University of Chicago Tenure
In 1929, he moved to Chicago, Illinois to become President of the University of Chicago at the age of 30. Over the next several years, Hutchins came to question Legal Realism, which he had previously championed, and grew skeptical of the ability of empirical research in the social sciences to solve social problems, especially in the face of the Great Depression. Particularly through contact with Mortimer Adler, he became convinced that the solution to the philosophical problems facing the university lay in Aristotelianism and Thomism. In the late 1930s, Hutchins attempted to reform the curriculum of the University of Chicago along Aristotelian-Thomist lines, only to have the faculty reject his proposed reforms three times.
Hutchins served as President of the University of Chicago until 1945, and as the University's Chancellor until 1951. During his Chancellorship, he recruited a commission to inquire into the proper function of the media. By 1947, the Hutchins Commission issued their report on the "social responsibility" of the press.
Hutchins was able to implement his ideas regarding a two-year, generalist bachelors during his tenure at Chicago, and subsequently had designated those studying in depth in a field as masters students. He moreover pulled Chicago out of the Big Ten Conference and eliminated the school’s football program, which he saw as a campus distraction. He also worked to eliminate fraternities and religious organizations for the same reason. While he exhibited great fervor for his curricular project and numerous notable alumni were produced during the period, nevertheless, the business community as well as donors became highly skeptical of the value of the program, and eventually were able to have the four-year, traditional A.B. and S.B. reinstated (and in time, football). The College’s financial clout, which had been considerable prior to his tenure, underwent a serious downgrading with decreased collegiate enrollment and a drying up of donations from the school's principal Chicago area benefactors. As such, his critics view him as a dangerous idealist who pushed the school out of the national limelight and temporarily thwarted its possible expansion, while his supporters argue that it was his changes that kept Chicago intellectually unique and from taking on the vocational inclinations that he denigrated in his writings.
Read more about this topic: Robert Maynard Hutchins
Famous quotes containing the words university of chicago, university of, university, chicago and/or tenure:
“Television ... helps blur the distinction between framed and unframed reality. Whereas going to the movies necessarily entails leaving one’s ordinary surroundings, soap operas are in fact spatially inseparable from the rest of one’s life. In homes where television is on most of the time, they are also temporally integrated into one’s “real” life and, unlike the experience of going out in the evening to see a show, may not even interrupt its regular flow.”
—Eviatar Zerubavel, U.S. sociologist, educator. The Fine Line: Making Distinctions in Everyday Life, ch. 5, University of Chicago Press (1991)
“The great problem of American life [is] the riddle of authority: the difficulty of finding a way, within a liberal and individualistic social order, of living in harmonious and consecrated submission to something larger than oneself.... A yearning for self-transcendence and submission to authority [is] as deeply rooted as the lure of individual liberation.”
—Wilfred M. McClay, educator, author. The Masterless: Self and Society in Modern America, p. 4, University of North Carolina Press (1994)
“A University should be a place of light, of liberty, and of learning.”
—Benjamin Disraeli (1804–1881)
“Ethnic life in the United States has become a sort of contest like baseball in which the blacks are always the Chicago Cubs.”
—Ishmael Reed (b. 1938)
“A politician never forgets the precarious nature of elective life. We have never established a practice of tenure in public office.”
—Hubert H. Humphrey (1911–1978)