to decide that up to 24 stanzas a poem was a lyric and after that it was an epic. But if our class avoided that trap we fell flat on "What is a poem?" I think someone said it had poetry in it. "What is poetry?" We stumbled around, but at the end of two hours none of us could make any important statements or explain what it meant.
We felt less grown-up. But we spent weeks trying out definitions of poetry on each other, which was of course the whole idea.
Going in the next few weeks from Homer to Herodotus to Tacitus to Plato to Athenian tragedy and comedy made us feel like citizens of old Athens; we knew our way around. Then we found ourselves ruining Christmas vacation by slogging through Aristotle's Ethics and Poetics; if I made it through five pages an hour I was pushing it. Those works really did require revisiting, for which the schedule had no time. Next came another shock: The Bible.
Hutchins began by saying that he and Adler "take the position that
the Bible is inspired." The rules of combat precluded our asking what
it meant to be "inspired," even had anyone thought to do so. But most
of us were pretty much free thinkers, as Hutchins and Adler expected,
and we spent two hours trying to disprove the idea with no success.
Much later I realized we'd had our first memorable lesson in a basic
logical axiom: You can't prove a negative (or, Why anyone accused of
a crime must be presumed innocent until proven guilty -- he can't be
required to prove he is not guilty since that is usually impossible).
Hutchins liked to play such games, often asking some unusually tricky question and then leaning back and blowing eloquently perfect smoke rings while a student floundered. But when Hutchins was absent, Adler could not always inhibit the urge to tell us the Truth....
... One night, just after Hutchins had come back from confronting Red hunters in the state legislature, I attended the discussion of Paradise Lost and the Aeropagitica. I came in late and instead of my usual position at the end of the table found myself in the only vacant seat, next to Hutchins. I had flaming red hair in those days beyond recall, and when Hutchins sat down and glanced at me, he exclaimed, "Mr. McElroy -- Banquo's ghost -- shake not thy gory locks at me!"
Then he asked me to state the Aeropagitica's argument for free speech and press. I did, and he, deadpan, said, "Now, Mr. McElroy, you don't really believe that, do you?"
I gasped and gurgled and said that of course I did. For an hour and a half he took the position that free speech was a danger to society, and we all hammered away at it. He didn't quite fight fair: every time I stated a preliminary or two to an argument, he jumped on the preliminaries and I never got to the argument. Only half an hour was left for Paradise Lost.
Gary Becker, Ph.D. 1955. Nobel Prize, Economics 1992.
... [My parents and I] had many lively discussions in the house about politics and justice. I believe this does help explain why by the time I finished high school, my interest in mathematics was beginning to compete with a desire to do something useful for society. These two interests came together during my freshman year at Princeton, when I accidentally took a course in economics, and was greatly attracted by the mathematical rigor of a subject that dealt with social organization. During the following summer I read several books on economics.
I had to take a few extra
courses during the next year, and I chose reading courses
in modern algebra and differential equations for the summer
afterwards. For the equations course, I was given a set of
unpublished lectures that emphasized existence proofs and
uniqueness of solutions to differential equations. I
learned a lot about such proofs, but very little about
actually solving one of these equations. Still, my heavy
investment in mathematics at Princeton prepared me well
for the increasing use of mathematics in economics.
Fortunately, I decided to go to the University of Chicago for graduate work in economics. My first encounter in 1951 with Milton Friedman's course on microeconomics renewed my excitement about economics. He emphasized that economic theory was not a game played by clever academicians, but was a powerful tool to analyze the real world. His course was filled with insights both into the structure of economic theory and its application to practical and significant questions. That course and subsequent contacts with Friedman had a profound effect on the direction taken by my research.
While Friedman was clearly the intellectual leader, Chicago had a first class group of economists who were doing innovative research. Especially important to me were Gregg Lewis's use of economic theory to analyze labor markets, T.W. Schultz's pioneering research on human capital, Aaron Director's applications of economics to anti-trust problems, and industrial organization more generally, and L. J. Savage's research on subjective probability and the foundation of statistics.
