Midway Man

"We demand epidemic freedom!" By last week even fuddled urchins helping their big brothers & sisters picket New York City's Board of Education building had thus taken up the academic battle cry of 1935. Since autumn, patrioteers led by the Hearst Press and the American Legion had hounded the nation's schools with unprecedented vehemence. Last week as commencement season let loose torrents of oratory on college campuses, the pedagogs' reply was echoing throughout the land. Within a fortnight commencement speeches by the following university heads had made the following headlines: Johns Hopkins' Ames

CALLS FOR WAR ON ENEMIES OF FREE THOUGHT Cornell's Farrand

DR. FARRAND CALLS FOR FREE TEACHING Amherst's King

STANLEY KING ASKS ACADEMIC LIBERTY Rutgers' Clothier

COLLEGE PRESIDENT'S

FREE SPEECH PLEA Syracuse's Flint

DR. FLINT DEMANDS TRUTH IN TEACHING Boston's Marsh

RADICALISM HELD A PATRIOTIC NEED Meantime in Chicago the year's best-publicized academic Red scare, having run up against a combination of scorn and spunk named Robert Maynard Hutchins, ignominiously collapsed. When Drugman Charles R. Walgreen withdrew his niece from University of Chicago, clamoring that the campus was rampant with Communism, President Hutchins angrily refused to dignify his vaporings with a public investigation (TIME, April 22). Only 75 of the University's 7,500 full-time students belonged to its two pinko student organizations.* But Drugman Walgreen got his hearing anyway, before the Illinois Senate and in the Press.

Last week the Senate Committee, after four weeks of chasing marsh lights, disgustedly called off its investigation for good. President Hutchins, who had sat through its hearings in blank boredom, calmly went off about his business. Next week the University will present a series of public lectures by Soviet Ambassador Alexander Troyanovsky and two of his countrymen on "The Soviet Union and World-Problems."

For the Defense. A lucid, original mind, engaging presence and quiet, incisive delivery make Bob Hutchins one of the ablest and most popular public speakers in the land. In University of Chicago's majestic cathedral-chapel last week he summed up for all liberal educators their case against the patrioteers. His rangy, athletic figure draped in silken gown and the purple hood of a Doctor of Laws, he leaned out from the pulpit to declare:

". . . Almost everybody now is afraid. This is reflected in the hysteria of certain organs of opinion, which insist on free speech for themselves, though nobody has thought of taking it away from them, and at the same time demand that it be denied everybody else. It is reflected in the re-turn of Billingsgate to politics. It is reflected in the general resistance to all uncomfortable truths. It is reflected in the decay of the national reason. Almost the last question you can ask about any proposal nowadays is whether it is wise, just, or reasonable. The question is how much pressure is there behind it or how strong are the vested interests against it.

"Current fears are reflected too in the present attacks on higher education. From one point of view these attacks are justified. From the point of view of those who believe that Heaven is one big country club, universities are dangerous things. If what you want is a dead level of mediocrity, if what you would like is a nation of identical twins, without initiative, intelligence or ideas, you should fear the universities. From this standpoint universities are subversive. They try to make their students think. . . ."

When President Hutchins was done his audience, the first one to behave so in the memory of any chapelgoer, beat their palms.

Come of Age. More than the touch of grey in his close-cropped dark hair, this commencement speech revealed the maturity which is overtaking the golden boy of U. S. Education. Six years ago the nation gasped at the bright promise implied in his prodigious chronology--War-decorated by Italy at 19, Secretary of Yale at 24, Yale Law School lecturer at 26, full professor and dean at 29, President of University of Chicago at 30. To a large section of the U. S. public he is still a brilliant boy theorist, miraculously allowed to tinker a university to his mind's content. But Robert Maynard Hutchins, once the youngest and handsomest big-university president in the land, is now only the handsomest. After six years of guiding a great university through Depression he stands not on his promise but on his performance.

Second Greatest. John D. Rockefeller and a prodigious predecessor from Yale gave Bob Hutchins the kind of university he has to run. One "delicious May morning'' in 1889 the nation's No. 1 industrialist, trim, erect and in his prime at 49* was pacing up & down before his Manhattan home with the Secretary of the American Baptist Education Society. Suddenly, a few steps from Fifth Avenue, Mr. Rockefeller stopped, faced the Baptist secretary, announced his decision. He would give $600,000 toward founding a Baptist college in Chicago, provided other acceptable donors would give $400,000. When this proposal was announced to a convention of the Education Society in Boston, delegates spontaneously burst out in "Praise God from whom all blessings flow." Mr. Rockefeller concurred in this judgment when he paid his first visit to the Chicago campus seven years later. Said he: "The good Lord gave me the money, and how could I withhold it from Chicago? ... It is the best investment I ever made in my life."

