Echo: The Yearly Newsmagazine, 1936. The peripatetic President Hutchins was featured in the "travel" section of the first issue of Echo, an annual student review patterned on Time magazine and published with the Cap and Gown. While Echo praised Hutchins for his educational innovations and executive leadership, it noted that "students look forward to graduation as a means of meeting the president."

 

John R. Davey to F. Champion Ward, telegram, June 26, 1954. Despite the academic success of College students, graduate and professional schools, including the University's own, were reluctant to accept Chicago students on the basis of a two-year AB. Harry Kalven, professor of law, informed Dean of Students John R. Davey that the Law School would soon accept only those students with traditional college degrees.

The Higher Learning

The College Reshaped
These efforts to revive the College found fuller expression in 1965 under the leadership of Edward H. Levi, Provost, Acting Dean of the College, and (after 1968) President of the University. As proposed by Levi, the College was reorganized into four Collegiate Divisions corresponding to the four graduate divisions and an unaffiliated fifth division, known as the New Collegiate Division, which would encourage interdisciplinary work.

General education courses were rearranged into an entering "common year" and a second year that could be taken later in the student's program, a sequence which was to become the basis for the College's revised "Common Core."

The Levi plan offered students an opportunity to acquire an integrated general education while permitting disciplinary specialization as well. New offerings in nontraditional fields and non-Western cultures enriched the College curriculum and broadened the alternatives for individual students. When the last of the comprehensive examinations was phased out, the College severed a structural link to the Hutchins tradition, but in its divisional structure and common core it remained profoundly indebted to his academic leadership.