Chicago Rumble

"We have sifted out the substance from the shadow left over undergraduate education by the sainted Bob Hutchins," said a University of Chicago official. Last week an era ended at the undergraduate college that once doted on the innovations of Chicago's ex-Chancellor Robert Maynard Hutchins. Out went the exciting theories and in swept a hardheaded, quick-witted new dean of the college, Oxford-trained Historian Alan Simpson, 46. After nearly 30 years of following the Hutchins line, the college was back to orthodoxy.

Down with Textbooks. When Bob Hutchins arrived in 1929, to be president of the university after a young-prodigy year as dean of the Yale Law School, the College of the University of Chicago was smothered by graduate schools in a research-minded institution. Young (30), brilliant Idealist Hutchins launched a campus revolution that forced U.S. higher education to re-examine its purposes. He declared the college independent, and issued some memorable orders: no textbooks or attendance records, no more intercollegiate football. To enter "Hutchins College," a qualified freshman needed but two years of high school. To leave with a B.A. degree, he needed only to pass general-education exams in the 14 "areas" that Hutchins regarded as the mindscape of man. Theoretically, a really bright student could get out of the college trenches with a degree by his second Christmas. Those were heady, gabby days at Chicago.

The Babel began to burst even before the Boy on the Midway had become chancellor of the university in 1945. The college became so exotic ("itself-directed," cracked a sociologist in Chicagoese) that it sometimes seemed more a boot camp for pre-beatniks than an institution of higher learning. Its "science" students might discourse knowingly on biochemistry and not have a clue to lighting a Bunsen burner; its "history" students soared in a swirl of timeless notions of man and man's fate without ever knowing what happened to Napoleon.

When Hutchins left Chicago in 1951 to become associate director of the Ford Foundation and (since 1954) president of the Fund for the Republic, U.S. graduate schools were already ignoring Chicago applicants in favor of students with traditional majors. Chicago's own graduate schools refused to give the college's "two-year" B.A. four years' credit; high school advisers told seniors to steer clear of the place. In 1953 only 141 freshmen entered the college, and enrollment (geared for 3,500) plummeted to 1,350.

Up with Enrollment. Ever since, the university's new Chancellor Lawrence A. Kimpton (a Stanford-and Cornell-trained philosopher) has been trying to pick up the pieces (TIME, Jan. 24, 1955). He has restored four-year college degrees, set up college departments again, last year took over the acting deanship. Some of the Hutchins-era glamour has been lost in the process; Kimpton has not been able to stem a flight of top scholars who miss the old excitement. But this year college enrollment is up to 2,154.

Last week Chancellor Kimpton announced his briskest reforms to date: appointment of Dean Simpson and complete re-establishment of major studies within the college. The full-size curriculum is likely to command respect at last for the sagging college of the wealthy (endowment: $186 million) university; the new dean already has it. Trim, clip-toned, British-born Alan Simpson went to Chicago in 1946 as a newly demobbed Royal Artillery major. He is now a U.S. citizen, married to an associate editor of the Bulletin of Atomic Scientists.

"I am not a professional educator," Dean Simpson said last week. "But I do know an educated man when I see one, and I shall try to see that we turn out that kind of student--namely, one free of cant and humbug. The ordinary American boy who will only make a million in later life, the ordinary girl who wants a husband as well as a diploma, are as welcome here as the Quiz Kid."

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