The University of Utopia
Robert Maynard Hutchins
(University of Chicago 1953)

passages selected by Adam Kissel

The great bulk of the students in American universities are there in order to meet these [occupational] requirements. The public acquiesces in them, first, because it has a vague feeling that the members of certain occupations at least should be certified, or sanctified, in some way before they are let loose upon the public. . . . The universities acquiesce in these arrangements because they wish to increase their enrolments; students bring in income, and anyway there is a general feeling that excellence in educational institutions, as in most other occupations, businesses, and professions promote these arrangements in order to restrict competition and enhance their prestige. 31

Many occupations deal with intellectual subjects--subjects that can be thought about by ordinary people. Teaching is an obvious example. But teaching, like many other occupations, has no intellectual content in its own right. Education is not itself a discipline; it is a practical activity, a means by which the of disciplines is communicated to those unfamiliar with it. Education is a secondary, dependent subject. It depends on what you want and what you can do. What you want depends on your philosophy. What you can do depends on your circumstances. Wherever you touch education, it fades into something else. The aims of an educational system are the aims of the society in which it is conducted. The philsophy of education is merely moral and political philosophy. Educational psychology is nothing but the psychology of learning. When we pass from the general subject of education to the more particular one of teaching, we are no better off. The teacher has to have knowledge but not knowledge of education or what purports to be knowledge about methods of teaching gained from texts prepared by professors of Education in universities. The teacher has to have knowledge of the subject that he is attempting to teach. In addition, it will be helpful if he knows how to write, speak, and figure. It will be helpful, in short, if he knows the liberal arts, which are the arts of communication. 32-33

What a teacher needs is a liberal education and special preparation in the subject or subjects that he may be called upon to teach. This preparation should not be such as to render him an uneducated man or one incapable of contributing to the education of others. I defy anybody to show that the Ph.D. degree in its usual manifestations has had any but a baleful effect on the colleges of liberal arts to which most of those who hold it go. The most striking change in the liberal arts colleges over the last fifty years is the multiplication of courses, the multiplication of departments, and the reduction in the intellectual scope of the individual teacher. In a liberal arts college fifty years ago the professor of history could take the work of the professor of literature if the professor of literature got sick. Now, if the professor of American history gets sick, the professor of English history cannot take his work. And in a university, if the professor of American history from 1860 to 1864 gets sick, the professor of American history from 1865 to 1870 cannot take his work. 34-35

... the research worker is likely to get lost unless he can see where his work fits into some comprehensible whole.
       I must say that I think research in this country is an example of the confusion of names and things. No university can now be called respectable that is not respectable in research. Fifty years ago it was just the other way round. Universities were then colleges of liberal arts with professional schools attached. The campaign for research as the distinguishing characteristic of the university was not won until yesterday. The success of the campaign has in large part been the result of snobbishness. Good teaching, however impressive it may be to those who come under it, can enjoy only an esoteric fame. Research can be published, and scientific research can lead to sensational publicity and sometimes to practical results. 36

To paraphrase Sir Richard Livingstone, "The sign of a good university is the number of subjects that it declines to investigate." 37

There is every reason to insist that every member of a university community should keep on thinking, but there is none to demand that he conduct research that does not require thought. One aim of a university is certainly to add to the sum of human knowledge. But there is a great difference between knowledge and information. Knowledge is organized information, that is, information that has been reflected upon, thought about. The collection of information for the purpose of thinking about it is a legitimate function of a member of a university, but only on the assumption that he goes on to think about what he collects. 37-38

The university rests on the assumption that there should be somewhere in the state an organization the purpose of which is to think most profoundly about the most important intellectual issues. Its purpose is to illuminate the whole educational system and the speculative and practical issues that confront speculative thinkers and men of action. It is a community that thinks.
       Extreme and premature specialization in the United States has carried the educational system into activities that have no connection with the intellectual development of the population and has caused a disproportionate amount of its effort to go into such activities. The social and political community that might result from a common understanding has no chance to emerge. Boys and girls are mistrained in specialties and not educated to comprehend the duties of citizenship or the methods by which they might hope to lead happy and useful lives. 41

