Espionage at I-House

marlowe1
Fri, 01 Nov 2019 16:52:26 +0000

@JHS , if you can track down a book by Hutchins published by the UChicago Press in 1936 called “No Friendly Voice”, you can apparently find this speech. Might require a trip to Regenstein.

Hutchins was the boy-wonder Dean of Yale Law before he was the boy-wonder (at the age of 30) President of the University of Chicago. He was a Presbyterian minister’s son who had lost belief in his father’s faith - or had perhaps replaced it with a secular version thereof. “Hutchins was yearning for firm and clear principles like his father’s in proposing that metaphysics take over from theology” (p. 69).

Not an uncommon type in that era - but Hutchins had something a bit more than that: call it charisma. Everyone was impressed by him. He had it all - commanding presence, verbal dexterity, good looks, very little self-doubt. You either swooned before him or hated his guts. However, dismissive as he was of all old ideas and practices, he was not really an egomaniac. He was a man of idealism if not of fully developed ideas. He was always seeking a sort of unified field theory of the meaning of a college education - and indeed of what a university in all its departments and fields was all about. That was what drew him to the middle ages. It was also what caused him to have such phenomenal wars with older faculty and such difficulty in getting his programs accepted by the Departments.

One of his foibles was overstatement. The quoted passage displays it. Nevertheless, as the book says, this was a clarion call to a certain kind of idealistic student, and it clearly distinguished the University of Chicago from the peer schools. Undergraduates of the time “had the belief that the College was at the very forefront of curricular advance. This engendered a cocksure, smart-alec attitude among Chicago students. Having been one myself, I [McNeill] can attest that we felt we knew more than our parents, more than our contemporaries at other schools, and more, even, than most of the University’s professors, confined, as they were by departmental blinkers” (p.58).

Something of that attitude lingered into the sixties. I daresay that many feel it today (though are too polite to voice it). I was not so polite.