Robert Maynard Hutchins: A Memoir.

• Author: Karabell, Zachary
• Position: Brief Article

By Milton Mayer, edited by John H. Hicks University of California Press. 550 pp. $35.00.

If readers of The Progressive think you've heard the last of Milton Mayer, forget it. You have a treat in store in this, the last book Mayer wrote before his death in 1986. An account of the association of two friends for about forty years, this book is also a history of the social and political movements of the middle decades of the Twentieth Century.

Mayer, The Progressive's essayist and roving editor for many years, shares his personal experiences as he reflects on the life and times of Robert Maynard Hutchins (1899-1977). It is often hard to know when Hutchins leaves off and Mayer begins; both men lived in times that were out of joint. Or, as Studs Terkel puts it in the book's foreword, "Hutchins was out of sync."

At this time, when the United States is rethinking the role of education in a democratic society, it may be useful to revisit Hutchins. He was one of the most creative innovators in the philosophy of education since John Dewey.

Assuming the presidency of the University of Chicago at age thirty, in 1929, Hutchins called the university a community of scholars that had as its primary purpose "to unsettle the minds of young men, to widen their horizons, to inflame their intellects.... It is not to teach men facts, theories, or laws; it is not to reform them, or amuse them, or make them expert technicians in any field. It is to teach them to think ... for themselves."

During his twenty-two years at Chicago, he changed the nature of education there. He founded the Great Books Foundation and taught freshman courses with such titles as "The Nature of the World and Men" and "The History of Ideas."

Hutchins was a staunch defender of academic freedom and the Bill of Rights. When Robert Morss Lovett, an old professor, was under attack for his "alleged communistic teachings," a member of the faculty warned Hutchins that he would...