Before he was through Mr. Rockefeller had increased this best investment to $35,000,000, and his various foundations have since given almost as much again. But no such project was in his mind on that May morning in 1889. He thought he was establishing a small Baptist College in the Midwest. It was William Rainey Harper, college student at 10 and Yale Ph. D. at 19, who rid him of that idea. Chosen to bring the embryo institution to birth, fertile, vigorous, 35-year-old First President Harper set his heart on building a great university, scoured the world for its first requisite--great scholars. Before he died of cancer in 1906 he had set the liberal, experimental, scholarly course from which University of Chicago has never departed. Prodigious Yaleman Hutchins now heads the fourth richest (endowment: $59,475,148), sixth largest (enrollment: 13,000) university in the land, with 85 fine buildings, mostly Gothic, strung three-quarters of a mile along South Chicago's spacious Midway Plaisance. Indisputable intellectual leader of the Midwest, it has housed such world-famed scholars as Physicists Albert A. Michelson and Robert A. Millikan, Biologists Jacques Loeb and Frank Rattray Lillie, Philosopher John Dewey, Historian-Ambassador William E. Dodd, Astronomer Edwin Brant Frost, Medical Researchers Alexis Carrel, Frank Billings, Howard Taylor Ricketts. It still has Physicist Arthur Holly Compton, Physiologist Anton J. Carlson, Medical Researchers Maude Slye, Arno Luckhardt and George F. Dick, Orientalist James Henry Breasted, Classicist Gordon Jennings Laing, Political Scientist Charles Edward Merriam.

In the current Atlantic Monthly, President Edwin R. Embree of the Rosenwald Fund ranked U. S. universities on the basis of the American Council of Education's investigation of their scholarly eminence in each of 35 academic departments. He found University of Chicago second only to Harvard, its senior by 254 years.

New Plan-President Hutchins bided only a year before he turned University of Chicago upside down with his New Plan. At one stroke he wiped out the whole conventional university structure and paraphernalia: colleges, graduate schools, credits, course examinations, compulsory class attendance, arbitrary residence requirements. His new structure comprised a College and four Upper Divisions: Biological Sciences, Physical Sciences, Social Sciences, Humanities. A student was to lay a broad cultural foundation in the College, stop there with a certificate if he wished, or proceed to one of the Divisions for advanced work funneling up without interruption through A. B. and A. M. to Ph. D. General examinations would test not his ability to parrot back a set of facts dealt out by one professor, but his thoughtful grasp of a whole field of knowledge. Freed from oldtime academic harness, he could gallop or amble through his course as fast or slowly as he wished.

There are no tangible tests of success for such a scheme as the New Plan, and it is still quite new. But in the enthusiastic judgment of president, faculty and students, the Plan works. University attendance has increased since it started. More important, student calibre has kept step. Dullards are afraid of it. The high-school average of last year's Freshman class was an astounding 90. Applicants write in from all corners of the land, half of them saying they want to enter University of Chicago solely because of the New Plan. Given a chance to proceed under their own steam, students have found that learning is exciting. They pile into extra lecture sessions just for the fun of it, or take examinations without any previous classwork whatsoever and generally pass with higher marks than those of classmembers.

The New Plan has proved itself an administrative blessing. Instead of a regiment of department heads, President Hut chins has only a handful of "vice pres-idents"--Deans of divisions and professional schools--to deal with on matters of finance and appointments. Individual budgets have dropped from 72 to twelve. Some 400 over-specialized or overlapping courses have been eliminated. To this economy of organization, plus the able assistance of sturdy, white-haired Vice President Frederic Campbell ("Fritz'") Woodward, President Hutchins credits his success in bringing the University through Depression relatively unscathed. As income from real estate, mortgages and Standard Oil stock plummeted, he has had to dip heavily into a $1,000,000 reserve fund. But no professors have been discharged, no salaries cut except those of the medical faculty (now mostly restored) and of administrators, including the president. Midway's Hutchins. Aboard a Manhattan-bound express train a fellow passenger once cheerfully asked Chicago's president: "Where are you going?"

