A T W E N T I E T H
-
CENTURY
COSMOS
THE COLLEGE AT THE UNIVERSITY OF CHICAGO
JOHN W. BOYER
T H E
NEW PLAN
A N D T H E
ORIGINS OF
GENERAL
EDUCATION
AT CHICAG O
Ferdinand Schevill, undated photograph by Norman F. Maclean
he condition of the liberal arts at elite colleges has been
highly visible in public discussions in the last several
years, inspiring commentary in the press and on college
campuses across the country. Some of this debate has
come in response to issues of academic freedom, as colleges face criticism
for failing to defend the rights of faculty to teach freely without political
interference, as well as coercive pressures from outside the academy or
from various interest groups within the campuses themselves (including,
unfortunately, student groups seeking to pressure the faculty to teach or
not teach in certain ways). Other voices have addressed the perceived
failure of institutions to develop coherent and thoughtful curricular pro-
grams that enable students to engage the full sweep of liberal-arts
disciplines. Among the latter are analysts who argue that elite institutions,
under the sway of educational neoliberalism, have reduced the value of
the liberal arts to their economic utility. Where higher education once
sought the formation of character and intellectual autonomy, it has now
conformed to the language and values of the marketplace. is, the
A TWENTIETH-
CENTURY COSMOS
The New Plan and the Origins of
General Education at Chicago
INTRODUCTION
This essay was originally presented as the Annual Report to the Faculty of the College on
October 31, 2006. John W. Boyer is the Martin A. Ryerson Distinguished Service Professor
in History and the College, and Dean of the College.
T
A TWENTIETH-CENTURY COSMOS 2
argument goes, is perilous to the work of self-discovery, especially to the
study of the humanities, which are being eclipsed by more lucrative
majors in the STEM elds and economics. is is a potent and in some
ways arresting argument. Yet it recapitulates many of the charges of edu-
cational corruption that have surfaced regularly about American higher
education since the early twentieth century. It supposes an institution
whose curriculum and mission are shapelessly adapted to new fads, lack-
ing the legitimacy of a campus culture that is itself suused with scholarly
values.
Fortunately, that institution is not the University of Chicago. One of
the dening themes of our 125-year history has been thoughtful curricu-
lar innovation by the faculty, rooted in the values of interdisciplinary
thought, rigorous meritocracy, and intellectual analysis. ese values lie
at the heart of the Core, which introduces every student, regardless of
major, to the practices of humanistic reection as a basis for further study
and has been able to accommodate many challenges since the 1930s.
e College’s Core curriculum has been one the most eective instru-
ments for our University to sustain our collective memory work. A
curriculum is more than a set of formal prescriptions and requirements.
It is a statement of basic values and a way by which the faculty can assert
what is educationally important and what is not, and how it wishes to
organize its own work, based on past traditions and past experience. e
curriculum also comes to constitute the cognitive framework through
which our alumni remember their intellectual accomplishments while
on campus, giving them a special sense of having lived and been trans-
formed in a special place. And our curriculum is a public commitment
and a public armation that we will educate our students for the kind
of future—humane, tolerant, enlightened—that all of us esteem and
hope will always come to pass.
JOHN W. BOYER3
Since the early 1930s the College’s curriculum has been most noted
for its tradition of general education. is year—2017–18—is the nine-
tieth anniversary of the formulation of the rst plan to develop a program
of general education at the University of Chicago, a plan that led three
years later to the launching of the rst Core courses in the College in the
autumn quarter of 1931. It is thus an appropriate moment to pause and
consider what these courses were, how they came about, how they embed-
ded themselves in our institutional consciousness, and how they managed
to sustain themselves or their ospring in the decades that followed. A
few years ago Arnold Rampersad of Stanford University, who once taught
at Columbia University, observed that the Core curricula of universities
like Columbia and Chicago were like the federal interstate highway
system—you could never build them the same way again, but since they
exist, you can take care of them, keep them functioning, and help them
to achieve the educational objectives that are rather unique to such special
systems of liberal education.
1
In this essay I want to explore how that
“highway system” came to be built, who built it, why they built it, and
what we should do with it now.
1. See Charles McGrath, “What Every Student Should Know,” New York Times,
January 8, 2006, http://www.nytimes.com/2006/01/08/education/edlife/what-
every-student-should-know.html. I issued an earlier version of this essay in
October 2006. e present version, completed in July 2017, oers a signicant
revision which takes the story down to the present. I am extremely grateful to
Daniel Koehler and Michael Jones for their assistance. I am also grateful to Leon
Botstein, Terry N. Clark, Martin Feder, Hanna Holborn Gray, Paul H. Jordan,
Ralph Lerner, Joel Snyder, and William Veeder for answering questions about
specic individuals or events that are discussed in this essay.
Chauncey S. Boucher, undated photograph by Norman F. Maclean
JOHN W. BOYER5
THE NEW PLAN AND
THE CREATION OF A GENERAL-
EDUCATION PROGRAM
ur traditions of general education date back to the late
1920s, when a group of colleagues at Chicago decided
to revolutionize the world of higher education by creat-
ing what was called the New Plan, a bold attempt to
synthesize broad elds of knowledge in an explicitly interdisciplinary
framework for rst- and second-year students in the College. e New
Plan was our rst Core curriculum, and the current curriculum, passed
in 1998, owes much to the spirit and practices of the New Plan.
e New Plan was the brain child of Dean of the College Chauncey
S. Boucher who was rst appointed to the deanship in 1926. Briey,
during the late 1920s Boucher came to be dissatised both with the level
of intellectual accomplishment of undergraduates at Chicago and with
the somewhat lackadaisical way in which the University treated under-
graduate education. Even before Robert Maynard Hutchins assumed the
presidency in the summer of 1929 Boucher had conducted a lobbying
campaign to create a new curriculum of general-education courses based
on a comprehensive examination system and a new approach to under-
graduate education.
2
Boucher argued:
2. See Chauncey S. Boucher, “Suggestions for a Reorganization of Our Work
in the Colleges, and a Restatement of Our Requirements for the Bachelor’s
Degree,” December 1927, Dean of the College Records, 1923–1958, box 27,
folder 6; and “Report of the Senate Committee on the Undergraduate Col-
leges,” May 7, 1928, ibid., folder 7, Special Collections Research Center,
University of Chicago Joseph Regenstein Library. Unless otherwise noted, all
archival documents cited in this essay are located in the center.
O
A TWENTIETH-CENTURY COSMOS 6
A trick of fate put me into the Dean’s oce where I soon began to
get a much broader and entirely new perspective. At rst I thought
that a dean must necessarily spend most of his time and eorts
quibbling with students over one or another of the numerous book-
keeping regulations for the attainment of a degree, and on
disciplinary problems—in fact I thought that a dean must be pri-
marily a petty police ocer, spending his time catching and
torturing ies. I had no stomach for such activities any longer than
was necessary to allow the President’s oce time enough to enlist
a man to take the place. Very soon, however, I learned that Presi-
dent Mason and Vice President Woodward were anxious to do
something really signicant with the Colleges and were ready to
entertain any constructive suggestions which the Dean might have
to oer. I then began in earnest to study the biggest problems of
college education, particularly our own problems, and, by spend-
ing as little time as possible on the petty aairs of the oce, I soon
became deeply interested in the major problem.
3
Boucher’s real ambition, articulated in many position papers that he
wrote between 1927 and 1930, was to begin to recruit more motivated
and academically gifted students to the Colleges and then to put them
in a more coherent and rigorous instructional program that was not
controlled by the departments and that would be protected by an inde-
pendent Oce of the Examiner. He sought to construct a completely new
system of general education for all areas of the arts and sciences at the
3. Boucher, “Suggestions for a Reorganization of Our Work in the Colleges,”
53–54. Boucher gave this long appeal to Max Mason in January 1928 and sent
it to his colleagues in the University Senate on March 12, 1928.
7
University of Chicago, and he had to do so in a way that the inuential
factions of senior natural- and social-science faculty at Chicago would
accept, if not actively embrace.
Having been inspired by a talk that President Max Mason gave to the
Institute for Administrative Oces of Institutions of Higher Education
in July 1927, Boucher began to survey the state of collegiate education
nationally and to consult with experts who would speak with him:
I read more widely whatever literature would give me the current
practice and progressive thought of men in other institutions; I
talked with about thirty individuals in various departments and
schools of the University of Chicago; in January 1928 I made a
trip to learn rst hand what is going on at Princeton, Columbia,
and Harvard. I talked with many of the leading constructive
thinkers at each of these institutions. My object was rst of all to
see what features of the practice at each of these institutions could
be adapted to our conditions; secondly, I was anxious, if given any
encouragement, to tell the main features of the plan on which I
was to work, in order to get the constructive and corrective sug-
gestion of these men whose training and experiences would make
their opinions valuable.
4
4. Boucher, “Suggestions for a Reorganization of Our Work in the Colleges,”
51–52.
Boucher’s visit to Columbia doubtlessly led him to investigate the
Contemporary Civilization course rst launched in 1919.
5
But it would
be a mistake to think that Boucher was trying to copy such models, for
the political and intellectual challenge that he faced at Chicago was much
more radical than anything that the Columbia humanists like John J.
Coss and Harry J. Carman had faced in the 1920s in creating their new
history course. e relative prestige of the senior social, biological, and
physical scientists among the arts and science faculty at Chicago at the
time meant that Boucher had to attract their support and design a cur-
riculum with a substantial investment in the natural and social sciences,
along with the humanities. A critical turning point seems to have been
his six-hour visit in New York City in late January 1928 with William S.
Learned, a senior sta member at the Carnegie Foundation for the
Advancement of Teaching and a remarkable interwar critic of secondary
and tertiary levels of education in America. In 1927 Learned had pub-
lished a tough critique of the state of American higher education in which
he denounced “the bane of the average” that aicted American colleges
and universities. Looking over the landscape of college and university
programs, Learned saw incoherence, lack of rigor, a jumble of course
credits and grading practices that had no rational purpose or aim, and,
most seriously, a complete distain for “the intellectual vision, energy, and
5. See John J. Coss, “A Report of the Columbia Experiment with the Course on
Contemporary Civilization,” in e Junior College Curriculum, ed. William S.
Gray (Chicago, 1929), 133–46; Justus Buchler, “Reconstruction in the Liberal
Arts,” in A History of Columbia College on Morningside, ed. Dwight C. Miner
(New York, 1954), 48–135; Gary E. Miller, e Meaning of General Education:
e Emergence of a Curriculum Paradigm (New York, 1988), 35–41; and Timo-
thy P. Cross, An Oasis of Order: e Core Curriculum at Columbia College (New
York, 1995).
A TWENTIETH-CENTURY COSMOS 8
JOHN W. BOYER9
enthusiasm of young minds.”
6
Boucher was much taken by Learned’s
proposals for enhancing curricular rigor and his disdain for course credits,
and Learned encouraged him to pursue a set of fundamental, transdisci-
plinary structural reforms.
7
If any single outside inuence shaped the
creation of Chicago’s rst Core curriculum, it was the work of empiricists
like William Learned and his colleagues at the Carnegie Foundation.
8
A month later Boucher constituted and chaired a faculty committee
that formulated his reform program and presented it to the University
6. William S. Learned, e Quality of the Educational Process in America and in
Europe (New York, 1927), 42–48, 98–125. Learned was chiey responsible for
organizing the famous Pennsylvania Study which examined learning outcomes
for large numbers of high school and college students in that state between 1928
and 1932 on the basis of systematic assessment testing. He was also the architect
of the rst Graduate Record Examination, created in 1937 on a trial basis with
the cooperation of Harvard, Yale, Princeton, and Columbia.
7. Boucher reported that he considered Learned “to be the one man in the coun-
try, if there is any such one man, best prepared and best qualied to give a critical
judgment on any such plan as the one proposed.” After going over his plan with
Learned, he was pleased to report that Learned “sincerely hoped the University
of Chicago would adopt the plan and carry it into successful operation in the
immediate future,…because if the University of Chicago were to inaugurate
such a system of work and requirements, it would be more signicant in its
eects on both secondary and college education in this country than if it were
done by any other institution.” Boucher, “Suggestions for a Reorganization of
Our Work in the Colleges,” 52–53. On Learned’s opposition to course-based
credit and grading, see Paul F. Douglass, Teaching for Self Education—As a Life
Goal (New York, 1960), 82–89. See also Ellen Condlie Lagemann, Private
Power for the Public Good: A History of the Carnegie Foundation for the Advance-
ment of Teaching (Middletown, Conn., 1983), 101–7.
8. In his 1932 Inglis Lecture at Harvard, Learned spoke approvingly of
“the recent revolution at the University of Chicago,” signied by its use of new
comprehensive examinations. See Realism in American Education (Cambridge,
Mass., 1932), 27–28.
A TWENTIETH-CENTURY COSMOS 10
Senate on May 7, 1928. e committee was dominated by a centrist
group of scholars who were sympathetic to the cause of undergraduate
education. ey included Julius Stieglitz, Anton Carlson, Leon Marshall,
and, perhaps most notably, Charles Judd of the Department of Educa-
tion. Boucher’s plan called for a set of bold changes: the establishment
of a junior-college program that would have its own curricular structure
distinct from the control of the departments but taught by the regular
research faculty; the revision of the curriculum for the rst two years of
the undergraduate work, which would replace ad hoc departmental oer-
ings with broad survey courses based on research ndings of the faculty
(an idea that built on an earlier experiment in the natural sciences in the
mid-1920s); the use of ve general-education competency examinations
to assess and evaluate student progress, which students might take when-
ever they felt ready; additional new subject area courses designed to meet
student interest in early specialization, particularly in the natural sciences;
and the abolition of mandatory quarterly course examinations.
9
Nor did
Boucher restrict himself to intrepid curricular changes, for his plan also
presumed that several million new dollars would be invested in new resi-
dence halls, in additional endowment to pay for the upkeep of these halls,
and in the construction of instructional facilities and the expansion of
undergraduate library resources as well.
10
Finally, although he insisted on
9. “Report of the Senate Committee on the Undergraduate Colleges (presented
to the University Senate, May 7, 1928),” Presidents’ Papers, 1925–1945, box
19. is report contains as well a “Supplementary Statement” by Boucher. e
May 1928 report was based on a long document that Boucher prepared in
December 1927, “Suggestions for a Reorganization of Our Work in the Col-
leges, and a Restatement of Our Requirements for the Bachelor’s Degree.”
10. “Suggestions for a Reorganization of Our Work,” 53–58; as well as “Bait,
cut by C. S. Boucher,” January 7, 1930, 18–19, Presidents’ Papers, 1925–1945,
box 19. In mid-December 1928 the university announced a $2 million gift from
JOHN W. BOYER11
new resources for the College, Boucher wished to keep most of the actual
instruction on the main quadrangles to avoid creating an undergraduate
ghetto. For those who sought to marginalize undergraduate education at
the University of Chicago, these proposals, taken in their entirety, were
a declaration of war.
Boucher draped his plan in the aura of the research university with
the research-based content of courses; the intellectual individualism,
stamina, and autonomy required of undergraduates; and the regime of
“scientic” testing that would evaluate student achievement. Among his
original recommendations in May 1928 was the idea that the College
should make it possible “to save time for the better students, who are able
to develop themselves both faster and more thoroughly than the average
student, by awarding the [bachelor’s] degree on the basis of demonstrated
accomplishment, rather than on a required number of course credits, and
thus break up the lock-step system.”
11
Boucher was convinced that he
had designed a system that would eliminate most of the glaring ills that
Learned found evident in American higher education. But he also hoped
that, in attracting more intellectually independent students who would
merit the respect and admiration of the regular departmental faculties,
he would be able to rescue the undergraduate program at Chicago from
its politically marginal status.
Boucher’s strategy for a curricular revolution stumbled in early May
1928 when President Max Mason unexpectedly resigned to become
Julius Rosenwald (matched by a $3 million commitment from the university)
for the construction of new undergraduate dormitories for men and women.
“Proposal for a Dormitory Development on a 40% Gift and 60% Investment
Basis,” [1928], Records of the Department of Buildings and Grounds, 1892–
1932, box 12.
11. “Supplementary Statement,” May 7, 1928, 1, 11.
A TWENTIETH-CENTURY COSMOS 12
director of the Natural Sciences Division at the Rockefeller Foundation,
with the informal understanding that he would then become president
of the foundation within a year or two. e resulting power vacuum in
the summer of 1928 put Boucher’s scheme in limbo. Attempts to imple-
ment the reforms in a piecemeal fashion in later 1928 inevitably stalled,
and Boucher felt isolated and unsupported, beset by powerful forces
intent on thwarting his plans to strengthen undergraduate education.
12
Still, Boucher was convinced that a more challenging and more imagi-
native curriculum would attract intellectually stronger students to
Chicago, and he was prepared to gamble that the University could nd
ways to enhance student quality and commitment. Even though Chicago
might lose a signicant share of its weaker and less committed students,
they would soon be replaced by
a better type of student; the young people of the United States are
keen enough to recognize the best to be had in education quite
as quickly or even more quickly than in any other line, and are
interested enough in their own welfare and development to seek
the best wherever it is to be found; therefore, these Eastern men
[scholars with whom Boucher had consulted] predicted, if Chicago
12. e plan that Boucher brought before the University Senate was not a for-
mal legislative proposal for that body, but rather a series of recommendations
that would have to be considered rst by the Faculty of the Colleges of Arts,
Literature, and Science. is faculty met on May 15, 1928, and agreed to create
two boards—one for the junior-college curriculum and one for the senior-col-
lege curriculum—to evaluate Boucher’s proposals and then report back to the
full faculty. e boards began to meet in the autumn quarter of 1928, but it
soon became apparent that, lacking the presence of the new (and, as of yet,
unnamed) president, it would be dicult to establish sucient political consen-
sus as to how to proceed.
JOHN W. BOYER13
were to adopt such a plan as here outlined, it would at once be
recognized the country over as a performance superior to the old
stereotyped and almost universal plan, and in a short time Chicago
would have more applicants of better quality than ever before.
13
For his basic instructional model Boucher adapted and expanded the
structural idea of an interdisciplinary, trans-departmental “survey course”
for freshmen in the natural sciences, entitled e Nature of the World
and Man, that H. H. Newman and others in Biology had organized for
sixty students each year beginning in 1924. is course, whose major
organizing theme was the trajectory of human evolution, was taught on
a two-quarter cycle, and by 1928 had 240 students. e Newman course
aimed “to make clear the fact that all science is one and that there are no
hard and fast lines between its various branches.” Newman and his col-
leagues, who included Rollin T. Chamberlin, Anton J. Carlson, Harvey
B. Lemon, Merle Coulter, Fay-Cooper Cole, Julius Stieglitz, Charles H.
Judd, and others, had the striking goal in mind of presenting students
with “a general philosophic view that will rationalize all of the order and
unity in the natural universe.”
14
Boucher used this course as a template
for his larger and more ambitious plans to restructure the undergraduate
curriculum as a whole.
15
13. Boucher, “Supplementary Statement,” May 1, 1928, 16, ibid.
14. H. H. Newman, e Nature of the World and of Man, Dean of the College
Records, 1923–1958, box 5, folder 4. In 1926 Newman also published a formi-
dable 550-page book, bringing together essays of sixteen collaborators who taught
in the course, entitled e Nature of the World and of Man (Chicago, 1926).
15. Chauncey S. Boucher, e Chicago College Plan (Chicago, 1935), 17.
A TWENTIETH-CENTURY COSMOS 14
A crucial turning point that put Boucher’s eorts back on track toward
stunning success came in the summer of 1929, when the young Yale Law
School dean, Robert Maynard Hutchins, assumed the presidency of the
University of Chicago. Immediately after Hutchins’s appointment was
announced in April 1929, Boucher wrote two back-to-back letters to
him, duly praising his appointment but also informing and lobbying
Hutchins about his (Boucher’s) plans. Boucher noted: “After a year of
uncertainty, with the consideration of important questions of basic policy
necessarily postponed, the election of anybody as president at this time
would have given us a feeling of relief. But, your acceptance of the presi-
dency has given us genuine satisfaction and has inspired us anew with
enthusiasm and condence.” For Boucher “the most important project
in educational policy which was before us for consideration when Presi-
dent Mason’s resignation was announced is set forth in the report of the
Senate Committee on the Undergraduate Colleges, dated May 1, 1928.”
16
Boucher proved to be an able advocate, and Hutchins slowly came to
embrace the basic substance of Boucher’s plan. us did Boucher gain a
powerful ally who, as the new executive leader with the sovereign force
of the presidency behind him, had the political resources and the moral
authority to force Boucher’s schemes through the faculty. Once Hutchins
had determined in the autumn of 1930 to restructure the University to
create four separate graduate divisions, it became logical to create an
administratively separate college as well.
17
Boucher’s conceptual ideas on
a new curriculum for such a college and Hutchins’s structural reforms
16. Boucher to Hutchins, April 27, 1929, and May 3, 1929, Dean of the Col-
lege Records, 1923–1958, box 1.
17. See John W. Boyer, e Organization of the College and the Divisions in the
1920s and 1930s (Chicago, 2002), 10-64.
JOHN W. BOYER15
converged, and beginning in late December 1930 Boucher chaired an ad
hoc curriculum committee which crafted, over the course of two months,
a curriculum for the College whose centerpiece was a set of four year-long
general-education survey courses, with an additional survey in English
composition.
18
e new survey courses were to be administered by clus-
ters of faculty drawn from the four divisions, but under the administrative
and curricular aegis of the separate College.
19
Originally, Boucher
intended that most of the faculty participating in the College would have
simultaneous departmental memberships. It is of great importance to
remember that Boucher had no intention of creating a faculty separate
from and in opposition to the departments and the divisions. e Uni-
versity Senate concurred in this view when it authorized the College in
1932 to hire faculty members who did not have departmental member-
ships, but cautioned, “it is considered desirable that a large proportion of
the College faculty be members of Departments and Divisional faculties.”
20
Boucher was well aware that the audience for his new program con-
sisted of many students who sought careers in the professions or in
18. e committee solicited reactions from the faculty and received a number
of thoughtful commentaries in late January 1931, which are led in the Presi-
dents’ Papers, 1925–1945, box 19, folder 9. e nal proposal, dated February
7, 1931, is in ibid., folder 8. Hutchins followed the work of the committee
closely, and met with them at least twice to discuss their progress.
19. See Chauncey S. Boucher, “Procedures to Put the Plan into Operation,”
November 1930, Dean of the College Records, 1923–1958, box 10, folder 2. A
convenient overview of the actual plan is oered by “First Year of New Plan in
the College,” ibid. See also Boucher to Hutchins, October 16, 1930, with a
memo on “e College Curriculum,” Presidents’ Papers, 1925–1945, box 19,
folder 7.
20. “Minutes of the University Senate,” November 19, 1932.
A TWENTIETH-CENTURY COSMOS 16
business and not in academic life.
21
Hence he tried to make his vision
appealing to a broad range of students, stressing the timeliness and func-
tional utility of a general-education program for students who wished to
undertake careers in business, law, and medicine. Boucher insisted that
“general education provides the basis for an intelligent discharge of these
larger responsibilities which inevitably come to the man or woman who
is really successful in a profession or vocation.” But even for those who
did desire academic careers general education was vital, since “the special-
ist in any eld should be characterized by the wealth of his knowledge of
many elds. To be only an expert results in a one-sided personality and
limited usefulness.”
22
All of this was to connect the New Plan to the world
and to emphasize its relevance for professional careers outside as well as
inside of the academy.
After securing the approval of the new curriculum by a vote of 65 to
24 at a general meeting of the Faculty of the College in early March 1931,
and after conferring with the newly appointed divisional deans and with
key department chairmen, Chauncey Boucher set out to organize four
planning groups to create the new survey courses. e groups worked
quickly and assembled necessary course materials, which Boucher found
21. See Chauncey S. Boucher, e New College Plan of the University of Chicago
(Chicago, 1930), 5–6, 9, 14. A survey undertaken in 1932 of prospective stu-
dent careers found that 27 percent of the male students intended careers in law,
20 percent in medicine, and 16 percent in business, advertising, or engineering.
Seven percent intended careers in teaching, and 17 percent in science, with 5
percent wanting careers in journalism. See Robert C. Woellner, “e Selection
of Vocations by the 1932 Freshmen of the University of Chicago,” Dean of the
College Records, 1923–1958, box 6, folder 6.
22. “Education and Careers” (Chicago, n.d.), 1. e pamphlet is unsigned, but
was clearly by Boucher or under his direction.
JOHN W. BOYER17
the funds to purchase. Each course produced a detailed syllabus, which
included a prose outline of the major arguments and material of the
course together with detailed bibliographical citations for further reading.
Substantial investments in books and equipment had to be made.
Boucher also held several meetings in the spring of 1931 where all sta
leaders met jointly to work out logistical and scheduling issues. Slowly,
the appearance of a unied curriculum emerged. A key feature of the new
general-education curriculum was that it would not depend on course
grades but on six-hour nal comprehensive exams administered by an
independent Oce of the Examiner, headed by Professor Louis L. ur-
stone, a distinguished psychologist who did pioneering research in
psychometrics and psychophysics. Students could pace themselves
through the curriculum, taking the nal comprehensives whenever they
felt prepared to do so. e idea of individual agency, cast as the autonomy
of student freedom, was a central feature of the logic of the New Plan.
23
Attendance at the general-education survey courses was not manda-
tory to prepare for the comprehensive exams, although in most cases
most students seem to have attended the course lectures. Students could
register either for audit or for advisory grades, and most of the courses
oered quarterly exams, papers, and quizzes that were intended to serve
an advisory function, allowing a student to measure his or her progress
within the course. e advisory grades did not convey graduation credit,
however, since the comprehensive exams were the basis of receiving the
23. For the history of the Board of Examinations, see Benjamin S. Bloom,
“Changing Conceptions of Examining at the University of Chicago,” in Evalu-
ation in General Education, ed. Paul L. Dressel (Dubuque, Iowa, 1954),
297–321.
A TWENTIETH-CENTURY COSMOS 18
College’s certicate.
24
Grades were thus used only as advisory instruments,
or to facilitate transfer credit if a student opted to move to another college.
THE BIOLOGICAL SCIENCES
AND PHYSICAL SCIENCES
GENERAL COURSES
n the natural sciences Boucher had the advantage of
being able to drawn upon a group of men who had
already participated in e Nature of the World and
Man course. e world of the natural sciences at Chi-
cago in the late 1920s was exciting and lled with ambitious scholars,
optimistic about the progress of their disciplines and certain that the new
knowledge of modern science could be made both appealing to and
relevant for a general undergraduate audience. e primary architect of
the Biology course was Merle C. Coulter from the Department of Botany.
Coulter was the son of John M. Coulter, the founder of modern botany
at Chicago, with whom the younger Coulter had collaborated in writing
a book defending modern evolutionary theories in 1926.
25
He was a
product of Chicago, having received his undergraduate degree in 1914
and his PhD in 1919. As a young assistant professor Merle Coulter had
24. “e marks made in the comprehensive examinations, and not the quarterly
reports, constitute the final record for purposes of fulfilling College
requirements, awarding scholarships and honors, and fullling requirements for
admission to a Division.” A. J. Brumbaugh to M. C. Coulter et al., October 15,
1936, Dean of the College Records, 1923–1958, box 6, folder 9.
25. John M. Coulter and Merle C. Coulter, Where Evolution and Religion Meet
(New York, 1926).
I
JOHN W. BOYER19
been a collaborator in e Nature of the World and Man, preparing a
chapter of the textbook that accompanied that course. In 1930 he was
an associate professor of botany, a man of considerable diplomatic skill,
and an inspiring teacher. He did not enjoy the research reputation of his
father, which he always regretted, but the General Biology course enabled
him to make a signicant professional contribution at the University.
26
When Chauncey Boucher asked him to lead the planning eort to get
the new sequence o the ground, Coulter was eager to do so.
Coulter organized a course that depended on the cooperation of a
number of other senior biologists, each of whom agreed to give several
lectures in the course. He was assisted in his lectures by a team of younger
biologists, including Alfred E. Emerson and Ralph Buchsbaum from
Zoology and Ralph W. Gerard from Physiology, several of whom would
go on to distinguished scholarly careers in the Division of the Biological
Sciences. More senior members were also invited to give lectures, includ-
ing Warder C. Allee, Fay-Cooper Cole, Lester R. Dragstedt, and Alfred
S. Romer, with perhaps the most notable scholar being A. J. Carlson,
popularly known as Ajax Carlson, a distinguished physiologist who gave
fteen lectures during the academic year and became one of the most
beloved general-education faculty teachers in the College before World
26. Joseph Schwab later argued that Coulter had always stood in the shadow of
his father, and his participation in the Biology course oered him a way to com-
pensate for this situation: “He felt he should have been what his father had been,
a research man. He kept up with the literature in the eld, he read, he always
had a rapport with the papers that were being printed and published and so
on.…Anyway, he had a research ideal which he did not fulll.” Interview of
Joseph J. Schwab with Christopher Kimball, April 7, 1987, 59–60, Oral History
Program.
A TWENTIETH-CENTURY COSMOS 20
War II.
27
Born in Sweden, Carlson came to America at the age of sixteen
in 1891 knowing not a word of English. He worked as a carpenter’s
apprentice and planned on becoming Lutheran minister. But he soon
became interested in physiology and ended up at Stanford, where he took
a PhD in 1902. In 1904 Harper hired him as an instructor at Chicago,
and by 1914 he was a full professor of physiology. Carlson was legendary
for asking his students in his heavy Swedish accent the formidable ques-
tion: “What is the evidence?” at students were often befuddled and
even terried as to how to answer Carlson’s questions seemed to make
him all the more appealing as a lecturer. Joseph Schwab remembered him
as someone who “took no nonsense, he didn’t talk professorese, he was a
toughie.”
28
Edwin P. Jordan, a former student who became the director
of education at the Cleveland Clinic, recalled that “in creating a state of
mind of skepticism, coupled with a desire to learn more, but to do this
only on the basis of the scientic method, you have surely had an enor-
mous inuence not only on those who were directly touched by your
teaching and investigative methods but also on their students and their
students’ students as well.”
29
Merle Coulter later observed of Carlson’s
role in the Biological Sciences general course, “you were usually our chief
oensive threat and a tower of strength on defense.”
30
at a scholar of
Carlson’s stature was steadily devoted to the Biological Sciences general
course as a matter of professional responsibility made its success all the
27. Lester R. Dragstedt, “Anton Julius Carlson, January 29, 1875–September
2, 1956,” Biographical Memoirs of the National Academy of Sciences 35
(1961): 1–32; and idem, “An American by Choice: A Story about Dr. A. J.
Carlson,” Perspectives in Biology and Medicine 7 (1984): 145–58.
28. Interview of Joseph J. Schwab with Christopher Kimball, April 7, 1987, 34.
29. Jordan to Carlson, December 28, 1949, Anton J. Carlson Papers, box 1.
30. Coulter to Carlson, January 29, 1950, ibid.
JOHN W. BOYER21
easier. But Carlson’s ferocious empiricism and condent assaying of “the
facts” of any intellectual problem was to become a subject of a campus-
wide debate in 1934.
Merle Coulter was particularly proud that students would encounter
“the most distinguished authority” in a specic eld, thereby enabling
the course to generate a “real ‘University tone’” by giving rst- and sec-
ond-year students “contact with many of the most outstanding men on
our University faculty.”
31
In addition to the formal lectures students par-
ticipated in weekly discussion conferences and also had access to what
Coulter called “laboratory exhibits.” Attendance at the latter was optional,
31. Merle Coulter, “Report on Ten Years of Experience with the Introductory
General Course in the Biological Sciences,” October 1941, 8, Dean of the Col-
lege Records, 1923–1958, box 5, folder 8.
Merle C. Coulter, undated
A TWENTIETH-CENTURY COSMOS 22
but Coulter reported in 1935 that “most of the students of previous years
have attended regularly and have found these exhibits to be one of the
most interesting and valuable parts of the course.”
