The Making of a University

A University has to sell itself today -- to students, prospective faculty, and to donors, both private and corporate. It has to project an image which will attract the best of all three. The University of Chicago does not have as much pure prestige as some of the Ivy League universities. Nor is it as way out as Berkeley. Being Midwestern, it is probably in the middle, and is trying hard to establish its own identity. Three factors will probably determine the outcome of this identity crisis -- the university's educational reputation, its Chicago neighborhood, and financial needs.

William Rainev Harper assumed office as the U of C's first president in 1891 at the age of 35. He had received his Ph.D. from Yale at the age of 19, and later had held two full professorships simultancously. These he sacrificed for the opportunity to create a new university. Harper did not intend Chicago to be one more traditional liberal arts college, so many of which had been started in the Midwest in the earlier nineteenth cenutry. He was determined to found a school of post-graduate instruction, modeled perhaps after Johns Hopkins and Clark University, in Worcester, Mass.

Faculty members were lured away from the east coast, often with offers of uncommonly high salaries. The initial faculty of 103, for 594 students, included eight former college presidents. Harper's dreams of an internationally famous center of post-graduate research were fulfilled. Besides its early Nobel Prize-winning research in the sciences, culminating in Enrico Fermi's first controlled nuclear chain reaction in 1942, the university pioneered the new field of sociology and quickly gained professional schools in business, law, divinity and medicine.

The second Wunderkind arrived in 1929. Robert Maynard Hutchins came to the university at the age of 30, also from Yale where he had been dean of the law school. Like Harper, he could not resist the chance to put his ideas into practice. During his 22 years at Chicago, Hutchins developed his philosophy of education into the "Chicago plan" which focused on the undergraduate.

He established a full faculty for the College alone. Undergraduates benefited from men of full professorial rank, who were able to devote their time completely to College affairs. The faculty of the graduate divisions was staffed with men concerned with advanced specialization and research. Both systems of instruction were re-organized into four subject Divisions--Biological, Physical and Social Sciences, and the Humanities.

Hutchins' plan recommended that college education begin at the end of sophomore year in high school. The four years of college were then to provide a general education in preparation for specialized study in post-graduate years. The liberal education program was not organized as in most American colleges, where a quota of courses from each broad area of knowledge was assumed to expose the student to several disciplines. It was hoped at Chicago that students would study and become proficent in the important intellectual thought processes which had formed Western civilization. As Hutchins put it:

"The liberally educated man ... knows what is meant by soul, state,. God, beauty, and by the other terms that are basic to the discussion of fundamental issues. He has some notion of the insights that these ideas, singly or in combination, provide concerning human experience."

This impressive ideal was implemented in a program of year-long integrated courses, which could be passed by a comprehensive examination or passed out of in initial placement tests. Members of the College faculty devoted themselves to the preparation of the syllabi for these unique courses. Hutchins planned for an emphasis on method rather than content so that the student would develop, with the professor, a technique of critical analysis rather than a list of memorized facts. A Humanities course would not attempt to familiarize students with a wide historical range of "the greats" of literature or art. Instead, a class would probe in depth isolated examples of literary, artistic and musical creation. An examination would present new material and ask the students to apply the intellectual and emotional methods of analysis and appreciation developed over the year.

The emphasis was obviously also on independent learning, for the student was expected to continue his education indefinitely, rediscovering the method and not the content of his courses. This was the spirit of Hutchins' "Chicago plan," at work in the university until 1954 when it was modified to allow for four years of high school education and to require half of the college courses to be in a specialized field. In the other half, the basic schema of liberal education remains.

Hutchins resigned in 1950, much to the relief of many of his critics who doubted that students were really "being educated." But his departure was also regretted by many who enjoyed the spirit of independence which he had brought to the College. A humorous commentary on the controversy over Hutchins' policies is provided in a satire of the University of Chicago. The Dollar Diploma, written by Georg Mann in 1960. One faculty critic had this to say on what Mann termed Individualized Education:

"It made the faculty feel inferior and lose its sense of authority. How can you teach with any confidence, when you have to put your emotions as well as your knowledge on the line every day, or otherwise three-quarters of your class will be boning up in the library, and only panic-stricken dullards will be out there in front of you? No matter who succeeds Raynsword [Hutchins], Individualized Education has to go. And of course we'll have to bring back football."

Hutchins' ideas will not stand or fall on the comments found in The Dollar Diploma, but the postalgia felt at the passing of a revolutionary figure fills the book. The "Chicago plan" for liberal education, practiced undiluted on the university's College, had widespread effects on general education programs throughout the nation. Hutchins' ideas, much like John Dewey's, entertained a certain vogue until reactionary criticism arose.

The foundations established at Chicago by Harper gave the university an enviable reputation as an outstanding center of graduate instruction and research. The Hutchins' era provoked a mild educational revolution which aroused excitement and suspicion. The University of Chicago is now trying to maintain both of these traditions at a time when, pressured by neighborhood problems and capital needs, the demand for educational greatness is mounting.

The graduate programs seem easiest to sell. Chicago clearly ranked in the top ten in last summer's infamous survey of Graduate School education. But it never placed number one. Chicago newspapers played up the university's high standing, while simultaneously undercutting the survey's pretensions and criteria for judgement. The U of C's seven professional schools (Business, Divinity, Education, Law, Library, Medicine and Social Service Administration) likewise rank high, but none have an assured position in first place. Chicago can proudly claim 27 Nobel Prize winners in some form of affiliation, including its current President, George W. Beadle. But the university just does not have the confident prestige of a Harvard or Yale, even Columbia or Berkeley.

So perhaps Chicago should not pretend that it does. As the newspapers pointed out, general criteria for greatness really satisfy no one. The U of C's virtues will not be found in a prestige or ranking contest with other universities. They are instead small and unique, usually a question of emphasis different from other institutions: the pioneering Urban Training Center for Divinity School students, or the communications system-computer expert who heads the library school. The university has not lost its Harper-established reputation, but it must not forfeit its individuality by stretching its claims.

Meanwhile, the College has not lost its spirit of innovation. Last year a new division was added to the four basic programs of instruction. It will offer interdisciplinary studies, such as social thought or philosophy of science for undergraduates, and will emphasize tutorial and independent studies instead of course-work. The Master of the new division, James Redfield, for several years fulfilled his offer to teach Greek to all comers. The student body of 2,500, taught by its own faculty numbering 350, maintains an incredibly high faculty-student ratio of one to eight.

Students must expect something different at the University of Chicago, and many are initially disappointed with the unstructured student life and the sense of informality which pervades the campus. But they can quickly find their cause in the surroundings. The university is an integral part of the Hyde Park neighborhood. The students get caught up in the problems of the community, and soon feel that it is "home." More important, the students become involved in the dialogue over their own education which has been going on since the Hutchins' era.

They are drawn in first by the two-week orientation period and a program of informal lectures and discussions, which prompts them to think about more than their course schedule. The program is annually entitled "Aims of Education" and was supplemented in February of 1966 with a further week free of classes devoted to assessing undergraduate programs. Students have institutionalized several daily coffee and tea hours which faculty and undergraduates attend in equal numbers. After his appointment as Provost in the spring of 1964, Edward H. Levi invited several groups of thirty to forty fourth-year students and faculty members to his house to discuss problems and plans for the educational system.

This genuine, and often over-riding concern for their own education is part of the Hutchins' legacy. In the anti-football riot of 1964, students carried signs proclaiming "Hutchins is our leader!" But it has also been carefully cultivated and passed on by each succeeding student generation, and the dialogue is not lost in the past. While the university itself worries about Chicago's educational reputation, the student body is far more concerned with the process.