The Higher Learning in America
Robert Maynard Hutchins
(New Haven: YUP, 1936)

passages selected by Adam Kissel and Don Levine
(somebody else made marks in red pencil which I did not use)

The most striking fact about the higher learning in America is the confusion that besets it. 1

The college of liberal arts is partly high school, partly university, partly general, partly special. 2

It is sad but true that when an institution determines to do something in order to get money it must lose its soul, and frequently does not get the money. 4 I do not mean, of course, that universities do not need money and that they should not try to get it. I mean only that they should have an educational policy and then try to finance it, instead of letting financial accidents determine their educational policy. 5

It is probably fair to say that American universities above the junior year ought to do anything and everything that would reduce their income from students. This is true because most of the things that degrade them are done to maintain or increase this income. 5

A university that attempts to do freshman and sophomore work therefore ends up doing either a poor university job or a poor col [8/9] lege job. And one or the other of these situations obtains at almost every American university today.
     There is only one way that I have been able to think of in which a university can entertain freshmen and sophomores and do well by them and by its university obligations at the same time. That is to take the view that the university may well try to help the system of public education by working out for it what a general education ought to be. 8-9

The faculty dealing with general education . . . must be remote enough from [the university] to be able to work on its problems without the interference or control of the university faculty and without interfering with or controlling that faculty. 10

The love of money means that a university must attract students. To do this it must be attractive. This is interpreted to mean that it must go to unusual lengths to house, feed, and amuse the young. No[10/11]body knows what these things have to do with the higher learning. Everybody supposes that students think they re important. The emphasis on athletics and social life that infects all colleges and universities has done more than most things to confuse these institutions and to debse the higher learning in America. 10-11

The love of money makes its appearance in universities in the most unexpected places. One would look for it in presidents and trustees. [But] a good many professors instantly react to any proposal for the improvement of education by displaying a concern for the university's income that is notably absent when they are pressing for increases in their own research budgets. Two answers are usually made . . . : it is said that the students cannot do the work and that [12/13] the university by frightening away students will reduce its income. What these answers usually mean is that the professors who make them do not want to change the habits of their lives. Since this cannot be made a matter of public knowledge, some philanthropic reason must be put forward instead. 12-13

. . . present and prospective economic conditions are such that the terminus of the public education which the ordinary youth is expected to enjoy will be set at about the end of the sophomore year in college. This means that the public junior college will become the characteristic educational institution of the United States, just as the public high school has been up to now. 16

Adjustments to individual capacities should be made by permitting the student to proceed at his own pace, taking the examinations whenever in his opinion he is ready to take them. 19

Trustees are in a different category from alumni. They at least have the undoubted legal right to control the institution. The wiser they are the less they will attempt to do so. 23

If a president succeeds in finding a few great men, he cannot hope to make them useful in an organization that ties them hand and foot and in a course of study that is going off in all directions at the same time and particularly in those opposite to the ones in which the great men are going. 28

Undoubtedly, fine associations, fine buildings, green grass, good food, and exercise are excellent things for anybody. You will note that they are exactly what is advertised by every resort hotel. The only reason why they are also advertised by every college and university is that we have no coherent educational program to announce. 29

Vocationalism leads, then, to triviality and isolation; it debases the course of study and the staff. It deprives the university of its only excuse for existence, which is to provide a haven where the search for truth may go on unhampered by utility or pressure for "results." . . . The spirit of the age is not congenial to long-term, quiet investigations of matters which seem remote from daily life; nor is it in fact congenial to the impartial, detached study of subjects that touch daily life more nearly. Everybody wants the university to advance his special brand of propaganda, to join his private pressure group. 43

To the extent to which universities and professional schools abandon creative thought and degenerate into trade schools the profession must degenerate into a trade. I attribute the decline of the church in this country to the decline of the theological schools, the plight of the law to the plight of the law schools, the condition of engineering to the condition of the engineering schools, and the comparative excellence of medicine to the comparative excellence of the medical schools developed since 1910. (44)

My contention is that the tricks of the trade cannot be learned in a university, and that if they can be they should not be. They cannot be learned in a university because they get out of date and new tricks take their place, because the teachers get out of date and cannot keep up with current tricks, and because tricks can be learned only in the actual situation in which they can be employed. 47

All that can be learned in a university is the general principles, the fundamental propositions, the theory of any discipline. The practices of the profession change so rapidly that an attempt to inculcate them may merely succeed in teaching the student habits that will be a disservice to him when he graduates. 48

All there is to journalism can be learned through a good education and newspaper work. All there is to teaching can be learned through a good education and being a teacher. All there is to public administration can be discovered by getting a good education and being a public servant. 56

. . . if we can develop general education so that all advanced study will rest on a common body of knowledge, we may succeed in making our universities true communities and communities of true scholars. 57

The justification for the privileges of universities is not to be found in their capacity to take the sons of the rich and render them harmless to society or to take the sons of the poor and teach them how to make money. It is to be found in the enduring value of having constantly before our eyes institutions that represent an abiding faith in the highest powers of mankind. 58