32
Coulter’s group crafted their outline, in considerable detail, during
the spring of 1931. e course was intended to help cultivate “the scien-
tic attitude of mind” among students by exposing them to various
examples of the application of the scientic methods, to provide a level
of basic knowledge of biology as would be needed by “a modern citizen,”
and to encourage among students an interest in “the grand machinery of
the organic world and in the major concepts of biology.” e course was
divided into four major parts: a survey of the plant and animal kingdoms;
an analysis of the dynamics of living organisms, including physiology and
psychology; studies in evolution, heredity, and eugenics, and a section
on ecology; and the adaptation of living organisms to their environment
and to each other.
33
e autumn quarter focused on giving the student
an evolutionary portrait of the organic world, moving from the plant
kingdom to invertebrate and vertebrate animals to the most complex
animal, the human being. e winter quarter then focused directly on the
nature of human life, with lectures on blood, heart, respiration, digestion,
enzymes, the kidneys and endocrine glands, the nervous system, nutrition,
bacteria, and disease. e nal part of the course related man to the world
around him, using ecology and evolution as its central focus. Here the stu-
dents heard lectures on evolution, heredity, mutation, eugenics, and ecology.
e course gained a strong coherence by its focus on the major con-
cepts of evolution, structure, and function within the domain of biological
32. “General Introductory Course in Biological Science: Schedule of Confer-
ences and Lectures, Autumn, 1935,” ibid., box 6, folder 9.
33. “e General Course in Biological Science,” [1931], ibid.
JOHN W. BOYER23
phenomena. Its inductive and experimental approach and its frequent
invocation of the physical and chemical basis of human life and of the
chemical and physical knowledge required to understand such processes
as photosynthesis and respiration or the functioning of the nervous
system aorded the course natural links to the material covered in the
Physical Sciences general course. Coulter felt that it was especially valuable
to give the student an understanding of and a respect for the unbi-
ased method of thinking that characterizes, or should characterize,
workers in the eld of natural science.…We hoped to drill the
student in such a manner to improve his ability to think scientically
and/or strengthen his habit of thinking in this way. Recognizing
that other courses on our campus would be aiming at the same
general objective, we felt it appropriate for our course to stress that
particular tool of the scientic method which modern biology cher-
ishes most highly—controlled experimentation.
34
Coulter’s emphasis on the virtues of the scientic method, as customary
and conventional as it might seem to us today, was in fact a decision of
great curricular import, for it set the New Plan in a skills-oriented direc-
tion that transcended the conveying of raw data and factual information.
It conrmed the excitement and prestige of science in the interwar period.
e course used a range of review materials, quizzes, and papers to
achieve these noble ends, although these were only advisory and not for
credit. In addition to the lectures and discussion conferences Coulter also
organized each week an optional laboratory demonstration. Students
were not permitted to handle specimens or equipment, so their role was
34. Coulter, “Report on Ten Years of Experience with the Introductory General
Course in the Biological Sciences,” 2.
A TWENTIETH-CENTURY COSMOS 24
to be one of the interested observer, not an active participant. Coulter
actually believed that this was a more eective pedagogical approach since
“more than once it has been remarked by adult visitors to some of our
laboratory demonstrations that a half-hour of this type of thing is more
valuable to the average student than a month of old-fashioned laboratory
work.” In 1934 Coulter estimated that between 60 and 70 percent of the
students regularly attended the laboratory demonstrations.
35
Coulter and his colleagues also pioneered the production of a series
of short motion pictures with ERPI Classroom Films that provided dem-
onstrations of experiments on such topic as the Heart and Circulation,
Mechanisms for Breathing, Digestion of Foods, the Work of the Kidneys,
the Endocrine Glands, the Nervous System, and Heredity. By 1940
eleven such lms had been produced, and Coulter was proud that all of
them were “good and some of them are remarkably good.” e lms were
designed so that they appealed to more general audiences beyond uni-
versity students, enabling viewers to see and understand complex
biological processes “even more clearly than if they had been present in
the laboratory.” Coulter also admitted, “for better or worse, most of our
young American students like the movies and are stimulated to an
increased interest in biology by an occasional movie presentation.”
36
Among College students the Biological Sciences general course quickly
became the most popular of the four general-education courses, and its
coherent organization, overarching themes, and logical rhythm certainly
contributed to that state of aairs. But there was also the quiet certainty
35. Statement by Merle Coulter, September 14, 1934, Dean of the College
Records, 1923–1958, box 6, folder 9.
36. Coulter, “Report on Ten Years of Experience with the Introductory General
Course in the Biological Sciences,” 18–19.
JOHN W. BOYER25
and condence that the course was genuinely important for young stu-
dents, not only as citizens but as inhabitants of a closely and intimately
shared natural world. Anton Carlson was particularly insistent: “the
understanding of the physical man himself and his environment, the
adjustment to and the control of his environment cannot be foreign to
genuine liberal education.”
37
e parallel course in the physical sciences was organized by Harvey
B. Lemon, a physicist who completed his undergraduate studies at
Chicago (BA, 1906) and who had studied with Albert A. Michelson
and Henry Gale at Chicago for the doctorate, completing a dissertation
on spectroscopic studies of hydrogen in 1912. Lemon was interested
in pedagogy, and authored several articles in the 1920s on the use of
intelligence tests to diagnose the capability of students to succeed in
science courses.
38
Lemon was a scholar of wide-ranging interests with a
air for the dramatic. He was also deeply committed to improving the
teaching of physics, and from 1937–39 served as the president of the
American Association of Physics Teachers. He also exercised stringent
standards in the hiring of course assistants, noting that if one specic
graduate student did not conduct himself in a “thoroughly dignied and
grown-up fashion,” he would “nd himself demoted to the laboratory.”
39
37. Anton J. Carlson, “e Oerings and Facilities in the Natural Sciences in
the Liberal Arts Colleges,” e North Central Association Quarterly 18 (1943): 162.
38. Harvey B. Lemon, “Forecasting Failures in College Classes,” e School
Review 30 (1922): 382–87; idem, “Preliminary Intelligence Testing in the
Department of Physics, University of Chicago,” School Science and Mathematics
20 (1920): 226–31.
39. Lemon to Gale, June 6, 1936, Department of Physics Records, 1937–2002,
box 9, folder 17.
A TWENTIETH-CENTURY COSMOS 26
Lemon was joined in the course by a distinguished chemist, Hermann
Schlesinger, who had also received both his BA and PhD degrees at the
University of Chicago, studying with Julius Stieglitz. Schlesinger joined
the faculty in 1910 and was promoted to full professor in 1922; he even-
tually won the Priestly Medal of the American Chemical Society. Others
who gave lectures included Gilbert A. Bliss, Otto Struve, Arthur H.
Compton, William Bartky, J. Harlen Bretz, and other distinguished
scholars, thus giving young College students a chance to encounter
prominent scholars from across the division.
40
e new course sought to integrate astronomy, mathematics, physics,
chemistry, and geology into one year-long survey. It started with the
earth as an astronomical body, considering the structure of the universe,
the nature of planets and stars and their evolutionary origins; it contin-
ued with a survey of essential components of the physical sciences,
beginning with the fundamental laws of energy, heat, and temperature
as manifestations of atomic and molecular motions, and the nature of
electricity, sound, light, and X-rays as examples of the phenomena of
waves; and it continued with a study of basic chemistry, chemical ele-
ments, compounds, mixtures, solutions, and colloids; it followed with
atomic weights and numbers, chemical transformations, the periodic
system, chemical reactions, the atmosphere, ionization, and carbon com-
pounds; and the course concluded with a study of the geological features
of the earth, rocks, minerals, the formation of the mountains and oceans,
climatic changes, and fossils as a geological record of life.
Both the Biological Sciences and Physical Sciences general courses
were organized in a lecture-discussion format, having three lectures plus
40. A detailed history of the course is provided by ornton W. Page in “e
Two-Year Program: Physical Sciences,” November 1949, Presidents’ Papers,
1946–1950, box 12, folder 5.
JOHN W. BOYER27
one discussion a week. Both courses styled themselves as “state of the
art” in scholarly terms, and both proted from that crescendo of self-
condence about the importance of the natural sciences to human life
that enveloped American research universities after World War I. e
war had given American scientists powerful opportunities to demon-
strate the practical impact of modern science, not only for human
destruction but also for human regeneration and reconciliation. On our
campus, for example, Julius Stieglitz, the chair of Chemistry, who par-
ticipated in the development of e Nature of the World and Man
course, was a bold and articulate spokesman for the view that chemistry
was a crucial partner for modern medicine and modern pharmacology:
“chemistry is the fundamental science of the transformation of matter,
and the transformation of matter almost at will obviously has inherent
in itself the realization of unlimited possibilities for good.”
41
Stieglitz
was also a strong advocate of integrating the intellectual standards associ-
ated with advanced scientic research and graduate education into the
undergraduate curriculum. He was convinced that the University of
Chicago should
develop to the utmost its singular opportunity for the most inspir-
ing type of college education, resulting from the co-existence in a
single institution of great graduate departments and great colleges
crowded with eager thousands—the red blood of universities.…
Situated in the heart of the American nation, why should it hesitate
to try the experiment of giving to its four years of college life every
last ounce of benet from the presence of its great graduate faculties
and, reciprocally, of increasing the strength and research output of
41. Julius Stieglitz, Chemistry in the Service of Man (Chicago, 1925), 9.
A TWENTIETH-CENTURY COSMOS 28
its graduate schools in the manning of its college chairs and thus
develop to the utmost the American university.
42
Equally noteworthy was the greater sense of interdependence of vari-
ous disciplines in the natural sciences, and the need for close collaboration
across the disciplines to attain path-breaking conceptual and empirical
discoveries. A proposal by Ezra J. Kraus of the Department of Botany in
late 1927 to create an interdisciplinary Institute of Biology insisted that
“the [fundamental biological] problems, rather than the departments of
the university should serve as points of attack. us the work of perhaps
several men in various departments could be coordinated and focused
on a problem.”
43
Vice President Frederic Woodward said that Kraus was
“a great believer in cooperative research,” and was “struck by the similarity
of the situation in the biological and social sciences. He made a great
impression on me and I think we should encourage him and back him
up at every possible point.”
44
As a young physicist writing in the early
1920s, Harvey Lemon was equally condent that science was on the
threshold of enormous changes that educated men and women must
understand, if only to prevent the kind of misuse of science that had (to
his mind) taken place between 1914 and 1918:
Clear heads and sober minds are needed, as never before, to watch
lest the genie prove to be an evil one providing us with the weapons
42. Julius Stieglitz, “e Past and the Present,” e University of Chicago Maga-
zine, March 1929, 233–39, here 239.
43. Kraus to Max Mason, October 24, 1927, “Institute of Biology,” Presidents’
Papers, 1889–1925, box 101, folder 1.
44. Woodward to Mason, August 29, 1927, ibid.
JOHN W. BOYER29
for our own destruction. e dreams of Jules Verne that red the
imagination of our boyhood, incredible as they then appeared, are
today in many instances accomplished facts.…As individuals in
social and political life, we must keep pace with science; and, taking
the warning from the fate of [Henry] Moseley, prevent the repeti-
tion of another such orgy of destruction as that which recently was
detonated by the monumental stupidity of our so-called
civilization.
45
Lemon later insisted that science was not simply about generating ever
more remarkable technical applications:
Applications of science have not been, and never will be, the chief
motive of the scientic investigator or student. e study of pure
science will never be abandoned as long as human beings are char-
acterized by a certain element of curiosity with respect to their
environment.…In our continuing eorts to a better and better
understanding of things which perhaps we shall not fully under-
stand for many centuries yet to come, if ever, we nd the greatest
interest and the most driving motive in the pursuit of scientic
studies.
46
45. Harvey B. Lemon, “New Vistas of Atomic Structure,” e Scientic Monthly
17 (1923): 181.
46. Harvey B. Lemon and Niel F. Beardsley, Experimental Mechanics: An Ana-
lytical College Text (Chicago, 1935), 6.
A TWENTIETH-CENTURY COSMOS 30
THE HUMANITIES AND
SOCIAL SCIENCES GENERAL
COURSES
f the two natural-sciences courses emerged from cur-
ricular projects of the 1920s, the new general Humanities
course had an even deeper institutional history. e
main architect was an elderly history professor, Ferdi-
nand Schevill, whose initial appointment to Chicago originated in 1892.
Schevill had a fascinating career. Born in Cincinnati in 1868 Schevill
attended Yale University as an undergraduate, at the same time that
William Rainey Harper was on the faculty. Schevill took Harper’s course
on the Hebrew prophets, establishing a personal relationship that even-
tually led to Schevill’s coming to Chicago. After graduating from Yale
he went to Germany to study for a PhD in history, working at the Uni-
versity of Freiburg with, among others, Hermann von Holst. In 1892
Harper oered Schevill a job for eight hundred dollars as an “Assistant
in History” on the recommendation of Charles F. Kent, a former student
of Harper’s at Yale who was studying Hebrew in Berlin and who
reminded Harper that Schevill was one of the “brightest men” in the
Yale graduating class of 1889.
47
Such informality was typical of the times,
47. Kent to Harper, October 1, 1891, William Rainey Harper Papers, box 14,
folder 30. Schevill’s birth name was Schwill, which he anglicized in 1909. Urged
by Kent, Schevill wrote to Harper on October 17, 1891, re-introducing himself
and presenting his credentials. Schevill to Harper, October 17, 1891, ibid.
Harper received a similar suggestion from George S. Goodspeed, who informed
Harper of a recent meeting with Schevill and who allowed that “he…strikes me
as a very bright man. I think if you could put him in as a docent at Chicago, you
would not be mistaken at all.” Goodspeed to Harper, October 25, 1891, ibid.,
box 12, folder 34.
I
JOHN W. BOYER31
and Schevill came to Chicago knowing little or nothing of the prehistory
of the new University.
Ferdinand Schevill soon proved to be an amiable colleague and a
brilliant teacher.
48
He was particularly close to a remarkable social circle
of young humanists in the later 1890s who met regularly and included
John Mathews Manly, Robert Herrick, Robert Lovett, and William
Vaughn Moody, a reminder of how dependent the early faculty were on
each other for intellectual and cultural sustenance.
49
Schevill never liked
the University as an administrative community, and when he warned
his personal friend Frank Lloyd Wright that the University High School
was like “all schools, established churches, minister-blest marriages, and
all other sacred institutions” in that “to play with any one of them is
alas! alas! to toss yourself into a buzz-saw,” he was alluding to his own
iconoclastic relationship with Chicago.
50
48. e distinguished American historian Howard K. Beale of the University of
Wisconsin many years later remembered that Schevill “was the greatest teacher
I had ever sat under. He was, of course, one of the most cultivated persons and
delightful companions I have ever known. Above all else he was a great human
being. I still feel the inspiration he gave me when I took his courses as an under-
graduate.” Beale to James L. Cate, December 31, 1956, James L. Cate Papers,
box 4.
49. Robert M. Lovett, All Our Years: e Autobiography of Robert Morss Lovett
(New York, 1948), 97–98. Robert Herrick later remembered: “e half dozen
of us young men who had come to the new world together naturally formed the
closest sort of fellowship. We were like a company of the celebrated musketeers,
disturbers of the academic peace and scoers often, but really devoted to our
work and faithful. We may have cast regretful glances half of homesickness back-
ward to that pleasant East from which we came, but we were faithful to the hope
of the West.” “Going West,” 6–7, Robert Herrick Papers, box 3, folder 10.
50. Schevill to Wright, September 4, 1916, Frank Lloyd Wright Papers, micro-
che copy at the Getty Research Institute.
A TWENTIETH-CENTURY COSMOS 32
Schevill began his scholarly career with studies of the medieval Italian
communes. His rst major book was a study of the free republic of Siena
in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries, and it highlighted a major
theme in Schevill’s thought: the tension between the universal and the
particular, between monarchy, which represented order and civility, and
communal self-government, which sponsored freedom and democracy.
Schevill believed that free communes like Siena had “endowed man with
a new conception of his powers and purposes.” ey created “a new civi-
lization, a civilization, in fact, with the elaboration of which the world
had been occupied down to our own day.”
51
A similar conceptual frame-
work informed Schevill’s later book on the Renaissance city-state of
Florence, published in 1936. Schevill would later argue that both of these
impulses—order and freedom—were already present in the ancient
world, and that it was thus logical to begin the study of European civiliza-
tion with Greece and Rome.
52
Of the many members of the early Chicago
faculty who had studied in Europe, Ferdinand Schevill was perhaps the
one most transformed by European values and European culture. He
once confessed to his friend Sherwood Anderson, “in America I often
have the feeling that I belong to Europe, and in Europe I reach the deep
51. Ferdinand Schevill, Siena, the Story of a Medieval Commune (New York,
1909), 420–21.
52. “e outstanding forms evolved by the Mediterranean peoples are two:
monarchy and the self-governing city-state. Monarchy represents the tendency
toward unity and peace; the city-state the tendency towards freedom and self-
determination. e balance between unity and freedom is indicated as the
political problem of mankind.” Schevill to Baker Brownell, November 26, 1924,
Baker Brownell Papers, box 9, folder 4, Northwestern University Archives. See
also Ferdinand Schevill, “Man’s Political History,” in Man and His World: North-
western University Essays in Contemporary ought, ed. Baker Brownell, vol. 4,
Making Mankind (New York, 1929), 145–76.
JOHN W. BOYER33
conclusion that my roots are in American soil.”
53
He traveled frequently
across Europe, gaining an intimate, rsthand knowledge of European art
and architecture and often took friends and the children of colleagues on
cycling and walking tours of France, Germany, and his beloved Italy.
54
During World War I Schevill was one of a small minority of faculty
who opposed America’s entrance into the war, further isolating him from
the mainline faculty politics of Chicago, and by the early 1920s he had
tired of teaching, indicating to President Ernest D. Burton in 1923 that
he intended to resign to pursue a full-time career in writing.
55
Burton
persuaded Schevill to stay on a part-time basis until 1927, when he left
the University for good, or so he thought. Schevill had looked forward
to a life beyond the institutional claims of the University, but by 1930
he was almost broke, having loaned substantial sums to friends who were
in distress because of the Depression, and part of his motivation to return
to teaching may have been nancial urgency.
56
When Boucher contacted
him in early 1931 about returning to the University to take up the great
challenge of the new Humanities course, Schevill was thus easily per-
suaded both by the substantial salary that Boucher oered him and by
53. Schevill to Sherwood Anderson, written while Schevill was visiting Vienna,
November 13, 1927, Sherwood Anderson Papers, box 27, Newberry Library.
54. See, for example, Lovett, All Our Years, 71-89, 106–20; William Vaughn
Moody, “European Diary,” 28–33, William Vaughn Moody Papers, box 1,
folder 9. e Chicago sociologist Everett C. Hughes later remembered that
Schevill took the son of W. I. omas on a walking tour of Italy. Hughes
to Mary Bolton Wirth, May 31, 1968, Mary Bolton Wirth Papers, box 5,
folder 1.
55. Schevill to Burton, December 27, 1923, Presidents’ Papers, 1889–1925, box
59, folder 21.
56. Schevill to Frank Lloyd Wright, October 19, 1930, Frank Lloyd Wright
Papers. Schevill also faced heavy medical bills arising from his wife’s illness.
A TWENTIETH-CENTURY COSMOS 34
the challenge to nally leave his mark on the teaching of European civi-
lization to newly minted college students.
57
World War I had come as a deep shock to Ferdinand Schevill, who
believed that the war had threatened the fundamental values of cultural
balance and material progress that had marked European civilization
up to 1914. e world of the 1920s was one dominated by “revolutionary
monstrosities” in Europe and “heaped-up wealth” in America.
58
For a
bourgeois humanist rooted in the culture of late nineteenth-century
Central Europe, both continents seemed to be veering o course, into
crass materialism and social upheaval. To Frank Lloyd Wright Schevill
argued in 1927, “ours is a government by the mob,” and by 1932 he
would insist that
the more I turn the present diculties over in my mind, the more
convinced I am the issue is quite simply between two kinds of
society. Either the acquisitive society we’ve got or a friendly com-
monwealth of approximate economic equals. Maybe the acquisitive
society is all we are capable of with our inheritance and animal
equipment. In that case we shall continue to struggle in the back
slough in which the human race has been immersed from the
beginning. But if we are to make a try for the other thing—and
I say, let’s go—we ought to be perfectly clear that it is a whole-
57. Boucher to Filbey and Woodward, March 13, 1931, Dean of the College
Records, 1923–1958, box 7, folder 2. Schevill was oered an annual salary of
$7,500, a very substantial sum for the time.
58. Schevill to Anderson, September 22, 1923, and November 13, 1927, Sher-
wood Anderson Papers, box 27.
JOHN W. BOYER35
hog or nothing proposition and that pacism, third-parties and
melioratives are distractions that darken the issue.
59
Schevill was a prolic writer, espousing the nineteenth-century Euro-
pean tradition of writing history for the educated general reader. He
once argued that
I kept in mind a prospective audience, composed, not of a small
group of specialists, but of that larger body of men and women
who constitute a spiritual brotherhood by reason of their common
interest in the treasure of the past.…I make bold to arm my
belief that scholarship practiced as the secret cult of a few initiates,
amidst the jealous and watchful exclusion of the public, may in-
deed succeed in preserving its principles from contamination, but
must pay for the immunity obtained with the failure of the social
and educational purposes which are its noblest justication.
60
Schevill thus believed that history’s largest purpose was to ennoble as well
as to educate the general reader, and in his teaching at the University of
Chicago he pursued the same objectives, making him an ideal and much
cherished teacher who sought to encourage the student’s cultural self-
development and intellectual maturity. In a sense, Schevill was deeply
involved in the project of general education long before the phrase
became a popular educational concept in the 1930s and 1940s.
59. Schevill to Wright, February 16, 1927, Frank Lloyd Wright Papers; Schevill
to Anderson, September 26, 1932, Sherwood Anderson Papers, box 27.
60. Schevill, Siena, v.
A TWENTIETH-CENTURY COSMOS 36
Schevill’s most successful book was his History of Modern Europe, rst
published in 1898 and revised continuously until 1946. e 1925 edition
reveals many of the arguments that would have informed his approach
to teaching European history. Schevill believed that Europe had over a
thousand years nurtured a European civilization that was perhaps the
most powerful and far-reaching of world civilizations, since it included
the United States within its cultural and intellectual compass. e United
States was a “passionate, struggling, and inseparable element” of a larger
European civilization, and this gave special urgency and authority to the
project of teaching European history to young Americans.
61
Yet after
World War I, a war that he profoundly regretted, Ferdinand Schevill’s
story of a slow, but positive evolution of European civilization was vastly
complicated by the ruptures of the Treaty of Versailles. By the later 1920s,
he was in the fascinating but also perplexing situation of having to imag-
ine the portrait of a Europe that he viewed with both admiration and
disillusionment, which could be proered to young Americans. In the
end, the course that he designed was much more of the rst than the
second, having little to do with a twentieth century that Schevill found
dispiriting and depressing.
Schevill was assisted by Arthur P. Scott, then a mid-career associate
professor of history who was a departmental jack-of-all-trades, and (to a
much lesser extent) by Hayward Keniston, an associate professor of Span-
ish philology and comparative linguistics who eventually left Chicago for
the University of Michigan. A graduate of Princeton, Scott had received
his PhD from Chicago in 1916. Scott had lived for several years in Beirut
and had a special interest in the expansion of Europe. He was also an
authority on colonial American law, publishing a book on criminal law
61. Ferdinand Schevill, A History of Europe from the Reformation to Our Own
Day (New York, 1925), 4.
JOHN W. BOYER37
in colonial Virginia, and he regularly taught courses on US history as
well. In the 1920s he taught an introductory survey in the Department
of History on the History of European Civilization, based on a strict
chronological framework. e new Humanities general-education survey
was a collaborative eort, but Ferdinand Schevill provided the major
intellectual imprint on its formation.
62
Arthur Scott later recalled: “we
used to say that whatever the course did for the students, it certainly
educated the sta; and no small element in our education was the inti-
mate and informal contacts with the leader whom we usually addressed
as Maestro, and referred to as the Old Master.”
63
When Schevill died
in 1954, Norman Maclean remembered of the founding of the course
in 1931: “in the history of our university, this moment itself was a Renais-
sance and the atmosphere was charged with excitement, deance, and
promise of adventure.” For Maclean, Schevill’s humanism lay at the heart
of the course, a humanism that was itself “a form of art. He was a historian
of man’s creative activity, and so the Renaissance was his home and Flor-
ence was his city. By this, I mean something more than that he loved
architecture, painting, sculpture, literature, and music. I mean that he
viewed man’s other activities—economic and political and social—as
themselves manifestations of the creative spirit which when fully ourish-
ing as in Florence, is dominated by a desire to attain beauty.”
64
62. See Schevill to Boucher, April 23, 1931, Dean of the College Records,
1923–1958, box 7, folder 2.
63. Arthur Scott, eulogy for Ferdinand Schevill, 1955, Cate Papers, box 4; and
C. Phillip Miller to James L. Cate, March 9, 1955, ibid.
64. Norman Maclean, eulogy for Ferdinand Schevill, 1955, ibid.
A TWENTIETH-CENTURY COSMOS 38
Schevill, Scott, and Keniston fashioned a course that wove together
strands of other courses they had taught in the 1910s and 1920s.
65
e
purpose of the course was to expose students to “the cultural history of
mankind as a continuum and as a whole.”
66
Although colleagues in the
Social Sciences later tagged the course as being primarily “aesthetic” and
neglecting political and social history, this was not quite true. Framing
lectures did provide key chronology, but much of the course was on the
history of European ideas, as represented by signicant writers and think-
ers. Students were expected to read substantial parts of classics like
(among many others) the Iliad and Odyssey, Herodotus, ucydides, the
Bible, Dante, Chaucer, Molière, Luther, Shakespeare, Voltaire, Rousseau,
Goethe, Darwin, and Walt Whitman. Many individual poems and other
shorter pieces were also assigned. e aim of the course was to use “his-
tory as a foundation and framework for the presentation of the religion,
philosophy, literature and art of the civilizations which have contributed
most conspicuously to the shaping of the contemporary outlook on life,”
beginning with the civilizations of the Nile and the Tigris-Euphrates
valleys, Greece and Rome, and concluding with “our ruling western civi-
lization,” the latter being “the main object of attention.”
67
Intellectually,
it was clearly the most conservative of the four new general courses, since
65. It might be argued that Boucher privileged his own department in giving
the historians the primary charge of organizing the Humanities general course.
e department had adopted a resolution in early 1931 urging Boucher “to
retain the course on the History of Civilization as part of the oering of either
the Humanities or the Social Sciences Division or both.” Boucher’s decision to
appoint Schevill did essentially that. “Minutes of the Department of History,
January 24, 1931,” Department of History Records, box 19, folder 4.
66. “Preliminary Report of the Committee in Charge of the General Courses in
the Humanities,” Dean of the College Records, 1923–1958, box 7, folder 2.
67. Schevill, “Humanities,” [April 1931], ibid.
JOHN W. BOYER39
it did not seek to break new ground in pedagogical methods or in schol-
arly design. e logic of the course was to convey the rich tapestry of the
European tradition, but a tradition that had experienced profound rup-
ture between 1914 and 1918. e course dealt with World War I and its
aftermath in only two lectures, perhaps because Schevill himself was so
disillusioned by it.
68
Although the history of Western civilization from the ancient world
to contemporary times became the organizing axis, much attention was
also paid to European literature, art, and architecture. American literature
was also included, both for a sense of time and place, but also in a bow to
Schevill’s notion that America was also a part of Western civilization.
e works of art examined in the course were treated in a strongly con-
textualist mode, or as a later commentary noted “that ideas and works
of art are related to the life out of which they arise”
69
e course was an
obvious target for formalists who cared little or nothing about the
encrusted historical exemplariness of their texts and more about the
intrinsic structural properties that dened them as works of art. Still,
the course styled itself as closely attentive to the development of analytic
skills and aesthetic judgment. As Arthur Scott put it in 1933, the
Humanities course aimed to convey a certain amount of information
68. In fact, the initial outline proposed in April 1931, had nothing on the twen-
tieth century, aside from a nal lecture on “is Plural World: e Reigning
Confusion in Our Intellectual and Aesthetic Outlook.” e rst syllabus pub-
lished in September 1931 commented that “the modern world of science and
machines, of national states and world empires, has set in motion forces which
seem to have got out of hand and threaten, like Frankenstein’s monster, to
destroy the civilization which gave rise to them.” Introductory General Course in
the Humanities Syllabus (Chicago, 1931), 328.
69. Arthur P. Scott, “e Humanities General Course. Statement of Objectives,”
May 1939, Dean of the College Records, 1923–1958, box 6, folder 9.
A TWENTIETH-CENTURY COSMOS 40
about European culture that would be of “practical value to young
people presently to be adult members of twentieth century American
society.” But it also sought, “to the limits of its collective ingenuity,” to
encourage and to give practice to “straight and independent habits of
thinking, as by-products of which it may fondly be hoped that a more
critical, rational, tolerant, and broad-minded attitude may be fostered.”
70
To operationalize the course Schevill needed young assistants, and
he found three dedicated men in Norman F. Maclean, Eugene N. Ander-
son, and James L. Cate. Cate, a young medievalist from Texas, and
Anderson, a young German historian from Nebraska, had studied with
Schevill and Scott and were hired rst. Cate in turn told Schevill and
Scott about Norman Maclean and persuaded them to hire his fellow
Westerner from Montana who was a graduate student in the Department
of English. e chance to join what he viewed at the time as a truly revo-
lutionary teaching project was a decisive moment for Maclean. Chauncey
Boucher later described Maclean’s work in the Humanities general
course as the product of a “choice soul and a teaching genius.…His hold
upon students is most remarkable.”
71
Many years later Maclean wrote to
Frances Cate, Jimmie Cate’s widow, remembering that Schevill and Scott
had looked for “young men who like them were warm-hearted, humor-
ous, and wide-ranging in their interests” and that the chance to teach
in the new Humanities course between 1931 and 1937 had oered “the
happiest and most exciting years of our lives.”
72
70. Scott to Boucher, November 1, 1933, Dean of the College Records, 1923–
1958, box 7, folder 2.
71. Boucher’s evaluation, dated 1935, is in the Presidents’ Papers, 1925–1940,
box 42, folder 1.
72. “Remember…all the excitement of those days of the new Hutchins College,
and the wonderful warm times we had when our sta was invited to Books-
JOHN W. BOYER41
e course consisted of ninety lectures of fty minutes each over three
quarters, with one discussion session a week for twenty-ve students that
focused on an intensive discussion of an assigned original document or
documents. Schevill and Scott gave most of the lectures, but they also
recruited other luminaries from the Humanities, like Paul Shorey, T. V.
Smith, James W. ompson, William Craigie, Shailer Mathews, and
Robert Lovett, to oer single lectures on subjects close to their research
competency. e lectures were organized linearly along a chronological
trajectory and combined narrative social and political history with stud-
ies of novels and works of art. At rst several fragments of texts were
discussed each week, but by the mid-1930s, the course had settled into
a pattern of assigning one notable work—a novel, a poem, or a piece of
nonction—each week for discussion, thirty in all through the aca-
demic year. e lectures did not duplicate the reading assignments, but
were meant as introductions to broad debates or as portraits of a Welt-
anschauung of a historical era. e course was replete with facts and
dates, but also had a more ambitious agenda in that it hoped to encour-
age analytic study skills and intellectual self-condence among its
students.
73
Much of this happened outside of class, in small groups run
by Cate, Maclean, and others. William H. McNeill, who was a student
wallow.” Maclean to Frances Cate, November 6, 1981, Norman Maclean Papers,
box 15.
73. Maclean remembered about James Cate’s discussion groups: “Jimmie really
ran discussion groups. ey were really ‘question hours’. Jimmie pursued his
students with shrewd, unrelenting questions until he caught them with the
answer, and ‘I don’t know’ was never an answer to him. To him, you always
knew the answer, if you only knew how to nd it. And I feel that his greatest
professional joy was in teaching and seeing his students’s discovering with joy
that they really knew the answer.” Ibid.