I published two articles in 1952, based on my research at Princeton. But I realized shortly after arriving in Chicago that I had to begin to learn again what economics is all about....
James Watson Cronin, Ph.D. 1955. Nobel Prize, Physics 1980.
I received my undergraduate degree from Southern Methodist University with a major in physics and mathematics in 1951. In high school my natural interest in science was encouraged by an excellent physics teacher, [who] stressed analytical methods as applied to simple physical systems as well as practical experimental problems.
My real education began when I entered the University of Chicago in September 1951 as a graduate student. I was fortunate to have among my classroom teachers, Enrico Fermi, Maria Mayer, Edward Teller, Gregor Wentzel, Val Telegdi, Marvin Goldberger and Murray Gell-Mann. I did a thesis in experimental nuclear physics under the direction of Samuel K. Allison. While at Chicago my interest in the new field of particle physics was stimulated by a course given by Gell-Mann, who was developing his ideas about Strangeness at the time.
Daniel C. Tsui, Ph.D. 1967. Nobel Prize, Physics 1998.
I knew from the start that I would go to graduate school, and the choice of subject and school was never a problem. C. N. Yang and T. D. Lee [students of Fermi] were awarded the Nobel Prize for Physics in 1957 and they both went to the University of Chicago. Yang and Lee were the role models for Chinese students of my generation and going to the University of Chicago for a graduate education was the ideal pilgrimage.
The University of Chicago was intense and intellectual. I liked its being in a major city, its cosmopolitan atmosphere, and even its grimy buildings and the austerity they appeared to convey. I was also fortunate that Royal Stark, who had just joined the physics faculty as a solid state experimentalist, took me on as a research assistant in the building-up of his laboratory.
John Coetzee. Nobel Prize, Literature 2003.
In a statement to the press upon hearing of his Nobel award, John Coetzee wrote: "I am particularly happy that the Nobel announcement has come during this autumn quarter, which is the time of year that I spend at the University of Chicago. The University, and in particular the Committee on Social Thought, has been my intellectual home for the past seven years." He also noted that his literary predecessor in the Committee on Social Thought, Saul Bellow, had won the 1976 Nobel Prize in Literature.
As with collaborative research at the University, co-taught courses also preserve and promote Chicago's interdisciplinary approach to research and teaching. "This year I am teaching two courses with colleagues here -- a course on Plato with the philosopher Jonathan Lear, and a course on Walt Whitman with the poet Mark Strand. And I am of course continuing with my own work. I am working on new fiction, and I have a book of translations of Dutch poets due out shortly," said Coetzee in his statement.
Professor Jonathan Lear described what Coetzee gives his students. "John Coetzee is one of the great writers of our times, but he is also one of the world's great teachers. In the tradition of the exemplar, and the witness, he teaches us all what is really involved in reading a great book. He has taught me to look with greater clarity at the human soul, and his remarks in and out of class are lifetime memories, reverberating away."
Educated at the University of Cape Town, Coetzee earned B.A.s with honors in English (1960) and Mathematics (1961). He was awarded an M.A. in English there in 1963. After travel to Britain, he completed Ph.D. work in English at the University of Texas, Austin in 1969. He has taught at the University of Chicago in the Committee on Social Thought since 1996.
[The article] "Comp Time" brought
back a lot of memories to me. Three hours in the morning and another three hours
in the afternoon covering each subject. We could take books into the exam, but it didn't help. Anybody who
brought detailed class notes was also doomed to waste valuable time looking through those notes instead
of concentrating on the questions. Nerves were stretched to the breaking point, and every so often there
would be a groan and someone would slump to the floor.
I was among the student veterans on the GI Bill, surrounded by brilliant 13-year-olds. We old geezers in our 20s would rather die than have these kids show us up. Still, the dropout rate [among us ex-GIs] in the first year was about 50 percent. I believe the University admitted veterans like myself on the basis of a curve rather than skim off the top scorers in the entrance exam. As it turned out, the results were the same all the way across the curve: the same dropout rate for the top scorers as for those at the bottom or anywhere inbetween.