The American University, which seems to be concerned almost exclusively with money, and hence with public realtions, which are supposed to produce gifts, legislative grants, and tuition income, will offer any course of study that seems likely to interest any influential group in the community; for what standard other than money or public relations can it invoke? I discern the love of money at the bottom of the disintegration of the American university. 41

... in order to have a community that thinks, you have to have mutual intelligibility. Society requires specialists; but even specialism requires, if it is not to come to a dead end, that every specialty be able to throw light on every other. Every specialist must therefore be able to catch whatever light is being thrown from any quarter. As a man, as a citizen, and even as a specialist, the specialist requires liberal education. And since even the best liberal education cannot survive the kind of graduate training that most specialists now receive, the Utopians treat graduate education, training for their higher degrees, as principally designed to give the student an understanding of his special field in relation to others. Unless a man is going to be a research worker, they do not set him at research. If he is going to be a teacher, they try to see to it that he understands the subjects that he is likely to teach. If he is going to be a professional man--and professions among the Utopians are very few--they try to make sure that he acquires a knowledge of the intellectual content and the intellectual history of the professional discipline. 43-44

... a former president of the University [of Utopia] was tricked into assuming office late in life, after a distinguished career in nuclear physics. ... He found that his presidential duties left him no time to think and, of course, no time to teach or carry on research, even of the most pedestrian kind. He thought it odd that the only person in the University who was not required to be a teacher, scholar, or thinker was the head of it. He saw that one of the most unfortunate consequences of specialization was the production of the specialized educational administrator. 45

You will notice that the Utopian educational system and the University of Utopia are highly specialized institutions. What we want is specialized institutions and unspecialized men. [footnote: "This distinction was first brought to my attention by Professor Edward Shils in a seminar of the Committee on Social Thought at the University of Chicago under the chairmanship of Professor Colin Clark.] We want men who even though they are specialists are still men and citizens and who would ideally be able to move from one specialty to another as their interests and the needs of the community might recommend. We want men who are men and not machines. We must not be misled by the objection that there is now so much to be known that nobody can know enough to understand more than a fragment of a small field. This is to confuse information and knowledge. What every human being needs is a grasp of fundamental ideas and the ability to communicate with others. 46

The hope is found in the independent, endowed universities. Here money and public relations are already prime objects of attention; and it may be that the independent universities will become custodial, too [i.e. develop non-educational means to keep young folk occupied]. But this will mean only that they have decided to become like everybody else, that the lure of normalcy has been too much for them, and that they have not the courage to be different. In this case they will have ceased to be universities, and they will have ceased to be independent. May Heaven avert the omen . . . 48

A custodial system may be regarded a sthe efflorescence of a society's despair that it can make no rational and coherent statement about the type of man that it wants to produce. It therefore decides to leave the matter to chance, providing harmless accommodation and occupation for the young until they reach maturity. This, I should be careful to point out, is an entirely different thing from saying that the kind of man we want is one who can think and act for himself and that therefore we are going to let him learn for himself while the educational system does little more for him than keep him out of harm's way.
       Though I do not favor this philosophy of education, I admit that it is one. . . . The two most obvious disadvantages of it are, first, that it implies that teachers need not know, any more than their pupils, what an education is and, second, that it breaks up the community of learning that might exist among students and deprives them of the assistance of their fellow-students and of the ability to communicate with them during their schooling and with their fellow-men in later life. [v. Abbott survey 1996] 52-53

[the Utopian at College] continues to study history, geography, literature, science, music, and art, but the emphasis shifts from learning the techniques of communication to obtaining familiarity with the principal views of the world that men have developed and the leading ideas that have animated mankind. 57

The University of Utopia was conceived and established as a center of independent thought. I have said enough to show in what sense it is a center: everybody can and will communicate with everybody else. I have perhaps said enough to suggest in what sense it deals with thought: anything that is not thought can have no place in it. By this I do not mean that the University is opposed to recreation or social life. The program of extracurriculum activities is startling in its range and richness. All I mean is that the University has never confused these activities with the purpose of the institution. One reason for this is, perhaps, that intercollegiate football has never taken root--it has never even been thought of--in Utopia. As I have said, the Utopians are a sensible people. 62-63