A TWENTIETH-CENTURY COSMOS 42
in Maclean’s discussion group of the Humanities course in 1934–35,
later recalled the scene in Maclean’s oce where
you [Maclean] used to assemble a group of eager beavers to talk
about anything and everything. e kernel of this group later
migrated to the Beta house and became the protagonists of the
marathon bull sessions on whose margins I wafted through col-
lege. You, of course, were the catalyst, and thereby created the
micro-environment of my college days, an environment which still
seems so marvelous to me that I cannot really believe that others
since have ever attained such heights as we, foolish and sophomoric
as we must have been, then scaled.
74
e Humanities course was in some respects as self-consciously skills
oriented as was its latter-day heir, the History of Western Civilization
course of the 1950s, but it did insist that European civilization itself bore
within it the fate of modern man, and that in studying this fate, Ameri-
can university students would come to appreciate and analyze their own
situations more acutely and self-consciously.
e year-long Social Sciences course for rst-year students, Social
Sciences I, was organized by three young professors, Harry Gideonse,
Jerome Kerwin, and Louis Wirth. Each of these men represented a dif-
ferent discipline, each was to become an authority in his eld, and each
had clear personal connections to the “real” world of social-science praxis
that began to dene the conduct of general education in the 1930s.
75
An
74. McNeill to Maclean, January 29, 1966, Maclean Papers, box 18.
75. “Perhaps the most important result of the association of the graduate and
professional schools with the college is the inuence of research upon the general
educational process.…ere is an increasing disposition on the part of students
JOHN W. BOYER43
economist, Harry D. Gideonse served as the chair of the course and was
its most articulate spokesman.
76
Born in the Netherlands and trained in
chemistry and economics at Columbia University and the University of
Geneva, Gideonse wrote his doctoral dissertation on the war debts gener-
ated by World War I. He worked for an international student organization
in Geneva for several years, was uent in French and German, and had
strong credentials in international relations and international trade.
Gideonse was hired by the Department of Economics from Rutgers
University as an untenured associate professor in 1930, with the expecta
-
tion that he would be tenured within three years.
77
Gideonse was an
acerbic, scrappy person, with an outgoing personality and quick wit
who sometimes came across as overly cocky and even vain.
78
He was
a very eective public intellectual and participated regularly for seven
years in the University’s Round Table radio program, speaking out on
to seek the classrooms of teachers who are known by their criticism of society to
be realistic and fearless.…Research will replace tradition and authority in deter-
mining the beliefs by which men live.” See Robert M. Lovett, “e Cleavage
between College and Life,” 6–7, Robert M. Lovett Papers, box 2, folder 17.
76. Boucher rst appointed Gideonse to lead the course, who then recruited
Wirth and Kerwin to join him. See “e General Course for Freshmen in the
Social Sciences, April, 1931,” Dean of the College Records, 1923–1958, box 15,
folder 3. Gideonse, Wirth, and Kerwin also organized a second year-long course
in the Social Sciences for students wishing to major in one of the Social Science
disciplines, but since this course was not required of all New Plan students, my
discussion in the present essay will focus on the Introductory Course.
77. “If at the end of the period indicated [i.e., 1933] the relationship was mutu-
ally satisfactory, we should expect your tenure to become indeterminate.” H. A.
Millis to Gideonse, February 6, 1930, Presidents’ Papers, Appointments and
Budgets, box 25, folder 5.
78. “Gideonse is very able and nice, but something of a ‘blowhard’.” William T.
Hutchinson Diary, entry of January 19, 1936.
A TWENTIETH-CENTURY COSMOS 44
public-policy issues relating to domestic and international aairs.
Charles Merriam characterized Gideonse as an excellent lecturer, but
also as an “indoctrinator,” and Merriam did not mean this in a wholly
attering way.
79
As we will see below, Gideonse soon found himself on
a collision course with Robert Hutchins over the meaning of general
education, since he violently opposed Hutchins’s attempts to impose
what Gideonse felt to be a backward-oriented, great-books program at
Chicago. In 1938 Gideonse was oered a tenured full professorship at
Barnard College, which Hutchins refused to match, thereby forcing
Gideonse out of the University. Gideonse soon left Barnard to become
the second president of Brooklyn College, where he served with distinc-
tion until 1966 but amid some controversy over his staunch opposition
to left-wing radicalism in the New York City unions.
Jerome G. Kerwin received his PhD in political philosophy at Colum-
bia University in 1926. In 1923 Charles Merriam recruited him to join
the faculty of the Department of Political Science at Chicago as an
instructor. Kerwin quickly became a protégé of Merriam, with Merriam
personally introducing him to the vagaries of Chicago municipal poli-
tics. Kerwin immediately became engaged in local reform activities, like
investigating illegal polling practices in Hinky-Dinky Kenna’s First
Ward during the 1924 mayoral elections in Chicago. roughout his
career Kerwin encouraged his students to become involved in local poli-
tics, and he took pride that his former students as diverse as Leon
Despres, Charles Percy, and Robert Merriam had followed his lead.
Kerwin devoted much of his career to exploring the complex issues of
church and state in American political culture, but he also wrote impor-
tant books on schools and city government, on federal water-power
79. “Minutes of the Sub-Committee on Curriculum, February 4, 1935,” 6,
Division of the Social Sciences Records, box 16.
JOHN W. BOYER45
legislation, on civil-military relationships in American life, and on the
idea of democracy. A devout Catholic, Kerwin helped to found the local
Roman Catholic Calvert House in 1953. Kerwin immediately proved
himself an immensely popular undergraduate teacher (when he consid-
ered leaving Chicago for Dartmouth in 1928, six hundred students
signed a petition urging him to stay), so it was hardly surprising that
Boucher recruited him to the team charged with organizing the new
course. Of his collaboration with Gideonse and Wirth, Kerwin later
recalled, “as we were from three dierent disciplines, it took three or
four months for us to understand each other.” Given the enormous
intellectual range that the new Social Sciences course sought to cover,
Kerwin found the new course to be “the hardest job of teaching I ever
attempted.”
80
Louis Wirth was the most distinguished scholar of the group. Born
to a Jewish farming family in Gmünden, a small Rhenish town in Ger-
many, Wirth was sent in 1911 to live with an uncle in Omaha, Nebraska.
He decided to remain in America, attended the College of the University
of Chicago between 1916 and 1919, and stayed on to take his PhD in
sociology. His teachers in graduate school were the great sociologists
Albion Small, Robert Park, Ellsworth Faris, and William Burgess, but
as an undergraduate, Wirth studied history as well as sociology and had
eight courses in modern European history and modern American his-
tory. Wirth was one of a small group of campus leftists during World
War I, and his presence was widely known, so much so that he ran afoul
of the University administration in 1919. Wirth was a leader of the
Cosmopolitan Club, a group of international students. He was also a
student radical who opposed American intervention in World War I. In
80. Chicago Maroon, November 18, 1960, 20.
A TWENTIETH-CENTURY COSMOS 46
the weeks before graduation in June 1919, Wirth gave a speech at a
meeting of the Cosmopolitan Club denouncing the Treaty of Versailles
as “the most impudent document ever devised by the hands and brains
of diplomats.”
81
Fred Merrield, an assistant professor of New Testament
studies and the faculty advisor to the Cosmopolitan Club, reported to
President Harry Pratt Judson on Wirth’s sentiments, accusing him of
being a “clever orator, cool, and daring” who opposed all established
governments and of being “in favor of revolution.”
82
Judson thereupon
took the astonishing step of summoning an emergency meeting of the
full professors of the arts and sciences to consider whether to withhold
granting Wirth and Ephraim Gottlieb, another student radical, their
81. Chicago Tribune, June 7, 1919, 3.
82. See the memorandum in the Presidents’ Papers, 1889–1925, box 69, folder
3; and the unsigned statement, written after May 14, 1919, in the Ernest Bur-
gess Papers, box 6, folder 11, reporting: “there was in existence among certain
member[s] of the Club of a disposition to conduct the aairs of the Club House
in accordance with Bolschevistic or anarchistic principles. is manifested itself
in expressions of opposition to University regulation, and in declarations of
intentions to observe only those which were approved by the individuals.” Fred
Merrield then had a direct collision with Louis Wirth at a meeting of the Cos-
mopolitan Club three days after Judson had attempted to have him expelled.
Merrield reported to Judson that Wirth had accused him of insulting students
who were Jewish, that Wirth “cast slurs on my divinity (religious) work, insinu-
ating that this work was carried on insincerely” and also that Wirth “drew out a
petition, signed by numerous members, some signature taken in my presence
with most insulting looks cast my way, to throw me out of the club.” Fred Mer-
rield, “Insulting Remarks Addressed to Faculty Members at the Recent
Cosmopolitan Meeting, Sunday, June 8th [1919],” Presidents’ Papers, 1889–
1925, box 31, folder 8. Merrield was himself a graduate of the university and
the Divinity School. He had spent several years in Japan and had the claim to
fame of having introduced baseball to the Japanese. As a scholar, he was not
particularly distinguished.
JOHN W. BOYER47
BA degrees, which would have been legally tantamount to expulsion.
83
Clearly, Judson wanted Wirth to be evicted, but Ferdinand Schevill and
Albion Small made a point of attending the meeting and spoke out
strongly in Wirth’s defense.
84
As a college student Wirth had had three
history courses with Schevill, including Schevill’s two-quarter graduate
course on the History of Civilization, for which Wirth merited As.
85
As
profoundly dierent as these two men were—the one a young German
Jew who had become a left-wing radical during his three years on campus
and who was accused by Merrield of being a Bolshevik, the other a
83. “Minutes of the Faculty of the Arts, Literature, and Science, Special Meet-
ing, June 5, 1919,” 1; Chicago Tribune, June 7, 1919, 3.
84. See the later memoir of Mary Bolton Wirth, “1916–1920 at the University
of Chicago,” 2. Mary Wirth, who was also an undergraduate at Chicago during
the war, described in graphic detail the stolid campus political atmosphere
presided over by President Harry Pratt Judson. She insisted that Ferdinand
Schevill and his wife used their home to provide bond money for a local radical
student arrested in late 1919 and early 1920 in the so-called “post-Palmer raids”:
“Professor and Mrs. Schevill put up their home as bond and the case was con-
tinued for nearly eight years during which time this student—considered the
most ‘dangerous’ of our days—had become a successful and conservative busi-
nessman in the State of Missouri. e Schevills were in a position for years
where they could not sell their house because of the bond.” Ibid., 3-4. Schevill
sold the house to Everett C. Hughes in 1944, who later recalled that Schevill
stopped by several times just to see the place again. Hughes to Mary Wirth, May
31, 1968. Both documents are in the Mary Bolton Wirth Papers, box 1, folder
1 and 2.
85. Schevill himself considered that this course was a prototype of the history
he intended to write in the mid- and later 1920s. In his letter of resignation to
Ernest D. Burton Schevill observed: “my courses in the History of Civilization
may give you a general idea of the kind of thing which has taken possession of
me and which I wish to bring to some sort of conclusion before the Referee calls
Time and it is too late.” Schevill to Burton, December 27, 1923, Presidents’
Papers, 1889–1925, box 59, folder 21.
A TWENTIETH-CENTURY COSMOS 48
middle-aged German American whose life and career had made him
into a kind of late nineteenth-century German Bildungsbürger deeply in
love with Italian culture but fated to live his life in the American Mid-
west—both were opposed to the war, and both were shocked by the
social inequalities it summoned forth and by its awed diplomatic resolu-
tion in 1919.
86
e assembled faculty had the good sense to reject Judson’s
ploy. As Robert Lovett, another disillusioned senior faculty member
who had lost a son in the war, later recalled, the “two students, about
to graduate, made caustic criticisms of the Treaty of Versailles at a
dinner of the International Club, which were reported by faculty spies.
e president summoned the faculty to consider the question of with-
holding their degrees, and was unanimously told that if approval of the
Treaty was to be required for a degree, it should be so stated in the
entrance requirements.”
87
By the early 1930s Wirth was on his way to become one of the most
important urban sociologists of his generation, but his notions about
how to teach social science to beginning undergraduates were profoundly
aected by his personal interest in large cities like Chicago.
88
Having
86. Schevill’s deep unhappiness with the Treaty of Versailles is clear in the 1925
edition of his A History of Europe: “e new boundaries were drawn by a group
of victors with the conscious purpose of doing the vanquished as much injury
as possible” (696).
87. Robert M. Lovett, “Democracy in Colleges,” 6, unpublished and undated
manuscript, Robert Lovett Papers, box 2, folder 17.
88. “Mary and Louis Wirth were young radicals and social workers together;
Louis spent a day or two in jail at the time of the Palmer raids (1920?).” Everett
Hughes to Winifred Raudenbush, June 24, 1966, Robert Park Papers, box 19,
folder 6. For Wirth as a teacher see Edward Shils, A Fragment of a Sociological
Autobiography: e History of My Pursuit of a Few Ideas (New Brunswick, NJ,
2006), 44–46. I owe this reference to Terry N. Clark.
JOHN W. BOYER49
worked for the Jewish Charities of Chicago, helping immigrant families
in the early 1920s, Wirth had a deep interest in translating social theory
into social action. After rejoining the faculty as an assistant professor in
1931, he became involved in a myriad of municipal reform activities,
serving as president of the American Council on Race Relations, as the
director of planning for the Illinois Planning Commission, and as an
advisor to many local community and business groups in Chicago. He
was courageous enough to call for an end to the terrible real estate cov-
enants that blocked African Americans in Chicago from moving into
Hyde Park and Woodlawn.
Louis Wirth, photo by LIFE magazine, 1945
A TWENTIETH-CENTURY COSMOS 50
One of the main intellectual goals of the new Social Sciences course
was to help students understand the complexities of urban industrial
civilization, and it could do this so eectively because its students lived
and worked in the vast social laboratory that Chicago represented. Given
the strong interest of Jerome Kerwin and Louis Wirth in using Chicago
as a social laboratory for their teaching, it was not surprising that the
course even arranged for students to visit the Stock Exchange, the Board
of Trade, Armour and Company, and the International Harvester Com-
pany, as well as unemployment oces, slums, and housing projects.
89
In
addition to these formal visits, which were carefully planned to illustrate
lecture or discussion topics in the course, the organizers also staged
smaller events away from campus, including a group of fty students at
Druce Lake, who heard the young Reinhold Niebuhr discuss the (in his
view) deeply awed nature of American capitalism. Not surprisingly,
Harry Gideonse sharply opposed this view, and the students found
themselves in a two-day donnybrook that left them better informed
about both positions. Another group of students organized a three-day
retreat on international relations at Lakeside, Michigan, which discussed
(among other topics) whether the United States should belatedly join
the League of Nations. One of the Social Sciences course’s discussion
leaders, Mary Gilson, observed of the latter event: “At this conference
as well as the Druce Lake Conference the New Plan students stood head
and shoulders above the others. is was so noticeable in relation to both
their grasp of the subjects discussed and their phrasing of questions that
one of the old plan students said to me ‘We old plan students are at a
disadvantage at these conferences for you can see what a dierence the
89. Gilson to Boucher, May 11, 1933, Dean of the College Records, 1923–
1958, box 8, folder 2.
JOHN W. BOYER51
New Plan training has made when you hear the freshmen and sopho-
mores in discussion’.”
90
Such visits and symposia also helped to modulate
the heavy emphasis on text-based readings, and as Walter Laves later
observed, “this promises to become one of the richest aspects of the
course to the students and is really only possible on a systematic basis
when the sta and student body are suciently large—as in our present
College course—to warrant a thoroughgoing eort.”
91
e Social Sciences course did not attempt to give a panoramic over-
view of the social sciences, since Gideonse, Kerwin, and Wirth felt that
this was conceptually impossible. Rather the course focused on three
large problems and approached them with the theoretical apparatus of
three dierent disciplines, which they believed would be vastly superior
to existing introductory courses, which “must everywhere, for obvious
reasons, be supercial and unsatisfactory.”
92
e main theme of the new
course was the “impact of the complex of forces that is generally described
as the industrial revolution on economic, social, and political institu-
tions.”
93
e rst quarter, taught by Gideonse, stressed the role of indus-
trial change in England and in contemporary America, where students
were asked to read R. H. Tawney, e Acquisitive Society, Lewis Mum-
ford, e Story of Utopias, Herbert Hoover, American Individualism,
90. Gilson to Boucher, May 11, 1933, ibid.
91. Walter H. Laves, “Report on the First Year of the Introductory Course in
the Social Sciences,” 12–13, Dean of the College Records, 1923–1958, box 8,
folder 2.
92. See Gideonse, Wirth, and Kerwin to the Social Sciences Faculty, May 15,
1931, 1, ibid.
93. “e General Course (for Freshmen) in the Social Sciences,” April, 1931,
ibid.
A TWENTIETH-CENTURY COSMOS 52
and Norman omas, America’s Way Out, in order to explore the devel-
opment and general characteristics of the present economic order. e
second quarter, taught by Wirth, took up questions of the impact of
scientic and technological progress on modern society, studying popu-
lation movements from rural to urban areas, the ways in which the new
industrial-technological order had accelerated large-scale social change,
the growth of large cities, and the emergence of new kinds of “culture”
in place of societies with strong notions of customary traditions. is
quarter used books such as W. G. Sumner’s Folkways, Franz Boas’s e
Mind of Primitive Man, and the classic work by Robert and Helen Lynd,
Middletown: A Study in Contemporary American Culture. e nal quar-
ter, taught by Kerwin, focused on the modern state—and especially
central government—as a premier locus of political and economic con-
trol, with students exploring the growth of governmental authority and
bureaucratic control in the industrial world.
94
In this quarter students
read Charles A. Beard, American Government and Politics, Harold
Laski, Politics, Graham Wallas, Human Nature in Politics, and Gilbert
Murray, e Ordeal of is Generation. e course ended with six lectures
oered by Gideonse that tied the various themes together. In addition
to these books, students also read essays by (among others) Adam Smith,
Karl Marx, Immanuel Kant, T. R. Malthus, omas Paine, Ruth Bene-
dict, Charles Beard, Charles H. Cooley, Robert E. Park, William F.
Ogburn, Edward Sapir, and John Dewey—a veritable who’s who of
modern social and political thought.
Seen three-quarters of a century later, the Social Sciences general
course looks like an enterprise invented in the midst of the vast displace-
ments of the Great Depression, with both teachers and students alike
94. See Gideonse’s testimony about the course during the Walgreen investiga-
tion, May 24, 1935, Laird Bell Papers, box 8, folder 8.
JOHN W. BOYER53
confronting the collapse or near collapse of liberal societies in Europe
and America. Ostensibly about the origins and development of industrial
society, the course raised profound issues about the fate of individualism
and personal freedom in the face of the challenges that communism and
fascism presented to European liberalism and American democracy. In
seeking to analyze how the West became enveloped in the industrial
world of the nineteenth century, the course also weighed America and
Europe’s common but perilous future in the twentieth century, conclud-
ing with lectures on the rise of international cooperation and the options
for the future determination of peace. e course’s very lack of a single
overarching theme or interpretative standpoint was quite deliberate.
Intellectual pluralism, within a schema broadly sympathetic to industrial
capitalism, would contrast with the mistaken hopes of utopians, whether
on the left or the right. In an inadvertent claim that revealed much about
the course, Gideonse would later insist, “a course that pulled everything
together quite systematically would not be true to life, and could only
exist on the basis of some totalitarian philosophy of the Marxist,
omist, or Fascist type.
95
e reference to omism as a “totalitarian
philosophy” was for local consumption in Hyde Park, and we will return
to this invocation shortly.
e Social Sciences course prided itself on having lectures that were
not repetitions of material from the syllabus, which resulted in more
students attending than might otherwise have been the case and thereby
encouraged “the greatest stimulation of original thinking and interest.”
In contrast to the other courses that relied on visiting instructors who
were often men of great prestige, the Social Sciences course had the
advantage of allowing the students to get to know the ideas and
95. Gideonse to Brumbaugh, October 31, 1935, 4, Dean of the College Records,
1923–1958, box 8, folder 2.
A TWENTIETH-CENTURY COSMOS 54
personality of one person for a “long period of systematic attention.”
96
Although discussion sections were voluntary, as late as 1940 Walter Laves
estimated that at least two-thirds of the 750 students enrolled in the
course faithfully participated in these exercises for all three quarters.
e published syllabi were equally noteworthy, since they provided
all students with a “common eld of reference” that they might rely upon
to understand the lectures and other assigned readings, and thus helped
to create intellectual anchors for the course. Given that the previous
academic preparation that individual students brought to the general-
education courses was extremely varied, the common syllabi and
common readings created an even playing eld for all students to per-
form as eectively as possible.
OPERATIONALIZING
THE NEW CURRICULUM
nce the planning groups had developed the plans for
their courses, Dean of the College Chauncey Boucher
sent their proposed syllabi to other, more senior mem-
bers of various departments for their comments. Given
the coalition nature of the courses in the biological and physical sciences,
most colleagues either accepted the outlines, or were indierent to the
projects, once it was clear that students seeking advanced training in the
natural sciences could also select more specialized science sequences as
free electives to supplement the work of the general surveys.
97
Among
96. Walter H. Laves, “Report on the First Year of the Introductory Course in the
Social Sciences,” 3.
97. Mortimer Adler was Hutchins’s mole on the deliberations of the rst cur-
riculum committee in 1930–31 and reported on the strident demands of
O
JOHN W. BOYER55
the humanists, the New Plan encountered skepticism from John Mat-
thews Manly, the chair of the Department of English, who thought that
the system of comprehensive examinations would be dicult to sustain
and also worried that students would lack proper assistance “in deter-
mining their eld of specialization early in their college course.” e
Humanities course itself earned a rebuke from Shailer Mathews, who
complained about the absence of religion in the syllabus. But in general,
faculty opinion deferred to Boucher and especially to Schevill, who had
great prestige in the division.
98
e Social Sciences course became, in
contrast, the object of considerable acrimony from the start, meeting
with heated opposition from members of the Geography and the Educa
-
tion Departments. Harlan H. Barrows, the chair of the Department of
Geography, denounced the enterprise as intellectually unwise, as a
danger to specialization, and as ignoring the importance of students
learning sucient facts before they were invited to begin generaliza-
tions.
99
From the Department of Education came an even more strident
reaction. Professor Henry C. Morrison was so disturbed by the syllabus
of the new course that he sent a ve-page letter insisting that it be
Hermann Schlesinger and Anton Carlson that departmental science courses be
folded into the New Plan curriculum. See the undated letter from late January
1931, marked “Saturday,” in the Mortimer Adler Papers, box 56.
98. “Minutes of the Faculty of the Humanities Division,” December 3, 1930,
1, and March 12, 1931, 1; Shailer Mathews to Chauncey Boucher, May 9,
1931, Dean of the College Records, 1923–1958, box 7, folder 2.
99. “Minute of the Executive Committee, Division of the Social Sciences,” Feb-
ruary 23, 1931, Division of the Social Sciences Records, box 17; and “Minutes
of the Department of History,” January 24, 1931, 1, Department of History
Papers, box 19, folder 4. Barrows had written to Boucher a month earlier in the
same vein. See Barrows to Boucher, January 21, 1931, Presidents’ Papers, 1925–
1945, box 19, folder 9.
A TWENTIETH-CENTURY COSMOS 56
dropped from the curriculum.
100
In the rst place Morrison was upset
with what he called the course’s “unscientic point of view,” by which
he meant that the instructors made no eort to teach the students a set
of formal principles by which they might comprehend the social world.
Morrison was convinced that “they do not propose to teach the truth,
but rather the results of the a priori and empirical thinking which hap-
pens to be in style.…ey propose to launch freshmen forthwith into
studies which would perhaps be appropriate in advanced university
courses.” Morrison gamely insisted that if the Division of the Social
Sciences “has no principles to teach, it should release the freshmen to the
other science divisions, which do have principles.” Moreover, allowing stu-
dents to discuss original documents cold, with no set principles to guide
them, was pedagogically irresponsible. Morrison viewed this as the
equivalent of “setting people to expressing opinions about pneumonia,
typhoid fever, infantile paralysis and sleeping sickness, who are quite
innocent of any comprehension whatever of the underlying medical
sciences.” Finally, Morrison predicted that the course would be a waste
of time for the majority of students, whom he dismissed as being mere
“conrmed lesson learners.” Still other students would be confused,
bewildered, and discouraged. A nal and larger group of students, who
were “cocky and opinionated,” would end by becoming “mere intellectual
and moral anarchists,” suering from “distinct neurotic degeneration.”
In fact, Henry Morrison was correct in that the new Social Sciences
course made no attempt to instill a body of principles in the students.
Rather than imposing a set of xed “principles,” Gideonse, Kerwin, and
Wirth preferred that their students learn empirically the merits of con-
icting theoretical approaches by reading and discussing an array of
100. Morrison to Filbey, August 20, 1931, Dean of the College Records, 1923–
1958, box 8, folder 2.
JOHN W. BOYER57
original documents and sources. Gideonse himself was dismissive of
attempts to create a single social science, based on xed principles. e
instructors consciously refused to tell the students what they should
think, since that was, ultimately, a responsibility of the students them-
selves. As Gideonse later put it, “if there is one duty that could be singled
out as the primary one for a college instructor in the social sciences, it
would be to cultivate a gingerly attitude against easy generalizations and
uninformed eorts to build ‘systems’.”
101
Notwithstanding Morrison’s acerbic commentary about the Social
Sciences course, and resistance from other departmental loyalists who
feared a possible loss of their ability to attract rst-year students to their
own programs, the New Plan survey courses were launched in October
1931. For the most part each course began smoothly and in a well-
organized fashion. Given the pace and work load demanded by the new
courses, which exceeded anything in the University’s undergraduate
programs in the past, it was not surprising that during the rst year some
students found the readings heavy going and the pace of work intimidat-
ing, so much so that Boucher was forced to write to the course leaders
reporting frequent “complaints of students that they are overworked to
the point of serious discouragement.”
102
He reminded the course chairs
that each course was supposed to require about ten hours of work each
week outside of class, and pointedly urged the faculty to “avoid every-
thing that smacks of competition between courses for a lion’s share of
the student’s time.” Finally, although he admitted that there might be a
small number of students for whom the New Plan was over their heads,
101. Gideonse to Brumbaugh, October 31, 1935, 7.
102. Boucher to M. C. Coulter et al., October 30, 1931, Dean of the College
Records, 1923–1958, box 6, folder 8.
A TWENTIETH-CENTURY COSMOS 58
the course leaders should remind the students that with diligent work
most of them would easily be able to master the material and pass the
comprehensive examinations. e dean of Rockefeller Chapel, Charles
W. Gilkey, encountered ambivalent responses when he surveyed 450
rst-year College students in small groups during the autumn quarter
of 1933. Gilkey found that the academic seriousness and dedication
of the New Plan students was striking: “ere is less interest in under-
graduate life, more serious concern about technical and academic phases
of the University experiences in which they are situated.…Administra-
tion and ‘old guard’ [student] activity leaders should not be surprised at
the ever increasing inuence of such students upon the extracurricular
and fraternity branches of the campus picture.” But he also encountered
serious complaints about how dicult students found the transition
from their high schools to the fast-paced rigor of the new general-edu-
cation courses in the College: “ere is very denite feeling that, for the
best of students, the transition from high school atmospheres and methods
of study to the University campus and its new plan is a dicult one, and
there is not enough instruction and guidance as to methods of study for
the new student.”
103
In February 1932 Boucher followed with another
missive, urging that when the syllabi were revised, the number and
amount of readings should be reduced, since “we seem to have erred very
denitely on the side of too heavy a load for the average student.”
104
Still,
over time the courses attracted enthusiastic student constituencies, and the
stronger academic quality of the students admitted after 1931 may have
103. e results of these sessions were summarized in Warren E. ompson, “A
Report of the Nine Informal Freshman Discussion Groups at the Gilkey Home,
Fall Quarter, 1933,” Dean of the College Records, 1923–1958, box 2, folder 14.
104. Boucher to Schevill et al., February 5, 1932, Dean of the College Records,
1923–1958, box 6, folder 8.
JOHN W. BOYER59
played a role in making the courses more sustainable. Students liked the
balance between lecture and discussion and the emphasis on reading original
documents; and their teachers found it challenging and stimulating.
Faculty ingenuity was able to respond to many of the initial adjust-
ment problems, but often at the cost of creating other problems. For
example, in the biological sciences, Merle Coulter found that “the transi-
tion from high school to our College was quite a shock to a good many
students. e methods and total setting were so dierent that these
students remained in a state of confusion of several months before set-
tling down to a systematic, business-like attack upon their course of
work. By that time they had become fairly well oriented but were in need
of a review of the subject matter content of the rst few months.” Coulter
responded by organizing regular “review sessions,” which became so
popular that they were organized throughout the year and which “our-
ished increasingly” over the 1930s. But Coulter soon realized that the
sessions were ourishing too much, since they led students to cut their
regular discussion meetings and attend the review sessions, which
quickly became known as “cram” sessions for the comprehensive. Having
substituted one problem for another, Coulter then restructured the
review sessions so that they did not provide a comprehensive overview
of the course, but only responded to particular, ad hoc problems gener-
ally faced by the weakest students. is put an end to the cramming
culture associated with the Biological Sciences general course, or at least
deprived it of some of its oxygen.
105
e Physical Sciences course developed creative interventions to bring
students in contact with the actual practice of science. Given the large
numbers of students, it was not feasible to plan small-group labs, but
105. Coulter, “Report on Ten Years of Experience with the Introductory General
Course in the Biological Sciences,” October 1941, 24–26.
A TWENTIETH-CENTURY COSMOS 60
Lemon and Schlesinger instead created permanent demonstrations in the
form of a Physics Museum, a Chemistry Museum, and a Geology Museum,
with demonstration lectures for astronomy at the Adler Planetarium.
Lemon was particularly entrepreneurial in new visual materials. Devel-
oped in cooperation with the Museum of Science and Industry the Physics
Museum consisted of three rooms of about 3,000 square feet in Beleld
Hall housing 125 experiments and exhibits which were self-operating
or student operated.
106
e purpose of the museum was to expose stu-
dents to a series of physics experiments in mechanics, heat, wave motion,
sound, and light, beginning with the most simple and proceeding to the
more complex. Lemon believed that the museums netted the University
considerable positive publicity and urged Boucher to see if the College
could obtain what he shrewdly called “special consideration” from the
central administration for sponsoring these exhibits.
107
Like Coulter,
Lemon also developed several motion pictures for use in this course,
which supplemented regular lectures, and which aorded students the
chance to return to demonstrations and experiments already studied and
watch the course of an experiment attain a natural conclusion. Giving
students the opportunity to review and restudy the critical stages of a
key experiment about which they might be initially unclear would reveal
to them the painstaking methods that scientists had to employ to under-
stand more fully the contingent nature of their evidence.
Chauncey Boucher’s hope that a more rigorous curriculum would
attract smarter and more able students also came to fruition. By the spring
106. See Harvey B. Lemon, “e Physics Museum of the University of Chicago
and Its Relation to the New Curriculum,” American Journal of Physics 2 (1934):
10–17.
107. See “Science Museum Exhibits Tried Out on Students,” Chicago Tribune,
December 4, 1932, 16.
JOHN W. BOYER61
of 1932 University Examiner Louis urstone reported to Boucher: “it
seems quite certain that we are attracting brighter students under the
New Plan than the Old Plan. e exact reason for this may not be evi-
dent, but it is probably associated with the publicity for the New Plan.”
108
e challenges of the New Plan attracted many gifted students, and
Boucher developed a long list of stories that he regularly recited about
the gifted nature of his students in the College.