-- Stan Gilson (A.B. Chicago, 1951), University of Chicago Magazine, August 1995, Letters to the Editors.
When I was fourteen, I graduated from high school in Albuquerque.... I selected the college I wanted
to enter entirely on my own... [but] I heard of Chicago because half the Los Alamos people
migrated there. I found out that there would be a lot of students
there my own age, a unique thing for a major university. I was accepted at Chicago, and
... so I entered the Hutchins Great Books program at the University of Chicago, thinking of majoring later in
physics. That was 1947, when ex-soldiers under the GI bill flooded Chicago and every other institution with
dead serious intent to learn and make up for lost time. Their company was a quick maturing experience. I
enjoyed the Hutchins program a lot. I read the complete great book whenever a snippet of one was assigned in
one of the Hutchins courses. I had the noted southern poet Allan Tate as my preceptor in the metaphysical
poets. I had seminars with T.S. Eliot. I remember speaking to and listening to Nehru at a reception. I spent an
evening with Dylan Thomas in a local tavern. Class attendance was not required in the Hutchins college, so I
attended only lectures of enlightening teachers, and otherwise only read. This was all Hutchins' work. He really
liked providing undergraduates with broad intellectual and cultural experiences and complete independence.
Then there was the Hyde Park neighborhood, with the Compass group with Elaine May and Mike Nichols and
crew, whom I and my friends went to see at virtually every opportunity during its heyday and before Second
City. There was also
Severn Darden
and his fabled escapades at the university. Then there was Chicago. In that
new postwar period, the Premier Grand Cru Bordeaux and Burgundy were two dollars a bottle; no one over
here valued them and France needed currency. Many evenings were spent in intellectual discussions over a
bottle of Margaux or Hermitage and cheese. There were cultural events at the Chicago Art Institute, at the
Oriental Institute, at theatre groups on campus, there was acting as hatcheck for downtown legitimate theatres
in return for free tickets, there was being a subject for autohypnosis experiments. I had a wonderful time in a
wonderful place. Most of the successful products of that milieu feel the same. Of course there were many others
for whom either the standards or the freedom led them to disaster.
-- from Autobiography, Anil Nerode (A.B. Chicago, 1949), Goldwin Smith Professor of Mathematics, Cornell University [©2000 by Anil Nerode, all rights reserved, excerpt used by permission].
"The College" at the University of Chicago became a great experiment in American higher education during the tenure of Robert M. Hutchins, the University's fifth
president [1929-1951]. The Chicago College Plan was designed to combat a perceived decline in integration and rational content of the undergraduate curriculum. Although Robert Hutchins was not the only one to shape the Chicago Plan, he was pivotal. Quite simply, his energy and his vision made the plan work. In this sense, the Chicago Plan really was Hutchins' dream. He was necessary to hold the plan together. When Hutchins left the University of Chicago, the plan lost its strength and momentum; it became vulnerable to attack by the forces which had been suppressed so that the plan could be implemented.
Some of the boldest educational reforms of the 20th century were undertaken by Robert M. Hutchins during his tenure at the University of Chicago. His chief criticisms of modern education were aimed at academic overspecialization and the extraordinary emphasis on careers while in school. His aim was to introduce students to the intellectual traditions of Western civilization before they turned their attention to making a living....
Hutchins' idea of a university could only be realized after a radical reorganization of its structure. The college, he said [1929]:
must resolutely face the question of what is important and what is not. It cannot teach everything that any student thinks he would like to hear about or that any teacher thinks he would like to talk about. It cannot pile course on course. It must set up clear and comprehensible goals for its students to reach. It must articulate its courses, squeezing out waste, water, and duplication. It cannot tolerate education by the adding machine, that system by which we mark the intellectual progress of the young by the arithmetical averages they have achieved on a medley of miscellaneous courses. More than all, [the college] that wishes to solve the problem of how to develop and administer a liberal education must have a faculty devoted to this task.
