All Quiet on the Midway
When asked what he has done during
his 15 years at the University of Chicago,
Robert Maynard Hutchins, 45, likes to
answer: "Nothing at all." Last week the indolent president had once again done nothing but stir up a good section of U.S. higher education. The latest innovations and heterodoxies:
> Hutchins suggested that university presidents be given increased powers and be elected with faculty advice for a very short term, subject to impeachment by a faculty vote of no confidence -with responsibility for University policies then falling on the faculty.* > Hutchins proposed that faculty rank be abolished as dividing the university community. This would supplement the recent Chicago reform whereby faculty contracts will be gradually rewritten 1) to command every professor's full time for eleven months a year at an improved salary, 2) to pour into the University's coffers whatever money facultymen earn from lecturing, broadcasting, publishing outside the University. But Hutchins will let a Nobel Prizewinner keep his swag; he regards that (sometimes as much as $46,000) as "unearned income." > Hutchins announced the election to a University Vice-Presidency of Wilbur Cheney Munnecke, who for four years has held a similar title at the Marshall Field department store. Munnecke will coordinate University business affairs. Vice President Emery Thomas Filbey will continue as chief educational coordinator and Vice President William Burnett Benton (formerly of Manhattan's Benton & Bowles advertising, firm) will run such sidelines as the University's Encyclopaedia Britannica (TIME, May 24), its film unit which is now working out plans for rapid expansion, its radio Round Table. > Hutchins inspired the students' Daily Maroon to offer $750 in prizes for a motto to replace the present one, Cres-cat Scientia Vita Excolatur, which means "Let Knowledge Grow That Life May Be Enriched." But some people do not understand Latin, and others do not understand "enriched" as spiritually as President Hutchins would wish. He proposed a line from Walt Whitman: "Solitary, singing in the West, I strike up for a new world."/-
*The only U.S. university heads in office longer than Hutchins are Columbia's Nicholas Murray Butler (42 years), Clark's Wallace Walter Atwood (23 years) and Cal Tech's Robert Andrews Millikan (22 years).
/- Some other U.S. university