The scheme that I advance is based on the notion that general education is education for everybody, whether he goes on to the university or not. It will be useful to him in the university; it will be equally useful if he never goes there. 62

I shall not be attentive when you tell me that the plan of general education I am about to present is remote from real life, that real life is in constant flux and change, and that education must be in constant flux and change as well. I do not deny that all things are in change. They have a beginning, and a middle, and an end. Nor will I deny that the history of the race reveals tremendous technological advances and great increases in our scientific knowledge. But we are so impressed with scientific and technological progress that we assume similar progress in every field. We renounce our intellectual heritage, read only the most recent books, discuss only current events, try to keep the schools abreast or even ahead of the times, and write elaborate addresses on Education and Social Change.
     Paul Shorey said:

If there are permanent studies which every person who wishes to call himself educated should master; . . . then those studies should be the center of a general education. They cannot be ignored because they are difficult, or unpleasant, or because they are almost totally missing from our curriculum today. The child-centered school may be attractive to the child, and no doubt is useful as a place in which the little ones may release their inhibitions and hence behave better at home. But educators cannot permit the students to dictate the course of study unless they are prepared to confess that they are nothing but chaperons, supervising an aimless, trial-and-error process which is chiefly valuable because it keeps young people from doing something worse. The free elective system as Mr. Eliot introduced it at Harvard and as Progressive Education adapted it to lower age [70/71] levels amounted to a denial that there was content to education. Since there was no content to education, we might as well let students follow their own bent. They would at least be interested and pleased and would be as well educated as if they had pursued a prescribed course of study. This overlooks the fact that the aim of education is to connect man with man, to connect the present with the past, and to advance the thinking of the race. If this is the aim of education, it cannot be left to the sporadic, spontaneous interests of children or even of undergraduates. 70-71

In any field the permanent studies on which the whole development of the subject rests must be mastered if the student is to be educated. 72

In general education we are interested in drawing out the elements of our common human nature; we are interested in the attributes of the race, not the accidents of individuals. 73

[The great books] are then a part, and a large part, of the permanent studies. They are so in the first place because they are the best books we know. How can we call a man educated who has never read any of the great books in the western world? Yet today it is entirely possible for a student to graduate from the finest American colleges without having read any of them, except possibly Shakespeare. 78

. . . knowledge [of the great books] is gained in general through textbooks, and textbooks have probably done as much to degrade the American intelligence as any singly force. 78

Yet we may with profit remember the words of Nicholas Murray Butler:

Four years spend partly in reading, discussing, and digesting books of . . . importance would . . . serve as preparation for advanced study and as general education designed to help the student understand the world. It will also develop habits of reading and standards of taste and criticism that will enable the adult, after his formal education is over, to think and act intelligently about the thought and movements of contemporary life. 81

Correctness in thinking may be more directly and impressively taught through mathematics than in any other way. [cf. Republic VII] 84

The professors of today have been brought up differently. Not all of them have read all the books they would have to teach. Not all of them are ready to change the habits of their lives. Meanwhile they are bringing up their successors in the way they [86/87]were brought up, so that the next crop will have the habits they have had themselves. And the love of money, a misconception of democracy, a false notion of progress, a distorted idea of utility, and the anti-intellectualism to which all these lead conspire to confirm their conviction that no disturbing change is needed. The times call for the establishment of a new college or for an evangelistic movement in some old ones which shall have for its object the conversion fo individuals and finally of the teaching profession to a true conception of general education. Unless some such demonstration or some such evangelistic movement can take place, we shall remain in our confusion; we shall have neither general education nor universities; and we shall continue to disappoint the hopes of our people. 86-87

Under an intelligible program of general education, the student would come to the end of the sophomore year with a solid knowledge of the foundations of the intellectual disciplines. He would be able to distinguish and think about subject matters. He would be able to use language and reason. He would have some understanding of man and of what connects man with man. He would have acquired some degree of wisdom. 91

The common aim of all parts of a university may and should be the pursuit of truth for its own sake. But this common aim is not sufficiently precise to hold the university together while it is moving toward it. Real unity can be achieved only by a hierarchy of truths which shows us which are fundamental and which subsidiary, which significant and which not. [cf. McKeon on architechtonic rhetoric] 95

As a contemporary has said:

. . . it has become almost a tradition in this country for a natural scientist after he achieves eminence and leisure to employ some of both in metaphysical, and even theological, speculations. Without any particular training in these disciplines and with a healthy contempt for those who have he proceeds to confuse the public further about the greatest questions that have confronted the human mind. [I've run into such a one at U of C] 104

And this is what teaching is. The liberal arts train the teacher in how to teach, that is, in how to organize, express, and communicate knowledge. In the university he should learn what to teach. 115

We see, then, that we may get order in the higher learning by removing from it the elements which disorder it today, and these are vocationalism and unqualified empiricism. If when these elements are removed we pursue the truth for its own sake in the light of some principle of order, such as metaphysics, we shall have a rational plan for a university. We shall be able to make a university a true center of learning; we shall be able to make it the home of creative thought. 117