In 1936 Robert Hutchins delivered a series of lectures at Yale University that was published as The Higher Learning in America (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1936). Showing the influence of five years of teaching with Adler, he advocated restructuring undergraduate education based on "a course of study consisting of the greatest books of the western world and the arts of reading, writing, thinking, and speaking, together with mathematics, the best exemplar of the processes of human reason." He argued that the modern specialist is "cut off from every field but his own," but that a liberal arts college experience could provide a basic shared intellectual experience.
Seeking to institute just such a liberal arts core at Chicago, the next year he brought in Adler's Columbia associates Stringfellow Barr and Scott Buchanan as visiting professors to sit on the Liberal Arts Committee headed by recent-hire and former Adler associate Richard McKeon, Professor of Greek and Dean of the Humanities Division. The Committee was charged with exploring the possibility of an undergraduate curriculum based on a study of the Great Books. Not surprisingly, many members of the faculty (who Adler claimed were in general uprising at the time) viewed the Committee made up of recent hires and visiting professors as nothing more than nepotism designed to railroad through Hutchins' reforms. At first Adler was purposely left off the Committee because, as he wrote to Stringfellow Barr, his name was "still the big bugaboo which [could] ruin anything it [was] connected with." Further damaging the Committee's credibility was an internal battle between McKeon, Adler, and Buchanan. Although they agreed in principle to the same set of values and beliefs, they were unable to agree on much of anything else: from the structure of their meetings to the content of their discussions.
While the battle of the core raged on campus, and the faculty argued the merits of the Great Books as teaching tools, Mortimer Adler explored other avenues for promulgating his beloved canon. In 1940, he published his most famous work, How to Read a Book: The Art of Getting a Liberal Education (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1940). In it Adler espoused the belief that a direct relationship with the Great Books would enable people "to lead the distinctively human life of reason." Surprising nearly everyone, How to Read a Book shot onto the bestseller list, spurred by its publisher's aggressive marketing campaign.
Adler's strict adherence to a static canon of culture and his pedantic, prescriptive lists and instructions for reading stirred the ire of critics. University of Chicago alumnus James T. Farrell reacted to How to Read a Book with a stinging critique in Partisan Review. Calling Adler pompous and superficial, he accused him of employing "weak" and "shabby" logic to support his brand of medieval absolutism. In an attack clearly shaped for his Partisan Review audience, Farrell compared Adler to John Starkey, the 1930s fellow traveler who could never bear to actually join the Communist Party, and to Torquemanda, the brutal leader of the Spanish Inquisition.
While critiques such as Farrell's stuck with Adler for the rest of his life, a far less caustic criticism also greeted How to Read a Book. Penned by the pompously named pseudonymous, Erasmus G. Addlepate, How to Read Two Books (New York: Frederick A. Stokes, 1940) parodied Adler's opening line, "This is a book for readers who cannot read," with comic instructions written "for readers who cannot think." It included chapters on "How to Read in Bed," "Catching on from the Title," and its own list of the Great Books including such canonical titles as the Sears Roebuck Catalog, the Telephone Directory, What a Girl Can Make and Do, and Light Gymnastics.
THE GREAT IDEAS: THE UNIVERSITY OF CHICAGO AND THE
IDEAL OF LIBERAL EDUCATION