Robert Maynard Hutchins (January 17, 1899 — May 14, 1977) was an American

9 min readMay 7, 2021

Robert Maynard Hutchins (January 17, 1899 — May 14, 1977) was an American educational philosopher. He was president (1929–1945) and chancellor (1945–1951) of the University of Chicago, and earlier dean of Yale Law School (1927–1929). He was the husband of novelist Maude Hutchins. Although his father and grandfather were both Presbyterian ministers, Hutchins became one of the most influential members of the school of secular perennialism.

A graduate of Yale College and the law school of Yale University, Hutchins joined the law faculty and soon was named Dean. While Dean he gained notice for Yale’s development of the philosophy of Legal Realism. Hutchins was 30 years old when he became Chicago’s president in 1929. While he was president, Hutchins implemented wide-ranging and sometimes controversial reforms of the University, including the elimination of varsity football. He supported interdisciplinary programs, including during World War II, establishing the Metallurgical Laboratory. His most far-reaching academic reforms involved the undergraduate College of the University of Chicago, which was retooled into a novel pedagogical system built on Great Books, Socratic dialogue, comprehensive examinations and early entrance to college. Although parts of the Hutchins Plan were abandoned by the University shortly after Hutchins left in 1951, an adapted version of the program survived at Shimer College.

Hutchins left Chicago to head the Ford Foundation where he channeled resources into studying education. In 1959, he founded the Center for the Study of Democratic Institutions, a think tank in Santa Barbara, California.

Early life and career[edit]

Robert Maynard Hutchins was born in Brooklyn in 1899, the second of three sons of William James Hutchins, a Presbyterian minister and future Berea College president.[1] Eight years later, the family moved to Oberlin, Ohio, site of Oberlin College, where William Hutchins became an instructor.[2] Oberlin was a small community dedicated to evangelical ideals of righteousness and hard work, which had a lifelong influence on Hutchins.[3] Hutchins studied at Oberlin Academy and subsequently Oberlin College from 1915 to 1917.

At age 18 in 1917, shortly after the United States entered World War I, Hutchins joined the ambulance service of the United States Army, together with his brother William. The Hutchins brothers served in an all-Oberlin unit, Section 587, which for much of the war was stationed at the Allentown Fair Grounds, where they were tasked with creating a barracks. Upon subsequent deployment to Italy, Hutchins was awarded the Croce al Merito di Guerra.

Returning from the war in 1919, Hutchins went to Yale University (B.A. 1921).[4] At Yale he encountered a very different society from what he had known before at Oberlin; the tone was set by preparatory school graduates who defied Prohibition.[5] However, Hutchins did not enjoy the same level of financial support, and in his junior and senior years, he worked menial jobs for up to six hours per day to cover living expenses.[6] In his senior year, he was tapped for the Wolf’s Head Society.[7] Having already fulfilled his graduation requirements, he also enrolled in Yale Law School. Fascinated by the case method, Hutchins subsequently regarded this as the beginning of his true education.[8] Shortly after his graduation in 1921, Hutchins married Maude Phelps McVeigh. They would have three daughters together, the first born in 1925.[9]

After spending a year teaching high school History and English in Lake Placid, New York, he was hired to become the Secretary of the Yale Corporation. In this position he was the principal assistant to the president of Yale, with responsibility for alumni relations and fundraising. Returning to New Haven, he also resumed his studies at Yale Law School (LL.B 1925). Upon completing his LL.B., graduating at the top of his class, he was invited to join the Yale Law faculty, teaching courses on evidence and utility law. He became acting Dean of Yale Law School in 1927, and full Dean in 1928.[10] It was at this point, when he was the Dean of Yale Law while still in his 20s, that Hutchins became a national figure.[11]

At the time, Yale Law School was dominated by the Legal Realists and Hutchins sought to promote Legal Realism during his time as dean. Skeptical of the received rules of evidence that he had taught as a professor, he worked to integrate the findings of psychology, sociology and logic with the law.[12] His supporters in this enterprise included William O. Douglas, who left Columbia School of Law to work under Hutchins at Yale.[13] Hutchins played a key role in convincing the Rockefeller Foundation to fund an Institute of Human Relations at Yale, to foster partnerships between the social sciences and law and medicine.[14]

University of Chicago tenure[edit]

In 1929, he moved to Chicago, Illinois to become President of the University of Chicago at the age of 30, the youngest university president in the country. Over the next several years, Hutchins came to question Legal Realism, which he had previously championed, and grew skeptical of the ability of empirical research in the social sciences to solve social problems, especially in the face of the Great Depression. Particularly through contact with Mortimer Adler, he became convinced that the solution to the philosophical problems facing the university lay in Aristotelianism and Thomism. In the late 1930s, Hutchins attempted to reform the curriculum of the University of Chicago along Aristotelian-Thomist lines, only to have the faculty reject his proposed reforms three times.

Hutchins served as President of the University of Chicago until 1945, and as the University’s Chancellor until 1951. During his Chancellorship, he recruited a commission to inquire into the proper function of the media. By 1947, the Hutchins Commission issued their report on the “social responsibility” of the press.

Hutchins was notable as a defender of academic freedom. When the University was accused of fostering communism in 1935 (by Charles Rudolph Walgreen, who claimed his niece had been indoctrinated with communist ideas whilst studying there) and again in 1949, Hutchins defended the right of the University’s faculty to teach as they wished, arguing that the best way to defeat communism was through open debate and scrutiny, rather than suppression. “Hutchins stood behind his faculty and their right to teach and believe as they wished, insisting that communism could not withstand the scrutiny of public analysis and debate.”[15]

Hutchins was able to implement his ideas regarding a two-year, generalist bachelors during his tenure at Chicago, and subsequently had designated those studying in depth in a field as masters students. He moreover pulled Chicago out of the Big Ten Conference and eliminated the school’s football program, which he saw as a campus distraction. Hutchins heaped scorn upon schools which received more press coverage for their sports teams than for their educational programs, and the trustees provided the support he needed to drop football in 1939. The decision was hailed by many, and Hutchins today serves as a model for those who argue that commercialized college sports are incompatible with the academic and intellectual aims of institutions of higher learning.[16]

Robert Maynard Hutchins (January 17, 1899 — May 14, 1977) was an American

Contents

Early life and career[edit]

University of Chicago tenure[edit]

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