During his first year as President of the University of Chicago, twenty-nine-year-old Robert Hutchins hired Mortimer Adler, just one year his junior, to help reform undergraduate education at Chicago, an institution devoted to graduate instruction that attracted many undergraduates unlikely to continue their studies beyond their bachelor's degrees. Two years earlier Hutchins, who was then acting Dean of the Yale University Law School, had invited Adler to New Haven to discuss Adler's first book Dialectic (New York: Harcourt, Brace and Company, 1927). The two found common ground in their theories of law, but Hutchins was also intrigued by the young scholar's zeal and devotion to the liberal arts.
Even before he arrived at Chicago, Adler persuaded Hutchins to offer General Honors at Chicago. Hutchins, who lamented that he had never read the Great Books himself, was so excited by the prospect of General Honors that he agreed to co-teach the class to round out his own education. During the summer of 1931, Hutchins read the "easy books," War and Peace, Crime and Punishment, Pere Goriot, and John Stuart Mill, but he struggled through Hume whom he found an uninteresting "old ass." He enjoyed teaching the class so much that he continued to teach it in one form or another with Adler for nearly two decades.
Set up almost exactly as it had been at Columbia, General Honors was offered as a two-year course for entering freshmen in the fall of 1931. The inauspicious announcement in the Freshman Week calendar attracted eighty students who interviewed for a spot in the class, from which twenty were selected.
The press jumped at the novelty of young President Hutchins acting as "Mr. Adler's straight man" in a course for freshmen. Visiting dignitaries often sat in on the class: actors Lillian Gish, Ethel Barrymore, and Orson Wells attended sessions, as did Eugene Meyer, publisher of the Washington Post, but none caused quite the stir that Gertrude Stein did in 1934. Skeptical of the entire endeavor to teach the Great Books (she insisted that the classics could not be understood when read in translation), Stein led a session on Homer's Odyssey. Alice B. Toklas remembered that Stein gave the students more freedom than Hutchins and Adler normally allowed, enabling the students to "formulate their own ideas." But, according to Adler, Stein abandoned the Socratic method and "harangued [the students] with extempore remarks about epic poetry which she thought up on the spot, but which none of us, including Gertrude, could understand, then or in the years to come."
The grandiose scope of Adler's liberal arts mission (as well as the fears of those who thought the seminar could never teach any subject in depth) is best summed up by the first question on the exam he and Hutchins prepared for the completion of the first year of the class: "Discuss the Renaissance in the light of the books of this course." Students who dared take on the topic were forbidden from also choosing Part B, Question 7: "Discuss the following authors, Erasmus, Montaigne, Rabelais, and Francis Bacon, in the light of the four R's: romanticism, revolution, reformation and renaissance."
THE GREAT IDEAS: THE UNIVERSITY OF CHICAGO AND THE
IDEAL OF LIBERAL EDUCATION
To Next Section--3. From General Education to the College Curriculum