A friend recommended to me this most fascinating biography of Robert Maynard Hutchins by Milton Mayer I, in turn, recommend it to anyone interested in the meaning and definition of education.Hutchins was off to a galloping start. At age 24 he was Secretary of Yale, a position that was a virtual training ground for university presidencies. But law school turned him around - not the turgid law books, nor the trade school purpose of teaching, but the law itself - because it was "an introduction to the liberal arts and the life of the mind." It was the Dean of the Law School who "recognized the educator beneath the disdain for a career in education."
Hutchins believed the business of universities was understanding, not vocational training, which until his appointment as Dean of the Yale Law School (at age 28) had been the practice. He deplored the fragmentation of learning in the university (university means the uniting of disciplines) which was breaking apart into more and more specialized units. He related it all to the law. "To understand the law was to understand the nature of reason, right and justice... to understand the nature of society." Law was ultimately inseparable from the humanities, which went to the true nature of man, from the social sciences, which went to the nature of society, and even inseparable from the natural sciences and medicine. Hutchins was attempting to answer the question posed 2500 years earlier, "Can you tell me, Socrates, whether virtue is acquired by teaching or by practice, or in some other way?"
He was a great fund-raiser and quite well off himself. He used to say, "The rich have a short attention span. When you have that kind of money you don't have to listen." He, too, was bored easily. The longer he stayed at the University of Chicago, where he had been appointed a very young president, the more bored he got. His speeches, which had been known for their pithiness and succinctness, "generally laced with irony, began to be increasingly laden with pronunciamentos of the snore-inducing kind, which in our own day, university presidents have come to specialize: education for democracy, education for leisure, education for freedom." [From "The Sad Story of the Boy Wonder," a review of another Hutchins biography, by Harry S. Ashmore, [book:Unseasonable Truths: The Life and Times of Robert Maynard Hutchins] in Commentary, March 1990.
The Depression hit the University of Chicago quite hard, but Hutchins used it as an opportunity to define the institution. He had the option of cutting everything across the board, or deciding what the priorities were: faculty salaries or cutting the grass. The salaries won. [If we:] "had cut everything across the board we could have gone through the Depression just as thoughtlessly as we went through periods of prosperity... the Depression required it [the University:] to define itself, reorient itself, reorganize itself, to think about everything once more, to try to act intelligently in the light of its resources. Hutchins was not afraid to take on the glorified traditions. Interscholastic football and other sports had to go. It was obvious to him that athleticism (note he was referring to athleticism not athletics) was inimical to education. He gradually persuaded the board. When asked by one diehard fan what would replace football, his response was "education."
There is an absolutely classic chapter entitled "The Red Room," which recounts the infamous attack upon the university's patriotism by Charles Walgreen (owner of the drugstore chain and inventor of the tunafish marble cake) in cahoots with Robert McCormick and the Hearst Empire. The outcome? Hutchins got a $500,000 donation to the university from his nemesis.
