John Boyer's Zoom Talk

marlowe1
Thu, 07 May 2020 14:15:00 +0000

You may have been one of the some 600 listeners last night. Many questions were also asked at the end of the talk, and there were some tentative answers and tantalizing hints of changes being considered. The first part of the talk was historical in nature, but it did contain a thesis: that the University of Chicago has been shaped by crisis. The two he particularly highlighted were the Depression (the Hutchins era) and the student revolutions of the late 60’s (the Levi era). In each case changes to the deep structure of College education emerged as a response.

We tend to think of Boyer, with some justice, as being a revisionist of the “failed experiments” of past eras. No one listening to this talk would come away with that undiluted impression. Hutchins is given his due as a great innovator: he created the Core Curriculum; he created the Divisions, one of which was the College; he made the University into a byword for excitement and experimentation; he attracted to it the very best students of the era. Yet he was only following in the tradition of strong presidents, risk-taking, and innovation begun by Harper. Innovation, Boyer said, is in the DNA of the University; that is its brand; and Hutchins is its prime exemplar. Yet Hutchins took it all a little too far, especially in attempting to merge the latter years of high school into his new-model College, and he alienated much of the faculty along the way. His legacy is mixed, but even the turmoil and endless discussion he prompted are and remain typical of the University of Chicago, where nothing is settled forever or even for very long.

Boyer’s second instance was from the late sixties, a period when the traditional meaning of a liberal arts education at Chicago as everywhere else in North America was under severe scrutiny, protest, and calls for radical reform from a student body who had ceased to entirely buy into what Levi called “the sacred mission of the University of Chicago.” That era followed and reinforced the “hard fifties” which had brought the decay of the neighborhood, giving rise to losses of both students and faculty. The centerpiece and terrible culmination of it all was the occupation of the Ad Building in January 1969. Levi kept his cool, more or less, through the three weeks or so of actual occupation; there was no Columbia-style sending in of the police or cracking heads. However, he was deeply shaken: that something like that could happen at a school (one which he was a complete product of, having attended every level of his education starting with Lab School) with its tradition of education in the liberal arts and with its dedication to free speech. The faculty of the day also put pressure on him: they were as alientated from the students as the students were from them. I myself remember reading an excoriatingly sarcastic piece by the noted Law Prof Philip Kurland titled simply “The Revolting Student”, in which the adjective was dual-purpose. In the result Levi simply panicked, instituted trial-like proceedings that culminated in the expulsion of thirty or so students, and created a somber legacy of student demoralization that lasted for decades. In effect he and the faculty lost faith in undergraduate education. The student body of the College was purposely reduced by one-third. All this was meant to stave off a revolution expected to come in the seventies - and that never came. Rather it was the demoralization that remained and poisoned. Yet it was the recognition of that very effect that led to the reforms that (though Boyer modestly does not say so) culminated under his own leadership.

Even in the fifties and early sixties (my era) the College had paid insufficient attention to the lives of its students - it had coasted on the “hot-house” excitement of the Hutchins era and on a singular focus on “life of the mind”. Boyer describes the little room in Reynolds Club, manned by a single staffer, which functioned as a clearing house for job opportunities after graduation. I went up to that little room on one occasion at the end of my final year; the friendly staffer pulled out an index card with the name of a single lead for a job - a federal agency hiring people to track down the contacts of VD patients! That could have been interesting work, but I passed on it for another year of grad school. There are now, Boyer says, more than 50 people devoted to career counselling and finding summer internships and jobs after graduation, and this is a major focus of the College - and but one instance of the reforms which, in his telling of it, came out of the legacy of bitterness, contraction, and demoralization that set in in the seventies as a result of the crisis of the late sixties. That crisis produced bitter fruit, but it also produced reform.

So much for the history. With the general thesis that this present crisis too will produce a response in the traditions of this University Boyer gave us a few tantalizing glimpses of what these might be.

One of these was a mega-reunion that would also function as a graduation ceremony for the Class of '20 (possibly at the same time as that of '21?) and a general convergence of alums of all eras for a really grand celebration of the University. He spoke of this as a big and unprecented deal.

Another was that this fall the University will be open again: he said the plan was not final and that the University had a greater runway to work out the details because of the University’s quarter system. Some combination of in-class and remote learning was hinted at. He said only that “if I was a betting man I would place that bet.”

He spoke of a plan developing wherein the city of Chicago itself might function much as the cities of Europe function when Chicago students go abroad to study in them. It was hardly clear to me - and he gave no details - as to how this would work, but he gave a brief paean to to the greatness of the city itself and to its many opportunities. The University by implication had not sufficiently harnessed these; now was the time to start. The crisis could bear that fruit.

Another extremely tantalizing hint, in light of a long discussion on a previous thread, was that in the course of describing the special efforts being made to find jobs and places at grad schools for the class of '20, he said that he had had discussions with Chicago’s own graduate and professional schools which will result in their giving special attention - it almost sounded like a preference - for Chicago undergrads. That was tantalizing indeed.

This post is already long enough. Even so, I have skipped over several other interesting items, both historical and practical. Would be most interested in corrections or additions.