The College immediately developed a new curriculum which was composed primarily of general introductory or survey courses. The courses were designed to convey the essential factual information and to introduce the method of thought of a given discipline. Completion of the College requirements was stated solely in terms of educational attainment as measured by a series of comprehensive exams, and not in terms of accumulated course credits. This new College program was adopted in March, 1931....
The survey course was developed by the Chicago faculty to combat the specialization and lack of integration found in the elective curriculum....
The concept of integration of knowledge and the survey course influenced the development of the Chicago Plan. Three other features of the Plan are also important in the development of the College. The College curriculum committee stated that:
1) Experimentation with methods of instruction shall be encouraged;
2) Placement tests to determine a student's competence for enrollment in a course shall be encouraged; and
3) For each of the courses a syllabus with appropriate bibliographical material, and sample examinations, shall be published.Members of the faculty trained in the various disciplines met to agree on what a course should contain, worked together on the syllabi and other instructional materials, and reached agreement about what the examinations should expect of the students. The individual instructors then went into the classrooms to conduct their courses with a great degree of freedom as to techniques and approaches. Likewise, students were free to attend the lectures or not as they desired....
Hutchins proposed to solve the confusion in American education by incorporating the last 2 years of high school and the first 2 years of traditional college. This 4-year block would follow a strict liberal arts curriculum -- a curriculum which was viewed by Hutchins as indispensable for preparing for life. He viewed discipline in the liberal arts as an essential aspect of education for everyone. Teaching everyone to think, and to think well, was viewed by Hutchins as the ultimate in democratic education.
Hutchins made it clear that he expected more development in the College curriculum -- development along the lines of the traditional liberal arts. In 1936 he stated that the optimum college curriculum would be:
A course of study consisting of the great books of the Western world and the arts of reading, writing, thinking, and speaking, together with mathematics, the best exemplar of the process of human reason....
Friendship and mutual admiration between [Mortimer J. Adler and Hutchins] later grew at the University of Chicago where Hutchins was President and Adler a member of the faculty. Adler became an intellectual mentor to Hutchins. Hutchins reports that Adler,
looked on me, my work, my education and found us not good. He intimated that unless I did something drastic I would close my educational career a wholly uneducated man. He broadly hinted that the president of an educational institution ought to have some education.
Adler's remedy for Hutchins' lack of education was to begin to study the great books of the western world. Adler was qualified to guide Hutchins in such a course because he, Adler, had taught in the great books program at Columbia University. The "Great Books" program was the conception of John Erskine, a professor on the faculty of Columbia. He and other faculty members, including Mortimer Adler, conducted a seminar in which the faculty and the students read a "classic" a week and then came together for intense discussion of the ideas presented in the classic. The program was a large success. Even the faculty felt that they learned a great deal in the seminars. Adler considered this program his first real education.
With Hutchins' conversion to the program, he set out to implement it at Chicago. As such, Stringfellow Barr, a historian, and Scott Buchanan, a philosopher, both from the University of Virginia, were made visiting professors, and a committee of their choosing set to work to frame a Chicago curriculum based on a study of the great books of western civilization....
In March, 1937 the College finally adopted a curriculum for a 4-year College which would begin after 2 years of the traditional high school.... All students in the 4 year College were to follow the same basic program: a 3-year course in the humanities; a 3-year course in the natural sciences; a 3-year course in the social sciences; a 3-year course in reading, writing, and criticism; a 1-year course in philosophy; two departmental electives; and competence in
mathematics and a foreign language. Graduation from the College was granted after passing 15 comprehensive examinations covering this 4-year course. The comprehensive exams were just that -- they lasted 6 hours each!...
By the end of the academic year 1945-1946 the College had become a 4-year program in which students were placed on the basis of their performance on placement examinations. A 22 year-old could be placed in the same class as the 16 year-old who had just finished his second year of high school. Placement depended upon the need for a certain course of study. At the other end of the program, students who, as a result of independent work, had mastered a given area of subject matter deemed a part of general education, were not held back from taking the comprehensive examination merely because they lacked course credits....
