Unseasonable Truths
O'Brien, Dennis
BOOKS 'There's a troublemaker' UNSEASONABLE TRUTHS Harry Ashmore Little, Brown and Company, $27.50, 616 pp. Dennis O'Brien The first student demonstration I ever witnessed was at the...
...Liebling claimed in a famous phrase, "the greatest magnet for juvenile delinquents since the Second Crusade...
...Unseasonable Truths-the title comes from Hutchins 's claim that the sin of speaking truth "out of season" was his lifelong fault-breaks roughly in the middle between Hutchins's career at Chicago and all that came after...
...Hutchins's life was not as pale as Immanuel Kant's, but in the long run the value of philosophers is not in their friends and table manners...
...The Hutchins College was a required four-year course which concentrated on Great Books (more or less...
...Dennis O'Brien The first student demonstration I ever witnessed was at the University of Chicago in the spring of 1953...
...He spotted Hutchins's picture on the cover, tapped the volume and said emphatically, "There's a troublemaker...
...One senses the comic sadness of it all in Hutchins's name for the mansion in Santa Barbara where the center was located: El Parthenon...
...He was to say of the Hutchins College: [It was] a kind of queer and unusual place...
...Hutchins sought to duplicate in an undergraduate curriculum some echo of the grand Summa he admired by St...
...Son of the parsonage, dean of the Yale Law School at twenty-seven, president of the University of Chicago at twenty-nine, Hutchins was the most controversial and publicized educational leader of his day...
...It is precisely that detail of persons and issues that is lacking in the account of the Chicago years...
...he was continually rumored to be a crypto-Catholic but, in fact, was decidedly untheological...
...When I used to kid him about it, how superficial and shallow it was, he would say, "Well, it's better than getting drunk" and I think that's a pretty good summary of it...
...Placards read: "Don't let them [the faculty] take our College from us...
...Robert Maynard Hutchins, right or wrong, may have been the last university president for whom anyone cared whether he/she was either...
...Unseasonable Truths is a biography of Robert Maynard Hutchins, the man who created the college which the student demonstrators wished to protect from faculty libertarians...
...Specifically the students were protesting against the introduction of free choice (elec-tives) into the college curriculum...
...he was in America First yet also accused of communism...
...Hutchins himself steadfastly refused to write an autobiography and he may have been correct...
...Here an often inspired teaching staff introduced us to the attempt...
...Mr...
...Thomas...
...It certainly made no intellectual contribution...
...I happened to run into the president of one of the major Ivy universities while I was reading through Unseasonable Truths...
...Every queer and unusual student who disliked athletics and the normal outlets of young people was attracted to the Hutchins College...
...Contrast Kimpton's acid comment with the ecstatic review of a Hutchins College alumnus, George Steiner: "To this distant day, I tingle at the recollection of Oil Observation, Information, and Integration the crowning course in the college...
...Philosophy has no biography...
...None too soon as far as his successor, President Lawrence A. Kimpton, was concerned...
...By the time of the 1953 demonstration, the forces of academic partition and specialization against which he had battled were about to regain the curriculum...
...Most university presidents are low on the tingle, managing bureaucracies of scholarship which process youth to no ill-effect but which rarely produce, or even seek, "a general principle of human understanding...
...The interesting Hutchins tried to live as a timeless contemporary of Aristotle...
...Hutchins had an unhappy first marriage...
...Hutchins resigned as chancellor of the University of Chicago as of January 1951...
...One of Hutchins's Chicago defenders contrasted Hutchins and Kimpton: "Hutchins was wont to put first things first but nothing second...
...The great man spent the rest of his life drumming up conferences on grand issues with the touching hope that a gaggle of intellectuals might clear up world politics...
...An inherently important story but not, alas, in Harry Ashmore's account...
...Even today Hutchins's views evidently can cause a shudder to run down Ivy walls...
...Harry Ashmore became associated with Hutchins during this later "floundational" period (Ezra Pound's ingenious coinage...
...What came after is the stuff of Chekovian tragedy...
...With his philosophical collaborator, Mortimer Adler, President Hutchins established such a metaphysical program for John D. Rockefeller's university on the Midway that it was said of Chicago that it was "a Baptist institution where Jews taught Catholicism to atheists...
...Was Hutchins's summa curricula a paragon of pedagogy or, as A.J...
...Kimpton put second things first, for lack of clear priorities of his own...
...The Great Books course was a joke, and Hutchins knew it was...
...to discover a general principle of human understanding, to find logic and meaning in both the world and the thought in which we incorporate the world" (New Yorker, October 23,1989...
...In his account of Hutchins at Chicago, Ashmore gives us lots of second things without really assessing the force of the first things...
...A biography of Hutchins-the-troublemaker would require a searching look at the practice and theory (such as it is) of higher education in America and RMH's place as a troublesome, arrogant, Quixotic critic of the same...
...The demonstration was in classical form: placards, chanting students, a cordon of protesters through which faculty had to maneuver...
...Either way it would be a fascinating story...
...The last three hundred pages of the biography constitute the better half because Ashmore knows the intimate arguments and egos which marked the sad escapades and bold dreams of Hutchins's last ventures...
...it was somewhat irrelevant that he also dealt with Harold Swift, his remarkably supportive Chairman of the Board...
...The cause of all this commotion was, however, absolutely unique and in the contemporary world wholly incredible...
...The Center for the Study of Democratic Institutions was the last of these ventures...
Vol. 116 • December 1989 • No. 22