Among the younger faculty, the discussion leaders found themselves
caught up in the work and they liked it. Bill Halperin, later a distin-
guished historian of modern Europe who as a young man taught one of
the discussion sections of the Social Sciences general course, reported:
Many of the students were surprisingly alert and sophisticated,
and at times the discussions were extremely suggestive and
outspoken.…A very considerable number of the students have
responded to the challenge by developing very excellent study
habits. It is my impression that the New Plan students not only
do more work than their old-plan predecessors, but approach their
academic problems with greater alertness and understanding. e
necessity of integrating and synthesizing data garnered from vari-
ous elds of learning has provided the more intelligent and
industrious students with that intellectual experience which, under
existing educational conditions, to a large extent is reserved for
post-graduate study.
109
108. urstone to Boucher, March 18, 1932, as well as “General Course: First
Year Examination, Autumn Quarter 1931,” Dean of the College Records,
1923–1958, box 15, folder 9.
109. Halperin to Boucher, May 27, 1933, ibid., box 8, folder 2.
A TWENTIETH-CENTURY COSMOS 62
Similarly, Mary Gilson commented on the excitement of teaching in
such an open-ended course:
Surely no one can criticize the New Plan for regimenting or routin-
izing the instructor. On the contrary, it furnishes rich opportunities
for initiative and experimentation, and no instructor can justly
attribute to it any contribution toward a tendency on his part to
go stale. In other words, dry rot may attack any instructor under
any scheme, but the New Plan has in it potent antitoxins for coun-
teracting such germs.
110
Equally positive reactions were evident among those teaching in the
Humanities general course. Eugene Anderson liked the increased respon-
sibility that fell to discussion leaders in such a wide-ranging and at times
unfocused course:
Since these students are so very young and immature the discus-
sion leader has to make his material popular and he has to do better
teaching than he has ever done. is is a point to emphasize—that
it is the most dicult teaching, for there is no opportunity to play
the taskmaster, you have to win your students and hold them just
by the excellence of instruction and not by compulsion. is whole
system puts a whole lot more responsibility on the teacher than
any other one that I have ever taught under.
111
110. Gilson to Boucher, April 28, 1933, ibid.
111. Anderson to Boucher, May 22, 1933, ibid., box 7, folder 2.
JOHN W. BOYER63
Similarly, James Cate praised the collegiality and open-mindedness of
his colleagues, especially the senior scholars who led the course:
In many ways I consider our personnel an ideal one. It would be
hard to assemble a more congenial group, or one composed of men
more eager to shoulder each his part of the load. ere is no lack
of dierences of opinion, and some of our best measures have come
as the result of heated discussions, yet once a general policy is laid
down there is no refusal to cooperate on the part of dissident
minorities. From the point of view of a junior member of the sta,
perhaps the most pleasant feature of all has been the attitude of
the various heads—Messrs. Schevill, Scott, and Lovett. ere is
no doubt in any case as to who is in charge of the course, but there
is never any intimation of administrative or academic superiority.
We younger members have been made to feel from the beginning
that the Humanities is very much our course, and I think the result
has been a general loyalty and a deeper interest in the work.
112
ree years later Cate wrote that the combination of lecture and discus-
sion, and particularly the focus on selected texts for more intensive
interrogation,
widened the student’s range of interest and have taught him where
to go for the great classics and how to read them, projected each
against its own age; if we have done this without undue distortion
of the ground covered too rapidly, then we feel amply repaid for
our eorts. My own opinion is that the Humanities Survey helps
112. Cate to Boucher, June 7, 1933, ibid.
A TWENTIETH-CENTURY COSMOS 64
most students more than it harms them; more I would not say
about any course.
113
In June 1933 Harry Gideonse was asked by Chauncey Boucher to
evaluate the Social Sciences course after its rst two years.
114
Gideonse
thought that the course had proven itself successful on several dierent
fronts. In the most basic terms, the course generated high attendance at
its lectures, even though they were not mandatory. e course also
inspired students to question existing social conditions and it enhanced
their interest in discussing contemporary social problems. Gideonse
found that most of his students demonstrated “active interest and spon-
taneous participation” and continued to ask for more discussion of
“current social phenomena around them.” Because the course was part
of a shared and common matrix of expectations that all students had to
meet, the course also helped create what Gideonse characterized as “a
signicant universe of discourse in our student body.” e methodology
of the course—the interrogation of conicting original sources—was
benecial because it trained students to uncover the intellectual premises
that governed the work of the various authors they read. Gideonse noted,
“the other day one of my colleagues informed me that he was convinced
that our present organization was one continuous process of indoctrina
-
tion. What he meant to say was that he felt greater diculty in presenting
his particular type of social theory to students who had followed our
particular course of training, because we had stressed in considerable
detail the nature and presuppositions upon which his particular theory
113. James L. Cate, “An Introductory General Course in the Humanities,” e
Social Studies 27 (1936): 157–64, here 164.
114. Gideonse to Boucher, June 9, 1933, Dean of the College Records, 1923–
1958, ibid., box 6, folder 8.
JOHN W. BOYER65
is based.” In other words, inviting students to read original works and
think about the preconceptions and presuppositions that they contained
was bound to be productively disruptive down the line.
Gideonse did believe that challenges lay ahead for the divisions to
adjust the kinds of upper-level courses they would oer students coming
out of the general-education program, since many faculty members were
unused to interacting actively with students. He also reminded Boucher
that if other universities were to adopt Chicago-like general-education
courses—which Boucher fondly hoped would happen—it had to be
emphasized that the success of the New Plan was very much owing to
the innovation, exibility, and dedication of the new teachers, and not
just to new curricular structures and materials: “e new plan is not
only a question of method, it is a matter of men and women. During
the last two years we have had a remarkable change in the personnel
teaching in the College courses in the Social Sciences. at is as worthy
of stress as the change in the methods of instruction.” is point was to
be of crucial signicance for the future of the general-education tradition
at Chicago, and we will return to it later in this essay.
Gideonse was particularly proud that the New Plan had recruited a
“higher caliber of students” and that those students found the Social
Sciences course among the most challenging. Whereas in the 1920s
social-science courses were seen as “snap” courses, they now rivaled or
even surpassed their counterparts from the other divisions in terms of
the diculty of mastering the material presented.
115
e natural scientists were equally pleased. Merle Coulter was proud
that in his course the lectures were very eective: “most of the lecturers
were imbued at the start with a strong desire to cooperate in our
115. “Sub-Committee on Curriculum,” January 14, 1935, Division of the
Social Sciences Records, box 16, 2–3.
A TWENTIETH-CENTURY COSMOS 66
educational experiment; and most of them later discovered a substantial
satisfaction in presenting their ideas to the large and rather appreciate
audience of high-grade young Americans that they found in our course.”
Coulter also stressed that his colleagues had made a strong eort not to
overwhelm students with so many technical terms so that they would
fail to “master and apply” the seminal ideas of modern biology. He
characterized this strategy as one of “detechnicalization.”
116
e Biology
course employed as discussion leaders only young postdoctoral fellows,
and it tried to select men with research ambitions who would nd a
home in the relevant department. e faculty associated with the course
also produced a number of high-quality textbooks that supplemented
the general syllabus.
117
After two years of teaching the Physical Sciences general course,
Harvey Lemon found student “esprit de corps” high, and he defended
the policy of having many dierent lecturers as made necessary by the
“great sweep and wide diversity of technical subject matter covered.” In
fact, Lemon believed the rotation of lectures among dierent faculty
“supplies a frequent freshening of interest that is benecial and in my
judgment more than osets the distinct disadvantage of this method,
which produces a certain lack of unied technique of presentation and
consequent unavoidable necessity on the part of the student to make
116. Coulter, “Report on Ten Years of Experience with the Introductory General
Course in the Biological Sciences,” October 1941, 8, 10.
117. Ralph Buchsbaum, Animals without Backbones (Chicago, 1938), A. J. Carl-
son and V. Johnson, e Machinery of the Body (Chicago, 1937), Fay-Cooper
Cole, e Long Road (Baltimore, 1933), M. C. Coulter, e Story of the Plant
Kingdom (Chicago, 1935), H. Garrett, Great Experiments in Psychology (New
York, 1930), H. H. Newman, Evolution, Genetics, and Eugenics (Chicago, 1932),
and A. S. Romer, Man and the Vertebrates (Chicago, 1933).
JOHN W. BOYER67
readjustments and to sometimes indulge in inevitable invidious
comparisons.”
118
Discussion and large-group review sections were reason-
ably well attended and pedagogically eective, and Lemon noted of one
of his colleague’s reactions: “Dr. Bretz who was the most ardent objector
of large group discussions…expressed himself as astonished and delighted
a few weeks ago when over 150 students participated with him in one
of the most stimulating and eager discussion groups which it has ever
been the writer’s privilege to witness.” In general, in light of the fact that
much of the material of the course was analytic rather than descriptive,
and that the majority of students had no intention of pursing advanced
studies in science, Lemon believed that his course had made a “creditable
showing,” in that students scored well on the nal comprehensives and
voluntary quizzes. He later asserted:
We know that no inconsiderable number of our able students have
been, and are, progressing through [the New Plan] with the utmost
satisfaction and joy. is fact alone would seem not only to justify
the experiment to date but to encourage the further attempt to
carry it along and improve upon it. Indeed we know of no one
who has been intimately associated with this work, either in our
own or other divisions, who does not seem to share in a greater or
less degree this general conviction.
119
118. Harvey B. Lemon, “Report on the First Five Quarters of the General
Course in the Physical Sciences,” May 1933, Dean of the College Records,
1923–1958, box 8, folder 1.
119. Harvey B. Lemon and Hermann I. Schlesinger, “After Five Years: An
Appraisal of e Introductory General Course in the Physical Sciences,” Dean
of the College Records, 1923–1958, box 8, folder 1.
A TWENTIETH-CENTURY COSMOS 68
e impact of the New Plan’s general-education courses on the qual-
ity of our student body was momentous. A study undertaken in 1940
indicated that more students were completing their BA degree programs
in nine quarters or less than had done so before 1930. More important
was the academic quality of the students and the impact that they had
on campus student culture. Chauncey Boucher argued strongly in 1935
that the New Plan had seen a signicant upgrading in the quality of the
students: “ough we did not raise our entrance requirements, we hoped
that the announcement of the New Plan would attract a larger number
of superior students. is hope has been realized. We have more appli-
cants for admission than ever before from students who ranked in the
top tenth of their graduating classes in excellent preparatory and high
schools.” is improvement in high-school rankings was paralleled by
signicant increases in aptitude of matriculating students, as measured
by the American Council on Education’s Psychological Examination,
which was administered to all entering rst-year students. e median
score achieved in 1933 was 38.5 percent higher than that achieved by
Chicago students entering between 1928 and 1930.
120
Indeed, by 1934
University of Chicago students ranked third in the nation in aptitude
for educational achievement out of 240 colleges and universities who
participated in the examination.
121
Given the enhanced aptitude of matriculating students, it was also
not surprising that most New Plan students felt positive about their
educational experiences in the demanding new curriculum. A survey of
1,065 New Plan alumni in 1938–39 who had completed the College
120. Boucher, e Chicago College Plan, 110.
121. “Facts about Undergraduates at the University of Chicago,” Dean of the
College Records, 1923–1958, box 15, folder 2.
JOHN W. BOYER69
between 1931 and 1935 revealed that a great majority were either very
satised or satised with the quality of teaching that they experienced
at Chicago and that they were equally satised with what they had
learned in their general-education courses in the College. When asked
“should every student be required to take the [general-education] survey
courses?” almost 89 percent answered armatively. e young alumni
were equally convinced (72 percent) that the instructional materials of
the general-education courses were well organized and that they got a
lot out of the courses in which they participated (73 percent). Seventy-
eight percent of the alumni believed that the New Plan curriculum gave
them a greater satisfaction in living their lives. And, not surprisingly,
almost 88 percent answered yes to the question, “did you like the free-
dom allowed under the New Plan?”
122
Of course from the distance of ninety years, it is dicult to apply the
kinds of ne-grained evaluation mechanisms that we would use today.
Still, the slow acceleration of time to degree and the generally favorable
image that the University clearly had in the eyes of these students suggest
that Chauncey Boucher’s gamble of 1930–31—that a more challenging
and dicult curriculum but also one that was more coherently organized
and eciently taught would lead to more gifted students enrolling in
the University—was proven correct.
But the impact of the New Plan was also evident in the external
operations of the College. e collapse of big-time football in the late
122. “Students at the University of Chicago,” 1940–1941, 7–8, ibid. See also
the “Report of an Evaluation of the College Program of the University of Chi-
cago by Students Who Entered the College in the Autumn Quarters of 1933,
1934, and 1935,” ibid., box 9, folder 12. is survey has comparative evaluative
data from 648 students on student satisfaction with the four general-education
survey courses. Of the four, the Biological Sciences course was by far the most
popular.
A TWENTIETH-CENTURY COSMOS 70
1930s was attributed by many to the fact that the College was now
recruiting more academically oriented students, which lowered the com-
petitive athletic position of Chicago within the Big Ten: “there have
rarely been, in recent years, more than two or three Maroon regulars
who could make the second or third teams at other Big Ten Schools.”
123
Robin Lester concluded that “the New Plan, adopted in 1931, resulted
in a brighter, more critical student body and one much less likely to have
participated in athletics at secondary school or on the Midway.”
124
e
New Plan did privilege sturdier and more resilient students, as Bill
Halperin conrmed when he observed that “the greatest praise for the
New Plan invariably comes from the superior students, while the sharp-
est criticism emanates from those who nd it very dicult to adapt
themselves to the novel features of the present arrangement.”
125
e educational impact of the new general-education courses on
student culture went beyond the classroom to encourage what Walter
Laves described as
the inter-stimulation of a large group which goes through the same
study at the same time. It has been fun to watch the spread of a
new term or idea throughout the whole group via lectures, dormi-
tory discussions, small informal and formal group “sessions”, and
so forth, with the echo, in the form of questions or disputes that
arise in these discussions, coming back to the faculty. e common
123. Quoted in Robin Lester, Stagg’s University: e Rise, Decline, and Fall of
Big-Time Football at Chicago (Urbana, 1995), 183.
124. Ibid., 173.
125. Halperin to Boucher, May 27, 1933, 4, Dean of the College Records,
1923–1958, box 8, folder 2.
JOHN W. BOYER71
and cumulative building up of a eld of reference or universe of
discourse was never as obvious under the old plan, the eort was
more scattered, students could not take it for granted that their
classmates were interested in the same notions and as a conse-
quence study was not nearly as obviously a major activity as it now
seems likely to become.
126
Laves, who had been an undergraduate student at Chicago between
1919 and 1923 and thus knew the pre–New Plan curriculum personally,
described a revolutionary side eect of the general courses—namely, that
they helped create a powerful group consciousness among undergraduate
students, all of whom were now involved in deeply challenging collective
experiences. To the extent that the University of Chicago came to have
a distinctive and intensely self-conscious academic culture in the twen-
tieth century, this factor was of enormous import.
e initial success of the New Plan did not preclude certain opera-
tional problems, and these became clearer as the years wore on. e
comprehensive exams generated divergent and sometimes questionable
practices involving tutors. Some students sought “extra” help in prepping
for the exams, which often amounted to circumventing the need for
attending lectures. Issues of conict of interest soon arose, as to whether
those individuals associated with the courses and who had a role in the
formulation of the exams should also be permitted to tutor students for
extra compensation. Boucher was rm in his opposition to such prac-
tices, but the very existence of such “o-shore”” practices highlighted
126. Walter Laves, “Report on the First Year of the Introductory Course in the
Social Sciences,” 13–14.
A TWENTIETH-CENTURY COSMOS 72
the reservations of those who opposed the comprehensive exams on other
grounds.
127
Even among the faculty teaching the courses some reservations
emerged. e younger instructors canvassed in 1933 pointed to serious
problems, particularly lack of coherence in the lectures, unevenness in
student preparation to cope with fast-paced courses requiring huge
amounts of reading, occasional student confusion over the “big picture”
that the courses were trying to convey, lack of coordination among the
four survey courses, unevenness in the success of the discussion groups,
and great frustration with the comprehensive exams, which many
instructors felt required too much of their time to construct and which
failed to measure adequately the achievement of the students.
Arthur P. Scott complained as early as 1933 that “partly as a result of
the pressure of time to nish the syllabi in short order, the four courses
were prepared with virtually no consultation between the four commit-
tees in charge.”
128
Similarly, Louis Wirth was concerned with the fact
that the founders of the four courses had not “arrived at any fundamental
consensus as to our notion of general education. Individually and in
a sort of formal way we have expressed ourselves on this subject. We
have not been able to ‘sell’ our ideas to one another and cannot therefore
be very eective in ‘selling’ them to the world at large, not to speak of
our students.”
129
127. Boucher to Louis L. urstone, June 8, 1935, Dean of the College Records,
1923–1958, box 6, folder 2.
128. Scott to Boucher, November 1, 1933, ibid., box 7, folder 2.
129. Wirth to Hutchins, September 13, 1935, Presidents’ Papers, 1925–1945,
box 19, folder 4.
JOHN W. BOYER73
Worries about overload and heavy reading assignments that were too
schematic and supercial were also troublesome. Ferdinand Schevill
complained to Boucher about the danger of overwork that was built into
the New Plan, and he suggested on several occasions that the reading
load of the new Humanities course was too heavy. He also worried about
its all-too-inclusive quality, urging that some restrictions on the range
of topics and more focus on whole books would be desirable.
130
Lest Scott
take this as a concession to Robert Hutchins, Schevill added candidly,
“you may say that I am raising the President’s cry against the pouring
out of mere facts and in favor of directive concepts. I have less reason
for denying the impeachment as I have taken essentially the same posi-
tion for the larger part of my teaching career and have certainly
represented it from the rst in my discussions with you.”
131
Scott too
wanted the College to provide the Humanities course with more
resources, so that the number of lectures could be reduced and the dis-
cussion sections increased, but he received little support for his requests.
132
Tensions with the departments were also evident, as department
chairmen tried to inuence the appointment of discussion leaders who
would be assigned to the general courses. In 1932 Ferdinand Schevill
130. Boucher to Schevill and Scott, May 27, 1932, and Schevill to Boucher,
June 16, 1932, Dean of the College Records, 1923–1958, box 7, folder 2
131. “I think our range of subject matter is so excessive as to be unmanageable;
and I crave restriction, precision, and deniteness in place of the loose, illogical
encyclopedism now in practice.” Schevill to Scott, May 12, 1934, Dean of the
College Records, 1923–1958, box 7, folder 2.
132. See Brumbaugh to Scott, April 29, 1938, ibid. Brumbaugh admitted that
Scott had “raised the question several times with reference to increasing the
number of discussion periods and reducing the number of lectures in Humani-
ties I.” Brumbaugh was either unable or unwilling to support these requests.
A TWENTIETH-CENTURY COSMOS 74
threatened to resign in protest over what he felt to be William Dodd’s
unauthorized meddling in the teaching roster for the Humanities
course.
133
Boucher talked Schevill out of it, but the incident highlighted
the political fragility in which the new courses operated, and the latent
structural tensions between the College’s interests and those of the
departments.
e new system of comprehensives also encountered resistance.
Harvey Lemon thought that the examiner’s oce manifested a lack of
“creative critical helpfulness” to the faculty of the general courses, relying
too much on faculty initiative and manifesting “too little initiative and
drive.”
134
Walter H. Laves laconically opined: “e comprehensive exam-
inations have been the most disputed part of the new program as far as
our course is concerned. e preparation of questions has taken more
time than any other feature of the new arrangements. In the minds of
most of those concerned with the course the results have not corre-
sponded with the eort. Judging by conversations with our colleagues
in parallel courses these impressions are not limited to our group.” Laves
added, “it is dicult for an inexperienced group like the Board of Exam-
iners to realize just how much work and time the faculty has to put into
such a task.”
135
Over time, faculty also became unhappy with the failure of some
students to show up for lectures and discussion sections, even though
133. Schevill to Boucher, May 26, 1932 and Boucher to Schevill, May 27, 1932,
Dean of the College Records, 1923–1958, box 7, folder 2.
134. “Report on the First Five Quarters of the General Course in the Physical
Sciences,” 12, Dean of the College Records, 1923–1958, box 8, folder 1.
135. Walter H. Laves, “Report on the First Year of the Introductory Course in
the Social Sciences,” 4, 9. Dean of the College Records, 1923–1958, box 8,
folder 2.
JOHN W. BOYER75
these were, in theory, voluntary and not mandatory. Given the high
professionalism of the faculty and their investment of time to prepare
their lectures and discussions, it was understandable they might become
irritated if some students treated their eorts in a cavalier manner.
136
By
1936 Harvey Lemon and Hermann Schlesinger had become suciently
disillusioned with student attempts to game the system by picking and
choosing which lectures they would attend and which materials they
would read in order to pass the nal comprehensive exams that they
recommended that no student should be allowed to sit for a nal com-
prehensive unless he or she had passed successfully the three quarterly
examinations that were embedded as advisory instruments in the struc-
ture of the Physical Sciences general course.
137
Although Lemon and
Schlesinger continued to pay lip service to the idea of nal comprehen-
sive examinations, their proposal was in essence a strong, if oblique,
criticism of a key behavioral premise of the New Plan, namely, that
students should have perfect freedom to prepare for their comprehensive
exams in whatever way seemed most appropriate to them.
e unhappiness of faculty with students not fully engaging the mate-
rial and instead cramming for the comprehensives was conrmed by a
study in 1939 that found that middle- and lower-ability students who
merely audited the survey courses, as opposed to students who partici-
pated more fully by taking quarterly exams and quizzes for advisory
grades, were likely to score lower on their nal comprehensives. is
nding, coming just before the outbreak of World War II, suggested
that class attendance and focus on the material discussed in class were
136. W. C. Krumbein to Brumbaugh, November 5, 1936, Dean of the College
Records, 1923–1958, box 6, folder 9.
137. Lemon and Schlesinger, “After Five Years: An Appraisal of e Introduc-
tory General Course in the Physical Sciences,” 11.
A TWENTIETH-CENTURY COSMOS 76
important, especially for students who were ranked in the middle or
lower echelons of academic ability. Today we would take the idea that
the personal interaction between faculty and students is a vital and
constitutive part of learning and that the classroom work of teachers
does matter as obvious and self-evident, but at the time it seemed to
undercut the rhetoric of freedom that was at the foundation of Boucher’s
original New Plan design from 1931.
138
Changes in the stas of the graduate students and young faculty who
served as discussion leaders also posed challenges, since each sta was
bound to experience comings and goings. In November 1936 Aaron
Brumbaugh broached the idea of creating half-time internships for
apprentice discussion leaders so that they might become familiar with
the courses.
139
In the spring of 1939 Brumbaugh then asked the directors
of the general courses to provide written statements of the purposes and
objectives of each of their courses.
140
is latter request reected the
impact of Ralph Tyler’s appointment as the university examiner in 1938.
Tyler wanted the general-education stas to design examinations that
reected and supported each course’s synoptic learning goals, which
would allow the exams to measure the achievement of students in terms
of the purposes and objectives of the course.
141
Tyler’s theoretical aims
138. “e Achievement in Comprehensive Examinations of Students Who
Received ‘R’ in Quarterly Reports Compared with Students Who Received
Qualitative Quarterly Marks,” Summer 1939, Dean of the College Records,
1923–1958, box 15, folder 2.
139. See his proposal from November 1936 in ibid., box 6, folder 9.
140. A. J. Brumbaugh to P. H. Boynton et al., March 16, 1939, Dean of the
College Records, 1923–1958, box 6, folder 9.
141. Interview of Benjamin Bloom with Christopher Kimball, April 14, 1986,
22; June 4, 1986, 41; February 5, 1987, 77–80, Oral History Program. See, also
JOHN W. BOYER77
may have been salutary, but the fact that the stas were now compelled
to generate detailed statements about the goals of their courses was a
sign that the initial rush of ad hoc experimentation was slowing down
and that more systematic forms of institutionalization were needed in
order for the general-education program to sustain itself. is trend
raised the longer-term issue of whether new instructors joining the
courses in the future would share the same values and same aspirations
as the original architects. e creation of guidelines for “in-service”
procedures in 1941 to ensure proper training and socialization of new
sta members was also a sign of such institutionalization.
142
Both pro-
cesses accentuated and compelled the more formal development of stas
qua stas, which by the later 1940s even had ocial charters and rules
of procedure. e curricular upheavals of 1942–46 resulted in even more
sophisticated and self-conscious attempts on the part of the general-
education stas to articulate the pedagogical and methodological goals
of each of their courses, so that they could be scrutinized and debated
by faculty from other elds.
143
is in turn led to shared modes of
Bloom, “Changing Conceptions of Examining at the University of Chicago,”
304–10; and “e Construction and Use of Examinations in the College of the
University of Chicago: A Statement by the University Examiner,” February 9,
1950, Dean of the College Records, 1923–1958, Series 98–41, box 99.
142. “e In-Service Training of Sta Members in the Introductory General
Courses and English 102 in the College Division,” May 12, 1941, Dean of the
College Records, 1923–1958, box 6, folder 9. is document summarized the
individual statements sent to Brumbaugh in February 1941 by Merle Coulter,
Arthur Scott, R. J. Stephenson, Walter Laves, and Percy Boynton (English
composition).
143. An early example of this genre is the seventeen page memorandum, “Rela-
tionships Among Social Sciences 1, Social Sciences 2, and Social Sciences 3,”
1946–1947, Dean of the College Records, 1923–1958, box 8, folder 2.
A TWENTIETH-CENTURY COSMOS 78
educational discourse about the goals and objectives of the College’s
general-education program as a whole, a body of discourses that, more
than anything else, gave an aura of distinctiveness to the Hutchins Col-
lege at its zenith between 1947 and 1954.
WIDER CHALLENGES
AND OPPORTUNITIES OF
THE NEW PLAN
he New Plan’s impact on the wider instructional culture
of the University can be illustrated by examining its
relationship to the Division of the Social Sciences and
to the School of Business. A particularly thorny issue
emerged in the Division of the Social Sciences relating to the kind of
baccalaureate program that social-science majors would complete in
order to qualify for a BA degree after they nished the College’s two-year
general-education curriculum. In 1931 the divisional faculty had decided
that a student who wished to obtain a BA degree had to take at least ve
of seven possible introductory courses, each representing one of the
Social Sciences’ departments, and to sit for a comprehensive examination
assembled from questions drawn from these courses. In addition, the
student had to specialize in a single subject as a major eld of study and
to take six other upper-level courses in the division as free electives. e
departmentally based introductory courses, each bearing the generic
number of 201, were mounted in a hodgepodge fashion in 1932. Within
three years considerable unhappiness had emerged about the value of
these courses, and in late 1934 the divisional dean, Robert Redeld,
appointed an ad hoc subcommittee on the divisional curriculum to
investigate the eectiveness of the 201 courses, their relationship to the
T
JOHN W. BOYER79
wider domain of undergraduate education in the Social Sciences, and
their relationship to the New Plan’s general-education sequences. As
Redeld explained to Hutchins, he hoped that the ad hoc committee
might undertake a “thorough review of the curriculum of the Division
and make recommendations for changes.” Redeld was frustrated: “at
present the student is confronted with a list of courses, which vary enor-
mously in character, and some of which are plain fakes.” In addition to
the 201 courses, Redeld also hoped that the committee would survey
departmental course oerings more generally, with a goal of determining
“which of them represent frontiers of science and scholarship on which
the man giving the course is operating, and which of them represent
substantially ‘canned’ material.”
144
Ideally, Redeld also wanted the
departments to decide what they were trying to accomplish with their
courses, and to say so publicly, so that the students would be able to
make more informed decisions about which courses to take.
For over a year Herbert Blumer, Charles Judd, Frank Knight, Fred-
erick Schuman, and Redeld labored to understand how best to teach
social sciences to third- and fourth-year undergraduates. e subcom-
mittee heard, almost as a grand jury, testimony from an array of
inuential historians and social scientists. Fay-Cooper Cole of the
Department of Anthropology argued that integration was already a
stated goal of the Social Sciences general course in the College, and that
the interrelationships among the social sciences could be better articu-
lated there than in more advanced courses. Cole also attacked several of
the sacred cows of the New Plan, insisting that students now were more
likely to work less than ten years previously, because they were not com-
pelled to attend class and take course-based examinations. For Cole the
144. Redeld to Hutchins, November 12, 1934, Division of the Social Sciences
Records, box 16.
A TWENTIETH-CENTURY COSMOS 80
new comprehensive-examination system had encouraged bad study
habits by allowing the student too much independence from conven-
tional instruction: “under the old system students were encouraged to
do independent work through term papers; now they are encouraged
only to pass examinations.” Cole wanted the comprehensive exams to
be based on the actual courses that faculty taught, not the courses upon
the nal comprehensive exams.
145
e next witness was Harry Gideonse, who defended the integrating
principle that informed the Social Sciences I course (the nature of con-
temporary society under the impact of rapid industrialization), and who
also had a rather low opinion of the 201 courses, which he felt were
simply a rehash of general materials already covered eectively in the
College’s general-education sequences. Gideonse argued that students
should be required to take at most three (instead of ve) of the 201
courses, spending more of their time on genuinely specialized courses
where they could engage in specialized work. In strong contrast to Cole,
Gideonse believed that the New Plan students were both brighter and
harder working than students from the 1920s. Finally, Gideonse men-
tioned that he did support a great works of social science honors course
that sought to integrate multiple perspectives on doing social science,
but insisted that this was most appropriate for seniors, not for freshmen,
thus implicitly rebuking Hutchins’s and Adler’s venture with rst-year
students.
146
Like Gideonse, Louis Wirth defended the integrated nature of the
Social Sciences general course, which was not a combination of three
145. “Report of the Sub-Committee on Curriculum,” December 17, 1934,
1–11, Division of the Social Sciences Records, box 16.
146. “Sub-Committee on Curriculum,” January 14, 1935, 1–9, ibid.
JOHN W. BOYER81
disciplines, but rather used disciplinary material from all of the social
sciences. At the same time Wirth was not fully satised with the general
course, since he “hoped that over-emphasis on examinations could be
minimized in order to improve student morale and to encourage in-
tensive work with zest, interest and spontaneity.” Because the College
faced serious budget restrictions, it was forced to overburden the mem-
bers of its teaching stas. Wirth also worried about the dangers of over
organization for the faculty themselves, insisting that the individual
instructors might be discouraged by having to follow a standardized
syllabus, which “destroys spontaneity and cramps teaching style.” And
like Gideonse, Wirth had a low opinion of the 201 courses, which “let
down” the students because of their “disparate, isolated” structures and
“make shift” qualities.
147
William Hutchinson represented the views of the historians, and his
comments were more akin to Cole’s. Hutchinson’s discussion revolved
around the College general-education sequences as much as it did the
division’s 201 courses. Hutchinson thought that the “old plan” of under
-
graduate studies was deservedly dead and buried and that the New Plan
had brought Chicago students who were “more alert, broader, more
willing to challenge lecturers and books, more critical and resilient.” At
the same time these same students were only interested in learning gen-
eralizations, not facts, which led the students to have “a large amount
of intellectual arrogance” for which they needed “to be taught some
humility.” Hutchinson blamed “the general courses in the College, where
whole civilizations are set up and knocked down within a few days,
147. “Sub-Committee on Curriculum,” January 23, 1935, 1–9, ibid.
A TWENTIETH-CENTURY COSMOS 82
although the College denies this charge. Students are interested in study-
ing the past only as a series of problems, without reference to time, space
and background.”
148
Another critical problem was that the New Plan
“actually squeezes out the teacher. With syllabi, optional class atten-
dance, etc., the teacher is reduced in status, becomes merely a walking
bibliography.”
ere was broad agreement on the part of all interviewed that, as
Louis Wirth put it, “as they now stand our 201 courses fail to synthesize
the social subject matter of the social sciences and probably cannot be
suciently modied (as long as they are given by separate departments)
to satisfy the need for a well-articulated and integrated general training
in the social sciences.”
