Well, this tale is an old one but a good one, from the thirties…
The University was suspected in those days of harboring un-American types. In an effort to dig up dirt on the sex lives of radical students and professors the blessedly extinct Chicago Herald Examiner, a Hearst paper, engaged the services of a young woman to move in to I-House and conduct undercover researches. Apparently she found nothing worth reporting (some things don’t change). In an attempt to satisfy her employer she stepped up the level of her provocations. Such un-UChicago activities led to her detection and confession. She was dubbed “Little Beverley” by the Maroon. A spectacular backfiring of the intentions of the paper ensued: “the sinister comedy she participated in aroused campus opinion against the Hearst press and all it stood for” (McNeill, “Hutchins’ University”, p. 63). Downtown sleaze could not touch the University.
McNeill, who was himself a student in the College of those days, describes the more serious political debate of the times as being being between the Thomists and the Marxists. Now doesn’t that sound ur-Chicago? As he says, “No other campus came close to such a mix.” Though many campuses had their Marxists, then and now, “only at Chicago did Marxists have to compete with a rival Thomist sect, whose argumentative skill was equal or superior to anything Marx had to offer” (p. 61).
Little Beverley would never have been detected if she had confined her provocations to making arguments for the existence of God.
While I’m at it I can’t refrain from quoting from a speech given by Hutchins to one of the College classes of those years. He considered it the best speech he ever made. Given the world these college kids were about to enter his words have a poignancy, but the concept behind them is a familiar one to us and our children today and is much debated on this board. “I am not worried about your economic future… I am worried about your morals. Time will corrupt you. Your friends, your wives and husbands, your business and professional associates, will corrupt you; your social, political and financial ambitions will corrupt you.” Nevertheless, for this brief moment of your lives, he told them, “Believe me, you are closer to the truth than you will ever be again.” (Quoted in McNeill, p. 68.)
Wow. I would like to read that Hutchins speech in full. The part you quote sounds all kinds of wrong to me, absolutely the worst kind of mandarin arrogance. If that’s the genius loci of Chicago, I am heartily glad that its influence has been significantly diluted.
Yes, both Yale College and Yale Law School, which he attended contemporaneously with serving as Secretary of the University. He became Dean of the Law School less than three years after he received his law degree, and in his two-year tenure in that job recruited many of the faculty who established Yale as the top law school in the country, starting with William O. Douglas (who had been teaching at the University of Chicago). He was clearly an impressive guy. But that doesn’t make him right.
@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.
Hyperbole can be an effective tool of speech. No doubt the “genius loci” wasn’t impacted negatively. No need for alarm bells or sighs of relief about current directions of the school. If anything, Hutchins - for all his faults - shared the same commitment to free speech on campus that has been underscored by Zimmer and Company.
Picking up on JHS’s characterization of Hutchins’ words as “the worst kind of mandarin arrogance”, well, if it was that, the galvanizing effect of those and similar words created a distinctly un-mandarinized student body. “[Chicago students] came from relatively humble homes. A question about parental education showed that 40 percent of their parents had not graduated from high school, 28.4 percent had one parent with at least some college-level education, and only 8.9 percent had two parents with at least some level of college education” (p. 52). Famously the University of Chicago opened its doors to Jewish students (who comprised nearly a third of the student body) whose parents had arrived in the United States early in the twentieth century and who “lacked the wealth and polish that other prestigious colleges [with their quotas] demanded… No other college replicated this sociological mix. Ivy League colleges took pains to attract sons and daughters of the upper classes who set a comparatively relaxed, genteel tone for undergraduate life… [Chicago] attracted so many academically gifted students from the lower middle class that it was they who set the pace and defined the texture of College life on the Midway” (pp. 53-54). If this was arrogance, it was the arrogance of talented poor youth directed toward the ruling elites.
I don’t think this is quite as paradoxical as it may seem. Hutchins was not solely responsible for this egalitarian ethos, but his words tapped in to the aspirational spirit of many poor kids who truly took the intellectual life seriously and had reason to suspect that it would not be taken seriously at other institutions - even if they could clear the non-academic hurdles erected at those institutions and gain admittance.
Of course, those kids eventually succumbed to the “corruptions” of the world. Hutchins was merely predicting what was bound to come to pass.
The Hutchins vision was a noble one. Most of us remain undamaged from a brush with nobility, especially in our youths.
The idea once upon a time that an education at the University of Chicago was somehow distinct from elite institutions elsewhere and - amazingly - as accessible to “non-elites” as it was to the privileged classes was likely as outré back then as it is generally forgotten or ignored these days. It does take a certain amount of confidence to declare that facet to be a “good” elevated above the corruptive power of everyday hum-drum life. As if truth and knowledge have eternal properties. Yes, that was quite a different sentiment from what we hear nowadays.
Indeed, Hutchins sounds like a preacher in that quote upthread - and that is no surprise. Hutchins was a preacher’s son, brought up and educated at Oberlin (where his own father was an instructor) before heading off to WWI and then Yale. Per Wiki, Oberlin had quite the impact on young Hutchins; in those days, it was “a small community dedicated to evangelical ideals of righteousness and hard work.” Oberlin’s founding, early history and heritage is another thing forgotten by many these days.
Sorry, I think there is something truly horrible about the notion that what family and social relations do, what living in the real world does, is “corrupt” one’s experience of truth. There’s a good deal of destructive energy in that; it’s recognizable in the Lenin of whom Stalin was the true successor, and in the Mao of the Cultural Revolution, and in all sorts of totalitarian violence. I question whether “truth” which will be “corrupted” by family and social relations is “truth” worth knowing, and frankly it’s horrifying to consider the contempt for other people that implies.
