Robert Maynard Hutchins (1899–1977)

Robert Hutchins wrote widely about education and is best known for his support of liberal education, which he believed "prepares the young for anything that may happen; it has value under any circumstances. . . . It gets them ready for a lifetime of learning. It connects man with man. It introduces all men to the dialogue about the common good of their own country and of the world community. It frees their mind of prejudice. It lays the basis of practical wisdom." He believed that the increasing complexities of civilization did not justify any modification in this approach. "The more technological the society," he says in The Learning Society (1968), "the less ad hoc education can be. The reason is that the more technological the society is, the more rapidly it will change and the less valuable ad hoc education will become. It now seems safe to say that the best practical education is the best theoretical one." After serving as dean of Yale Law School in 1929, Hutchins became (at age 29) president and in 1949 chancellor of the University of Chicago, remaining there until 1951. During this period, he and Mortimer Adler introduced the Great Books program into the Chicago curriculum. They believed that the best education is achieved through reading and understanding the great minds of the past. Later he became associate director of the Ford Foundation and president of the Fund for the Republic. In the latter post, Hutchins faced the oppressive climate for free expression brought about by McCarthyism, but he saw to it that the fund's projects included studies of the federal loyalty-security program, of political blacklisting in the entertainment industries, and of the nature of communism in the United States. He retired as the chief executive officer of the Center for the Study of Democratic Institutions in Santa Barbara, California, a "community of scholars" under the aegis of the Ford Foundation. (Bowker Author Biography) — biography from The Higher Learning in America (Foundations of Higher Education)… (more)