Robert Maynard Hutchins - Later Life and Legacy

Later Life and Legacy

After leaving his position at the University, Hutchins became head of the Ford Foundation. Due to the rapid growth of the US automotive industry in the early 1950s, the Ford Foundation was running such large surpluses that it attracted unwanted attention from the Internal Revenue Service. Hutchins was thus able to steer substantial funds into his ares of interest, establishing the Fund for the Advancement of Education and Fund for Adult Education. The Fund for the Advancement of Education sponsored projects including nationwide teacher training and college early entrance programs at 12 colleges. The programs at three of these colleges, Goucher College, the University of Utah, and Shimer College, continue in operation today. The Fund for Adult Education sponsored experimental educational programs for adults, chiefly in the liberal arts; these included the National Educational Television network which later became PBS.

After leaving the Ford Foundation, Hutchins founded the Center for the Study of Democratic Institutions in 1959, which was his attempt to bring together a community of scholars to analyze this broad area. Hutchins described the Center's goal as examining democratic institutions "by taking a multidisciplinary look at the state of the democratic world – and the undemocratic world as well, because one has to contrast the two and see how they are going to develop." He further stated, "After discovering what is going on, or trying to discover what is going on, the Center offers its observations for such public consideration as the public is willing to give them".

While modified and reduced in form, the collegiate curriculum at the University of Chicago to this day reflects the Great Books and Socratic method championed by Hutchins' Secular Perennialism. In addition, a direct descendant of the program continues in operation at Shimer College in Chicago, which was affiliated with the University until the mid-1950s. A classroom and scholarship for early entrants at Shimer still bear his name. A somewhat more distantly related program is operated at St. John's College.

Carl Sagan in The Demon-Haunted World says that he was "lucky enough" to have studied under Hutchins, "where science was presented as an integral part of the gorgeous tapestry of human knowledge."