Schooling for a Speaker

Each June at Commencement time, the guest speaker arrives on the college campus by the morning train or plane, his "prepared speech tucked in his briefcase. He is greeted by the college president, taken to lunch, escorted to his chair on the speaker's platform. After suitable introduction, he delivers his exhortation, sits down amid fitful handclapping and gets ready to head for home.

This spring, the graduating class of small (500 students), Quaker-founded Haverford College, outside Philadelphia, decided that the hit-and-run Commencement speaker was too far removed from his audience. They invited their man to spend a week on the campus, living and arguing with undergraduates. They picked a lively companion: Robert Maynard Hutchins, brisk but aging (55) boy wonder of U.S. higher education, onetime chancellor of the University of Chicago, now president of the Ford Foundation's Fund for the Republic.

Beer & Bull Sessions. Educator Hutchins moved into a suite in Haverford's Founders Hall, for five days dined with undergraduates, drank beer with them, attended their classes (he had a tough time in chemistry). In bull sessions, he got ample opportunity to deliver himself of a few long-standing peeves--and added a few new ones.

Sample Hutchinsisms:

On grants by big business to higher education: "Many of the liberal-arts colleges ought to be closed up. Business, by giving indiscriminate support to all of them, perpetuates bad colleges."

On California: "It has marvelous climate and scenery. The people and architecture leave something to be desired, but we'll fix that in time."

On professors reluctant to adopt Hutchins' views of education: "Faculties always oppose any new program by saying the students can't do the work, which always means that the faculty doesn't want to do the work."

Ask the Questions. Critic Hutchins was impressed by what he found at Haverford, tried in vain to get students to complain about the teaching. "If I were ever a college president again," he declared, "I'd try to run it on Quaker principles." His week's companions were not unanimously impressed by Hutchins. One observation: "[He] is an administrator . . . not an educational philosopher." Explained a senior: "Some of the class expected more than they got." But most agreed that Hutchins was no cautious pedant: "He's a name-dropper but not a punch-puller."

Last week Hutchins returned to deliver his scheduled Commencement address. His attentive audience found him still pleased with what he had seen. "A college is essentially a place where questions are asked . . . Haverford asks the questions. It is difficult to make a statement on this campus without having it challenged . . ." He urged an end to specialized training for graduate study or the professions: "The aim of liberal education is to produce a human being, a free man. To such an aim the wonderful displays put on by Haverford men in graduate schools . . . are largely irrelevant."

What makes a college outstanding? "One college is distinguished from another by [its] vitality . . . Vitality in turn appears to result from controversy. The deeper and more pervasive the controversy, the more students and faculty are involved in it, the better the education for the student and the world."

Bob Hutchins stepped back from the speaker's stand, smiled at the vigorous applause and soon departed to catch the train to New York City. Said one graduating senior, earlier dubious about Hutchins' visit: "I was very pleasantly surprised."

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