On the grounds that they knew better than the student what was the best curriculum in general education, the College faculty decided upon a required program. Elective courses could be taken in any field, along with the required general courses -- but not as substitutes for them.
The basic four year curriculum was fairly simple:
| First Year | Second Year | Third Year | Fourth Year |
|---|---|---|---|
| Social Sciences 1 | Social Sciences 2 | Social Sciences 3 | History |
| Humanities 1 | Humanities 2 | Humanities 3 | Foreign Language |
| Mathematics 1 | Biological Sciences 1 | Biological Sciences 2 | Mathematics 2 |
| English | Physical Sciences 1 | Physical Sciences 2 | Observation, Interpretation, and Integration (philosophy) |
[St. John's College, Annapolis, Maryland, which like Chicago adopted a Hutchins-type Great Books curriculum in the Thirties, continues to this day with the program. Its program's student reading list is not very different from the list of books we read at Chicago. Similar is Shimer college in Waukegan, Illinois.]
The College within the University was free of departmental control, it offered a program beginning at any time after the second year in high school, placement within the curriculum was determined solely by examination, and graduation with the Bachelor's degree was determined solely by mastery of the general education subject matter as determined by comprehensive examinations. The content of the course work was interdisciplinary and grouped along divisional lines. Pedagogy was determined by the individual instructor.
The College at the University of Chicago was a school for the intellectual elite.... The Chicago College Plan was a carefully designed total curriculum that unified knowledge. It was not a hodgepodge of elective courses and unrelated required courses. Integration and synthesis was its goal....
The College was continually attacked by the faculty of the graduate divisions who felt that students should have more specialized courses in a single field during their undergraduate years. Eventually these faculty won.... A year after Robert Hutchins left the University of Chicago the College was [largely] dismantled [1952]. His presence seems to have been essential to keep the hungry graduate school, from consuming the College. When he left, electives were restored to the curriculum and the general survey courses were compressed. Chicago was still a distinctive institution, but not in the Hutchins way. Undergraduate study at the University of Chicago came to resemble other universities: specialized study complemented by general study. The distinctive Hutchins curriculum became a historical footnote....
 | |
See Letter to the Trustees of the University of Chicago (1999).
See Must the University of Chicago loosen up? from Slate,Mar. 1999.
See U of C marketers ditch tradition in new viewbook from CWN,Aug. 1998.
See U. of Chicago Trading Excellence for Trendiness from Campus Report,Feb. 1999.
See Body Count, by Marcy Mason from Chicago Magazine,Sep. 1998.
See Letters to the Editors from Univ. of Chicago Magazine,Apr. 1999.
To quote accurately is to give thanks. To refuse the cant of "political correctness" is to try and keep the language in its vexed and vital kinship with the truth. To learn by heart is to buttress one's very minor self against barbarism; it is to give the masters an inward welcome and lodging. To know, to declare the radical differences between excellence and the ephemeral, between seriousness and triviality, between that which taxes the spirit and that which flatters, is to practice elementary hygiene.
But whose has been the treason? Who has sought to howl with the wolves before being eaten by them? Who endeavored to be popular and egalitarian, when the radiant enigma of any authentic teaching is one of authority (sometimes despotic)? It is very late in the day. Those who would negotiate their moral and intellectual passions are probably lost. Those who forget that "fashion is the mother of death" (Giacomo Leopardi) are caught in self-betrayal. Those who apologize where they should proclaim have cheapened their vocation.
It is not marbled foundations we need; not electronic aids (computers have memory but not remembrance). It is a table around which to learn to read again. To hear the plain mystery of communion in communication. It is bad times in which to sing. They may lie ahead.
-- George Steiner (A.B. Chicago, 1948), from The Humanities, in Memoriam.(1994)
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Hilbert Tu - Resume |
see also "Hutchins' Antecedents" -->
see also "900 Great Books" --> see also "Famous Graduates of the Hutchins College" --> back to "Books & teachers that changed my life" --> |