Green Midway

Under a hazy summer sun that lay warm on the Quadrangles and the green Midway, 500 of the world's great scholars met last week to celebrate the 50th birthday of one of the western world's youngest and most vigorous great universities. The University of Chicago could hardly match the ancient names and traditions of learning represented by its guests from Cambridge, Oxford, Aberdeen, Glasgow, Dublin, Edinburgh. But the delegates had come to honor not age but youth. At lusty Chicago they found the civilized spirit still green and hopeful.

"The members of the [Chicago] faculty," President Robert Maynard Hutchins told his guests, "breathe the freest air on this continent." At the freest university on the freest continent, delegates addressed themselves to freedom's future.

Chicago had pitched its celebration on a deliberately optimistic note--but not without grave philosophical headshakings. It gathered scores of eminent scholars to report their explorations (see pp. 68 & 73) on the frontiers of science and philosophy --frontiers from Jerusalem to Buenos Aires. Richard Henry Tawney, professor of economic history at the University of London, flew to the meeting by Clipper and plane. From the University of Buenos Aires came Philologist Amada Alonso; from the Catholic Institute of Paris, famed Philosopher Jacques Maritain. In the gathering were 150 college and university presidents. A symposium on the place of ethics in the modern world drew the biggest crowd. In the murk of Gothic Mandel Hall, 2,000 heard totalitarianism doomed by Professors Maritain, Tawney and Charles H. Mcllwain (Harvard) and President Hutchins. Although the learned gen tlemen, like lesser citizens, disagreed on the issue of war and peace they all agreed on the evils of totalitarianism.

But more inspiring to the delegates than the learned symposia was the fabulous history of the University of Chicago itself--a story of three men: William Rainey Harper, John D. Rockefeller and Robert Hutchins. Like the university he founded, Harper was a prodigy. Born in an Ohio log cabin, he read the Bible at three, graduated from Muskingum College at 13, taught Hebrew at Muskingum at 16, got a Ph.D. at Yale at 18, was a full professor at 20. Harper made the study of Hebrew, theretofore deader than Sanskrit, a national fad. He started Hebrew summer classes, institutes, correspondence courses, soon had so much mail that the local postmaster's salary had to be raised. Eventually Yale nabbed him; it took Yale's largest lecture hall to hold his students; he had more mail than the university itself. They called him "a steam engine in pants."

Baptist John D. Rockefeller sought out Baptist Harper, offered him the presidency of a new Baptist college, on which he was prepared to spend $10,000,000. But Harper, who knew exactly what he wanted, held out for three years until Rockefeller agreed to start not a college but a university. Harper became Chicago's founder and president at 34.

Only real universities in the U.S. then were tiny Johns Hopkins and Clark; Harvard was still a college without university research. The University of Chicago sprang fullgrown from Harper's head: the day it opened it had 594 students, a graduate school, Gothic buildings, a faculty of 120 eminent scholars, for which Harper had shamelessly raided eight colleges of their presidents and Clark of most of its professors. To get his men, Harper doubled professors' salaries, paying the unheard-of rate of $7,000 a year. John D.'s first gift of $1,600,000 grew to $35,000,000 before he quit in 1910, and the Rockefeller family and foundations have since given another $35,000,000. In 1906, having assured his university's permanence and presented John D. with his first balanced budget (surplus: $26), Harper died at 49.

Visitors to Chicago's semicentennial last week saw its second prodigy in the flesh. As tall and handsome as Harper was dumpy and homely, dimple-chinned Robert Maynard Hutchins was secretary of Yale at 24, dean of its law school at 29, president of Chicago at 30. Like Mr. Harper, Mr. Hutchins (even Ph.D.s are called Mr. at Chicago) is a prodigious money-raiser ($65,000,000 in twelve years) and innovator. Inheriting a university that stood second only to Harvard in scholarship, Hutchins has made Chicago preeminent in another quality--intellectual zizz.

For ten years, ever since Hutchins began his campaign to put the study of philosophy ahead of the study of science, the university has been in a constant intellectual furor. Students staged a running debate in the Daily Maroon on the topic: Facts v. Ideas; professors posted arguments on bulletin boards. So preoccupied with intellectual matters is Chicago that when the university dropped out of intercollegiate football last year and abandoned big Stagg Field to schoolboys, students and alumni uttered scarcely a whimper.

Last week Chicago's old grads delivered a verdict on their university: 15,000 of them, a third of all Chicago's alumni, chipped in for a $506,810 birthday gift to meet university deficits.

Money was on the university's mind last week. On hand for the celebration, where he was as thick with President Hutchins as his father had been with President Harper, John D. Rockefeller Jr.* told Chicagoans what they already knew: the university could expect no more Rockefeller money. Having given the University half of its total of $142,000,000 (endowment and plant), the Rockefeller family had delivered its future to the city of Chicago and the rest of the U.S. Of a fund of $12,000,000 which the university seeks to balance its budgets in the next ten years, it had raised $9,200,000 by last week.

Looking not to the past but the future, President Hutchins this week ended Chicago's first 50 years by conferring honorary degrees on 35 pioneering scientists and scholars, many of them now little known. Of the next 50 years, he said: "Our people should be able to look to the universities for the moral courage, the intellectual clarity and the spiritual elevation needed to guide them and uphold them in this critical hour. . . . Candid and intrepid thinking about fundamental issues--in the crisis of our time this is the central obligation of the universities."

* Asked whether he agreed with Marshall Field III, who last fortnight remarked that "I don't know what is going to happen to [my money] and I don't give a damn." Mr. Rockefeller grinned: ''Yes, I do. I don't care what happens to Mr. Field's money, either."

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