COMMANDO HUTCHINS
Mayer, Milton
Commando Hutchins By MILTON MAYER ALL HELL has broken loose on the University of Chicago campus again, and the heller, as usual, is Mr. Robert Maynard Hutchins. I would not bother you about this...
...6. The placing of initiative in educational policy in the hands of the president, with full responsibility to the Senate and presidential tenure contingent upon Senatorial confidence...
...His plan, unlike Stalin's or Trotsky's, arises from a most peculiar conviction he has about the community he wants to socialize...
...H. would have his Institute centered on liberal, or general, education...
...A university, he says, is a "consecrated community...
...I think he thinks that the production of signalmen, meteorologists, explosives, and poison gases has very little to do with education...
...Cooperative commonwealth" is just a fancy name for what Proposals 1, 2, and 3 imply...
...Hutchins said as much in the speech to the faculty in which he made the proposals...
...Hutchins proposes to adjust their salaries and have them live solely on the adjusted salaries, so that they will be able to pay attention to their University work...
...If I remember right, Stalin and Trotsky had an argument on that same point...
...But there is more to it than that...
...Some of them now, including some of Mr...
...The only measure of compensation in a true community, " said Mr...
...Hutchins' closest associates is said to have discovered with horror, is socialism...
...Hutchins is, if I read him right, trying to revolutionize the modern world, and when a great big handsome president of a great big handsome university goes revolutionary, it is time to sit up and take notice...
...Hutchins calls it anarchy...
...Hutchins' closest associates, pay very little attention to their University work...
...his opponents say it would be impossible...
...They are consecrated to the pursuit of truth, and not just to any old truth—such as the number of motions required in wiping dishes, which was the subject of a thesis for the Master's Degree in Home Economics—but to the pursuit of the truth that will make men free...
...What they imply, as one of Mr...
...H. is not opposed to dish-wiping, but he does not believe it will make men free...
...he's been talking this way, without any deviation, for 25 years...
...in other words, the parliamentary system of England, without the Lords...
...I will tell you this much: If this oaf succeeds in doing what he has set out to do, its effect on the world will be more cataclysmic than the outcome of the Invasion...
...He wants to free professors from the pressure to pursue mink coats for their wives, or for somebody else's wives, and assure them a modest competence based on need...
...and lest you then begin to rest easy, I will tell you that the unlikelihood of success does not in the least daunt Mr...
...Proposal 4 is so obviously democratic that nobody attacks it openly...
...Hutchins says that if the university president had the power of a prime minister, the faculty woufd have the supreme power of a parliament...
...He bears watching...
...the war will keep him busy," he decided to stage a one-man commando raid on the unguarded shrine of Let-Well-Enough-Alone...
...The hitch, of course, is how the devil you are going to have socialism in one country...
...4. Abolition of the present University Senate, which represents only the 100 or 150 full professors and has complete power over educational policy, in favor of a Senate representing all the 700 or 800 members of the faculty...
...I think he is the best and wisest man I know, and I warn you to read my analysis of the current hell-raising with the fact in mind that I admire him so fervently that probably I can not see straight...
...Hutchins insists that the members of a consecrated community are not competing for money or position...
...I am in no position to argue any of these matters, because I have a fuehrer complex about Mr...
...Island Of Socialism Proposals 1, 2, and 3 amount to nothing more nor less than a cooperative commonwealth...
...He is, in a word, a moral and political philosopher, and not a stuffed shirt university president at all, and he would like to organize the higher learning around the search for moral and political truth...
...3. Compensation of faculty members strictly on the basis of need...
...Hutchins complains, and has complained for 25 of his 45 years, that everybody agrees that education is terrible but that nobody does anything about it because nobody can...
...The opposition calls this democracy...
...In the first place, it isn't sudden...
...5. The creation, by a representative Senate, of an Institute of Liberal Studies, devoted solely to the preparation of teachers of liberal, or general, education, in contrast to vocational, technological, or professional education...
...But Mr...
...he is proposing a little island of socialism in a capitalistic country and a capitalistic world...
...Hutchins is a menace to all the sacred precepts that have produced the glorious civilization wje are now enjoying...
...H., "is need...
...Lest you begin to worry, I will tell you that I do not believe that he is going to succeed...
...They talk, instead, about Proposal 5, which they suspect is a menace to the pursuit of truth because Mr...
...and those who deny that one truth is more important than another, and those who assert that scientific truth is the only truth, are afraid, and quite properly, that Mr...
...Why The Commando Raid...
...and he is interested in education...
...And so he thinks that university professors—himself included, I suppose—should themselves be free to pursue the truth, and I dare say he regards his Proposals 1, 2, and 3 as the preliminary conditions to doing so...
...I just thought I would tell you all this because I believe that Mr...
...Hutchins is trying to overturn American education...
...What they all wonder is how their adjusted salaries would enable them to live...
...So, with everybody saying, "We don't need to worry about Hutchins for a while...
...they are cooperating in the pursuit of the object of their consecration...
...By the time this is printed there will be five, as I intend to take advantage of the indiscriminate petition-signing by passing around a petition for a raise in Mayer's salary...
...H. is proposing nothing so likely as socialism in one country...
...In the second place, I think he is bored running a colossal war plant, for a war plant is what the University of Chicago now is...
...2. Full-time service of all faculty members, with all outside earnings turned over to the University...
...The battle royal is being fought over Proposals 5 and 6, and the issues are stated, by all parties, including Mr...
...he thinks that the truth that will make men free is the truth (whatever it may- be) that makes men happy, and he thinks that happiness has something to do with a nice balance between virtue and external goods...
...Some of the boys who attack the other proposals are opposed to their own loss of aristocratic power, but they do not care to say so...
...But behind the battle royal is the battle sordid, for the faculty members, except for a few prima donnas, get between $3,000 and $6,000 a year...
...The difficulties of determining need, in this socialistic little island, would be enormous...
...Hutchins suddenly, in the midst of a great war, popped his revolution...
...Faculty members, living under rugged capitalistic conditions, are compelled either to live scrawnily, if they try to live on their wages, or, if they want to live at all elegantly, to engage in all kinds of legitimate outside rackets, such as ladies' club lecturing and the writing of School text books...
...Everybody agrees with him that education is terrible, but nobody in it wants to let anybody else in it do anything about it...
...But I think I can tell you why Mr...
...As for the abolition of rank, that, too, is strictly socialistic...
...the opposition says that the prime minister would, by personal influence, intimidation, and what-not, render the parliament impotent or buy it up with favors...
...I would not bother you about this matter except for the fact that you are all the products, or the parents of products, of American education, and Mr...
...Hutchins' Institute would center on the pursuit and communication of moral and political truth...
...Those who enter it do so willingly, somewhat in the manner of monks, because they, somewhat like the monks who seek the salvation of men's souls, seek the salvation of men's minds...
...Hutchins, in the loftiest terms...
...Here, as I was saying, are the proposals: 1. Abolition of all academic rank...
...Hutchins' Six Proposals Here are his six proposals, which have the faculty in such a stew, or set of stews, that no fewer than four petitions, violently for or against one or more of the proposals, are now said to be circulating among the professors...
...Proposal 6 is opposed as dictatorship, unlike Proposal 4, which is regarded as democracy, and Proposals 1, 2, and 3, which are regarded as socialism...
...Aren't you glad...
Vol. 8 • May 1944 • No. 18