149
Wirth’s statement begged the question of
whether the faculty could actually imagine and agree upon a common
set of assumptions as to what constituted nondepartmentally based social
sciences. e challenge of imagining how one might “integrate” social
sciences via interdisciplinary or comparative coursework for College
juniors and seniors then preoccupied the committee, and resulted in
numerous memoranda and position papers for and against.
e debates in the committee itself were vigorous. e discussions
inevitably ranged over a wide array of not very related topics, from the
quality of high-school teaching in the United States to the quality of
text books used in secondary education to duplication of courses among
related departments to the quality of lecturing that was done by the
divisional faculty to the time that faculty had to do research (Charles
Merriam insisted that the University did not need to have sabbaticals
since “every year is a sabbatical year for anyone who wishes to do
148. “Sub-Committee on Curriculum,” January 29, 1935, 6, ibid.
149. Wirth to Redeld, undated [January 1935], ibid.
JOHN W. BOYER83
research”) to the alleged mixture of ideology and politics that was now
aicting secondary school education.
150
But the specic issue that was the originating point of the committee
—the future of the seven 201 courses—resulted in little consensus.
Some, like Charles Judd, disliked the whole arrangement, arguing that
the generalizing work of such courses ought to be done in the College
and not the division, and wanted them abolished. Fay-Cooper Cole, in
contrast, thought that the College was not in a position to provide such
systematic introduction to multiple disciplines, which could only be
done by the departments. Robert Redeld believed that the division did
have the responsibility for creating interdisciplinary courses in compara-
tive social science on a higher level than could or should be done in the
College. Using the image of the divisional curriculum as a “pyramid
involving gradual and progressive specialization,” he proposed in March
1935 a scheme of six new courses that might replace the departmentally
based 201 courses.
151
ese courses were to include Social Life: Its Nature
and Setting, a study of the biological roots of human nature and behav-
ior, the human habitat, and the social and cognitive structure of human
behavior; A Comparative Study of Culture Types, a study of the struc-
ture of literate and nonliterate cultures and societies in the contemporary
world; History and Social Science, a review of the historical perspective
and of basic types of historical methodology, including those used in
archaeology and prehistory, as well as types of historical interpretation
and the functions of history; Statistics in the Social Sciences, an intro-
duction to quantication in the social sciences, including statistical
concepts, measurement, sampling, probability, and correlations; and a
150. “Sub-Committee on Curriculum,” February 4, 1935, ibid.
151. “Sub-Committee on Curriculum,” March 11, 1935, ibid.
A TWENTIETH-CENTURY COSMOS 84
two-quarter course on Social Science and Social Action, a discussion of
basic concepts of political science and economics, focusing on demo-
cratic government as a mode of social choice, state direction in a
free-market economy, the role of education and pressure groups in inu-
encing changes in social attitudes, and the types of group behavior
resulting from conicting social and economic interests.
152
Redeld
believed that the division had the responsibility to continue the work of
general education begun in the College, but on a higher and more sophis-
ticated level, focusing on the multiple ways that the individual disciplines
confronted common social issues and phenomena. He also believed that
it was a responsibility of the University of Chicago to show leadership
in American higher education and research and to do more than merely
“perpetuate the conventional division of labor in the social sciences eld
and preserve the departmental presentations of subject-matter.”
153
Redeld’s proposed new courses would move toward the idea of an
integrated social science by a series of pincer-like interventions. His pro-
gram was in fact a brilliant conceptual attempt to do two things at once.
He hoped to continue the revolutionary curricular élan of the early
1930s, but on a higher level, by providing more transparent interdisci-
plinary pathways from the new general education of the College to the
hyper-specialization of the departments. He also hoped to create a greater
sense of supra-departmental consciousness within the division itself,
making the division more than a series of isolated and mutually distrust-
ing political units. Redeld’s courses were to be created by volunteers
drawn from dierent departments, and students wishing to major in the
152. See the draft in Redeld to the Members of the Sub-Committee, August
27, 1935, ibid.
153. Memorandum of Robert Redeld, December 10, 1935, ibid.
JOHN W. BOYER85
social sciences would be required to take all six courses and a common
nal examination that would be “genuinely integrated” in drawing from
the materials of all of the courses. Fittingly, Robert Hutchins found
Redeld’s proposals to “mark a great advance over the 201 courses. I beg
to oer my congratulations to the Dean and the committee.”
154
Yet Hutchins’s congratulations were premature. When Redeld sub-
mitted his proposals to the faculty of the departments, he encountered
both active and passive resistance.
155
is was particularly the case in
Political Science where Quincy Wright, Frederick L. Schuman, and
Jerome Kerwin wrote trenchant commentaries on Redeld’s proposals.
Wright, who was the most senior, was also the most negative. He insisted
that the integration of the social sciences was a virtual phantom that was
both meaningless and dangerous unless a student had rst mastered the
individual scholarly disciplines. For Wright the proper function of an
undergraduate curriculum was to encourage dierentiation and not
integration.
156
Frederick Schuman in contrast thought that to postpone
such integrative work to graduate school—which is essentially what
Wright proposed—was to consign it to oblivion, since graduate pro-
grams were inevitably even more specialized. Schuman also argued that
the current individual disciplines of the social sciences were products of
a nineteenth-century political and social imagination in which econom-
ics never impinged on politics and where social issues were kept strongly
apart from the state and its scientic sponsorship. For Schuman the
154. Hutchins to Redeld, October 16, 1935, ibid.
155. See the comments reported in “Sub-Committee on Curriculum,” Decem-
ber 11, 1935, ibid.
156. “Comments on the Recommendation of the Sub-Committee on
Curriculum Created by the Executive Committee of the Division of the Social
Sciences,” ibid.
A TWENTIETH-CENTURY COSMOS 86
contemporary world of the 1930s showed how antiquated this compart-
mentalization of the social sciences had become—politics could no
longer be written in ignorance of economics or sociology, for example.
If Chicago were serious about teaching a truly modern perspective on
the social sciences, it would have to develop curricular modes that rep-
resented the scrambled quality of the world of knowledge and action.
157
Jerome Kerwin sided with Wright, urging that the departments oer
seven to eight disciplinary courses that would “acquaint the student with
the standards of criticism toward observations of social phenomena and
concepts about social phenomena employed by the most advanced con-
temporary social sciences.” Although these courses would reect upon
general questions, they would be controlled and staed by the individual
departments, which was in eect, a return to the status quo.
158
Nor did Redeld’s proposal gain unalloyed support from the College,
since Gideonse and Wirth, representing the College, insisted that much
of what Redeld’s committee wanted to achieve was already present in
the existing Social Sciences general course.
159
In the end, Redeld
encountered disharmony from the various departments, where uncer-
tainty reigned about who would teach these new courses and whether
they would lead to a lower prole, perhaps invisibility, for their particular
departments. Facing what Charles Judd called “the phenomenon of
mutual interdepartmental distrust” among the various departments,
157. “Comments on the Memorandum of October 28, 1935 Submitted by
Professor Quincy Wright in Commentary on the Recommendation of the Divi-
sional Subcommittee on Curriculum,” ibid.
158. “Memorandum in Organization of Undergraduate Work in the Social Sci-
ences,” October 28, 1935, ibid.
159. “Sub-Committee on Curriculum,” May 6, 1935, ibid.
JOHN W. BOYER87
Redeld settled for a modest compromise.
160
e existing departmental
201 courses were left in place, but he was authorized to encourage the
experimental creation of a few more boldly interdisciplinary ventures
that would highlight the “general underlying importance of the elds
selected to all students in the social sciences.…e selection and orga-
nization would not be dictated by departmental interests or follow strict
departmental lines.”
161
Redeld hoped that these new courses would
“make a tremendous contribution to the progress of Social Science and
put the Division far ahead of any other institution in this eld.”
162
How-
ever this proved to be little more than face-saving, since none of the new
experimental courses were mounted before the coming of the war. After
the recentering of the BA degree in early 1942, which eliminated any
role for the departments in Chicago’s undergraduate curriculum, the
eort was structurally less compelling in any event. In the end, Redeld
wrote ruefully, if also humorously to Hutchins, “the stirrings as to cur-
riculum in this Division are nothing to shout about. e mountain
labored and brought forth a few grasshoppers.”
163
e failure of Redeld’s
plan must have been a clear sign to Hutchins that Charles Judd was
correct in arguing that both the departments and the faculty associated
with the 1931 general-education courses stood in an unholy alliance. It
might be said that the path toward the radical decision that Hutchins
took in 1942—which essentially stripped the departments of any role
160. “Sub-Committee on Curriculum,” December 11, 1935, ibid.
161. “Sub-Committee on Curriculum,” March 5, 1936; “Report of the Sub-
committee on Curriculum, Division of the Social Sciences,” March 9, 1936,
ibid.
162. “Sub-Committee on Curriculum,” August 13, 1935, ibid.
163. Redeld to Hutchins, July 15, 1936, ibid.
A TWENTIETH-CENTURY COSMOS 88
in undergraduate education at Chicago—was more clearly marked out
after the failure of Redeld’s scheme of 1935–36.
If the Division of the Social Sciences struggled to exploit the ecacy
of the New Plan and to connect it in innovative ways to more specialized
domains of knowledge, the School of Business found that Boucher’s new
general-education program provided an ideal solution to serious educa-
tional problems it had faced for over a decade. It is a little remembered
fact that from 1898 until 1946 the University had an undergraduate
business major, becoming by 1914 “a leader in collegiate education for
business” and developing a curriculum that “had a profound inuence
on programs of collegiate training throughout the United States.”
164
In
1932 the School of Commerce and Administration (renamed the School
of Business in the same year) had 211 undergraduate students, compared
with 55 graduate students, and the tuition income of the undergraduates
was by far the largest share of unrestricted revenue available to the
school.
165
After a hiatus of seven years, the College and the Graduate
School of Business established the Professional Option program in 1953,
under which College students could double count the rst year of the
school’s MBA curriculum for their senior year in the College.
166
For most
of our institutional history, therefore, we have oered interested College
164. “Business Training and Research,” July 1930, 1, Presidents’ Papers, 1925–
1945, box 110, folder 6.
165. In the autumn quarter 1932 undergraduates paid $23,888 in tuition as
opposed to $4,166 by the graduate students. “A Comparative Statement of
Tuition in the School of Business, Autumn Quarter 1931 and Autumn Quarter,
1932,” Presidents’ Papers, 1925–1945, box 110, folder 4.
166. is was accomplished by the Faculty of the College agreeing in late
December 1953 to accept nine courses from the Graduate School of Business as
counting toward a baccalaureate degree, thus recreating a system that oered a
(de facto) business program for College students.
JOHN W. BOYER89
students the possibility of an undergraduate business program. e Uni-
versity’s long experience with professional education was strengthened
by the creation of the New Plan, since after 1931 a primary requirement
for the admission of Chicago students to the school’s business major
became the completion of the New Plan’s general-education courses.
e School of Commerce and Administration had hoped as early as the
mid 1920s to more sharply demarcate the boundary between liberal-arts
general education in the rst two years of college, and the more special-
ized studies, which students could pursue in the eld of commerce in
the second two years.
167
It wanted to base itself on “general education as
administered in secondary schools and junior colleges.” In 1926 the
school decided to abandon instruction in the rst two years of under-
graduate life to the liberal-arts colleges of the University.
168
e creation
of a separate college in 1930 and the New Plan curriculum in 1931 thus
came at exactly the right moment for the school, which renamed itself
as the School of Business in 1932 and announced that its educational
purview would be focused on the nal two years of undergraduate edu-
cation and an additional year that would lead to a master’s degree.
169
e
school’s faculty believed that future businessmen and women had to be
exposed to a rigorous introduction to the major elds of the liberal arts
via the New Plan’s general-education courses, especially courses in the
social, biological, and physical sciences, which the school deemed par-
ticularly important “in view of the highly inter-dependent character of
167. W. H. Spencer, “Memorandum on Business Training and Research at the
University of Chicago,” 1930, 9–11, Presidents’ Papers, 1925–1945, box 110,
folder 4.
168. L. C. Marshall to Max Mason, June 26, 1926, ibid., box 101, folder 10.
169. See Floyd W. Reeves, W. E. Peik, and John Dale Russell, Instructional Prob-
lems in the University (Chicago, 1933), 134–35.
A TWENTIETH-CENTURY COSMOS 90
modern society in which business is carried on.”
170
As early as 1926 the
former dean of the School of Commerce, Leon C. Marshall, had argued:
“when the education of business executives is broadly conceived, antago-
nism between vocational education and liberal education disappears.…
Vocational education for the task of the business executive includes and
must include liberal education.”
171
Two years later Marshall insisted, “let
us accept the attitude that ‘general education’ should never be thought
of as something which has been ‘completed’; and let us agree that a true
professional school is vitally concerned with both ‘general education’
and ‘social values’.”
172
Marshall’s thinking about business education was
greatly inuenced by his work on the University committee chaired by
Chauncey Boucher in 1928 that produced the rst report calling for a
radical reform of undergraduate education at Chicago, including the
creation of a serious program of general education.
173
Marshall’s ideas
had a strong impact on his colleagues. As Professor Wesley N. Mitchell
of the school put it in 1939,
from the very beginning of this development in collegiate education,
the School of Business has assumed its full share of responsibility
170. “Business Training and Research,” July 1930, 9–10, Presidents’ Papers,
1925–1945, box 110, folder 10.
171. Leon C. Marshall, “e Collegiate School of Business at Erehwon,” Journal
of Political Economy 34 (1926): 298–99. More generally, see Leon C. Marshall,
ed., e Collegiate School of Business: Its Status at the Close of the First Quarter of
the Twentieth Century (Chicago, 1928), esp. 3–44, 189–203.
172. Leon C. Marshall, “A University School of Business,” in e Collegiate
School of Business, 199.
173. “Report of the Senate Committee on the Undergraduate Colleges,” May
7, 1928, Dean of the College Records, 1923–1958, box 27, folder 6.
JOHN W. BOYER91
for elevating standards of business education. e program of the
School is designed to develop initiative, independence, and
resourcefulness among its students. It places emphasis upon a sense
of relationships, upon eective habits of work, and upon ability to
analyze and solve problems.…rough analysis of business situa-
tions and problems it endeavors to train students to think eectively
and consistently about these problems and to form valid business
judgments.
174
As a result of the curricular connection between the newly created
College and the School of Business, throughout the 1930s and early
1940s hundreds of students transferred to the school after completing
their general-education curriculum in the College and graduated with
a BA degree in business. Unlike the case of the Social Sciences, the
School of Business had no desire to create additional intermediary struc-
tures between general and more specialized education. For the School
of Business the New Plan thus provided a perfect transition point that
justied the operation of a more focused and analytically grounded cur-
riculum of business education for advanced undergraduates.
174. Wesley N. Mitchell to Emery Filbey, November 30, 1939, Presidents’
Papers, 1925–1945, box 110, folder 4.
A TWENTIETH-CENTURY COSMOS 92
COLLISIONS AT THE TOP:
ROBERT HUTCHINS
AND THE CRITIQUE OF
THE NEW PLAN
erhaps the greatest challenge faced by the New Plan
program was that the new president, Robert Maynard
Hutchins, felt substantial ambivalence toward it and
toward several of its leaders. It is one of the great ironies
of our history that Hutchins—the man usually associated with the
founding of the Core—came to dislike the general-education courses
that Boucher’s teams had put together, and that so many of the leaders
of these courses became ardent opponents of Hutchins’s leadership as
time went on. Maynard Krueger, who as a young instructor in the 1930s
had witnessed Hutchins’s covert criticisms of the New Plan at rsthand,
later recalled, “the new College [curriculum of 1930–31] had been initi-
ated before Hutchins ever got hold of it, and it was not being planned
on the basis of which Hutchins would have preferred.” According to
Krueger, Hutchins’s connection with Mortimer Adler in 1930 already
predisposed him toward a “heavy emphasis on the Great Books.”
Hutchins “would have preferred that from the very beginning…[the
curriculum] be[come] what he did make a great eort to make it later,
but at the time, the people who were doing that reorganizing were not
Hutchins’s preferred people.”
175
Beginning in the autumn of 1930, Robert Hutchins had indeed
collaborated with a young, brash, and highly controversial scholar from
Columbia University, Mortimer Adler, in organizing a great-books
175. Interview of Maynard Krueger with Christopher Kimball, May 11, 1988,
3, Oral History Program.
P
JOHN W. BOYER93
honors course each quarter over a two-year cycle. Modeled on a similar
course taught at Columbia University by John Erskine, the seminar was
called General Honors 110 (in 1934 it was renamed Classics of the
Western World), and in the rst year it assigned extensive readings from
the work of Homer, Herodotus, ucydides, Aristophanes, Plato, Aris-
totle, Cicero, Vergil, Plutarch, Marcus Aurelius, the New Testament, St.
Augustine, omas Aquinas, Dante, Cervantes, and other worthies.
(e second year then ran from Duns Scotus to Freud.)
176
e course
met two hours a week on Tuesday evenings, with no formal lectures,
and enrolled twenty freshmen, the students being responsible for doing
all of the assigned reading for each class. eir evaluation consisted of
an oral exam, administered by outside examiners, as well as an essay
exam based on the analysis of selected quotes. e reactions of the out-
side examiners were very positive, with Richard McKeon of Columbia
University suggesting in 1932 that “to judge by the examinations of the
sixteen students who appeared before me, I can think of no more eec-
tive course in collegiate education than that which resulted in the
training of those students.” Similarly, Stringfellow Barr of the University
of Virginia observed that “I can hardly overstate my admiration for the
intellectual poise with which your students have taken hold.”
177
e
College Curriculum Committee eventually voted to allow students to
use the nal examination in this course as a substitute for one of the
elective sequences beyond the general-education survey courses that each
Chicago undergraduate was required to take under the New Plan.
176. e list of readings for the General Honors course is in Presidents’ Papers,
1925–1945, box 38, folder 5.
177. McKeon to Hutchins, June 12, 1932 and Barr to Hutchins, June 15, 1931,
ibid.
A TWENTIETH-CENTURY COSMOS 94
Mortimer Adler’s arrival on campus had hardly been fortuitous, since
Hutchins’s failed attempt to impose him (as well as Scott Buchanan of
the University of Virginia) during the 1929–30 academic year on the
Department of Philosophy as an associate professor was a political disas-
ter.
178
By early 1931, when Chauncey Boucher was organizing the teams
to plan the new general-education courses, he wrote candidly to
Hutchins: “nearly every day I encounter an expression of distrust or fear
regarding the selection of men to be put in charge of the four general
divisional courses provided in the report of the Curriculum Commit-
tee—namely, that Mr. Adler will be put in charge of the Humanities
course, and that others of his ilk will be brought in for the other courses.
In each instance I think I have convinced the person that such fears are
unwarranted.”
179
Little did Boucher know what lay ahead.
Adler proved a potent inuence on Hutchins. ey had rst met in
1927 when Hutchins was at Yale Law School and he engaged Adler on
a project in the study of the logic of evidence in the law on the recom-
mendation of the British philosopher C. K. Ogden.
180
Adler’s rst book,
178. e events were described in detail in “A Statement from e Department
of Philosophy,” [1930], Presidents’ Papers, 1925–1945, box 106, folder 14. See
also Amy A. Kass, “Radical Conservatives for Liberal Education” (Phd diss.,
Johns Hopkins University, 1973), 108–18; and Hutchins to Adler, November
11, 1929, December 4, 1929, and January 30, 1930, Adler Papers, box 56.
McKeon’s name was also on the list, making up what Hutchins called the “holy
trinity.” Ibid., January 30, 1930. Adler later provided his own account of the
asco in his Philosopher at Large: An Intellectual Autobiography (New York,
1977), 129–30, 145–48.
179. Boucher to Hutchins, March 3, 1931, Presidents’ Papers, 1925–1945, box
106, folder 14.
180. Adler, Philosopher at Large, 107–10; Mary Ann Dzuback, Robert M.
Hutchins: Portrait of an Educator (Chicago, 1991), 88–108.
JOHN W. BOYER95
Dialectic, was about to be published under Ogden’s auspices. is book,
and many of Adler’s other writings of the 1930s, already have the ency-
clopedic and Aristotelian character that later became identied as Adler’s
omism.
181
Dialectic ranges over the history of Western philosophy in
pursuit of a taxonomic ordering of kinds of inquiry. Adler claimed:
“Dialectic is a convenient technical name for the kind of thinking which
takes place when human beings enter into dispute.…It is presented here
as a methodology signicantly dierent from the procedure of the empir-
ical scientist or…the mathematician. It is an intellectual process in which
all men engage in so far as they undertake to be critical of their own
opinions, or the opinions of others.”
182
Adler distinguishes throughout
the book between theoretical sciences (the traditional branches of phi-
losophy) and the modern empirical sciences. He thinks of his inquiry as
identifying an overarching methodology for all science since “in so far
as any science achieves theoretical form, its universe of discourse has
dialectical structure.”
183
As early as 1927, then, Adler was trying to pro-
vide a theoretical framework for the kinds of discussions that were
already taking place in Erskine’s General Honors course at Columbia.
His philosophical writings at Chicago and his teaching with Hutchins
carry this work forward, and Hutchins’s later juxtaposition of theoretical
ideas (which were good) against empirical facts (which were not) owed
directly from the inuence of Adler’s conceptual frameworks. It is
181. For example, What Man Has Made of Man (New York, 1937), a series of
lectures on philosophical psychology, and “An Analysis of the Kinds of Knowl-
edge” (1935), an outline of epistemology ranging from Aristotle and Euclid
through Galileo and Newton to modern empirical social science, which was
circulated in mimeograph through the University of Chicago Bookstore.
182. Mortimer Adler, Dialectic (New York, 1927), v.
183. Ibid., 239.
A TWENTIETH-CENTURY COSMOS 96
natural that Adler was drawn to the work of St. omas Aquinas, since
omas’s Summae provide a model for both the encyclopedic treatment
of philosophical problems and the engagement with all accessible tradi-
tional learning that Adler found attractive.
184
In Adler Hutchins found
a man nearly his own age who possessed substantial learning, conten-
tious eloquence, and profound intellectual ambition. It was a natural
collaboration. Both men aspired to traditional philosophical learning of
great seriousness and scope, and both men, for better or worse, aspired
to remake the institutions of the University in the pursuit of that ideal.
e Adler-Hutchins great-books course, which Adler conceived as a
radical alternative to the kind of curriculum that Chauncey Boucher
had instituted in 1931, was one ongoing challenge to the New Plan.
Indeed, the glowing evaluations about his great-books course that
Hutchins received from men like McKeon and Barr must have had a
powerful impact in motivating him to think beyond the curricular struc
-
tures of the New Plan. A second challenge came forward in 1933 in the
person of Ronald Crane, a respected professor of English who initiated
discussions in the autumn of 1933 about restructuring the curriculum
in a way that would privilege humanistic courses at the expense of the
natural sciences.
185
Crane also generated considerable controversy in the
spring of 1934 by writing a memorandum impugning the intellectual
ambitions of the Department of History. e memorandum arose from
a specic set of issues unrelated to the New Plan—the decision of the
Department of History to associate itself with the Division of the Social
184. Adler makes the case for linking his work with Aquinas’s in his 1938 Aqui-
nas Lecture at Marquette University, Saint omas and the Gentiles (Milwaukee,
1938).
185. See John W. Boyer, ree Views of Continuity and Change at the University
of Chicago (Chicago, 1999), 50–53.
JOHN W. BOYER97
Sciences for administrative purposes in January 1933, which caused
considerable unhappiness among faculty in the Humanities.
186
One of
Crane’s arguments was about the need for greater clarity as to who was
responsible for history and who in fact was a historian: “it has come to
be widely assumed among professional historians that their proper
domain is coextensive with the history of culture or civilization, and
that they ought to give increasing attention in their teaching and writing
to subject matters, such as economics, philosophy, science, and even art
which are already organized elsewhere in the University as special his-
torical disciplines.” In Crane’s mind, social and political history were
the legitimate province of the “professional historians,” but other
domains of historical inquiry and teaching should properly be left to
experts in the relevant substantive elds. Since History was Chauncey
Boucher’s home department, and since two prominent historians—
Ferdinand Schevill and Arthur Scott—were the primary leaders of the
Humanities general course that explicitly sought to go beyond political
and social history to include literature, art, and philosophy, Crane’s
intervention could also be seen as a further covert challenge to Boucher
and the New Plan.
187
186. “Minutes of the Department of History, January 13, 1933,” Department
of History Records, box 19, folder 6; “Minutes of the University Senate,” March
11, 1933.
187. R. S. Crane, “e Organization of History in a University,” April 1934,
and the Department of History’s response “e Objectives of a Department of
History,” June 1934, are led in ibid., box 25, folder 3. In his response to
Crane’s report Boucher cleverly urged that the conditions that Crane identied
should lead History to urge its graduate students to take more courses in spe-
cialty departments, not less, and thus gain greater professional preparation to
order do history of a broad interdisciplinary nature. See Boucher to H. F. Mac-
Nair, May 4, 1934, ibid.
A TWENTIETH-CENTURY COSMOS 98
As his contacts with Adler and Crane grew more intense, Hutchins
drifted away from whatever supercial commitment to the New Plan he had
had in 1931. is shift is apparent in Hutchins’s condential report to the
Board of Trustees in early 1935, where he observed of the New Plan that
only the four general courses can be called attempts to give a
general education. ey are barely half the ordinary student’s
work. e rest of his time he spends in specialization, which by
the legislation is the task of the Divisions, and in “tool” subjects,
which he should take only if he is going on into the Divisions. e
curriculum is seriously over weighted on the side of the natural
sciences. Two divisions of natural science are necessary for admin-
istrative purposes; it does not follow that two natural science
courses are necessary for a general education. A serious result is
that the Fine Arts are squeezed out or almost out of the curricu-
lum.…e curriculum would be much better if there were a
general course in the natural sciences, the social sciences, the ne
arts, philosophy, and history. e diculties with such an arrange-
ment are (1) that we have no adequate sta in the ne arts and (2)
it might be hard to get those who teach the present courses to vote
to change them. e whole course of study suers greatly from a
disease that aicts all college teaching in America, the informa-
tion disease. I have never favored survey courses in the usual sense.
A hasty look at all the facts in a given eld does not seem very
useful from any but a conversational point of view. I hoped that
the general courses would deal with the leading ideas in the various
elds of knowledge. Although some progress has been made in
this direction, the great weakness of the curriculum is still its
emphasis on current information.
JOHN W. BOYER99
Hutchins then continued: “I believe that departmental courses of all
kinds should be excluded from a general education. I am sure, too, that
a college course which is based largely on the reading of great books,
with lectures on them and discussions of them, is more likely to produce
understanding, even of the contemporary world, than a vast mass of
current data.”
188
ese tensions came to a head in 1934 and 1935, when the New Plan
sustained a series of public collisions, the like of which the University
had never before experienced, at least in the case of undergraduate educa-
tion. At the December Convocation of the University in late 1933 Robert
Hutchins opened a rhetorical battlefront by denouncing those who
would inundate the young with facts as opposed to concepts in under-
graduate teaching: “the gadgeteers and the data-collectors, masquerading
as scientists, have threatened to become the supreme chieftains of the
scholarly world.” In contrast, the University should really be a “center
of rational thought,” which was the “only basis of education and
research.” e current system of education was unfortunately designed
“to pour facts into the student with splendid disregard of the certainty
that he will forget them, that they may not be facts by the time he gradu-
ates, and that he won’t know what to do with them if they are.…e
three worst words in education are ‘character’, ‘personality’, and ‘facts’.
Facts are the core of an anti-intellectual curriculum.” Instead of collect-
ing evidence, the “gaze of the University should be turned toward ideas,”
which would “promote understanding of the nature of the world and of
man.”
189
Hutchins continued this theme in early January 1934 at the
188. Report of the President, 1930–1934, February 1, 1935, 21–22.
189. e speech garnered the attention of the local press. See Edgar Ansel
Mowrer, “Hutchins Stirs University by Questioning Science as a Basis for Phi-
losophy,” Chicago Daily News, December 27, 1933, 5.
A TWENTIETH-CENTURY COSMOS 100
annual trustee-faculty dinner where he insisted, “I have attempted to
show that facts are not science and that the collection of facts will not
make a science; that scientic research, therefore, cannot consist of the
accumulation of data alone; that the anti-intellectual account of science
given by scientists has produced unfortunate eects on the work of other
disciplines which wished to be scientic; and that our anti-intellectual
scheme of education, resulting in large part from this anti-intellectual
account, was misconceived and incapable of accomplishing the objects
set for it by its sponsors.” He further attacked those university teachers
who “oend us in lling their students full of facts, in putting them
through countless measurements, in multiplying their courses, in insist-
ing that they must have more of the students’s time so that they can give
him more information.”
190
Hutchins’s discursive framework—“ideas” as
being more important than “facts” and learning more important than
memorizing—was highly simplistic and betrayed a fundamental mis-
understanding about the way in which modern scientic research was
conducted, but it aorded a fascinating stance with which to take the
moral high ground, accusing universities of a thoughtless disregard for
the truly essential features of the mission of liberal education.
Hutchins’s discursive bravado, which could be read as targeting either
the New Plan courses directly or at least impugning the curricular imagi-
nation of the faculty who had organized them, gave encouragement to
the then editor of the Maroon, a young undergraduate by the name of
John Barden, to launch a frontal assault on the New Plan. Barden was
a New Plan student with a relatively modest academic record (he had
190. Both speeches were later published in Robert M. Hutchins, No Friendly
Voice (Chicago, 1936), 24–40.
JOHN W. BOYER101
received Cs in his comprehensive exams).
191
Barden had met Mortimer
Adler when he audited the Adler-Hutchins General Honors course and
also enrolled in the autumn of 1933 in Adler’s class on Law in Western
European Intellectual History. Barden quickly fell under Adler’s intel-
lectual sway.
192
In early January 1934 Barden wrote an editorial in which he slammed
Chauncey Boucher’s New Plan curriculum as purveying facts and not
ideas: “if we assume that a general education does consist of a collection
of ideas rather than a collection of facts, the new plan is not administer-
ing a general education.”
193
Barden continued this theme in weekly
commentaries throughout the winter and spring quarters of 1934.
Barden’s critiques of the New Plan as providing facts and not ideas might
be said to have the appearance of farce, given the heavy theoretical
superstructures oered by Gideonse et al., but his real target seems to
have been the New Plan’s basic assumption that scholarly professionalism
and current research should inform the teaching of general education.
He seemed to have a clear bias against the natural sciences and against
the structure of the comprehensive exams that tested a student’s mastery
of such research. In a subsequent essay, in the form of a dialogue between
Socrates and Exercon on the ideal of the University, Barden portrayed
Socrates as arguing with rened irony that “many people believe that
general education consists of exposition of the latest results of modern
191. Frank H. Knight to Walter B. Smith, December 7, 1934, Frank H. Knight
Papers, box 62, folder 2.
192. See Barden’s use of the Adler-Hutchins great-books course as a model for
a future curriculum in the College in the Chicago Maroon, March 8, 1934, 2.
For Adler’s subsequent account of these events, see his Philosopher at Large,
149–90.
193. Chicago Maroon, January 5, 1934, 2.
A TWENTIETH-CENTURY COSMOS 102
research.”
194
Barden also attacked the New Plan lectures as mainly
recounting facts that could easily be obtained in textbooks.
195
Instead of
teaching “great” general ideas, based on original sources that were pre-
sumably easily accessible to an undergraduate, the faculty were presenting
highly technical courses based on advanced research in which students
were overwhelmed with empirical data before any larger syntheses could
be oered.
Within a month of Barden’s initial attacks and Hutchins’s speeches,
the student biology club Alpha Zeta Beta invited Mortimer Alder and
Anton J. Carlson to a public debate in Mandel Hall before seven hundred
students on February 9, 1934, on the theme of facts versus ideas. is
uproarious event consisted of Carlson taking the stage and reading a
series of propositions defending the scientic method, followed by
Adler’s witty and ironic replies, which defended Hutchins’s ideas as
coherent and reasonable and, by implication, criticized Carlson’s presen-
tation as an example of the obfuscations of a kind of scientic research
that seemed to deny the importance of conceptual abstractions in the
articulation of the scientic method.
