Mortimer Adler

“ Universities in general may symbolize the achievement of European civilization—the endurance of which now seems to depend upon soldiers, not gentlemen or scholars; but the University of Chicago, like the city in which it was founded, is almost 100 percent American.
When Chicago got around to culture she was not content to make it hum. She turned out an American brand. It was not merely a "new system of philosophy"—the pragmatism or humanism which William James applauded—but a new orientation of the higher learning itself. ”

“ Last September a conference of scholars was called not merely for the purpose of assembling leading representatives of science, philosophy, and religion, but supposedly to have them understand one another's role in the development of culture. Those who called this meeting felt that unless philosophy and religion are genuinely acknowledged—that is, given their proper place above, not just along with, science—democracy is threatened from within culturally, perhaps even more seriously than from without by force. ”

“ Where there is so much heat there is always hope, at least, for the emergence of light.
The Chicago Fight now plays the role in American culture once played by the Chicago School. The university which, in its first period, mirrored the prevailing ideology in its own solidarity of doctrine, still functions as the cultural microcosm. For the past ten years it has been the arena in the spotlight. The heavyweights in its ring have staged a fight for a nationwide audience—an audience drawn not by their lust for blood, but by their genuine concern with the points in issue. ”

“ The denial of metaphysics and theology as independent of empirical science, the denial of stability in the universe and certainty in human knowledge, the denial of moral values transcending adaptation to environment and escaping relativity to time and place, the denial of intellectual discipline in education and of the light shed by an abiding tradition of learning, the denial of a personal God, self-revealed, and of a Divine Providence concerned with man's supernatural salvation—these kept the ball rolling, and gave it its terrific impact on American life. ”

“ The great difference between the medieval and the modern university is not that the former reached its apex in theology, and the latter laid its foundation in science; rather it is that the members of the medieval university, its students and faculty, were truly bachelors of liberal arts. They had learned how to communicate before engaging in the disputations which made the medieval universities the vital forums of their day. Embraced in a common tradition of learning, they could at least understand one another when they did not agree. ”

“ A university's greatness consists in its being the intellectual forum of the community, the place where the basic issues of its culture are fruitfully debated. Chicago's greatness lies in the partial performance of this service. For ten years it has debated the issues which the Conference on Science, Philosophy, and Religion met to consider—made necessary only by the fact that such debate has not occurred at other universities, as at Chicago. ”

“ I do not mean to imply that various departments always collaborated in research—although more of that has occurred at Chicago than anywhere else—but I do say that the large round tables of the faculty club could usually assemble a diversity of specialists who really understood what the other fellow's research was driving at because it was a common objective they all shared. If a university should be a community of scholars, if it should sustain a universe of discourse, then the pre-Hutchins Chicago almost (I say "almost") rang the bell. ”

“ They expressed, in more ways than William James realized, a school of thought. It was neither the eminent qualities of its individual professors nor the great quantities of research done in various fields which made Chicago the leading, the most typical, American university within a decade. Money bought professors for Chicago; it could buy them back for eastern institutions, as the competition for triple-starred names during the last half century reveals. Harvard, for example, has always had a larger endowment than Chicago and could usually procure the services of academic leaders. ”

“ From a negative unity to a warring diversity is change from a false peace to a significant conflict. From the conflict of violent extremes to a reconciliation of differences would be motion toward that genuine peace which lies still ahead. This is the university's future. There is more chance of its happening at Chicago than elsewhere, because at Chicago the opponents at least try to talk to one another. ”

“ Here I am concerned to define the unity of the earlier Chicago.
The general line of Chicago's pragmatism is too well known to need discussion beyond pointing out that much of its case rested on "the new science of psychology." According to Dewey's own report, it was James's Principles of Psychology which had awakened him from his dogmatic slumbers in the bower of Hegelianism. That book was radical in its chapters on instinct, habit, and emotion, in its attempt to give a physiological diagram for every aspect of behavior, in its view of man as an animal—whether rational or not. ”

“ Ten years' experience at Chicago indicates what one might expect from a gathering of scientists, philosophers, and theologians, who have no common universe of discourse. Nor can such community be achieved, in a university or at a conference, simply by bringing the diverse elements together and having them read papers at one another. The obstacle to be surmounted first, the most difficult task to discharge, is teaching the specialists how to talk to one another. ”

“ The true university is the center of thought on every problem connected with human life and work, and the first obligation resting upon the individual members who compose it is that of research and investigation. Steadfast devotion to and brilliant performance of this mission brought Chicago fair renown in the first ten years of its existence. ”