I don’t think the world ever had much to worry about in the form of totalitarian violence at the hands of Hutchins or his acolytes. He may have been inspirational, but he led no armies and incited no mobs. He may not have been Jesus, but neither was he Mao. I doubt that many who heard those words failed to form families or have friends or enter professions. These aren’t esoteric objectives. The commitment to finding the truth may be.
Hutchins was prone to whimsicalness. That was part of his charm. He could be using “corruption” somewhat unseriously, or he could be using it as a technical term. Then again, this may have been a cri de coeur out of the experience of a bad marriage to a fashion-plate of a wife unhappy to find herself in the midwest, or the treachery of false friends or the stormy relations with career-minded academics. Flawed as he may have been, he is our Hamlet.
@JHS at #11: Sure, understandable. If you are well versed in nothing but Leninist and Maoist ideology. But UChicago students were probably a bit more broadly educated, as @marlowe1 pointed out in his original post. For instance, many mainstream spiritual leaders can sound quite alarming if you just read snippets of their sayings. Jesus himself was probably one of the worst!
This is just a guess, but perhaps Hutchins was using hyperbolic words to inspire his audience to stick to the principles they acquired at school rather than be dissuaded by less thoughtful sentiments from those others around them, rather than using them to urge his charges to view their loved ones with contempt. And most likely he was NOT attempting to start a violent revolution. Hutchins was, after all, leading an institution that PROPOSED - not IMPOSED - ideas.
Edit/update: what @marlowe1 is saying at #12. Similar thoughts, better expressed.
We are getting quite a lot of mileage here out of the “Little Beverley” episode, but isn’t it a UChicago specialty to tease out and query the manifold implications of all situations and events high and low? In that spirit I feel Little Beverley has more to give us…
In the College of Hutchins’ days the culture was shaped not only by everyone (aside from Beverley) being smart and intellectually ambitious but by a common curriculum focussed on major texts and big ideas. These factors fostered a communal spirit of intense talk: “[Students] commonly talked about what they were reading at meals and in other spare time during the day - and late, late into the night” (p. 141). Is that how it is in today’s College, I wonder?
Here is McNeill one last time, describing this culture of interrogation and disputation as he himself experienced it: “No one could come away from two or three years of such talk without achieving a superior level of verbal agility and acquiring an aptitude for taking on big questions and encountering unfamiliar data (or at least assertions) with complete aplomb. Chicago’s students came to bear a common mark, which still survives. Even now, after more than forty years, veterans of the blizzard of words that the Hutchins College provoked among its faculty and students can often recognize one another by the assurance with which they are ready to discourse on almost anything and everything” (p. 141).
Some of that might sound a bit familiar to us old hands on the UChicago cc board. Indeed, it may be part of the explanation for why we seem to drive others on this board slightly nuts. The world tends to divide between those with a penchant for argument (truly understood, as dialectical discourse) and those who know it only as mere assertion and invective and therefore avoid or stigmatize it. A proper experience of the culture of the University of Chicago will infect you forever with a taste for it.
“”[Students] commonly talked about what they were reading at meals and in other spare time during the day - and late, late into the night" (p. 141). Is that how it is in today’s College, I wonder?"
In all fairness, even if my own kids were at another school they would still be the types to discuss what they were reading with others. In general, the question of whether UChicago manages to find these kids or create them might be a chicken and egg thing.
I quoted the above statement (separately) to each of my two and asked if that described them and/or the people they knew. My D replied yes, and that this was pretty normal. My son informed me that academic and intellectual topics are a normal and frequent part of their conversations, but so is other stuff. No one he knows is having late night philosophical discussions. Knowing each as I do, I pretty much would have predicted these responses. If anything, it demonstrates that each was well placed in his/her respective house.
“The world tends to divide between those with a penchant for argument (truly understood, as dialectical discourse) and those who know it only as mere assertion and invective and therefore avoid or stigmatize it. A proper experience of the culture of the University of Chicago will infect you forever with a taste for it.”
I wonder about the current generation of young people. Was just reading an article about the increase in "ghosting" among younger Millennials and Gen Z'ers - not just in personal relationships, but with employers and prospective employers as well! Has the desire for conflict avoidance gone to an extreme among this age group? How does such a tendency impact the college classroom today?
That’s certainly how it was when my kids were in the College, roughly a decade ago now. When my daughter took her first trip to visit friends at other colleges, she marveled, “For most of them, there’s some sort of social taboo against talking about what you are studying, which seems crazy! All they are allowed to talk about with their friends is TV. They spent hours telling me about their courses, because they knew I wouldn’t mind it.”
But it’s also exactly how it was when I was at Yale 40+ years ago, not long after marlowe1 was at Chicago. At lunch time, depending on whom you were sitting with you would get active debate about whatever artwork Vin Scully had been talking about that morning, or what Robert Kagan was saying about Thermopylae, or Gaddis Smith on modern diplomacy, or Arthur Galston on the biology of Agent Orange. Not everyone read the same books, but in Directed Studies we did, and sometimes we would swap books and articles with friends. One treasured memory is a party with a bunch of football players, and watching most of the starting offensive line, all multiple sheets to the wind, earnestly critiquing their captain’s senior thesis on pre-Socratic philosophy at 2 am. I will admit, though, that they may have been a bit farther from the truth than Hutchins would have preferred.
@JHS , isn’t it the case that the intellectuals on any football team are to be found on the offensive line? That may be relative. Nevertheless, I believe Aristophanes and possibly Alcibiades played those positions for Athens. Certainly they and all concerned were flapping in the wind at that famous Symposium reported on by Plato. Socrates alone remained sober. Hutchins would also have remained sober had he been in attendance, though I am not so sure about Mortimer Adler.
