Monday, Jan. 01, 1951
New Job for a Salesman
Just for a laugh, one day last month, the University of Chicago's student paper, the Maroon, put out a gag issue with the banner headline: HUTCHINS OUT! A few days later, Chancellor Robert Maynard Hutchins bumped into the Maroon's editor on the street. "You know," said he, "after that issue, no one will believe it when I really do leave."
Robert Hutchins was talking more closely to events than the Maroon's editor suspected. Though only two or three of his trustees knew it, he had actually been thinking for the past six weeks of handing in his resignation. His old friend Paul Hoffman had asked him to become an associate director of the $250 million Ford Foundation (TIME, Oct. 2). Last week, after thinking the offer over, Hutchins decided to say yes. "The University of Chicago," said he, "deserves a better deal. There's no reason why the university should be committed to me at 51 because I was a promising young man at 30. The university needs a new face."
No One Ready. The news stunned the campus. The board of trustees, summoned to a special meeting, wanted to know whether Hutchins might not change his mind. At the same time, the council of the university academic senate passed a resolution urging-him to reconsider. As Robert Hutchins had predicted, no one was ready to believe that he really meant to quit. Cried one student: "How can a myth resign?"
In 21 years, Chicago had grown used to accepting the Hutchins myth as a permanent part of the university campus. He had come to the Midway at 30, the Boy Wonder who seemed to want to revolutionize U.S. higher education all by himself. He had stirred up storms on his own campus, kept educators across the nation busy denouncing or applauding him. At Chicago, he thought that students should be allowed to go as fast as they wished, granted A.B. degrees to qualified students at the end of the sophomore year. He plumped for the study of the Great Books, and a liberal arts education concerned, not with fragments and specialties, but with ultimate values and first principles. Whether he found agreement or not, he had, as much as any man, forced U.S. educators to re-examine their purposes.
Start with the A's. As a director of the Ford Foundation, Hutchins' voice would not be lost. Last week, while his trustees began the search for a successor ("We'll just start with the A's in Who's Who," sighed Chairman Laird Bell). Robert Hutchins seemed still willing to raise that voice. "If you are going to present education as it is," he said, "you've got to present it as a mess. But why not do this: Why not sell the idea of a liberal education?" The Hutchins idea of a liberal education is to train men to "understand the order of goods and [to] achieve them in that order." With $250 million behind him, Robert Hutchins might turn out to be as good a salesman of his ideas as ever.
The Ford Foundation's second new director, announced last week: Chester C. Davis, 63, onetime Montana farm expert who became an early New Deal brain-truster, served briefly as F.D.R.'s food administrator during World War II, in 1941 was appointed president of the Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis.
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