Democracy Goes to College : ROBERT MAYNARD HUTCHINS: A Memoir, <i> By Milton Mayer</i> / <i> Edited by John H. Hicks With a foreword by Studs Terkel (University of California Press: $35; 550 pp.)</i>

America’s schools do not work. So many political and social goals have been loaded on their shoulders that their ability to instill and inspire practical skills, moral values and intellectual substance seems to be in steady decline. There has been one important exception, however: higher education. Yet in recent years crises over budget and curricula such as those in the UC and Cal State systems put even the continued excellence of these institutions at risk.

In trying to pry into what ails higher education there has, in recent years, been a modest industry in the life and work of Robert Maynard Hutchins, arguably America’s most idealistic and ambitious college leader. In 1989, one of his collaborators, Harry Ashmore, produced a biography; in 1991 Mary Ann Dzuback produced an intellectual history; and now, another of his sidekicks, Milton Mayer, has had his draft memoir posthumously edited for publication by John Hicks.

Hutchins was surely an arresting figure. A preacher’s son from New England stock, he was a “boy” Dean of the Yale Law School, then President of the University of Chicago from 1929 to 1951. In his later years, money from the Ford Foundation enabled him to counter America’s anti-Communist hysteria and to establish The Fund for the Republic to fight “restrictions on freedom of thought, inquiry and expression.” At the Fund’s headquarters in Santa Barbara he sat, as sociologist Edward Shils put it, like “a prince in exile.”

In this day when merely surviving as a college or university president is an achievement, what was it that made Bob Hutchins so important a figure to examine? Mayer entertains us with his life of Hutchins, but he never effectively answers the question.

It is, of course, important to know about Hutchins’ life. He was both gifted and lucky. Attending Oberlin before the First World War, he served in Europe and returned to finish college at Yale. His articulate style and absurdly handsome appearance won him the friends and contacts that his lack of wealth did not necessarily assure. Bright he surely was, although, with some justification, he was unimpressed by his college and law school experiences. He was, however, a life-long learner. He read constantly; he absorbed from everyone.

His long-term importance, however, was his iconoclasm. An avowed civil libertarian; courageous to the point of foolhardiness during the Red Scare and McCarthyism, he no doubt saw himself as a radical in higher education. Strangely enough, his major impact was as a conservative radical, not as a liberal reformer.

There are many ways of looking at American higher education. There are, after all, some 4,000 institutions of higher education in the United States. These probably include some 50 of the best universities and colleges in the world.

The reason that leading American universities are internationally respected is that they are known for their research and the distinction of their faculty. The latter is significantly a result of financial success. The market operates and the best universities buy the best faculty from around the world (and when the best faculty become disillusioned--as the University of California may well find--those faculty leave). Money, whether from the state, endowments, gifts or tuition also makes a high level of research possible. Research is what most leading scholars want to do. The third reason that American universities claim such a big share of the outstanding faculty and therefore command the best reputations is that American universities are basically run for the benefit of the faculty.

Some may see that as a tendentious remark. But I do not mean simply to deride the impressive power faculties have amassed nor the high salaries the best faculty members can command. Hutchins would have supported both of these. Others will see my remark as a critical reference to the naked conflict between research and teaching. Hutchins would not; he supported research. Hutchins’ battle, rather, was against the fragmentation of American educational mission.

A principal cause of this fragmentation, he believed, was the freedom faculty members had to set the exams in their own courses. This allowed them significantly to teach what they want, without a sense of sequence and without ever asking the question, What does an educated person need to know? The reverse side of that same coin is what Hutchins called “the adding machine system of education.” If you take a series of these courses at a series of institutions, each the whim of a faculty entrepreneur, and add them all together, you can claim to have a B.A., which is still our alleged talisman of the educated person.

Hutchins, the radical, was advocating an elitist solution. Our nation began with colleges that derived their curricula from the Scottish universities, which were more broadly based than English universities. But with Jacksonian democracy, the base became broad and free-ranging enough to worry Hutchins. Practical “how to” education gained full force at all levels, skepticism about what made a person “educated” abounded.

In the latter part of the 19th Century, the final blow was struck. Harvard President Charles Eliot introduced into the American scene the elective, dooming the idea of the educational core, although it took an unconscionable time in dying. Eliot also presided over the professionalization of the faculty, coupled with a scientific, Germanic approach to research. In the following hundred years the publishing professor pushed off the podium the teaching professor. The change brought great distinction to American higher education. Hutchins is important because he noted that some of the changes that Harvardization had wrought--especially the demise of a core curriculum--had not necessarily improved American education; indeed the reverse was true.

To a European, the American grade school and high school teacher is more social manipulator than teacher. Adjustment appears to take precedence over learning. The focus on student psychology makes educational coherence and structure elusive. As all education, but especially higher education, had been democratized in America, Hutchins believed it had lost rigor, integrity and coherence. He was right. The question is, was it a price worth paying? Whether he ever put the question in those terms we shall never know and Mayer certainly does not try to help us.

What we do see Hutchins doing, and it is all very exciting, is claiming that the University of Chicago would be the one university that continued to educate. Like Allan Bloom 60 years later, he no doubt looked back to a period that had never really existed, but it was in its own way a wonderful notion. So, he clashed head on with the faculty.

He wanted mandatory courses, he wanted a clearly defined, coherent exposition of what every educated person should know. He wanted exams set by professors who did not teach the course. He wanted appointments made in ideas and not in departments. He even had the heretical notion that the university president might be allowed to think about educational policy and have an active role in the appointments of faculty. And, horror of horrors, he thought faculty should be well-paid, but full-time, turning over their outside earnings to the university.

The professionalization of the professor, which Harvard had engineered, of course made this impossible. He did, however, make inroads that the giants among the presidents today, the Boks and the Youngs--could probably never make. He did get a structured curriculum within a separate faculty called the College. He did get exams set by those who were not teaching the course. He even had some modest success in making appointments. The changes, however, were all superficial. Prestige remained with the publishing professors in the traditional departments and the moment he was gone to the Ford Foundation the clock was turned back. While today Chicago still takes undergraduate education in the Hutchins sense more seriously than most research universities, his reforms are largely dead.

What a wonderful life, however. He fought the good fight. He was no doubt frequently wrong; he was politically naive, both inside and outside the university. He had to compromise with donors. He was like a small boy with new toys. He had a miserable home life and his career ended with the absurd battles about The Joys of Sex at Santa Barbara’s Center for the Study of Democratic Institutions, the successor to the Fund for the Republic. But he had more than his share of fun, as Mayer shows us in this intellectually undistinguished, but most enjoyable read.