Too Little And Too Late, Remarks Hutchins On Harvard's General Education Scheme

CHICAGO, Dec. 6--Robert M. Hutchins, Chancellor of the University of Chicago and the nation's leading exponent of traditionalism in university curricula, admitted yesterday that he is "not enthusiastic" about the Committee Report on "General Education in a Free Society" and that he believes its chief importance is as a "manifestation of the growing national sense of the urgency of a true liberal education."

"I could say," he asserted, "that it's a fine thing the Harvard Faculty has gone to such trouble to examine education in the United States. I could also say that it's a crime to education for Harvard to have taken 300 years. . .

"But I don't like to be offensive."

Faculty and student opinion along the Midway follows the Hutchins lead. The general attitude is that Cambridge has definitely veered in the Chicago direction but so insignificantly that the Report's main value lies in its mirroring of countrywide trends.

Adler Minimizes Importance

"All the Report does," claimed Mortimer J. Adler, Professor of Law and author of "How to Read a Book," is show the way the wind's blowing. There's nothing radical about it--I can name ten liberal arts schools which have gone further--it's merely adopting a more integrated curriculum.

"Harvard moves slowly," he went on, "it's an old man. What I really object to is the fuss Harvard's made over this. It is not a landmark, or a milestone, or anything of the kind. But it's nice to have you trailing along with us."

Undergraduates were less caustic. The Maroon student weekly, editorially conceeded that "the school along the Charles River still wields a schoolmarm's rod over the thoughts and actions of most American schoolmen" and crowed that "liberal education has unearthed an invaluable bedfellow."

"But . . . the report . . . states nothing new nor original," the Maroon continues. "It lacks the zest, the pioneering spirit so necessary to any revolutionary doctrine. . . At best it simply restates the findings of other universities which for a quarter century have pondered the problems of a general education. . . It's sheer plagiarism from Chicago, Columbia, St. John's, Wisconsin."

Abe Krash, editor, did not deny that Harvard specifically called the tract a "golden mean," hardly a revolution, and that the Report pointedly disclaims originality, attempting to cull the best from both extremes of current controversy: "Without denying the partial value of any . . . views we believe rather that the main task of education is to interpret at all stages both the general and the particular; both the common sphere of truth and the specific avenues of growth and change."

Like many institutions of higher learning, Chicago is opening its doors to a steadily increasing stream of returning veterans. Chancellor Hutchins feels that they are largely men who have serious college aims before them, and he has considerably toned down his last winter's "educational hoboes" stand on the GI Bill of Rights.

"It is quite conspicuous to the most casual observer on the University of Chicago campus that everyone takes his personal work and the policies of his chosen institution with the utmost seriousness. There is an air of intensity and frantic scholarship; the 'frivolity' which the University so deplores has been squelched to a remarkable degree."

Hutchins himself is thoroughly gracious, a towering and handsome figure who speaks with distinct self-assurance. One who has been conditioned by descriptions of a sneering cynic finds himself very pleasantly surprised. And while the mellow trimmings to American education are every collegiate's joy, there is good reason to give Hutchins a hearing.

"Nobody knows what education could accomplish," he says, "if we could prune out the triviality and frivolity which are its chief characteristics, in America, and concentrate on educating all our people to live for human ends in a human world. We must now at last take education seriously, and devote an amount of thought and effort to it comparable to that which went into the making of the atomic bomb. Education may not save us, but it is the only hope we have."