From the Academy

Dr. Hutchins Reconsiders

For two decades, Dr. Robert M. Hutchins has been one of the most able and energetic opponents of mere size and aggrandizement in American educational institutions. Though there happens to be a good deal in which I disagree with Mr. Hutchins, I think that this forceful gentleman has behaved wisely and manfully in this. And last month, in an address to the American College of Hospital Administrators, Dr. Hutchins observed that even he had not properly recognized, when he was President and Chancellor of the University of Chicago, the urgent necessity for conducting education on a truly human—that is, a personal, diminutive—scale. The administrative problem of the great centralized university is insoluble, he said; and, besides, the whole structure of the typical American university “tends to self-defeating excesses in specialization, self-defeating in the sense that the specialist who knows nothing outside his specialty eventually cannot succeed in it.”

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Russell Kirk

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Dr. Hutchins Reconsiders

For two decades, Dr. Robert M. Hutchins has been one of the most able and energetic opponents of mere size and aggrandizement in American educational institutions. Though there happens to be a good deal in which I disagree with Mr. Hutchins, I think that this forceful gentleman has behaved wisely and manfully in this. And last month, in an address to the American College of Hospital Administrators, Dr. Hutchins observed that even he had not properly recognized, when he was President and Chancellor of the University of Chicago, the urgent necessity for conducting education on a truly human—that is, a personal, diminutive—scale. The administrative problem of the great centralized university is insoluble, he said; and, besides, the whole structure of the typical American university “tends to self-defeating excesses in specialization, self-defeating in the sense that the specialist who knows nothing outside his specialty eventually cannot succeed in it.”