196
194. Ibid., January 9, 1934, 2.
195. Ibid., February 20, 1934, 2.
196. Ibid., February 9, 1934, 1. Carlson had denounced Hutchins’s views in a
newspaper interview in late December 1933, insisting, “the particularly disturb-
ing element in the present instance is that it comes from the president of a
university whose main distinction has come from its achievements in science.”
Giord Ernest, “Fact-Finding of Science Defended by Dr. Carlson; Denies
Charges of Hutchins,” Chicago Daily News, December 28, 1933, 8. Adler’s notes
for the February 1934 debate are in the Adler Papers, box 57.
JOHN W. BOYER103
Emboldened by Adler’s rhetorical brinksmanship, Barden commis-
sioned four College seniors to write critiques of the four general survey
courses in March 1934, based on their published syllabi. Because they
had matriculated in 1930, the four essay writers were studying under the
requirements of the old curriculum, and none of them had actually taken
any of the New Plan’s general-education courses. What they had in
common was that all four had been students in the Adler-Hutchins great-
books class, which in eect had become a rival general-education course
based on very dierent intellectual principles. Janet Kalven attacked the
Humanities course as being a course in intellectual history oered by
nonphilosophers, when, to her mind, only philosophers were competent
to undertake such an assignment. Kalven claimed to nd many “oenses
against sound scholarship” in the organization of the course. Particularly
oensive for Kalven was the syllabus’s cavalier treatment of Plato and
Aristotle, which suggested that there were important dierences between
the thought of these two philosophers, where Kalven insisted they were
tightly bound by similar theories of man and reason. In all, the Humani-
ties syllabus was “sophistical, dogmatic, anti-intellectual, inaccurate,
misleading, inconsistent, sentimental, and slovenly.” James Martin criti-
cized the Social Sciences course as being lled with covert ideas of
Comtean positivism, the theoretical structure of which he proceeded to
critique. Ignoring most of the actual material taught in the course,
Martin then opined that the course as a whole was based on “bad schol-
arship.” Darwin Anderson thought that the Physical Sciences course
suered from too heavy a reliance on evolutionary theory and “mecha-
nistic” theories of the origins of the universe and urged that the course
spend more time investigating the “fundamental principles of natural
philosophy.” Finally, Clarice Anderson attacked the Biological Sciences
course as having a “mechanistic bias” and as being too dependent on
A TWENTIETH-CENTURY COSMOS 104
evolutionary frameworks, and then spent the rest of her essay explicating
Aristotle’s theory of human nature and its relevance for modern
science.
197
e four critiques were gratuitous, poorly argued, and naive, and
other College students who were enrolled in the New Plan courses
quickly mounted a counteroensive.
198
One such pro–New Plan student,
Marie Berger, gathered 250 signatures on a petition accusing Barden of
conducting an authoritarian crusade that was divorced from the majority
of student opinion. Berger pointed out that the four writers had no
exposure to the courses they were writing about with such animus, and
that this was an unfair method by which to proceed.
199
e attacks in the Maroon clearly got under Chauncey Boucher’s skin.
Boucher thought that Barden was a “smart aleck” who had demonstrated
“bad taste.” Stunned by the negative publicity generated by the Maroon,
Boucher had the College Curriculum Committee issue a memorandum
denouncing the recent criticisms of the New Plan as the work of “ratio-
nalistic absolutism which brings with it an atmosphere of intolerance of
liberal, scientic, and democratic attitudes” that was “incompatible with
the ideal of a community of scholars and students recognizable as the
University of Chicago.”
200
Upon receiving a copy of this statement,
Barden wrote an ironic, but deeply insulting, letter to Boucher, wonder-
ing why Boucher would have taken the views of students in the Maroon
so seriously and adding, “I don’t care how good or bad a college news-
197. Ibid., March 8, 1934, 1, 3, 5–6.
198. Ibid., April 11, 1934, 1–4
199. Ibid., March 14, 1934, 2.
200. “e Educational Objectives of the College in the University of Chicago,”
April 21, 1934, Presidents’ Papers, 1925–1945, box 19a, folder 3.
JOHN W. BOYER105
paper may be, it is never worth ocial notice by any division of the
faculty. I feel that the College faculty have immeasurably degraded
themselves by ocially recognizing e Daily Maroon even exists.”
201
What Barden failed to appreciate, of course, was that Boucher’s real
worry was that Robert Hutchins not only agreed with the attacks, but
that Adler and he had encouraged the students to press them.
e debate about facts versus ideas had a fascinating afterwash among
the faculty from the Department of Economics. Harry Gideonse kept a
poster board outside his oce in Cobb Hall lled with clippings from
the Maroon, to which he added derisive commentaries and which were
available for students to see. More importantly, Gideonse submitted a
commentary to the Maroon in June 1934 asserting that Adler and his
followers were “pathic and pathetic” in their search for “certainty” in
knowledge and values, presenting themselves as a group of “tired young
men [who] are rejecting the tentative groping for truth that is character-
istic of modern science.”
202
Frank H. Knight, who was a voluble and
assertive personality and not easily intimidated, also entered the fray
with a strident attack on Adler’s alleged medievalism, accusing those
who would attack modern thought (like, presumably, Mortimer Adler
and Robert Hutchins) of engaging in “absolutistic verbalism,” “‘wish-
thinking’ as a substitute for truth,” and “intellectual dictatorship.”
rowing omism in the same class of “isms” as Marxism, Knight
insisted that both were “social reform propaganda,” and that “neither
society nor any group or class in it can be an intellectual community
unless we begin with an overwhelming presumption against the
201. Barden to Boucher, May 3, 1934, Adler Papers, box 56.
202. Harry D. Gideonse, “e New War of Science and Dogma,” Chicago
Maroon, June 7, 1934, 2.
A TWENTIETH-CENTURY COSMOS 106
soundness of any teaching whose promoters cannot place themselves
above suspicion of motivation by other interests than love of truth and
right. Between advocating and truth-seeking, meaning the quest of right
answers to problems, there is a nearly impassable gulf.”
203
After trying to publish his broadside “Is Modern ought Anti-Intel-
lectual?” in the Maroon, where Barden torpedoed it, Knight sent it in
samizdat fashion to various key faculty leaders around campus.
204
He
sent it to Chauncey Boucher with the comment, “the very sources of
intellectual integrity are being systematically poisoned in the University
as a whole.…Of course we cannot be absolutely sure how far the Presi-
dent is backing the rankest kind of empty and bigoted verbalism and
encouragement to dogmatism on the part of the most incompetent, but
the evidence seems to me overwhelmingly for conviction.…It seems to
me impossible to believe that the President is not consciously conniving
at, if not deliberately pushing, the whole uproar.”
205
Chauncey Boucher
responded, “I know how much real genius the College Faculty members
have shown in the immense amount of work they have done with verve
and enthusiasm to design and administer what I know to be the best
College program in the country. A Dean who would remain passive and
not turn his hand to save this glorious achievement from being wrecked,
203. “Is Modern ought Anti-Intellectual?” Knight Papers, box 61, folder 22.
It was eventually published in e University of Chicago Magazine, November
1934, 20–23, with Knight complaining about the Maroon’s refusal to print it.
204. “I am sure Adler wouldn’t get to rst base, or six inches from home plate,
if he had to stand on his own feet, but if the President’s public utterances and
general conduct mean anything at all the thing is a serious menace. If a leading
university jumps for medievalism as a cure for the perplexities of modern life
and thought, then the human race deserves to be drowned in something besides
water.” Knight to Beardsley Ruml, June 23, 1934, ibid.
205. Knight to Boucher, July 28, 1934, ibid.
JOHN W. BOYER107
would not be worth the powder to blow him to Hell.”
206
Boucher also
insisted, “if the Faculty will but stick together and present a nearly united
front, they can ‘get’ any damned Dean or even a President who can be
shown to be a nuisance rather than an aid.” It says much about how
dispiriting the situation had become for the rst Core organizers that
their putative leader and the real architect of the New Plan, Chauncey
Boucher, expressed himself in such strident, but also humiliating terms.
e dispute also found its way into the sanctums of the Department
of History, where the historians found themselves on the defensive by
the memo written by Ronald Crane. Crane would later turn against
Hutchins, but in 1934 he included himself along with Adler and
Hutchins as working in common on behalf of “our educational ends.”
207
Even before Crane’s broadside the nervous chairman of the Department
of History, Bernadotte Schmitt, who felt that his department was par-
ticularly exposed in the context of Hutchins’s attack on fact mongering,
circularized his colleagues with a memo arguing that their graduate
courses might be seen to be too fact oriented, and urging them to restruc-
ture them to be more “interpretative and integrating.”
208
Schmitt met
with opposition from his fellows, and soon had to back down.
209
e spring of 1935 then brought a wholly dierent kind of challenge.
e Walgreen Aair has been the subject of another of my essays, and
206. Boucher to Knight, July 31, 1934, ibid.
207. Crane to Adler, July 31, 1934, Adler Papers, box 56.
208. Memorandum of Bernadotte E. Schmitt, January 29, 1934, Department
of History Records, box 25, folder 3. Ironically, the kind of courses that Schmitt
wanted on the graduate level was already present in Schevill’s Humanities gen-
eral course in the College.
209. William T. Hutchinson Diary, entries of February 14, 1934, and February
19, 1934.
A TWENTIETH-CENTURY COSMOS 108
I will not repeat that story here.
210
But it is worth remembering that the
context for Lucille Norton’s accusations that she had been taught pro-
communist doctrines at the College and manipulated to embrace
communism was the fact that she was a student in the Social Sciences
general course taught by Harry Gideonse. Once her uncle, Charles Wal-
green, had made his accusation, and made it publicly, the University
community and Robert Hutchins found themselves caught up in the
circus-like atmosphere of a Red scare. Walgreen and the Hearst press
that manipulated Walgreen tried to tar a number of individuals at the
University, but among the central players in the end were Norton’s teach-
ers in Social Sciences I, Harry Gideonse and Louis Wirth. Gideonse
volunteered to testify before the Illinois Senate Committee investigating
the case, and he used his testimony as an opportunity not only to re-
but Walgreen’s accusations directly—he proudly reported that of the
5,987 pages of reading that a student was expected to do in Social
Science I, less than 1 percent had anything to do with communism, and
that about three thousand pages were related to American governmental
institutions—but he also denounced “the entire trend toward collectiv-
ism—whether of a Fascist or Communist sort—with the gravest
concern.” Gideonse insisted that it was the responsibility of a university
to provide its students with opportunities to debate current controversies
“in light of established facts and critical scholarship.”
211
For anyone
familiar with Gideonse’s confrontation with Barden the year before, and
with Frank Knight’s denunciation of intellectual authoritarianism on
campus, Gideonse’s choice of words would not have been lost on the
210. John W. Boyer, Academic Freedom and the Modern University: e Experi-
ence of the University of Chicago, rev. ed. (Chicago, 2016), 42–66.
211. Testimony of Harry D. Gideonse, May 24, 1935, 122–29, here 125–26,
Laird Bell Papers, box 8, folder 8.
JOHN W. BOYER109
University audience. at Robert Hutchins found himself in the ironi-
cally frustrating situation of defending Gideonse’s right to teach the
Communist Manifesto, and that he did so eloquently and uninchingly,
says something about Hutchins’s own core values.
e Walgreen controversy preoccupied students in the College and
led to various statements which allowed students to mobilize the critical
reading and writing skills that they had been taught in the New Plan’s
survey courses. One young woman who was a friend of Lucille Norton
wrote a paper on the aair, entitled “e ‘Ism Witch Scare’,” in which
she insisted that Harry Gideonse was a “self-styled pro-capitalist con-
servative” who could hardly be accused of purveying communism to
Chicago undergraduates. But, in her view, what Gideonse’s course did
do was to expose students to a range of views about the American politi-
cal and economic system, which she found healthy:
If persons in college are not suciently mature to think about the
possibilities of government other than American, when will they
be?…If we cannot think freely, discuss freely, and study freely all
manner of social organization or disorganization in the universities
where every possible opportunity for nding the truth is made
available, where shall we go?…the University does not teach sub-
versive doctrines. ey do not advocate an unquestioning
acceptance of any principle of government. ey are attempting
to teach intelligent criticism of government and economic philo-
sophies so that we may more wisely work toward an American
Utopia, accepting that which advances the cause, rejecting that
which retards.
A TWENTIETH-CENTURY COSMOS 110
She concluded by noting, “I hope I have succeeded in conveying the
impression that we freshmen are not so immature that we cannot think
for ourselves.”
212
Harry Gideonse had played a minor part in the Barden-Maroon
asco, but his role as a leader of the disloyal opposition to Robert
Hutchins grew rapidly after 1934. Maynard Krueger later insisted that
Gideonse was “the chief vocal leader of an opposition to Hutchins,” not
in the least because he was respected by the faculty of Physical Sciences
and Biological Sciences.
213
He became the preeminent spokesman for
what Krueger called the “anti-Hutchins position” on the faculty of the
later 1930s.
214
Harry Gideonse was rst brought to the attention of the
Department of Economics by William Ogburn, who had known him
during the years he spent at Columbia University in New York. Gideonse
212. Alda M. Luebbe, “is ‘Ism Witch Scare’.” Mary Gilson sent a copy of this
paper to Aaron Brumbaugh on December 23, 1935, with the comment, “she
told me she gave Mr. Walgreen a copy. Not bad for an 18 year old girl, is it?”
Dean of the College Records, 1923–1958, box 6, folder 7.
213. Interview of Maynard Krueger with Christopher Kimball, May 25, 1988,
13.
214.“I stayed in close touch with him all the rest of his life. I always thought of
him as more nearly an Englishman than an American, despite the fact that I
knew he was Dutch. He was on the liberal side of all social economic questions
and he regarded what he understood to be the Hutchins position—and what I
understood the Hutchins position, also—as a view of educational content that
was against the modern and back toward the utterly classical content. While
Gideonse, in prescribing reading lists for courses in the College, made some
considerable amount of classical formulations, he didn’t regard himself as having
any intention of becoming a captive of that view. at position of his was very
quickly appreciated by the people of rather high standing here in both the Bio-
logical and the Physical Sciences.…In fact, he was more nearly a spokesman for
the anti-Hutchins position than anybody in the Physical or Biological Sciences.”
Interview of Maynard Krueger with Christopher Kimball, April 28, 1988, 5.
JOHN W. BOYER111
was hired in early 1930 to coordinate the department’s undergraduate
program, but within a year of his coming he was oered the opportunity
to become the coordinator of the College’s new Social Sciences general
courses created in 1931. Although hired as an associate professor, he was
not given a tenured appointment, and this fact soon became crucial in
the drama that eventually played itself out. When Gideonse was rst
proposed for an appointment by the Department of Economics in 1930,
then Chair Harry Millis noted: “At twenty-nine he is not a real econo-
mist and he may never become an economist of the rst rank. He is,
however, an excellent teacher, a natural leader, and a real personality. He
seems to be able to draw the line neatly between what is good for and
eectual with young people, and what is not, and has had interesting
and varied experience and background for one of his years.…Of course,
the appointment of a young man, especially to function as in this case,
is more or less of an experiment, and involves a certain amount of risk.
It is partly for that reason that I recommend a three-year contract.”
Hutchins approved the appointment, but with the discouraging proviso,
“ok if the Department understands they may be choosing this as [against]
a ‘great economist’.”
215
In October 1935 Gideonse rejected calls that he and his colleagues
make the Social Sciences course more “integrated” and systematic. To
Aaron Brumbaugh he pointed out that
to call a group of related disciplines the division of the social sciences
does not create a social science, any more than the creation of the
division of the humanities creates a humanity. e term “social
215. See Millis to Woodward, January 23, 1930, Presidents’ Papers, 1925–1940,
Appointments and Budgets, box 25, folder 5.
A TWENTIETH-CENTURY COSMOS 112
science” is a mistranslation of the German “sozialwissenschaft”
which is correctly translated as “knowledge about society” rather
than as social science. A rst year course in social sciences (we call
it “introduction to the study of contemporary society” in our syl-
labus) is therefore not comparable to a rst-year course in the
physical sciences.…I think my colleagues would join me in saying
that if at any time any one should be able to persuade a committee
chosen from a list of representative members of the Division (say,
for instance, Redeld, Merriam, Viner, Ogburn, Millis, Wright,
Knight, etc.) of the general validity of any principles of “systematic
Harry Gideonse, circa 1935
JOHN W. BOYER113
social science” not now taught in our College work, we shall cheer-
fully accept their ndings and introduce these “principles”. As it
stands, “systematic social science” is a gment of uninformed
imagination in so far as it extends beyond the boundaries of what
is now taught in the introductory courses.
216
Gideonse continued by insisting that “the function of the college is to
teach in the best possible manner the results of the best established
scholarship. It is not its function to teach material that is utterly unac-
ceptable to representative scholarship and in many respects antithetical
to its dominant tendencies.”
Nor was Gideonse alone in these views. ey were consistently shared
by his colleagues. Maynard Krueger later remembered, “in the social
sciences there was never a time, from the time Harry Gideonse came
here, from the time the sta was organized, when the Great Books would
have got any votes in that sta. Now, that doesn’t mean they were against
good books, but it did mean that they did not propose to be captured
by something that they regarded with very great suspicion. e concept
of the Great Books…was a concept that had a great deal of disrespect
amongst members of the faculty.”
217
Gideonse followed his rejoinder to Brumbaugh a year later with an
essay in October 1936 in Social Studies where he took up the issue of the
pervasive search for systems of certainty in contemporary intellectual
and political practice, ranging from “the absolutism of fascism to that
216. Gideonse to Brumbaugh, October 31, 1935, 5, Dean of the College
Records, 1923–1958, box 8, folder 2.
217. Interview of Maynard Krueger with Christopher Kimball, May 11, 1988,
30–31.
A TWENTIETH-CENTURY COSMOS 114
of communism, and cover[ing] in its broad sweep the curious antics of
those who have found a ‘Road Back’ by retiring to the ‘rational order’
of Aristotle and St. omas of Aquinas.” In the context of the American
academy Gideonse saw this trend as a kind of radical counterpoint to
the destruction of the old classics-based educational system of the nine-
teenth century. Having given itself over to “freedom of election” the
academy now found itself surrounded by those who proered easy and
comfortable solutions to restore holistic order via ideological prescrip-
tions and theoretical syntheses drawn from the distant past. Gideonse
did not deny the need for overcoming the disjointedness of modern
knowledge, but he insisted that this chaos could only be overcome by
embracing modern thought and modern science on their own terms and
seeking problem-oriented solutions drawn from the new knowledge of
the various disciplines. Rather than training “xed persons for xed
duties” with incantations of past dogmas, it was the obligation of the
modern college to educate exible minds who would see through the
allures and temptations of the “systems.” Gideonse argued,
the clamor for a rational order, for a comprehensive set of rst
principles with “due subordination” of historical and current
empirical material selected with an eye to illustration or conrma-
tion of metaphysics, is essentially a claim to intellectual
dictatorship.…e tide of increasing specialized knowledge will
continue to run, metaphysical or administrative Canutes to the
contrary notwithstanding.…Our basic problem is not that of
improved means to unimproved ends, but rather that means are
ever more available to ends ever more muddled and evanescent.
Philosophy’s most tempting opportunity lies in the clarication
and statement of the values by which we live, and such a
JOHN W. BOYER115
clarication of values will spring from a detailed and synthetic
knowledge of the conditioning means rather than from sterile
parroting of the stale metaphysics of the past.
218
Gideonse also tangled with the powerful chair of the Department of
Education (and general supporter of Robert Hutchins), Charles Judd,
who denounced the rst-year Social Sciences course as taking up “in far
too great detail many of the intricate problems of economics” and as
conceiving “of the organization of society as determined by the forces
which have brought about the Industrial Revolution.”
219
Judd believed
that Gideonse’s essay in Social Studies smacked of intolerance of rival
views: “You go out of your way, as it seems to me, from time to time to
combat the people who have ideas that are not in agreement with your
own. I am accustomed to thinking of discussions of the curriculum as
objective rather than partisan. I have never been able to understand how
some of you who are students of society ignore so completely the social
elements which enter into university and school organizations.”
220
Gide-
onse responded angrily: “to me and my colleagues [your] letter was
disconcerting evidence of the extent to which even people on our own
campus can put forward opinions and statements of fact about the work
of their colleagues that have no more relation to reality than the views
of some critics of higher education outside the universities.”
221
Judd’s
218. Harry D. Gideonse, “Integration of the Social Sciences and the Quest for
Certainty,” e Social Studies 27 (1936): 363–72.
219. Charles Judd, “Memorandum on the Curriculum,” 4, Division of the
Social Sciences Records, box 16.
220. Judd to Gideonse, October 22, 1936, Presidents’ Papers, 1925–1945, box
102, folder 2.
221. Gideonse to Judd, November 20, 1936, ibid.
A TWENTIETH-CENTURY COSMOS 116
criticism of Gideonse’s eorts was part of a larger critique of the New
Plan’s links to the faculty of the divisions, and the quiet aversion that
many New Plan leaders felt toward collaboration with the University
High School. In 1937 Judd complained about the “obstructions which
have been encountered all along in coordinating the instructional pro-
gram of the new college unit with the work of the lower schools.…e
College curriculum departs from the ideal curriculum for general educa-
tion because it is determined in its organization by the fact that the
University has four Divisions—an organization which was set up to
serve the purposes of specialization of advanced students and the pur-
poses of research. at the divisional organization should reach down
and determine general education and control the courses given in the
period of general education is a calamity.”
222
Harry Gideonse’s trenchant opposition to Robert Hutchins doomed
his career at Chicago. By early 1935 Hutchins had decided that he
wanted to force Harry Gideonse o the faculty, telling Chauncey
Boucher that he had informed Gideonse that he was “not prepared to
say that we should increase his salary as the income of the University
improves or to assure him that he would be placed on permanent
tenure.”
223
In the spring of 1936 the Department of Economics sought
to make good on their initial commitment to Gideonse that he would
be oered tenure and a full professorship and formally recommended
such to Hutchins. Hutchins rejected the proposal out of hand. In July
1936 the full professors of the department then sent a respectful but
forceful plea to Hutchins to reverse his decision, but Hutchins would
222. Judd to Brumbaugh, June 1,1937, Dean of the College Records, 1923–
1958, box 19, folder 7.
223. Hutchins to Boucher, February 23, 1935, Presidents’ Papers, 1925–1940,
Appointments and Budgets, box 25, folder 8.
JOHN W. BOYER117
not bend. e department insisted that Gideonse had been hired to be
a superb teacher of college-level economics and had been assured that
distinguished teaching, rather than research, would be the primary
qualication used to measure his future advancement and promotions.
Now, exactly the opposite had happened, and this from a president who
claimed to be interested in quality undergraduate teaching. e writers
worried greatly that Hutchins action was motivated by his personal dis-
like of Gideonse, because of Gideonse’s opposition to Hutchins. ey
strongly hoped that this was not the case:
Mr. Gideonse’s views on educational policies to be followed in the
College may have diered in some respects from yours, and, in
accordance with the tradition of academic freedom which has
always prevailed at the University and to which you have given
many magnicent services, he may not have hesitated to express
himself on these matters.…If the impression should once gain
ground that those who freely objected to administrative policies
were denied promotion, strong men would slowly leave the Uni-
versity and only the weaker and less courageous would remain.
We know that this is the last thing you really want.
224
is letter was all the more remarkable, as Richard McKeon noted in a
condential advisory to Hutchins, since it manifested the “singular una-
nimity of a group of men who seldom agree about anything.”
225
224. Chester W. Wright et al. to Hutchins, April 9, 1936; H. A. Millis et al. to
Hutchins, July 17, 1936, ibid.
225. McKeon to Hutchins, July 29, 1936, Robert M. Hutchins Papers,
Addenda, box 92, folder 1.
A TWENTIETH-CENTURY COSMOS 118
So disturbed was Frank Knight about the Gideonse case that he
drafted a long denunciation of Hutchins’s behavior in a seven-page
single-spaced letter to Oskar Lange, as a kind of warning about the state
of the University when Lange was considering a professorial appointment
at Chicago. For Knight the Gideonse case was prime evidence of
Hutchins’s assault on the local faculty by using a kind of authoritarian
medievalism:
He has only contempt for the opposition, which he treats as either
incompetent or selshly motivated, or both, and he seems to prefer
to express this attitude in frankly insulting terms.…In so far as he
does have any one view, of direction to ride o in, it is pretty clearly
the aim of establishing the closest possible imitation of medieval
scholasticism. And I am naturally opposed to that. I am especially
opposed to it, moreover, because of the individual who would (of
course) be Pope. I don’t think educational theory in any proper
sense is really at issue. It is a question of power.
226
Lange, who was deeply familiar with the autocratic power of state min-
istries of education in Europe, must have been mildly amused by Knight’s
tale of woes, and he assured Knight,
I am not deterred by it from accepting appointment oered. After
my experience with the Polish universities and from what I know
about the German universities (I mean here the German universi-
ties in pre-Nazi times) such cases as you describe seem only minor
blots on a picture which is on the whole clear. e conditions in
226. Knight to Lange, January 14, 1938, Knight Papers, box 60, folder 25.
JOHN W. BOYER119
the Polish universities were such of constant interference, though
not from the rectors who have no power, from all possible sides.
227
Having been rejected for promotion in 1936 and again in 1937, Gideonse
decided to publish a scathing critique of Hutchins’s various educational
essays, especially Hutchins’s e Higher Learning in America, which had
been published in October 1936. Gideonse’s nal attack came in the
aftermath of the controversial attempt of Robert Hutchins and Mortimer
Adler to import Scott Buchanan and Stringfellow Barr to create a Com-
mittee on the Liberal Arts at the University, whose mandate was (among
other things) to think about how a great-books curriculum might be
planned at Chicago.
228
Hutchins toyed with the idea of imposing Barr
as the new dean of the College, even though he admitted to Adler, “we
all know that it is going to be hellish hard to put Winkie [Barr’s nick-
name] over as Dean.”
229
ese tactics had raised deep opposition in the
227. Lange to Knight, January 30, 1938, ibid.
228. See Adler, Philosopher at Large, 172–77. Adler reported to Mark Van Doren
in January 1936 that there were “a number of other very denite indications that
the College faculty were prepared to ght the President tooth and nail,” which,
according to Adler, “made Bob so sick at heart that he didn’t know what to do.…
e reason for the opposition of the College faculty is simple: you guys are
somehow related to me and to Bob, and that relation signies that you are all
Catholics, medievalist, scholastics, Aristotelians, and of course sons of bitches,
if not of St. Benedict.” Adler to Mark Van Doren, January 17, 1936, Adler
Papers, box 57. By the summer of 1937 Adler reported: “Chicago is hopeless.
From now on, everything will be progressively McKeonized. at’s my way of
saying that poison is being sprayed on the tree of knowledge.” Adler to R.
Catesby Taliaferro, July 21, 1937, ibid. See also Amy A. Kass, “Radical Conser-
vatives,” 135–55.
229. Hutchins to Adler, September 8, 1936, as well as August 21, 1936, Adler
Papers, box 56.
A TWENTIETH-CENTURY COSMOS 120
College and in the Division of the Humanities and may have contributed
to Richard McKeon’s ultimate reservations about Adler’s schemes.
230
Gideonse and several others associated with the New Plan curriculum
(Coulter, Scott, Schlesinger, Carlson, Keniston, and a few others) tried
to produce a collaborative pamphlet critiquing Hutchins’s educational
ideas as represented in Hutchins’s short book on e Higher Learning in
America in the spring of 1937, but the strategy collapsed when several
faculty got cold feet. Gideonse complained to Wirth, “the whole thing made
me more sick at heart than anything that has happened this year.”
231
Instead, Harry Gideonse decided to produce his own demarche. In
a thirty-four page pamphlet called e Higher Learning in a Democracy
Gideonse excoriated Hutchins for the latter’s call for a new metaphysics
that would bring intellectual and moral order to the chaos of American
university education, insisting that this was nothing short of imposing
an “absolutistic system.”
232
Gideonse argued that he was especially troubled
230. See the “Minutes of the Faculty of the Division of the Humanities, May 8,
1937, and October 9, 1937.” Hutchins initially sought to have Barr appointed in
the College, after vetting by the Department of History. Professor Harley McNair
was asked to poll the senior faculty in the department, and he reported that String-
fellow Barr was an “exceptionally pleasing person,” but also that Barr “makes no
pretense of scholarship or scholarly productivity in the sense in which those
terms are understood at the University of Chicago.” McNair to Brumbaugh,
November 26, 1935, Dean of the College Records, 1923–1958, box 2, folder 11.
231. Gideonse to Wirth, April 13, 1937, Louis Wirth Papers, box 4, folder 2.
e drafts of several of the chapters are in the Wirth Papers, box 51, folder 1
232. “By constructing a university in this way it can be made intelligible. Meta-
physics, the study of rst principles pervades the whole.…I should insist that a
university is concerned with thought and that the collection of information,
historical or current, had no place in it except as such data may illustrate or
conrm principles or assist in their development.” Robert M. Hutchins, e
Higher Learning in America (New Haven, 1936), 108–9.
JOHN W. BOYER121
by Hutchins’s alleged disrespect for modern science: “Acceptance of the
curricular primacy of a set of rst metaphysical principles would reduce
science to dogma and education to indoctrination.…If these are times
of confusion and disorder, the results and the methods of science also
make them times of unparalleled promise. Now—as never before—edu-
cational leadership calls for a persistent and critical emphasis upon the
signicance of present achievement and its promise for the future.”
233
e pamphlet was suciently arresting that Hutchins asked Mortimer
Adler to comment on it, which he promptly did, but Adler also sent
Hutchins a separate letter in which he candidly noted that Gideonse had
rich opportunities for intellectual subversion precisely because of
Hutchins’s imprecise and vague use of words and concepts about “phi-
losophy,” “metaphysics,” “knowledge of rst principles,” and the like.
234
233. Harry D. Gideonse, e Higher Learning in a Democracy: A Reply to Presi-
dent Hutchins’ Critique of the American University (New York, 1937), 9, 33.
Gideonse further elaborated some of his ideas about the importance of educat-
ing what he characterized as the “whole man” in “Quality of Teaching or
Content of Education?” in e Preparation and In-Service Training of College
Teachers. Proceedings of the Institute for Administrative Ocers of Higher Institu-
tions 10 (1938): 65–75.
234. “As I look back upon the last two or three years of eort in promulgating
your educational ideas and policies, I can see the following main errors: (1) that
unfortunate distinction between facts and ideas which has been misunder-
stood, because of the language, on all sides; (2) your use of ‘metaphysics’ both
in place of theory, on the one hand, and in place of philosophy, on the other;
and in the connection the very bad phrase ‘knowledge of rst principles’; (3)
the unfortunate phrasing of your attack on ‘character training’ which has been
misunderstood as a failure on your part to take account of the moral virtues in
education; (4) the failure to answer the questions, what philosophy or whose
metaphysics, which, not satisfactorily answered, leaves everyone with the sus-
picion that you must absolutely mean Aristotelianism or something like that.”
Adler to Hutchins, June 25, 1937, Adler Papers, box 56.
Coming from an untenured professor, Gideonse’s attack on the presi-
dent of the University was imprudent, but he may have realized that his
chances for tenure at Chicago were already nil. e Department of
Economics led protests with Hutchins, citing Gideonse’s extraordinary
teaching and his intellectual prowess, but this was to no avail.
235
When
Gideonse nally resigned in the spring of 1938 to accept a professorship
at Barnard College, Louis Wirth brought an unusual motion before the
Faculty of the College, recognizing Gideonse’s many talents and contri-
butions and expressing great regret that he was leaving the University
community: “His colleagues in the College deeply regret the departure
of Mr. Gideonse from the campus of the University of Chicago. rough
the many years of labor to establish the present organization, sta, and
curriculum, he has generously and devotedly given of his wisdom, his
enthusiasm, his energies, and his leadership.…We shall long remember
with pleasure the democratic and eective manner in which he inspired
the loyalty and comradely cooperation of his associates.”