“ Neither domination by one exclusive extreme nor suspended hostilities among many is desirable. Both counterfeit the ideal of true unity won from diversity by right order.
What is desirable is that peace of understanding which enables intelligent discussion to work progressively toward agreement—an end which may never be fully realized but which, nevertheless, gives discussion its highest meaning, if not its only justification. Unless controversy is to be as inconsequential as Ping-Pong, those who join issue in debate must aim at, and hope for, an ultimate resolution of the issues. ”

“ The cure will come only by a fundamental educational reform below the level of the university. The great tragedy of American education is that our universities were founded just at the time when genuinely liberal colleges were ceasing to exist. In fact it was the developing university which, imposing the elective system, helped to kill the liberal arts curriculum of the colleges. ”

“ The fate of Western civilization, as a cultural community, cannot be separated from the state of its educational institutions. Only one college in this country, St. John's at Annapolis, is working for the revival of a liberal curriculum. Only the University of Chicago has throughout its history manifested devotion to the true functions of a university—formation of fundamental doctrines, debate of the most serious issues. ”

“ The important fact about Chicago—the fact so distinguishing that in this respect Chicago escapes comparison—is the intellectual life it has cultivated, and the influence which this has exerted, educationally and culturally, upon the rest of the country. ”

“ The University of Chicago is popularly thought of as one of America's youngest institutions. In truth it is one of the oldest, if we discriminate between an undergraduate college and a university, a place for graduate study and research. Harper's Chicago is preceded only by Gilman's Johns Hopkins (1876) and by G. Stanley Hall's Clark (1888) . Before these institutions there was only sporadic and casual graduate work at Harvard and Columbia, Yale and Cornell. There was neither a formal program for graduate study nor a faculty to give full-time instruction to graduate students. ”

“ The enormous growth of the sciences in the past fifty years has reconciled us to the idea that Not quite true is as near as we can ever get. [Italics are mine.] For investigating minds there is no sanctity in any theory, and "laws of nature" absolutely expressible by us are the idols of the popular-science level of education exclusively. ”

“ With few exceptions—notably Paul Shorey, the Platonist—the Chicago faculty consisted of men who saw eye to eye on fundamentals, whether they were professors of geology or economics, of physiology or religion, of education or sociology. ”

“ A healthy unity requires the harmony of differences. But when, in the university or in our culture, other elements began to claim a place along with science, the weak unity, which had been maintained by negations ande exclusions, gave way to discord rather than to the harmony of ordered differences. Nevertheless, the shift from the Chicago School to the Chicago Fight is a small step toward the ideal of civilization, the ideal of a university, which Whitehead, writing of Harvard's future, defined as "the possible harmony of diverse things." ”

“ Though Dewey had been at Columbia for many years, and though James had left some disciples to carry on his teaching at Harvard, neither the Columbia nor the Harvard philosophy department could claim to be the seat of orthodoxy. Only at Chicago was there a homogeneous body of men who worked together with apparent understanding of a common doctrine. ”

“ Darwin had shattered the illusion of a static universe. Evolution made a mockery of the quest for certainty. Everything, including truth, is in flux. Creative intelligence must look to the contingent future. ”

“ This "evolutionary" conception of man as a system of reflexes which could be conditioned, as a bundle of drives which impelled him to adapt, gave rise to the new logic and the new ethics—both pragmatic in the sense that the ultimate criterion of the true or the good was successful adjustment, in thinking or action, to a changing world or a changing society. ”

“ Lack of liberal discipline has made our debates a babel of jargons, incurable by the logical esperanto of the semanticists. Lack of a common tradition has turned our universities into a jungle of predatory growths, impenetrable by special conferences or academic symposia. ”

“ Harper vigorously fought the American college system which, in his view, impeded the intellectual growth of able men by giving them heavy programs of undergraduate teaching. Teaching loads at Chicago were light, and promotion depended on successful research rather than on meritorious teaching. ”

“ This, more than anything else, set the academic style and nourished what William James was later to call "the Ph.D. octopus." In part, Harper's intention seems to have miscarried, for his emphasis on research sacrificed many promising young men to the coils of the octopus, crushing (if not killing) them as much as a heavy burden of sophomores. But this must not lead us to neglect another point from which to view his intention, and its execution by Chicago's faculty. In 1895 he said:
It is not enough that instructors in a university should merely do the class and lecture work assigned them. ”

“ But when the old truth was rediscovered it packed a new punch because the human animal, like every other, was now primarily viewed as engaged in the struggle for existence by adaptation to environment. ”

“ In biology there was Jacques Loeb, who pushed mechanism to its limits by trying to interpret even human adjustments to environment as physicochemical tropisms. In psychology there was James Rowland Angell, who, as a follower of William James, developed "functionalism," and ultimately became, in the hands of John B. Watson, his student, radical behaviorism. In the social sciences there was Thorstein Veblen, whose iconoclasms demolished conventional views of the human enterprise, social and political, as well as economic ”