Harper, Hutchins, Kimpton, Levi, Gray, Sonnenchein, Zimmer, or somebody else?
Who would get your vote and why?
Consequential - Harper. He breathed life into the institution as a distinct institution of higher learning that didn’t quite play by the same rules as all the others. While much has “normalized” over the decades, you still get that feeling when you visit.
Great - depends on the definition. Using Merriam Webster #1 - 3 (see below), I’d say Hutchins for his giant personality and skill in the art of persuasion, his legendary two-decade tenure, and the fact that it took the university several more to recover from some parts of it… Actually, I’d toss him in the Consequential category as well, and Harper was obviously Great. So I’d say it’s a tie.
Shout-outs to Gray and Sonnenschein for courageous leadership when the university needed it. Sonnenschein “the outsider” actually lost his job over that.
Jury’s out on Zimmer but he’s currently headed for some prestigious accolades as well. By the time his current term is up, he’ll have been at the helm for about 16 years. The more consequential ones seem to stick around that long.
great
adjective
\ ˈgrāt , Southern also ˈgre(ə)t
Definition of great (Entry 1 of 3)
1a: notably large in size : HUGE
all creatures great and small
b: of a kind characterized by relative largeness —used in plant and animal names
the great horned owl
c: ELABORATE, AMPLE
great detail
2a: large in number or measure : NUMEROUS
great multitudes
b: PREDOMINANT
the great majority
3: remarkable in magnitude, degree, or effectiveness
great bloodshed
@surelyhuman strikes again! Will there be any corridor of U of C history, tradition or legend left unexplored by the time she herself actually makes it to the place (fingers crossed)?
The contrarian in me would like to come up with a previously overlooked reason for urging Don Randel as sneakily great and consequential. Randel was committed to the Great College Rebuild Project that others had begun, and he must be one of the few musicologists ever to have headed a great research university. Or Lawrence Kimpton, who restored the viability of the College by rolling back the excesses of the Hutchins era. Or Edward Levi, who was a complete product of the U of C and Hyde Park, had the guts in the sixties to take some very hard decisions in order to preserve the University in a time of political turbulence, and served with distinction as Nixon’s Attorney General. Hannah Gray was also a vivid personality, and the first woman to be President of a major research university.
But in the end one cannot avoid the obvious: William Rainey Harper is our George Washington. Merely as a human being he was a phenomenon, with that endless energy and ebullience of so many of the gifted spirits of his time. One thinks of Theodore Roosevelt, minus an African Safari or two. He must also have had enchanting personal qualities, being able to communicate his vision of a great research university to a flinty narrow religious guy like John D. Rockefeller, extract millions from him, and then to convince so many of America’s finest academic minds to come to a muddy piece of land on the south side of Chicago with only a single building (and that one still on the drawing board). He puts me in mind of another great and optimistic spirit of his age - William James - who famously proclaimed that “belief always precedes accomplishment”. Such energy, optimism and blind faith are not usual in those who pursue the academic life. Harper began as a boy wonder and died before reaching even late middle age, worn out by his exertions. His monument is the University of Chicago, which is often called, for good reason, “Harper’s University.” Without him the University would either never have come into being or would have been a lesser institution.
The vision and personality of Hutchins has some of the same qualities of boldness and originality of his great predecessor. Hutchins, however, was a controversialist, not only in his educational ideals, which ran so counter to the spirit of the age, but in a certain provocative manner in speech and writing that made people either love or hate him. The story of this is told by William H. McNeill, a famous historian who was himself educated in the Hutchins College: “Hutchins’ University: a memoir”. As @JBStillFlying says, Hutchins was a huge and magnetic personality, and he was able to bring enough people with him in his eccentric mission to create a college unlike any in America at the time. Chicago was the anti-HYP of its day: it discriminated against no one and gloried in its reputation for poor brainiac kids - often very young ones who had nothing left to learn in high school - and of course it abolished varsity sports. Hutchins fought continuously with the Departments, however, and in the end many of them would not accept grads of his College. Yet it is from Hutchins that we get the most ringing statement of what became one of the University’s proudest hallmarks: the defence of academic freedom, under attack in his era from the know-nothings of the right.
Hutchins was something more than a mere University President, he was the unrepentant swashbuckling exemplar of ideals and principles. In deepest west Texas my know-nothing uncle knew of Hutchins and hated what he stood for. A man is known by his enemies. That aura of the Hutchins’ era brought many of us to the school once upon a time. On my arrival in the sixties, a decade after Hutchins’ departure, we felt we were living in an iron age. We would berate ourselves for this: “What would Hutchins say?” If creating a touchstone of that sort is one of the ways you judge greatness and consequentiality, Hutchins was both those things. That an adjustment to the practicalites of running a school became necessary cannot be denied. But it is the visionaries, not the adjusters, whom we call great.