236
e motion
passed unanimously, with each of the sixty faculty members present
rising to signify his or her personal approval. Most problematic was the
failure of Aaron J. Brumbaugh, the dean of the College, to support
Gideonse strongly and unambiguously, but Brumbaugh was not a dis-
tinguished scholar and, in contrast to Boucher, he seemed eager to please
235. H. A. Millis to Hutchins, May 27, 1937, Presidents’ Papers 1925–1940,
Appointments and Budgets, box 25, folder 10; Millis to Brumbaugh, January
31, 1938, ibid., box 42, folder 10.
236. “Minutes of the Faculty of the College,” June 2, 1938, 1.
A TWENTIETH-CENTURY COSMOS 122
JOHN W. BOYER123
or at least to accommodate Robert Hutchins.
237
Gideonse’s friends clearly
felt him to be the victim of a political purge, and Hutchins’s obfuscations
to student protestors that he had never rejected a recommendation of
the deans that Gideonse be promoted, while technically correct (he
rejected on several occasions a direct recommendation brought to him
by the Department of Economics), sounded slightly threadbare. With
Gideonse’s departure Hutchins had eliminated a formidable public intel-
lectual with articulate views on liberal education, a man who had the
rhetorical skills, the courage, and the capacity for leadership to challenge
Hutchins on his own terms.
238
Given that the other senior founding
members of the 1931 general-education courses were either disillusioned
or distracted and given that the College could only drift with a weak
237. Brumbaugh reviewed the case in January 1938 and after admitting that
Gideonse had done an eective job as a teacher remarked, “if the terms of the
original agreement [oered to Gideonse by the Department of Economics]
were as stated above…it would seem that Mr. Gideonse should either be pro-
moted now or should be given a denite indication as to the chances of his
promotion in the near future.” See Budget Narrative of the College for 1938–
1939, January 29, 1938, Presidents’ Papers 1925–1940, Appointments and
Budgets, box 42, folders 5–6. Hutchins had little problem ignoring such a
“judicious” non-recommendation. Ralph Tyler later remembered that Brum-
baugh was “an easy going, nice guy, who could say he believed in all the things
Hutchins believed in, but was intellectually, in my opinion, too lazy to think
through what that meant and how to do anything about it.” Ralph W. Tyler,
Education: Curriculum Development and Evaluation. An Interview Conducted
with Malca Chall in 1985, 1986, 1987 (Berkeley, 1987), 160.
238. William Hutchinson noted shrewdly of Gideonse: “Chicago will miss
him, although probably Pres. Hutchins isn’t sorry to see him go.” William T.
Hutchinson Diary, entry of May 27, 1938. For Gideonse’s later career as an
educational leader, see Harry D. Gideonse, Against the Running Tide: Selected
Essays on Education and the Free Society, ed. Alexander S. Preminger (New
York, 1967).
A TWENTIETH-CENTURY COSMOS 124
dean in charge of its aairs in the later 1930s, the way slowly opened for
the revolution of January 1942.
A radical revisions of the 1930 arrangements, as they related to the
relationship between the “Upper” divisions and the College, took place
in January 1942. Hutchins’s long-term solution to the perceived short-
comings of the New Plan was to create a real faculty for the College and to
encourage that faculty to develop a full-time, fully required curriculum
in general education that would span grades eleven to fourteen for all of its
students. Since Hutchins had decided that the real work of the College
should begin at the end of the second year of high school and conclude
with the second year of the College, he became convinced that the College
should exercise its right to hire a separate faculty and that it should gain
sole control of the award of the BA degree. Whereas before 1942 the award
of the baccalaureate degree had remained a clear divisional prerogative
and all members of the College faculty also held membership in the
faculty of a division, now the College assembled a faculty larger (on paper
at least) than three of the four divisions and it gained control of the
baccalaureate degree, creating educational programs that aorded no
place for the specialized research knowledge represented by the depart-
ments. What had been the “Upper” divisions between 1930 and 1942
now became the “Graduate” divisions that continue to mark the mental
and political map of our local academic world. Instead of a BA degree
that included both general education and specialized work, the rst
degree oered by the divisions would now be the MA, with the College’s
program focusing exclusively on general education. From 1942 the Core,
dened by fourteen separate general-education sequences, became the
be-all and end-all of an undergraduate education at Chicago.
e logic of the curricular legislation of January 1942, which eec-
tively eliminated the departments and their majors from the under-
JOHN W. BOYER125
graduate curriculum, was ercely opposed by many senior faculty mem
-
bers with experiences in the New Plan. For men like Schlesinger, Wirth,
and Scott the issue was not, as the proponents of the all-general-educa-
tion college would later try to argue, of rote memorization in the 1930s
survey courses against conceptual learning in the curriculum installed
in 1942, since they believed that their work had also encouraged such
analytic learning among the New Plan students. Rather, the real division
of opinion had most to do with the linkage of general education to more
advanced and specialized learning oered by the research faculties in
the departments as an integral and necessary component of a baccalaure-
ate degree program, and with the parallel assumption that the faculty
who taught general education should have the same kinds of scholarly
credentials and career aspirations as those who taught more specialized
departmental courses. In contrast to the College curriculum created in
1942 and strengthened in 1946, the New Plan was conceived not as a
curricular end unto itself, but as a period of intellectual preparation and
transition, leading to the higher and more specialized learning oered
in the divisions and the professional schools for the BA or BS degree.
Louis Wirth caught this distinction well when he argued in 1937:
Our conception of a general education is not one separate and
distinct from knowledge of any particulars. We hold that we can
only have valid general knowledge insofar as we have valid par-
ticular knowledge upon which to base it and vice versa….Even in
our general education we are not drawing a strict line of separation
between knowledge of universals and knowledge of particulars.
is intimate interrelationship between general and particular
knowledge is all the more evident in our present curriculum begin-
ning upon the termination of the courses given in the College…
A TWENTIETH-CENTURY COSMOS 126
We are attempting now in all of the Divisions of the University
and all of its Departments to build our curriculum upon what has
already been achieved by the student in the College.
239
e New Plan accomplished this work of translation not only through
the structure of its general-education sequences, which embraced the
practice of presenting contemporary empirical research in addition
to classic texts, but also by oering students in the College the chance
to take two specialized sequences as electives in addition to the four
general-education survey courses. It was thus understandable that
when Hermann Schlesinger criticized the new all-general-education
curriculum of 1942, he would focus on the gradual smothering of free
electives and the lack of integration within the undergraduate program
of general and specialized learning. Schlesinger insisted that the
new curriculum
gives the impression of having been designed primarily for students
who have developed no individual intellectual interests. In general,
those are the students with the least intellectual initiative and the
ones least likely to make a real contribution to the life of the
nation. I am convinced that the student who has a denite intel-
lectual interest in coming to college will usually be the one who
benets most from his general education. It is this type of student
I hope to nd in the majority among our future students. But the
College will not continue to draw students with intellectual inde-
pendence if it undertakes a program which throttles individual
239. Louis Wirth, “e University,” 5–6, unpublished ms., 1937, Wirth Papers,
box 51, folder 1.
JOHN W. BOYER127
talent and curiosity, by prescribing the inexible program which
has been submitted to us.
240
Similarly, Ronald Crane, who was originally skeptical about the
merits of the New Plan, concluded in June 1946 that the all-general-
education curriculum adopted in January 1942 was even less attractive:
If the College could get away from the present lock-step system of
courses and course examinations, it might be much more easily
possible than it is now to interest distinguished scholars or scientists
in the Divisions who are also good teachers in College teaching.
Everyone recognizes the importance, even for the purpose of gen-
eral education, of giving College students an opportunity of
coming under the inuence of such teachers, but it is certain that
not many of the more stimulating and original minds in the Uni-
versity would be willing to join the stas of any of the existing
general courses and to teach under the controls involved in their
constitution.
241
Arthur P. Scott kept a private checklist of faculty in the College who
overtly or covertly opposed Robert Hutchins’s educational ideas, and
the names of most of the faculty leaders of the 1931 survey courses were
on it, along with Scott himself.
242
It was perhaps noteworthy that the
240. Schlesinger to Clarence Faust, February 10, 1942, Dean of the College
Records, 1923–1958, box 21, folder 11.
241. R. S. Crane, “Memorandum on the College Program,” 1946, Dean of the
College Records, 1923–1958, box 21, folder 12.
242. Arthur P. Scott Papers, box 1, folder 13.
A TWENTIETH-CENTURY COSMOS 128
“Memorandum to the Board of Trustees on the State of the University”
drafted in April 1944 by Ronald Crane and others, which challenged
Hutchins’s style of governance as president and his putative revolutionary
interest in weakening the power and authority of the departments, was
signed by Merle Coulter, Alfred E. Emerson, Ralph W. Gerard, Harvey
B. Lemon, Hermann I. Schlesinger, Arthur P. Scott, Louis L. urstone,
and Louis Wirth, full professors who had played decisive roles in orga-
nizing the 1931 general-education curriculum.
243
In the end, in the struggles between the forces represented by Harry
Gideonse and Robert Hutchins we see the collision of two competing
curricular revolutions in general education. e one sought to use the
most auspicious works of modern social and natural science, grounded
in a strong historical and developmental perspective, to imagine a world
of general knowledge useful for the active, but highly thoughtful practice
of modern citizenship. e other sought to recover from the classic works
of the past a more coherent but also more introspective vision of learning,
stressing the skills of the individual knower and motivated by active
forms of educational connoisseurship. Both constituted vast improve-
ments over the curricular chaos of the 1920s, and both would continue
to have powerful resonances in the decades to come, on our campus and
in the American academy at large. If mass higher education in the twen-
tieth century was to do more than train the technical and professional
elites for their careers, then it would need a cultural and intellectual
mission to replace the classical learning of the nineteenth-century cur-
riculum. Growing enrollments, the development of modern science, and
the professionalization of scholarship had already killed o the classical
243. A copy of the memorandum is in the Knight Papers, box 60, folder 14, as
well as the “Minutes of the University Senate,” April 14, 1944.
JOHN W. BOYER129
curriculum. Both Gideonse and Hutchins represented systematic
attempts to preserve and to protect the intellectual culture of the modern
university against a “collegiate” culture that stressed adolescent amuse-
ments more than serious intellectual engagement. e new century
needed new alternatives, and the fateful collision of the ideals represented
by Gideonse and Hutchins under the aegis of the New Plan made
the 1930s a particularly fruitful and memorable time at the University
of Chicago.
THE FATE OF THE GENERAL-
EDUCATION PROJECT
IN THE 1940S
arry Gideonse believed that the rst general-education
courses at the University were “an attempt to substitute
a twentieth-century cosmos for the almost incredible
chaos that has arisen in American higher education as
the unplanned fruit of our rebellion against the old classical curriculum.”
244
is new cosmos required strong and consistent leadership, but as the
1930s evolved the teams who organized the rst general-education
courses began to fragment. e rst to go was Ferdinand Schevill who
left the Humanities course in 1935, following the death of his wife to
cancer, and returned to full-time writing. Harry Gideonse was forced
out as the leader of the Social Sciences course in the spring of 1938.
Louis Wirth and Jerome Kerwin also abandoned the Social Sciences
course, although they followed its subsequent history with some
244. Harry D. Gideonse, “Integration of the Social Sciences and the Quest for
Certainty,” e Social Studies 27 (1936): 365.
H
A TWENTIETH-CENTURY COSMOS 130
concern.
245
Harvey Lemon resigned from the chairmanship of the Physi-
cal Sciences general course in early 1939. Professional responsibilities
had already distracted Hermann Schlesinger who by 1937 was “so busily
engaged in other responsibilities that he does not nd time any longer
to attend regular sta meetings or conferences.”
246
To make matters
worse, Chauncey Boucher decided to abandon the deanship of the Col-
lege for the presidency of the University of West Virginia in the spring
of 1935. His decision was most likely the result of the embarrassment
and frustration that he felt over Hutchins’s failure to support the New
Plan, and his sense that the attacks in the Maroon in the winter and
spring of 1934 had Hutchins’s good wishes behind them.
247
Boucher had
been a strong dean with a clear vision of the kind of educational pro-
grams that he thought that the College should pursue and who enjoyed
credibility among the faculty. In his place Hutchins appointed Aaron
Brumbaugh, a genial administrator and a sometime professor in the
245. Interview of Maynard Krueger with Christopher Kimball, May 25, 1988,
13–18.
246. Lemon to Brumbaugh, November 17, 1937, Dean of the College Records,
1923–1958, box 8, folder 1; Brumbaugh to Lemon and Schlesinger, February
9, 1939, Presidents’ Papers, 1925–1940, Appointments and Budgets, box 42,
folder 6.
247. After three frustrating years at West Virginia, Boucher was appointed
chancellor of the University of Nebraska, where he served from 1938 to 1946.
On his later tenure, see Rex J. Cogdill, “A Study of the Chancellorship of
Chauncey S. Boucher at the University of Nebraska, 1938–1946” (PhD diss.,
University of Nebraska, 1995). Ironically, Boucher’s relationship with the
Nebraska faculty was just as rocky as that of Hutchins at Chicago. A recent
study concludes that, in spite of Boucher’s many positive accomplishments in
running that land-grant university, “his biggest leadership failure appears to be
his inability to establish and maintain positive communications with the fac-
ulty at Nebraska.” Cogdill, 388.
JOHN W. BOYER131
Department of Education who had no serious research credentials and
no real educational ideas of his own, and until Clarence Faust’s appoint-
ment as dean in mid-1941, the College drifted, lacking strong leadership.
World War II brought more severe disruptions, and the new all-general-
education curriculum that passed in January 1942 and the recentering
the BA degree was the nal denouement of the New Plan.
e later history of these early “Core” courses was complex, marked
in some cases by disillusionment and hurt feelings, but in other cases by
remarkable resiliency and great pedagogical progress. e Biological
Sciences and Physical Sciences general courses survived into the later
1940s, but the venerable courses were criticized by divisional interests
as lacking in sucient depth to prepare students interested in future
advanced study in the sciences. More importantly, they found themselves
in serious competition with a set of new Natural Sciences courses devel-
oped for the four-year program of the curriculum created in 1942, and
they were eventually subsumed into the larger structure of Natural Sci-
ences between 1950 and 1952. e old science courses thus found
themselves trapped between new general-education ideals of the post-
1942 Hutchins College and the rapidly evolving research professionalism
of the post-1945 science establishment at Chicago. Joe Schwab, a forceful
leader of the new Natural Sciences program, admitted much later in his
life that the competitiveness between the old courses and the new Natu-
ral Science courses was by design, since he felt Merle Coulter’s course in
particular was “very recalcitrant. ey had their big package of brittle
books and their big package of lectures duplicated for them, and discus-
sions which were nothing but going over those two texts. ey were
hard. I set up a separate and competitive natural sciences program simply
to needle them into change, which it did to about a 25, 30 percent
A TWENTIETH-CENTURY COSMOS 132
extent.”
248
Schwab’s assessment of Coulter’s course was unduly negative,
but it was the case that each group tended to go its own way, the result
being that sta members involved in the undergraduate science courses
wondered, as they put it in a memo to the dean of the College in 1948,
“what the ultimate fate of science in the College was to be. e result
[of the competition] was most unfortunate for the College; communica-
tion between the stas broke down almost completely, important
educational issues went undiscussed, and personal relations between
colleagues were strained.”
249
Still, even within the original Biological Sciences general course one
found seeds of change. When Merle Coulter became concerned that the
course, in spite of its rhetoric, was emphasizing too much “passive assimi-
lation” of material and too little conceptual thinking about basic
biological processes, he commissioned his sta in 1939 to draft a small
booklet of “ought Questions,” in which the student encountered two
hundred questions that he or she might pose about the material that was
being presented, which asked the students “to reorganize that knowl-
edge, to apply it to new situations, and often to add reasoning processes
248. Interview of Joseph J. Schwab with Christopher Kimball, April 8, 1987,
19.
249. ornton W. Page, J. J. Schwab, H. Vogel, and E. P. Northrup, “A Proposal
for the Improvement of the College Programs in the Natural Sciences, conden-
tial [September 1948],” Dean of the College Records, 1923–1958, box 7, folder
6. By 1951 the Natural Sciences sta in the College had abandoned the struc-
ture and techniques of the 1931 course, in favor of small sections, meeting ve
hours a week. See Benson Ginsburg to John O. Hutchens, August 26, 1951,
Dean of the College Records, 1923–1958, box 7, folder 7.
JOHN W. BOYER133
of his own in order to arrive at satisfactory answers.”
250
Discussion ses-
sions were then formed around the questions, so that students were
forced to think about larger conceptual issues. One of the co-authors of
these “ought Questions” was the young instructor of biology, Joe
Schwab. Schwab had received his PhB in English literature at Chicago
in 1930 but then shifted to biology for graduate work, receiving his PhD
in zoology in 1938 with a dissertation supervised by Sewell Wright.
Schwab began as a instructor and examiner in the Biological Sciences
general course in 1937 and emerged as an active leader of the College’s
all-general-education curriculum after the upheavals of 1942–46. He
later became one of the most famous teachers of the Hutchins College,
but he was also viewed by many colleagues as a partisan of Robert
Hutchins.
251
Leadership for the Social Sciences general courses after 1938 initially
proved problematic. Once Harry Gideonse left, Aaron Brumbaugh tried
to persuade William T. Hutchinson of the Department of History in
June 1938 to take charge of the courses, oering him both a promotion
to full professor and an increase in salary, but Hutchinson refused to be
250. Merle Coulter, “Report on Ten Years of Experience with the Introductory
General Course in the Biological Sciences,” October 1941,” 28; M. C. Coulter,
ought Questions for the Introductory General Course in the Biological Sciences
(Chicago, 1940).
251. Maynard Krueger later recalled that Schwab “had the reputation of not
only being an ardent Hutchins’s supporter, he was regarded as a supporter of
everything that Hutchins was suspected of being in favor of, including maybe
some things that Hutchins wasn’t in favor of.” Interview with Christopher Kim-
ball, May 25, 1988, 22. On Schwab see Donald N. Levine, Powers of the Mind:
e Reinvention of Liberal Learning in America (Chicago, 2006), 114–45.
A TWENTIETH-CENTURY COSMOS 134
“bogged down” in what he called the “the College morass.”
252
A former
graduate student of Charles Merriam, Walter H. C. Laves, was then
recruited to take charge. Laves valiantly tried to keep the course together
between 1938 and 1941, but he was a poor lecturer and lacked Gideonse’s
wide knowledge of the social sciences.
253
He also lacked the support of
his own colleagues, several of whom nally took the extraordinary step
of appealing to Hutchins to force Laves out. Under pressure from
Hutchins, Laves soon left the University on a leave of absence to work
for the government during the war, leaving Maynard Krueger as acting
chair of the course.
254
Some of the early young assistants also turned away. James Cate and S.
William Halperin abandoned the College’s general-education programs,
252. “I declined promptly because I wish to move into graduate instruction and
have more opportunity for research. ereby I probably missed a full professor-
ship and corresponding advance in salary. But I got out of the College morass
of papers, Board of Examiners, etc., 4 or 5 years ago and I’m not prepared to bog
down there again, even though by not accepting I sacrice both money and
position.” William T. Hutchinson Diary, entry for June 8, 1938.
253. Louis Wirth took Laves’s appointment as a signal that “this can mean only
one thing, therefore, namely that they are planning not to strengthen but rather
to ignore the social science work in the College, hoping probably in that way to
put something else in place of it which is more likely to suit the ruling elite.”
Wirth to Gideonse, July 28, 1938, Wirth Papers, box 4, folder 2.
254. Laves left Chicago in December 1941 to work as a director in the US
Oce of the Coordinator of Inter-American Aairs. He was soon involved in a
number of government jobs, from the Oce of Civilian Defense to a
consultancy at the Bureau of the Budget, and as an adviser to the US delegation
at the San Francisco Conference in 1945 that created the United Nations. Laves
became the deputy director general of UNESCO in 1947 and eventually taught
at Indiana University from 1954 until his retirement in 1972. He was the rst
person to hold the Wendell L. Willkie Professorship in Political Science at
Indiana.
JOHN W. BOYER135
tempted in the late 1930s by the prestige of departmental teaching and,
at least in the case of Cate, disillusioned by Hutchins and with the cur-
ricular changes enacted in 1942. Mary Gilson retired from both the
Social Sciences general course and the University in 1942, after which
she taught at Wellesley College and at Webber College in Florida.
Norman Maclean left the Humanities general course in 1937 for full-
time teaching in English, but remained active in the aairs of the
College, serving as the College’s dean of students during World War II.
But the cases of Maynard Krueger and Gerhard Meyer demonstrated a
positive grafting eect between the earlier and later formats of general
education in the Social Sciences. Krueger came to the College (under
the formal sponsorship of the Department of Economics) in 1932 from
the University of Pennsylvania, having been personally recruited by
Harry Gideonse, who knew Krueger from collaborative work they had
done together at the University of Geneva in the late 1920s.
255
An ardent
socialist, Krueger is best remembered for having run as the vice presi-
dential candidate on the Socialist Party of America’s presidential ticket
(with Norman omas) in 1940. Krueger soon became a xture in
undergraduate social-sciences and economics courses, and was a brilliant
teacher. Awarded tenure in 1947, Krueger became in the later 1940s and
1950s an active leader of several of the later Social Sciences Core courses,
and in 1958 he was awarded a Quantrell Award for Excellence in Under-
graduate Teaching. In May 1937, ve years after Krueger had been
recruited, Harry Gideonse with the strong endorsement of Louis Wirth
successfully proposed the appointment of Gerhard E. O. Meyer as
an instructor of Economics in the College, initially as a one-year
255. Interview of Maynard Krueger with Christopher Kimball, April 20, 1988,
25, 43–48; April 28, 1988, 3; H. A. Millis to E. T. Filbey, June 23, 1932, Presi-
dents’ Papers, 1925–1940, Appointments and Budgets, box 25, folder 9.
A TWENTIETH-CENTURY COSMOS 136
replacement appointment.
256
Meyer was recommended by Wassily Leon-
tief of Harvard, who knew Meyer from having worked with him at the
Institut für Weltwirtschaft in Kiel, Germany, between 1927 and 1929.
A German refugee who was trained as an economist at the University
of Kiel and who worked for one year (1932–33) at the Institut für Sozi-
alforschung in Frankfurt, Meyer ed to Paris in 1933 and ended up
working as a postgraduate student at the University of Manchester in
England from 1935 to 1937.
257
After a rocky start in learning how to lead
discussions, Meyer established a reputation for teaching excellence, and
his probationary appointment was renewed until he was nally awarded
tenure in 1946.
258
Meyer became one of the most beloved faculty teachers
256. See the les in Presidents’ Papers, 1925–1940, box 42, folder 1. Hutchins
approved Meyer’s appointment for “just one year,” but the deadline soon expired
and Meyer was retained. It is not completely clear how Meyer came to Gide-
onse’s attention. It is possible that Leontief at Harvard brought him to the
attention of someone in the Chicago Economics department, such as Frank
Knight, Jacob Viner, Harry A. Millis, or Gideonse himself. Louis Wirth met
with Gerhard Meyer in New York City after Meyer had already visited Chicago,
and wrote to Gideonse, reporting, “I must say [he] impresses me favorably.”
Wirth to Gideonse, May 17, 1937, Wirth Papers, box 4, folder 2.
257. e Kiel Institute of World Economics was a remarkable gathering point
of famous and soon-to-be-famous economists in the interwar period, including
Gerhard Colm, Adolph Lowe, Wassily Leontief, Hans Neisser, Jacob Marschak,
and Alfred Kähler. e general orientation of their work was to explore theories
of economic growth and the nature of business cycles from a structural perspec-
tive. Several scholars from Kiel ended up as émigrés working at the New School
for Social Research. Gerhard E. O. Meyer had, thus, an excellent scholarly pedi-
gree, even though he ended up publishing very little during his career at
Chicago.
258. “We had some doubts about whether we would get Meyer through [for
tenure]. He didn’t have a very good reputation as a conductor of discussion in
what we called Social Sciences I, that later became Social Sciences II. We were
almost at the point where we would have had to send him back to Germany
JOHN W. BOYER137
of the College in the 1950s and 1960s. Ironically, both Krueger and
Meyer, who owed their appointments to Harry Gideonse, ended up with
what Gideonse most wanted, namely, a tenured appointment on the
College faculty.
Moreover, the fate of the Social Sciences course was more congenial
and less disruptive than that experienced by the two science courses.
Under the leadership of Milton Singer, David Riesman, and Robert
Redeld the Social Sciences general course was able to reconstitute itself
in the later 1940s as the second in a tier of three year-long sequences,
using a framework of two lectures and two discussions per week that
enlarged the possibilities of seminar-style discussion in the now much
expanded general-education program. In theory, Social Sciences II occu-
pied the functional position enjoyed by the original Social Sciences
course. But parts of the original focus of the old course were devolved
onto the new Social Sciences I course—particularly the parts relating
to the American state and American political culture. After 1947 Social
Sciences II focused primarily on culture, personality, and social struc-
ture, as it continues to do down to the present day.
259
when the proposal was made that ‘let’s try him in the second year course, what
later became Social Sciences III, then called Social Sciences II. Let’s try him in
there.’ We shifted him to Social Sciences II and he blossomed out as if he were
a new man. Pretty soon he’s given the Quantrell award for excellence in under-
graduate teaching.” Interview of Maynard Krueger with Christopher Kimball,
May 25, 1988, 48–49.
259. See David E. Orlinsky, “Chicago General Education in Social Sciences,
1931–92: e Case of Soc 2,” in General Education in the Social Sciences:
Centennial Reections on the College of the University of Chicago, ed. John J.
MacAloon (Chicago, 1992), 115-25, esp. 119.
A TWENTIETH-CENTURY COSMOS 138
e Humanities survey course of 1931 was completely transformed
in the autumn of 1942, becoming the second part of a multiyear general-
education project in the Humanities, and the study of European civiliza-
tion via the chronological framework of European history was eliminated
as the organizing principle of the course.
260
As is well known, however,
the study of European history in the College was soon revived as the
History of Western Civilization course by a group of young historically
minded scholars in 1947, over the opposition of other partisans of the
new Hutchins College established in 1942. An unrecognized, but crucial
agent in this struggle was Ferdinand Schevill’s discussion leader from
the 1930s, Norman Maclean. Maclean emerged as a leader of the College
faculty during the stormy debates in the spring of 1946 about the fate
of the PhB degree, a degree that was the last vestige of the New Plan in
that it permitted students some free electives as part of their baccalaure-
ate program. It was largely owing to Maclean’s stubborn defense of the
importance of teaching European history in the College that the com-
promise document that was fashioned between the College and the
graduate divisions in May 1946 stipulated that the College should create
curricular space for a revived history course, which was duly launched
as the History of Western Civilization in 1947–48.
261
Maclean believed
260. Neil J. Wilkof, “History and the Grand Design: e Impact of the History
of Western Civilization Course on the Curriculum of the University of Chicago”
(master’s thesis, University of Chicago, 1973), 2, 29–30.
261. See Maclean’s defense of the need for a history course in the “Minutes of
the Committee on Policy and Personnel,” May 13, 1946, 1, and May 16, 1946,
3. Maclean was also at odds with Joe Schwab, whom he accused on May 4,
1946, of “smearing” the colleagues who opposed Schwab’s notions about a
totally required general-education curriculum. See the “Minutes of the Com-
mittee on Policy and Personnel,” May 4, 1946, 1.
JOHN W. BOYER139
that “the College should allow for more diversity both in respect for, and
in respect to, the complex state of modern knowledge and the variety of
interests of students and the Faculty.” Among those possible interests he
considered the study of history to be “one of the great subjects of a gen-
eral education, and I would hope it would be represented quantitatively
[in the College curriculum] in proportion to its worth and diculty.”
262
Did Maclean do this out of loyalty to Schevill, Scott, Cate, and the other
historians with whom he had such protable and pleasing interactions
in the 1930s? If such memories did inuence Maclean’s staunch leader-
ship, there is a direct human link between the two courses—the
Humanities general course from the 1930s and the History of Western
Civilization course from the 1950s—centered in the person of the dis-
tinguished writer Norman Maclean. Many years later, David Williams,
a professor in English in the College and a close friend of Maclean’s who
had witnessed his political performance during the 1946 debates, would
insist simply but categorically, “we owe the History of Western Civiliza-
tion course to you.”
263
Perhaps it was not surprising that Norman
Maclean and his friend James Cate emerged in the 1950s, after Hutchins
had left Chicago and Lawrence Kimpton led a controversial eort to
scale back the curricular claims of the Hutchins College’s general-edu-
cation stas, as close personal condants of Kimpton’s on the University
262. “e Joint Sub-Committee of the Committee of the Council and the Col-
lege Committee on Policy and Personnel,” May 10, 1946, 4; “e Joint
Sub-Committee of the Committee of the Council and the College Committee
on Policy and Personnel,” May 23, 1946, 6, Dean of the College Records, 1923–
1958, box 21, folder 12.
263. Williams to Maclean, April 5, 1966, Maclean Papers, box 18.
A TWENTIETH-CENTURY COSMOS 140
faculty.
264
When Kimpton died in October 1977, Norman Maclean gave
an eloquent and aectionate eulogy for him.
265
e stang of the new discussion-based general-education courses
created or recreated in the early and mid-1940s in the Hutchins College
was assisted by the integration of teachers from the University High
School. A number of secondary school teachers—Robert Keohane,
Gladys Campbell, John R. Davey, Howard Hill, Russell omas, and
Zens Smith were among the most prominent—became involved in the
new College-level general-education courses because those courses were
now part of an integrated curricular program beginning with grade
eleven that comprehended students who in other circumstances would
be in their junior and senior year in high school.
266
After the revolution
of 1942 some of these individuals became prominent activists on the
College faculty, and they contributed substantially to the programmatic
élan and high-quality teaching of the Hutchins College, often writing
defenses of its logic and practices. ey also helped to increase the
264. Kimpton was unusually candid, for example, with James Cate about the
(in his view) fear of competition with the departments that continued to ani-
mate the stalwarts of the College. He wrote to Cate in 1958: “We are sweating
it out slowly on this undergraduate business. Fortunately we allowed an awful
lot of time for talk and for changes, and I think the Divisional boys are becom-
ing a little more reassured about the whole situation. e College is getting
increasingly worried, and this, it seems to me, is a good thing. ose boys down
there really need to be shaken up, and I think we are generating a situation in
which precisely that will occur.” Kimpton to Cate, May 1, 1958, Cate Papers,
box 2.
265. e University of Chicago Record 12 (1978): 18–21.
266. See A. J. Brumbaugh to Gladys Campbell, Gertrude Doxey, Howard C.
Hill, Robert B. Keohane, and Russell B. omas, May 1, 1936, Dean of the
College Records, 1923–1958, box 6, folder 4. ese individuals were ocially
transferred to the College sta as of the 1936–37 academic year.
JOHN W. BOYER141
number of College faculty members who did not have divisional appoint-
ments: by 1946 less than 20 percent of the faculty of the College had a
joint appointment in a graduate division.
267
Yet the fact that many of the colleagues appointed to the College
faculty after 1942 were professional pedagogues with a very high level
of teaching competence but not scholars heavily active in traditional
research disciplines highlighted a dilemma that the College would face
for many years to come: if the right kind of teachers were crucial to the
success of the College’s general-education courses, who would select
these individuals, and what professional criteria would be used in select-
ing them? In the 1930s the departments had the formal responsibility
for vetting and appointing the instructors who created and sustained
the rst general-education courses, and in general, they applied conven-
tional criteria of research promise as well as teaching ability, although
the case of Harry Gideonse himself demonstrated that even a department
with as august a tradition for research productivity as Economics was
prepared to hire a scholar who was very smart, who was a brilliant
teacher, but who had only a modest level of formal publications in his
eld. Once the departments were excluded from hiring College faculty,
which happened in 1942, dierent kinds of criteria were used to hire the
faculty to teach these courses. Harvey Lemon had argued in 1936 that
the future welfare of his particular general-education course would
depend on his ability to hire younger scholars with sound scholarly
credentials, acceptable to the departments as assistant professors, who
would have their primary teaching responsibility in these general-education
courses. If this were not done, “there is grave danger that not only will
the experimental aspects of the enterprise and its continued improvement
267. “Minutes of the Faculty of the College, February 6, 1946,” 15.