"Where," replied Bob Hutchins, "is the train going?"

Chicagoans on & off the campus agree on two facts about President Hutchins:

1) he is exceedingly smart and able;

2) he is entirely too flip and smart-alecky. Friends excuse his brusque manner, his acid impatience with fatuity, on grounds of shyness. But when the Hutchins manner first made itself apparent on the Midway, that explanation did not salve the feelings of oldtime facultymen, already angry at having a youth brought in over their heads. Businessmen in the Loop were equally galled by his domineering ways when he served on Chicago's Unemployment Relief Commission. His popularity reached a nadir in 1931 when he caused the chairman and two members of his philosophy department to quit their jobs in high dudgeon.

Since then Chicago has become better acquainted with Bob Hutchins and his popularity, especially in the past year, has soared. Most facultymen who still dislike him fall into three classifications: 1) mossbacks; 2) peanuts; 3) strangers. Young fellow members of the faculty's X Club (wives have an X's Club) have found him a companion of first-rate wit and charm. Students lucky enough to get into his erudite course on "Classics of the Western World," which he teaches by dialog with smart young Philosophy Professor Mortimer Adler, think it the high spot of their campus lives.

Bob Hutchins still betrays his youth.

Last year he began contributing a column to the Daily Maroon (student newspaper). Excerpt:

"Cambridge, Mass. Harvard University has announced that it will increase or diminish (I have forgotten which) the size of its diplomas. All true friends of education will applaud this great forward step."

Some Chicagoans still think that President Hutchins' manner has hurt the University, that the town might have done more for the gown during Depression if he had been a bit more mellow. Friends and philosophers, however, are glad that Bob Hutchins has escaped the fate which Critic Carl Van Doren ascribes to Author Christopher Morley: "He got mellow before he got ripe."

His father is president of Kentucky's Berea College and his younger brother vice president of Yale-in-China, but Bob Hutchins might never have turned to Education if it had not been for beauteous Maude McVeigh. He was 22, penniless and wanted to be a lawyer, but a prep-school teaching job looked like the only way he could earn enough to support a wife. Like nearly all university presidents' wives, Maude Hutchins has been roundly criticized for snobbishness. Mrs. Hutchins, however, is a New Englander with a mind of her own. Scores of faculty folk have sat at her board but she figured out long ago that if she entertained six faculty folk per night, five nights per week, it would take practically a year to go down the list. Hence she and her husband live quietly with their 9-year-old daughter Mary Frances ("Franja") and their Great Dane "Hamlet" on the second floor of the big, yellow-brick President's House overlooking the Midway, entertain intimates there. Instead of an automobile their garage houses a studio where Mrs. Hutchins ably sculpts and draws.

Hutchins Midway. No man could rise so high as President Hutchins has in half his life without causing the world to wonder what the second half may hold for him. Just now not even his intimates can get Bob Hutchins to say any more than that he is vastly interested in Education. Having launched a program which should eventually transform U. S. Education, he is brimful of ideas for extending and improving it. But, though he thinks with vigorous independence about educational problems, he is not primarily a theorist. The New Plan, as he has often pointed out, is the work of many minds. His genius lies in possessing the courage and vision to effect new plans, the ability to administer them to success. As yet he has no political tie-ups, though he has served on the Chicago Regional Committee of the National Labor Relations Board, chair-manned numerous long-named public commissions.

Somewhat ambiguously, President Roosevelt may have pointed the way to Bob Hutchins' future last autumn. President Hutchins called at the White House and for a few days the Press was rife with rumors that he was slated for a front-rank New Deal job, probably as NRA enforcement officer (TIME, Oct. 29). Then silence.

President Hutchins, who had already secured a leave of absence from Chicago to take the job. has heard not a word from the White House from that day to this. For all he knows the explanation Washington gossips gave may be true: that Donald Richberg talked President Roosevelt into canceling the appointment. But Bob Hutchins does know that the job which President Roosevelt definitely offered him after four White House interviews, and which he accepted only after the President had promised him full powers, was the dictatorship of then-potent NRA.

*Both were suspended last fortnight for violating the University's rule against off-campus demonstrations. *Beginning his annual summer shuttle from Ormond Beach, Fla. to Lakewood, N. J. last week, Mr. Rockefeller failed for the first time to speak or wave to station bystanders as attendants helped him up a specially-built platform to his private car. His 96th birthday falls on July 8.

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