THE GREAT IDEAS:
THE UNIVERSITY OF CHICAGO AND THE
IDEAL OF LIBERAL EDUCATION

An Exhibition in the
Department of Special Collections
The University of Chicago Library

May 1, 2002 - September 6, 2002

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ORGANIZATION OF THE EXHIBITION

Introduction

1. General Honors at Columbia University
2. General Honors Comes to Chicago
3. From General Education to the College Curriculum
4. Creating a Great Curriculum
5. Spreading the Gospel
6. "Western" Culture
7. Spreading the Word
8. Back to Chicago

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THE GREAT IDEAS:
THE UNIVERSITY OF CHICAGO AND THE
IDEAL OF LIBERAL EDUCATION

By
Jay Satterfield

INTRODUCTION

In the 1930s, Mortimer Adler and Robert Hutchins set out to infuse the University of Chicago curriculum with the spirit of the "Great Books." Their project helped to shape the College's celebrated core curriculum and eventually led to the University's collaborative efforts with the Encyclopaedia Britannica, the Aspen Institute for Humanistic Studies, and the Great Books Foundation to spread the gospel of the "Great Ideas." Their experiment in liberal education reflects the aims and goals of the University of Chicago during the Hutchins era and into the present, while illuminating broader intellectual battles waged over the role of culture in American life.

The idea of the Great Books was not born in Chicago. Adler and Hutchins drew their inspiration from an experimental program to teach the classics developed by Adler's Columbia University mentor John Erskine. Prior to Erskine's efforts, the Great Books, as Adler and Hutchins would identify them (Erskine often used the phrase "Great Books" synonymously with "the classics," but it was Adler and Hutchins who popularized the phrase), most famously appeared in 1909 as Charles Eliot's "Five-Foot Shelf" of Harvard Classics. Eliot believed that a liberal education was available to anyone committed to reading the classics and that the true classics were a highly select collection of works that could fit comfortably on a five-foot shelf. Collier and Sons publishers saw the marketing opportunity and contracted with Eliot to edit a set. This milestone in the genteel tradition was based on Matthew Arnold's nineteenth-century supposition that "culture" was "the best which has been thought and said in the world." Cultivating a close relationship with the "best" was a sure path toward becoming "cultured," and what better way to start than by purchasing a set sanctioned by the president of Harvard University?

But genteel culture and the classics came under attack soon after the Harvard set was produced. Modernist critics argued that the classics represented an easy, but unproductive, standard for Americans with "lazy" taste. Others saw the genteel tradition, with its stress on the culture of the leisured gentleman, as hopelessly out of date in a modern world. For these critics, the nineteenth-century cultural dilettante had no role in twentieth-century America where highly specialized professionals drove progress. This debate over the nature of culture had been simmering on university campuses for decades. Faculty devoted to narrow fields of study thought the modern university ought to equip students for advanced and specialized scholarly training befitting a modern professionalized world. But others considered the undergraduate college as a cultivator of a supple mind by means of a general education based on the liberal arts.

During this debate the Great Books were reconceived at Columbia University. John Erskine deplored the narrow specialization rampant at Columbia. Harkening back to an idealized past, he hoped an education based on the classics would provide students with a shared culture to foster communication and community in a world of ever-increasing specialization and alienation. Calling culture "an interplay of life and ideas," Erksine envisioned an education based on the classics that "would circle through the moment in which we now breathe." Education, and culture as well, became for Erskine a "working up" of the past and the present "into new values" expressing the spirit of a people. Erskine's definition of culture as the interplay of life and ideas clearly articulates one aspect of the liberal arts ideal: the classics were valuable for their ability to inform the modern mind and create a more fulfilling life.

Perhaps at no other university was the debate over the Great Books and Great Ideas more pronounced than it was at the University of Chicago where the concept of a shared, classical foundation to undergraduate education formed part of William Rainey Harper's original plan. It emerged in the 1920s as a fundamental question of institutional identity--was the undergraduate curriculum to be designed to prepare students for advanced work of a highly specialized nature, or should the College be devoted to ensuring a general liberal education? In 1930, Mortimer Adler joined Robert Hutchins on campus with hopes of creating a curriculum based on the Great Books. They failed to achieve their goal, but they successfully positioned the University of Chicago as one of the most active champions of the Great Books. The popularization of the Great Ideas reached an apogee in the 1950s with the publication of the University of Chicago-sponsored Great Books of the Western World, the proliferation of Great Books clubs and the maturation of the Aspen Institute for Humanistic Studies. Through the Culture Wars of the 1980s and amidst more recent debates about the core, the ideal of liberal education at Chicago has been shaped by these concepts.

Drawing primarily on the papers of Robert M. Hutchins, Mortimer J. Adler, Walter and Elizabeth Paepcke, and William Benton, this exhibition takes you through the history of the Great Ideas at the University of Chicago-a history that says as much about shifts in American culture as it does about education at Chicago.

This exhibition was curated by Jay Satterfield, Head of Reader Services for the Special Collections Research Center, with invaluable help from Mark Alznauer, doctoral student in the Committee on Social Thought, and Sandra Roscoe of Reference and Information Services. Valarie Brocato and Kerri Sancomb executed the design and installation.

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THE GREAT IDEAS: THE UNIVERSITY OF CHICAGO AND THE
IDEAL OF LIBERAL EDUCATION

To Next Section--1. General Honors at Columbia University

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For further information about this exhibition and related book and manuscript collections, please contact:

Special Collections Research Center

University of Chicago Library

1100 E. 57th Street

Chicago, Illinois 60637

Fax: (773) 702-3728

SpecialCollections@lib.uchicago.edu