A TWENTIETH-CENTURY COSMOS 142
be lost to sight, but even that the ground already won cannot be attained
and consolidated.”
268
While Lemon asked the University to commit sub-
stantial new resources in the domain of undergraduate teaching,
exclusive of graduate education, he was not calling for the creation of a
separate College faculty. Yet such a separate faculty was precisely what
arrived on the doorstep of the University after 1942, and tensions
emerged between the College and the divisions over resources that soon
became acute. As Edward Shils would later recall: “ere was a condition
of beleaguerment. Many of the people in the College felt antagonistic
toward the Divisions. Some people because they were excluded; they
didn’t have appointments in the Divisions.…ere were a few people
who felt that they were ghting against the Divisions.…ere were a
number of people who were at war with the rest of the university, partly
because they felt Hutchins was at war and they felt they were protégés
of Hutchins.”
269
Joe Schwab, from a very dierent perspective, also
remembered a “profound and deep enmity between the entire Collegiate
organization and the Departments, the Divisions. ey had, after all,
lost their hegemony over undergraduates and with it, the hegemony,
went part of their budget, a big part. All the undergraduate courses
disappeared. ere were no longer any 200-courses in the Departments.”
270
268. “e directors of the course should plan ultimately to sta the lectures with
men drawn from the discussion section sta of instructors who hold the interest
and enthusiasm of this group, advancement to rank to assistant professors
should be made as soon as possible in deserving cases; in the meantime advance
in salary should be steady.” Lemon and Schlesinger, “After Five Years: An
Appraisal of the Introductory General Course in the Physical Sciences,” 5.
269. Interview of Edward Shils with Christopher Kimball, June 7, 1988, 11–12,
15, Oral History Program.
270. Interview of Joseph J. Schwab with Christopher Kimball, April 7, 1987,
56–57.
JOHN W. BOYER143
e actual number of faculty needed to organize the rst general-
education courses was small in the 1930s, given the heavy reliance on
large lectures as the primary mode of organizing the New Plan courses.
Perhaps the most decisive change that accompanied the revolution of
1942 was the slow transformation of our general-education courses from
being primarily lecture courses to primarily discussion-based small semi-
nars. is change was salutary for pedagogical reasons, but it required
a substantial expansion of instructional personnel. By the early 1950s a
signicant number of tenured or tenure-track faculty in the arts and
sciences had appointments only in the College. As late as 1958, 68 per-
cent (108 of 160) of the faculty with membership in the College had
appointments only in the College. With the College having its own
faculty, recruited primarily on the basis of teaching ability and curricular
imagination and not necessarily high-prole scholarship, it was possible
to sta the many sections of the various Core courses with highly moti-
vated and qualied teachers who also had faculty rank. After 1958, when
the University abandoned the separate College faculty and adopted the
norm that future faculty appointments would be joint with the graduate
divisions, the stang of these many and varied Core sections proved
much more challenging.
A TWENTIETH-CENTURY COSMOS 144
THE CORE IN
MODERN TIMES
f Robert Hutchins’s eorts at a totally general-education
curriculum designed for the last two years of high
school and the rst two years of college oered mag-
nicent claims and impressive accomplishments, they
also encountered deep suspicion among several of the divisions and in
many of the departments, and, perhaps more importantly, failed to sell
itself to the public as a viable alternative in American higher education.
271
When Hutchins left the University in 1951, the College as then consti-
tuted lost its most vital patron and protector. Facing serious fears that
the applicant base for a grades-eleven-through-fourteen, general-educa-
tion College was profoundly unsteady (by 1953 enrollments in the
College had nose-dived to less than thirteen hundred students), Chance-
lor Lawrence Kimpton, who as secretary of the Faculties, had sat through
and objectively recorded the bitter ghts over the curriculum that had
transpired in the mid-1940s, decided to launch a counterrevolution. In
so doing Kimpton was forced to confront a newly autonomous, relatively
large, and deeply resentful group of College-appointed professors who
since the late 1940s had come to feel themselves to be a genuine faculty
and who acted as such. e result of Kimpton’s counterrevolution was
the Filbey Report of May 1953 and, subsequently, the Report of the
271. At its high point in the early 1950s the curriculum included fourteen
general-education comprehensive exams, including Humanities 1, 2, 3; Social
Sciences 1, 2, 3; Natural Sciences 1, 2, 3; History; Foreign Language; Mathe-
matics; English; and OII (Observation, Interpretation, and Integration). e
latter course is perhaps the most characteristic symbol of the Faust-Ward College
and the one most indebted to the intellectual proclivities of Richard McKeon
and his protégés like Joe Schwab.
I
JOHN W. BOYER145
Executive Committee on Undergraduate Education (ECUE) of April
1958, each of which helped to destroy both the curricular autonomy
and, eventually, the autonomous status of the faculty of the Faust-Ward
College. e ECUE Report reinstated the idea of departmental majors
and specialized study, which perforce meant that the four-year Core of
the Hutchins College would have to be scaled back radically to nearly
half its original size.
A second rub came when Lawrence Kimpton made the decision in
1953 to begin to recenter the demographic basis of the College from
grades eleven through fourteen to grades thirteen through sixteen. In
the future the high-school graduate would become the normal, if not
exclusive, client of the University’s undergraduate programs. Now the
crucial question became, to how many years of college study would the
normal high-school graduate be held accountable? With College faculty
insisting on the necessity of almost three years of general-education
course work and the divisions wanting two years of specialized and elec-
tive course work, something had to give. In view of that stark fact,
compelling the College faculty to accept a two-plus-two structure was
a major victory for Kimpton and the divisional forces and a major defeat
for the faculty of the College.
e attacks on the Hutchins College in the 1950s produced curricular
disarray, resulting in chronic tensions among the faculty as to which of
the yearlong Core sequences should survive, and how much space in the
new hybrid curriculum that emerged in the late 1950s ought be allocated
to general education. ese stresses also took their toll on collegial coop-
eration and on curricular innovation. By September 1962, Dean of the
College Alan Simpson was complaining about what he felt to be the
College’s unsolved problems, including “the rigidity of the general educa-
tion requirements,” “the inadequacy of some upper-class oerings,” a “lack
A TWENTIETH-CENTURY COSMOS 146
of inventiveness in a college which prides itself on being experimental,”
and “the weaknesses in our appeal to high school graduates—we simply
do not attract as broad a band of the best talent or as big a volume of
applications as we should.” In response Simpson urged that “we ought
to face the future on the basis of diversity—in the proportions of general
and specialized education required of dierent students and in the ways
in which general education is oered.…We can surely safeguard our
traditions of general education without insisting any longer that there
is only one right plan.”
272
During the 1960s several attempts were made to broker compromises
that would restore a unied curriculum, the last one in 1966 essentially
giving each of the ve new collegiate divisions the right to design its own
version of a general-education Core, under which all students were still
required to take certain Core courses but were free not to take others.
is was a political compromise, not a sound educational program, but
it did lower the threshold of conict and cooled tempers somewhat. It
also had the virtue of sustaining a robust, if uncoordinated, set of Core
courses in the later 1960s, 1970s, and early 1980s at Chicago at a time
when many other American universities were abandoning their general-
education programs. To the the extent that Chicago maintained its
commitment to general education as a dening principle of liberal educa-
tion after 1960, a state of aairs that was increasingly rare in American
higher education, the “heritage” impact of the continuing Core struc-
tures from the 1950s onward cannot be underestimated.
273
e precedent
272. Simpson to the Policy Committee, September 19, 1962, Archive of the College.
273. For the collapse of general education after 1970 see John Guillory, “‘Who’s
Afraid of Marcel Proust?’ e Failure of General Education in the American
University,” and Roger L. Geiger, “Demography and Curriculum: e Humani-
ties in American Higher Education from the 1950s through the 1980s,” in
JOHN W. BOYER147
of ongoing structures, even if their future was the subject of intense
debate, ensured the survival of general education at Chicago.
Signicant change came in 1982 when Donald N. Levine assumed
the deanship of the College. Levine set about depriving the collegiate
divisions of their separate prerogatives and reassembling a common Core
for all students. e result was a new curriculum passed in early 1985,
which required the equivalent of twenty-one Core courses out of a total
of forty-two courses for a baccalaureate degree. e 1985 reforms created
a common curricular platform for all students, thus reestablishing the
unity of the Core that dened its original mandate in 1931 and 1942.
At the same time these reforms faced three major problems. First, they
had the disadvantage of assembling a large general-education compo-
nent, amounting to 50 percent of a student’s total course work in the
College, at a period in the University’s history when many of the older
“College loyalists” on the faculty who were most dedicated to the spirit
of the Hutchins Core felt themselves increasingly marginalized. Many
newer faculty appointed in the 1970s and 1980s came to Chicago from
universities where there was no tradition of general education. While
willing to participate in the Core, many of these faculty valued upper-
level undergraduate courses in their research specializations as much if
not more than Core teaching.
Second, and even more troubling, arts and sciences faculty teach-
ing loads nationally had begun to decline precipitously from those of
the pre- and immediate postwar periods.
274
e normal teaching load at
e Humanities and the Dynamic of Inclusion since World War II, ed. David A.
Hollinger (Baltimore, 2006), 38–45, 65–66.
274. Jonathan Z. Smith, “Dean’s Report to the Faculty of the College,” November
25, 1980, Archive of the College. For national trends, see Charles T. Clotfelter,
Buying the Best: Cost Escalation in Elite Higher Education (Princeton, NJ, 1996), 206.
A TWENTIETH-CENTURY COSMOS 148
Chicago had been at least six quarter courses a year as late as the 1950s
and 1960s, but by the mid-1980s it had contracted to four courses a year
in many Social Sciences and Humanities departments, allocated between
graduate and undergraduate teaching. ese reductions had an inordi-
nate impact on faculty teaching in the College’s general-education
programs, leaving College administrators with severe stang issues for
their very large Core curriculum.
A third problem originated in the identity of the Core sequences
left over from the Hutchins College. Many of these courses, excellent in
their design, were associated with College faculty who had created or
sustained them in the 1950s and 1960s. But as new faculty joined Chi-
cago’s ranks in the 1970s with joint appointments in both a department
and in the College, many were unwilling to participate in older courses
over which they had no intellectual control. As the master of the Social
Sciences Collegiate Division, Bernard Silberman, put it candidly in 1979,
the problem would not arise if there was an orderly succession of
[Core] courses—old ones dying and new ones emerging in a regu-
lar pattern. is doesn’t occur. e result is that a course exists
that becomes institutionally responsible to a new group of under-
graduates but which has relatively little appeal to a new group of
social scientists. New recruitment of regular faculty fails since the
course in its founding reected the interests of a small group.
Potential new recruits cannot view the course as an accurate reec
-
tion of what they do and what they think social science is about.
275
275. Bernard S. Silberman to the Social Sciences Collegiate Division Governing
Committee, May 18, 1979, Archive of the College.
JOHN W. BOYER149
Such critiques did not mean that the general education had lost
formal legitimacy, for Chicago was remarkable in not experiencing the
curricular meltdown of general-education programs that aicted many
other institutions. But they did signal that if the Core was to survive, it
would have to become more exible and open to intellectual renewal
and conceptual revision.
Beginning in the mid-1990s the College embarked on another sys-
tematic review of the Core curriculum. is review was informed by a
large survey of student opinion on the quality of life in the College,
conducted by sociologist Richard Taub in 1995, which found that sig-
nicant minorities of students were unhappy with the instructional
quality of many of the Core sequences, particularly in mathematics and
the natural sciences. A second issue in the minds of College leaders was
the fact that the 1985 reforms, although of fundamental importance in
creating a more coherent curriculum, had sanctioned a very large Core
that had the eect of pushing many general-education sequences into
the third and even the fourth years of undergraduate study. is pattern
contradicted the assumptions of Boucher and the original architects of
the Core in the 1930s, namely, that general education should come rst,
not last, for it prepared younger students for the methods and learning
skills necessary for higher-level university work and exposed them to
broad areas of knowledge before they were expected to focus on one eld
of study. e deection of parts of the Core into the later years of the
College made it impossible for students to study abroad in their third
year, since many students were forced to spend their junior year taking
yearlong general-education sequences that they had been unable to fulll
in the rst two years of their studies.
Finally, the debates of the mid-1990s reected fascinating strains
within the faculty themselves about the relative importance of the Core
A TWENTIETH-CENTURY COSMOS 150
compared to other elements of the undergraduate curriculum. e gen-
erational changes that Bernard Silberman had pointed out in the late
1970s had grown even more acute in the ensuing decades. In 1990
former Dean of the College Wayne C. Booth, in his role as chair of the
Council on Teaching, complained “of the total number of students in
the arts and sciences…more than half are undergraduates, but far less
than half of faculty teaching time and energy goes into College teach-
ing,” fostering a dependence “on altruism and a dwindling tradition of
loyalty” to maintain stang.
276
Two highly respected faculty members
in English wrote to the dean of the College in 1996, urging that the
Core be shortened to entail fewer requirements and that more room be
made for students to choose their own programs of study. ese steps
would create “stronger majors…that would include more faculty advising
and more extracurricular contact between students and faculty,” along
with “a broader menu of the kinds of classes undergraduates take, rang-
ing from large lectures to intimate junior and senior seminars” and
“signicantly higher stipends for graduate students coupled with signi-
cantly more teaching.”
277
eir views were quietly shared by many other
faculty across the four divisions. Faculty opinion on the size of the Core
was all over the map, with older faculty, particularly those with personal
connections to the Hutchins College era, attached to the idea of a very
large Core, but many younger faculty impatient with (what they felt to
be) its virtual domination of the undergraduate experience.
By the autumn of 1997, after a set of often contentious debates involv-
ing many dozens of faculty members, a plan emerged that would reduce
276. “Minutes of the Council of the Senate,” November 13, 1990, 6.
277. Memorandum of Bill Brown and Miriam Hansen to John W. Boyer,
August 1996, Archive of the College.
JOHN W. BOYER151
the size of the Core by several courses (from twenty-one to eighteen or
even fteen, depending on how a student met the foreign language
requirement), substituting two-quarter Core courses—designated “dou-
blets” by the master of the Physical Sciences Collegiate Division at the
time, Sidney Nagel—in place of yearlong sequences in the biological
sciences, humanities, civilizational studies, and the physical sciences.
e plan was intended to allow most students to complete their Core
requirements in the rst two years of study, while also increasing the
number of free electives to allow third- and fourth-year students greater
freedom to explore advanced courses taught by regular faculty that were
open to undergraduates and oered not only in the departments but in
several of the professional schools. e scheme also rejected any attempt
by the departments to cull more courses to add to their majors. Instead
of a curriculum dominated by the Core, general education now assumed
the role of a third of a student’s curricular plans, similar to the share of
Core courses required by Boucher’s New Plan curriculum of 1931. e
doublet model was structured to allow for more experimentation and
for the development of new options in the Core curriculum, thus
addressing the problem of frozen-up courses to which Silberman had
alluded twenty years earlier.
e logic of the proposal was based on the belief that a slightly
smaller, but more intensively focused and organized general-education
curriculum would still serve the original functions of the Core with
which Chauncey Boucher had rst endowed it in 1930, namely, to
recruit students who are more academically oriented and to give them
an intense synoptic intellectual experience that would introduce them
to the broader scholarly values of the University during their rst two
years on campus. e primary purpose of the reform was to ensure the
long-term survival of the Core by returning it closer to the size that it
A TWENTIETH-CENTURY COSMOS 152
had originally enjoyed in the 1930s, while also opening it up to new
intellectual impulses and scholarly movements. Given that Chicago’s
quarter system functioned, in terms of the typical workload imposed on
College students, almost like semesters in other top colleges, the defend-
ers of the plan believed that there would be no net loss of intellectual
“intensity” in the College. Indeed, to the extent that the new curriculum
allowed students to take more graduate-level courses as free electives, the
result might even be a bolstering of the College’s famed academic rigor.
e College Council passed this plan in March 1998 by a vote of 24
to 8. e new curriculum went into eect in the autumn of 1999, with
current students being given the option in March 1999 to opt to con-
clude their studies under the old (1984) or the new (1999) Core
curriculum. About 95 percent opted to join the new curriculum imme-
diately. While the vote was legitimate, the outcome did not sit well with
some senior faculty, who believed that the central administration had
somehow forced the changes in the name of creating a “Chicago-lite”
experience that would enable the admissions oce to attract more appli-
cants who would be inclined to work with less rigor in the College. It
was perhaps inevitable that the size and structure of the Core would
become intertwined with another contentious issue—the size of the
College’s student population—in the minds of faculty and alumni in
polemical and controversial ways in 1997 and 1998. Both issues became
ash points for critics, who believed that the plans for the College repu-
diated a hallowed and sacred past. anks to the aura of a distantly
remembered Hutchins (who had now been absent from campus long
enough to be embraced, even by those who did not particularly like
undergraduates) and the traditions of the Core, Chicago seemed to these
critics to have a stronger tie to a shared, cultural patrimony than other
universities. e impatience of younger faculty with xed canonical
JOHN W. BOYER153
texts, the desire of many to trim Core requirements, and the appearance
of new options of advanced study (like theater and performance studies,
cinema studies, gender and sexuality studies, race studies, and environ-
mental studies) appeared to signify an ominous threat to older
traditions.
Yet the two decades since these changes have proven such fears
groundless, as demographic and curricular developments have produced
a College that is more rigorous and just as reverent to its unique educa-
tional traditions and to the Core. e more than six thousand
undergraduates who will matriculate in autumn 2017 are more talented
and intellectually ambitious and better prepared for the challenges of
our curriculum than any in our history. e Core curriculum itself
continues to oer a series of intellectually exciting and rigorous two- and
three-quarter sequences, some dating back to the 1990s but many others
created in the past twenty years under new faculty leadership. Indeed,
what has been especially gratifying to observe is that interest in and
commitment to the Core is signicantly higher and more intense among
the faculty than it was twenty years earlier. We know that the continuity,
vitality, and discipline of the Core curriculum is a powerful attraction
for our students, who are now making the University of Chicago their
rst choice in numbers that would have seemed unlikely even ten years
ago. e ten new majors approved in the College since 1997—most
recently creative writing and astronomy and astrophysics—have simi-
larly been designed and operationalized with the same rigor and
seriousness of intellectual engagement with ideas and evidence that char-
acterized the New Plan.
Jerome C. Kerwin, Moffett Studio, Chicago, January 16, 1947
JOHN W. BOYER155
TRACES AND
MEMORIES
oday we seek to protect the ideal of the scholar-teacher,
men and women of distinguished scholarly attainments
who teach a range of specialized courses on the upper-
undergraduate and graduate levels, who also maintain
a serious dedication to the idea of collaboratively taught general-educa-
tion courses. In this specic sense, we have returned to the operational
ideals of the New Plan of the 1930s, while retaining the general-educa-
tion model of small discussion groups favored by the 1950s. Carl R.
Moore, the distinguished endocrinologist and chair of the Department
of Zoology put the issue well in 1935: “there seems preponderant evi-
dence of a fairly high correlation between these two types of scholarly
activity [teaching and research] at the college level which leads to the
conclusion that the University should be and can be staed at all levels
by creative scholars who are also selected and rewarded for being excel-
lent teachers.”
278
As I look at the faculty of the College today, I see many
such colleagues, and they are the best hope that the traditions launched
ninety years ago will continue to ourish in this century.
Yet the history of the early general-education courses reveals how
fragile the enterprise of collectively taught courses is, how dependent
they are on a small group of leaders and on imagination, and, equally
noteworthy, how critical the support of the University at large and espe-
cially of the central administration is to sustain these programs.
Ironically, in its collective portrait of itself to the wider public the Uni-
versity of Chicago has naturalized the tradition of general education,
278. Carl R. Moore to Brumbaugh, December 10, 1935, Dean of the College
Records, 1923–1958, box 6, folder 10.
T
A TWENTIETH-CENTURY COSMOS 156
but our community has not always recognized how challenging it is to
sustain the quality and the integrity of these courses. For our traditions
to ourish, each generation of faculty must embrace Chicago’s general-
education tradition as one of the University’s highest educational
priorities. Accordingly, the College has over the past twenty-ve years
cooperated closely with the graduate divisions and the departments in
articulating the ideal of the scholar-teacher as the norm for faculty
appointments. is means that we insist upon both distinguished
research work and a dedication to high-quality teaching on all levels,
including in the Core.
e rst general-education courses established the principle that it
was benecial to our students for faculty to collaborate and plan multi-
quarter sequences, rather than simply oering whatever might be
convenient for or of personal interest to individual faculty members. We
placed the educational needs of our younger students in the foreground,
and since the 1930s they have never left the spotlight of our College.
e New Plan also created strong possibilities for educational innova-
tion, what David Riesman once called “stirring the pot.”
279
Regular
curricular deliberations in the general-education stas and the coming
and going of faculty teachers over the decades created expectations that
there are always better ways of thinking about given pedagogical and
substantive issues, and new faculty joining the general-education stas
were encouraged to embrace this kind of ferment. Chauncey Boucher
was particularly proud of the fact that the printed syllabi for the four
general-education courses were reworked and revised each year, thus
279. Riesman to Milton Singer, December 20, 1947, Dean of the College
Records, 1923–1958, box 8, folder 3.
JOHN W. BOYER157
giving the teachers of the courses regular opportunities for experimenta-
tion and innovation.
280
With the exception of Harry Gideonse, the rst Core courses were
uniformly products of Chicago faculty intramuralism, developed by
faculty with long connections to the institution and who were respected
by their departmental colleagues. (Merle Coulter, Harvey Lemon, Her-
mann Schlesinger, and Louis Wirth had received both their undergraduate
and doctoral degrees at Chicago, while Arthur Scott received his doctor-
ate on the Midway. Although educated elsewhere, Ferdinand Schevill
and Jerome Kerwin had been on the faculty for many years before the
new general-education courses were launched in 1931.) e “t” between
the culture of the University faculty and the new educational structures
of the College was thus cushioned and empowered by the fact that the
leaders of the new courses had solid records of trust and reliability among
their colleagues. is may be one reason why the creation of general
education at Chicago was able to engender two special attributes among
our students that were clearly of immense value to the faculty. e rst
was serious intellectual engagement by undergraduate students with a
challenging, common program of study. e devotion of our students
to intense and thought-provoking forms of learning in their rst two
years at the University was encouraged by the excitement and the imagi-
nation of the rst general-education courses. In the New Plan our
students encountered and proted from the faculty’s own intellectual
virtues and gained thereby an appreciation of the enthusiasm, but also
the seriousness of intellectual engagement. Over the decades since 1931
the intellectual seriousness of our undergraduates has marked the Uni-
versity as a singular place in the world of American higher education.
280. Boucher, e Chicago College Plan, 40–41.
A TWENTIETH-CENTURY COSMOS 158
A second crucial characteristic of our culture that owes much to the
Core is academic freedom. e University of Chicago endured several
disagreeable crises in the twentieth century to defend the academic free-
dom of faculty and students alike, and it is no exaggeration that we
became a model for other universities, giving them courage to stand up
for their rights as well. As one trustee put in it in 1935, in the wake of
the Walgreen asco, “I have thought a great deal about the University
of Chicago and the diculties which you are now passing through. I
believe that we are making history in our stand for academic freedom
and that we will all realize after the storm has blown over, how wise we
were in not yielding to the emotional pressure of the moment.”
281
Yet the
capacity of the University to sustain true academic freedom has hinged
on our ability to teach our youngest students from the very beginning
of their academic careers at Chicago the importance of the reasoned
understanding of conicting positions, the need for rigorous interroga-
tion of rival claims, and the value of action that is informed by thoughtful
reection. Our general-education courses have come to serve as sturdy
launching points for such exemplary teaching. Without an undergradu-
ate student body that accepts the robust practice of academic freedom,
the University’s ability as a community to sustain such controversial
traditions would have been severely impeded.
Both of these concepts—intellectual seriousness and academic free-
dom—have dened the basic mission of our University, which is to
sponsor the creation, the preservation, and the transmission of knowl-
edge, and both concepts were profoundly enhanced in the 1930s by the
pedagogical culture that our general-education courses helped to create
281. Albert L. Scott to Harold H. Swift, May 9, 1935, Harold Swift Papers, box
190, folder 4.
JOHN W. BOYER159
and sustain. In challenging our students to engage large areas of human
knowledge and discovery, and to do so at a high level at the beginning
of their careers, general education contributed to the intellectual serious-
ness with which we endow the whole of our curriculum. And in teaching
students how to dierentiate good from bad ideas, sound from faulty
reasoning, and precise from imprecise arguments, general education has
had a powerful seeding eect in training generations of young under-
graduates in the skills of the scholar: intellectual engagement, dispassion in
the midst of controversy, and courage in the face of intellectual uncertainty.
e general-education programs of the 1930s were born in the heat
of intellectual controversy based on conicting modes of scholarly
inquiry. e founders of these courses did not intend that their content
should be unchanging, for to view them in such a light would have
turned them into mausoleums, not exciting educational projects. e
notion that Chicago’s general-education traditions have always been or
should be always be xed is not only unhistorical, it also violates the very
premises on which the New Plan was founded. e architects of the
New Plan knew that our general-education programs must be dynamic,
or they would fail to engage the imagination of faculty and students of
the future.
e New Plan also enabled remarkable eorts to think about the
sequencing of collegiate learning in a major research university and about
how liberal learning in the College might be connected with under-
graduate education in the professional schools. e existence of
undergraduate business, law, and social-work programs in the 1930s,
based on the foundation of the New Plan’s general-education courses,
gave interested College students a number of exible opportunities
to connect general and professional education. at the University of
Chicago throughout the life of the New Plan had an undergraduate
A TWENTIETH-CENTURY COSMOS 160
business major, undergraduate degree programs in the School of Social
Service Administration and the Divinity School, and a program that
was tantamount to an undergraduate law major demonstrate the cur-
ricular robustness and the capacity for living with both irony and
complexity that marked the University’s engagement with undergraduate
liberal education in the 1930s and 1940s. e Professional Option pro-
gram for Chicago undergraduate students interested in careers in
business that was authorized by the College and the Graduate School of
Business in 1953 and that operated eectively until the early 1990s was
a direct descendant of these pre-1942 partnerships between liberal and
professional education. e Chicago Careers in Business program, cre-
ated jointly by the College and the Booth School of Business in 2006–7
and recently named in honor of Byron D. Trott, is the latest iteration of
a collaboration that now extends back over a century.
Finally, the general-education structures of the 1930s encouraged the
loyalty of brilliant teachers, and such serious dedication to teaching on
the part of the faculty became a longstanding component of the College’s
faculty culture. In 1942 a middle-aged German refugee from Frankfurt,
Germany, who was seeking employment as a secondary schoolteacher
wrote to a school principal in Massachusetts with his views as to the
value of studying history. Trained as a classical historian at the University
of Frankfurt, Christian Mackauer argued that more than anything else
the study of history should not be a mobilization of ideas or facts pre-
sented in predigested formats, but rather that teachers were dealing with
“the souls and minds of boys and girls. e dierent courses of the cur-
riculum are as many dierent sets of gymnastic apparatuses for the
development of intellect, judgment, character of the young people
entrusted to your care.” Mackauer went on to argue:
JOHN W. BOYER161
It will be an immense service to the student when he learns to see
clearer and clearer the deepest foundations upon which he rests
his judgments, often without knowing it. e discussion of histori
-
cal problems may help him to discover inconsistencies in his
opinions, logical mistakes in his way of reasoning, or gaps in his
factual knowledge; but it will never irreverently touch his genuine
last convictions. e consciousness that sincere dierences of atti-
tude among members of one nation exist and are to be respected
will be one of the most valuable results of this kind of education
through History.
282
Embedded within the semantic structures of Mackauer’s arguments were
profoundly value-laden remnants of European culture. For Mackauer
was above all interested in defending the freedom of the individual mind,
which, in his view, could only be protected by being forced to engage in
intellectual activities, much as a professional gymnast exercises to attain
a kind of freedom with his body. Mackauer was no less committed to
the cultural and ethical values of European civilization than Ferdinand
Schevill, but Mackauer was writing at a time and was a member of a
generation that could no longer ignore or dodge the central issue of
individual pedagogical agency for the student himself. Schevill believed
that studying European culture would reveal to his students the com-
plexities of their civilizational heritage, whereas Mackauer insisted that
282. Mackauer to David R. Porter, headmaster of Mount Hermon School,
August 22, 1942, Christian Mackauer File, Faculty and Sta Files, Mount
Hermon School, 1881–1971, Archives of the Northeld Mount Hermon
School, Massachusetts. Having been red from his position as a Gymnasium
teacher in 1937 because his wife was Jewish, Mackauer ed Germany in 1939
for Great Britain. He immigrated to the United States in June 1940.
A TWENTIETH-CENTURY COSMOS 162
this heritage had to be treated as an intellectual problem to begin with,
to be puzzled over, to be understood in its utter complexity, for the good
of the development of that ideal of individual freedom that Schevill had
postulated as originating within the European tradition. For Mackauer,
studying freedom was not enough. One must practice being intellectu-
ally free, and this could happen only through the active involvement of
the student in the mechanisms of learning. Ferdinand Schevill may have
been a hostage of the First World War, but Christian Mackauer was a
hostage of the Second.
Christian Mackauer’s eloquent prescriptions oered a tting transi-
tion to the College of the later 1940s and indeed to our time as well.
When he wrote this letter, Mackauer knew little or nothing about the
general-education traditions of our College. He would eventually have
a rich eld of opportunity to apply and to realize them when he became
a central actor in the creation of the new History of Western Civilization
course in the College after 1948. But the sentiments that Mackauer
expressed would have been most congenial to the men and women who
organized and then defended the educational program of the New Plan.
Mackauer was a tting successor to Ferdinand Schevill in his estimation
of the immense importance of the European tradition for American
intellectual and cultural life. But he was also an institutional heir of
Harry Gideonse, for like Gideonse, Mackauer believed that students had
to comprehend the complexity and even arbitrariness of received ideas
in order to understand their own possible roles in modern society. More-
over, it was deeply tting that Christian Mackauer was rst hired at
Chicago in October 1943 not to teach Western Civilization, which did
not yet exist, but to teach in the Social Sciences general courses by
Maynard Krueger and Gerhard Meyer, who themselves had been hired
by Harry Gideonse in the 1930s for the New Plan courses designed by
JOHN W. BOYER163
Wirth, Kerwin, and himself.
283
is lineage of talent and conviction was
both durable and remarkable.
e general-education tradition at Chicago that Christian Mackauer
embraced in the autumn of 1943 was of fundamental importance in
rearming the basic culture of the University. Perhaps more than any
other leading private American research university, the academic culture
of our students and the academic culture of our faculty at the University
of Chicago substantially overlap, and this shared culture, in turn, pro-
vides for a common intellectual citizenship among students and faculty
alike. As the revolutionaries of the 1930s clearly understood, the exis-
tence of and operational impact of the new general-education sequences
was a primary motor in encouraging and sustaining an intense academic
enthusiasm among our students.
Without the project of general education the University would not
only have been educationally poorer, it would be culturally a very dier-
ent place for faculty as well as for students. e launching of general
education ninety years ago indeed signied, as Harry Gideonse insisted,
the creation of a new cosmos for the University of Chicago.
283. Mackauer was initially hired late in the appointment cycle of the 1943–44
academic year as a one-year visiting instructor to teach Social Sciences, while on
a leave of absence from the Mount Hermon School. See Faust to Filbey, Novem-
ber 3, 1943, Presidents’ Papers, Addenda, Budgets and Appointments,
1938–1945, box 2, folder 32. Given that the College was recruiting other teach-
ers from elite private high schools—Eugene Northrop in Mathematics was
recruited from the Hotchkiss Academy in 1943, for example—Mackauer’s
appointment made sense and was part of the rapid expansion of the College’s
faculty that took place after 1942.
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