... a country can have one educational system and one educational philosophy in the face of philosophical diversity.
       The Utopians have accomplished this feat by making the consideration of philosohical diversity the primary concern of educational philosophy. ... The University is not a center of propaganda for an official doctrine. Still less is it an institution like many American universities that is not concerned with doctrine at all. It is concerned with all doctrines that can have any reasonable claim to be taken seriously. Its effort is to work toward a definition of the real points of agreement and disagreement among these doctrines, not in the hope of obtaining unanimity, but in the hope of obtaining clarity. The object is not agreement but communication. The Utopians think it would be very boring to agree with one another. They think it helpful and interesting to understand one another. The University of Utopia, like the educational system as a whole, aims to bring together men of different attitudes, backgrounds, interests, temperaments, and philosophies for the purpose of promoting mutual comprehension. The University of Utopia is an understood diversity.
       Thus the educational system of Utopia is a paradigm, or prototype, or model of the republic for which the Utopians yearn. The civilization . . . is one in which discussion takes the place of force, and consensus is the basis of action. In theoretical matters the Utopians believe that the continuous refinement of methods and ideas will lead to the development of new ideas and hence to the advancement of knowledge. . . .
       But . . . in order to have a university or an educational system at all, they have had to impose some limits on the length and breadth of their philosophical tolerance. These limits [include] the kind of man who believes that he knows everything, who is closely related to, if not identical with, the kind of man who does not want to learn anything. Then there is the kind of man who does not want to talk with anybody. . . .The nature of liberal education in Utopia, and the univeral diffusion of that education, has reduced the number of Utopians who are unwilling or unable to discuss their ideas almost to the vanishing point. The wise differences of view among them in regard to such matters as the nature of man, the purpose of the state, and the existence of God have not prevented them from developing a coherent educational program. 67-69

There are two reasons why the discussions conducted in Utopia have had such inspiring results in the material, intellectual, and political progress of the country. First, the Utopians knows what they re talking about. They do not say that everything is a matter of opinion, and one man's opinion is as good as any other man's. This would mean either than no discussion took place, on the ground that it was useless; or that the discussion was endless. The Utopians say that knowledge in certain fields can be advanced by discussion. As to matters of knowledge, the Utopians intend to arrive at the truth by the method of discussion, in so far as the subject is one the knowledge of which is susceptible of advancement by this method. As to matters of opinion, the Utopians hope to reach the most intelligent conclusion, whether theoretical or practical. 73

The University of Chicago was founded by devout Baptists to stem the rising tide of Methodism in the Middle West. The requirements as to the religious affiliations of the president and the trustees were designed to keep the University on the right path. Fortunately, the combination of Mr. Rockefeller, Mr. Harper, and the enlightened wing of the Baptist Church preserved the University from too narrow an interpretation of its purpose. 78 [cf. 1999]

Unless we can figure out what education is and what a university is, and unless we can build up a tradition in this country that supports these conceptions, education and the universities will always be at the mercy of those who honestly or for political purposes seek to make them the protagonists of their views.
       I believe that the educators of America are largely responsible for the present confusion in and about education. They have felt obligated in my day to seek for money, first, last, and all the time. They have always supposed, I think erroneously, that money could be obtained only for activities that harmonized with the interests and opinions of those who had it. What they have done and what they have not done has been determined by financial considerations. ...
       I admit that this is a business civilization and that businessmen understand profit-and-loss statements and balance sheets. But one of the functions of educational leadership is to explain to businessmen that since a university has no profit-and-loss statement, and since its balance sheet is meaningless, there must be other standards by which its work is judged. Those standards are supplied by its purpose. 84-85

Public bodies or private persons who have money to dispense must be asked to do so not on the promise that the university will produce a lot of people in their image but on the assurance that the university will do its best to carry on the independent thought and criticism that the country requires and to turn out graduates who are capable of independent thought and criticism, graduates, that is, who are committed to the fullest development of their highest powers and who can do their part as responsible citizens of a democratic state. 88

The real academic crime is indoctrination, which is only slightly worse in Utopia than the crime of refusing to discuss. For these crimes a Utopian professor can be removed . . . The Utopian professor is supposed to have convictions, the deeper the better. He is not supposed to pump and pound them into his students, even though his opinions are shared by the overwhelming majority of the population. 95-96