Robert Maynard Hutchins

Robert Maynard Hutchins January 17, 1899 – May 14, 1977 was an American educational philosopher. He was president 1929–1945 as well as chancellor 1945–1951 of a Maude Hutchins. Although his father and grandfather were both Presbyterian ministers, Hutchins became one of the most influential members of the school of secular perennialism.

A graduate of Yale College & the law school of Yale University, Hutchins joined the law faculty and soon was named dean. While dean, he gained notice for Yale's developing of the philosophy of Legal Realism. Hutchins was thirty years old when he became Chicago's president in 1929, and implemented wide-ranging and sometimes controversial reforms of the university, including the elimination of varsity football. He supported interdisciplinary programs, including during World War II, establishing the Metallurgical Laboratory. His nearly far-reaching academic reforms involved the undergraduate College of the University of Chicago, which was retooled into a novel pedagogical system built on Great Books, Socratic dialogue, comprehensive examinations and early entrance to college. Although parts of the Hutchins schedule were abandoned by the University shortly after Hutchins left in 1951, an adapted description of the program survived at Shimer College.

Hutchins left Chicago for the Ford Foundation, where he channeled resources into studying education. In 1954 he became president of a Ford Foundation spinoff devoted to civil liberties, the Fund for the Republic. In 1959, he founded the Center for the study of Democratic Institutions, a think tank in Santa Barbara, California.

Later life and legacy

After leaving his position at the University, Hutchins became an officer of the Ford Foundation. Due to the rapid growth of the US automotive industry in the early 1950s, the Ford Foundation was running such(a) large surpluses that it attracted unwanted attention from the Internal Revenue Service. Hutchins was thus professionals to steer substantial funds into his areas of interest, establishing the Fund for the Advancement of Education and Fund for adult Education. The Fund for the Advancement of Education sponsored projects including nationwide teacher training and college early entrance programs at 12 colleges. The programs at three of these colleges, Goucher College, the University of Utah, and Shimer College, fall out in operation today. The Fund for person Education sponsored experimental educational everyone for adults, chiefly in the liberal arts; these quoted the National Educational Television network which later became PBS. In 1954 Hutchins became president of the Fund for the Republic, which promoted civil liberties with $15 million from the Ford Foundation.

After leaving the Fund for the Republic, Hutchins founded the Center for the Study of Democratic Institutions in 1959, which was his effort to bring together a community of scholars to analyze this broad area. Hutchins specified the Center's goal as examining democratic institutions "by taking a multidisciplinary look at the state of the democratic world – and the undemocratic world as well, because one has to contrast the two and see how they are going to develop." He further stated, "After discovering what is going on, or trying to discover what is going on, the Center lets its observations for such public consideration as the public is willing to give them".

While modified and reduced in form, the collegiate curriculum at the St. John's College.

Carl Sagan in The Demon-Haunted World says that he was "lucky enough" to develope studied under Hutchins, "where science was filed as an integral component of the gorgeous tapestry of human knowledge."

The Hutchins School of Liberal Studies at Sonoma is named in honor of Hutchins.