Nisbet, Robert A. "Hutchins of Chicago." Commentary Magazine. 1964.

Abstract:

Though the public still hears from Robert M. Hutchins as head of the Center for the Study of Democratic Institutions and perennial critic of the higher vocationalism of our colleges and universities, he is perhaps best known for his years at the helm of the University of Chicago. From the time he took office as the thirty-year-old “boy president” in 1929 until he left under heavy fire in 1951, Mr. Hutchins was a permanently controversial figure in American education who managed to stamp his personality and ideas upon the national scene as no other university president has done before or since. Arthur A. Cohen, who was an undergraduate at Chicago toward the close of Mr. Hutchins’s tenure, characterizes his career as that of a moralist among educational leaders. Many others would say moralist rather than educational leader, for despite his immediate impact, there is little evidence that Robert Hutchins had any lasting influence on the nature and structure of American universities, as, for example, his great forerunner, William Rainey Harper, did at Chicago or Daniel Coit Gilman did at Johns Hopkins, or Benjamin Ide Wheeler at California, or even Woodrow Wilson did at Princeton—whose mind was as morally driven as Hutchins’s own. Far from being, as he has so often been described, the last of the academic leaders among university presidents, Mr. Hutchins was the first president to illustrate, often with devastating fall-out, the impossibility of one-man leadership in the modern university, even by individuals of his talents, once faculties have become great and proud, as Chicago’s so plainly had long before 1929. The dramatic interlude of “the Hutchins years” has often diverted attention from the fact that the University of Chicago, for about two decades prior to 1930, was unquestionably the greatest single university, department for department, school for school, that this country had seen. Its intellectual and scholarly leadership in the country during that period has not since been matched, in scope at least, by Harvard, Columbia, or California. What President Hutchins did for, or to, Chicago must be seen, therefore, in terms very different from those in which men like Harper, Gilman, Wilson, or Wheeler are assessed. Hutchins inherited a great university, not a mediocre academy.

In a recent collection of essays written in honor of Hutchins,1David Riesman puts his finger squarely on the reason why no president can “lead” a great university—why indeed “leadership” by the president, in the old-fashioned sense, is one of the infallible signs of institutional mediocrity, of feebleness of faculty. With “the rise of an educated elite, with the use of the universities as sorting stations for talent to run the society, academic values enjoy a priority which they never had before in America. This ensures that power will not be centered in the president or his administrators, but in the academic guild as such.”

 

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