Education: On the Midway

Close to the crenelated, neo-Gothic heart of the University of Chicago is one “Doc” Bratfish. Few Chicago men-students in the last 25 years have not had a shave & haircut from him. He it is who each year examines upper lips and fires a gun to start the seniors’ mustache-growing contest, rewarding the most luxuriant growth with a shaving mug, the most girlish down with hair restorer.*

Barber Bratfish did not arrive upon the Chicago scene in time to serve such illustrious undergraduates as Milton Sills and Carl Van Vechten (class of 1903). But among the many now-famed names and faces which Barber Bratfish has known ahead of the world are Homer Guck (1904, now publisher of the Chicago Herald & Examiner), William Patterson MacCracken (1909, until lately Assistant Secretary of Commerce for Aeronautics), Arthur Burton Rascoe (1911-13) now associate editor of Plain Talk), Lawrence H. Whiting (1913, now president of Indiana Limestone Co.), Charles Glore (1910, now manager of Field, Glore & Co., investments). And in the class of 1907 Barber Bratfish well knew the stripling figure of Harold Higgins Swift, now vice president of Swift & Co. (packers) and still a familiar figure at the university, of whose board of trustees he is president.

“Many of the great men the university will bring forth are now young men on their way,” said Mr. Swift last week while discussing what he and Barber Bratfish and all other good Chicago University men had most in mind—the induction of Chicago’s new president, the youngest big-university president in the land.

The young-man tradition is strong at young-but-big Chicago.

A Chicago college was founded in 1856 with a land grant obtained by its first board chairman, famed Stephen Arnold Douglas, when he was U. S. Senator. But in 1886 it failed and died, lacking money. It was an entirely new institution that arose, six years later, out of three things: 1) Thomas Wakefield Goodspeed’s desire to establish a Chicago college foundation; 2) The American Baptist Education Society’s desire for a college somewhere; 3) John Davison Rockefeller’s decision to found a college either in New York or Chicago. Mr. Rockefeller (always referred to since as “The Founder”) gave $600,000. Marshall Field gave the site, worth $125,000 on the Midway where the World’s Fair of 1893 was to be held. The character of the institution was contributed by William Rainey Harper, the 35-year-old Woolsey Professor of Biblical Literature at Yale whom the ‘founders asked to be their first president. Youngman Harper said: “I am not interested in starting a college. But I am interested in starting a great university.”*

Seven years after President Harper took office, a boy was born to William James Hutchins and his wife, in Brooklyn. William James Hutchins is now president of Little Berea College (Berea, Ky.). The son, who was named Robert Maynard Hutchins, now 30, is the young man who, called like William Rainey Harper from Yale, was inducted as President Harper’s fourth successor at Chicago.â€

How successfully Chicago’s university has built up, not only as a great educational plant beneath the midwestern sky, but as a civic and social project far more present in the minds of Chicagoans than, for example, Columbia is in New Yorkers’ minds or the University of Pennsylvania in Philadelphians’, was suggested by the list of people who accepted invitations to the Hutchins inaugural last week. It was a list much like the roster of first-nighters at the opening of Chicago’s new Civic Opera House (TIME, Nov. 4, 18). Included were: President & Mrs. James Simpson of Marshall Field & Co.; Mr. & Mrs. Charles R. Walgreen (drug stores); Harold Leonard Stuart (Halsey, Stuart & Co., brokers) and his socialite sister; Mrs. Edith Rockefeller McCormick (daughter of Founder Rockefeller, onetime wife of Trustee Harold Fowler McCormick) and her bosom socialite friend Mrs. Waller Borden; onetime Governor & Mrs. Frank Orren Lowden; Senator & Mrs. Charles Samuel Deneen; Editorial Writer & Mrs. Tiffany Blake of the Tribune; Miss Caroline (“Madame X”) Kirkland, society colyumist of the Tribune; and Artist Frederick Clay Bartlett and his socialite sister; Bishop & Mrs. Charles Palmerston Anderson (he is the new presiding officer of the Protestant Episcopal Church; Mr. & Mrs. Louis Eckstein (he backs the Ravinia Opera); Mr. & Mrs. Kellogg Fairbank (she, a potent socialite Democrat); Mrs. Bertha Baur (socialite Republican); Mr. and Mrs. Arch Wilkinson Shaw (President Hoover consults him on business).

Most such Chicagoans send their children to eastern colleges.* But they are city-loyal to the extent of attending an induction ceremony and they respect the aura of culture which the Chicago faculty casts over fashionable Chicago dinner tables.

Respectfully conscious, too, are Chicagoans that it is a civic honor to be on the university’s board of trustees, now 29 strong. Besides such generous, longtime trustees as Julius Rosenwald, Martin Antoine Ryerson and Chairman Swift, who all live within a few blocks of the campus, and such illustrious out-of-towners as Charles Evans Hughes of Manhattan, George Otis Smith of the U. S. Geological Survey in Washington and Steelman Cyrus Stephen Eaton of Cleveland (elected last week), the board includes new-risen leaders of business and finance like President Sewell Lee Avery of U. S. Gypsum Co., Harry B. Gear of Commonwealth Edison Co., Charles Revell Holden of the Union Trust Co., Robert L. Scott of Carson Pirie Scott & Co. (department store), Albert W. Sherer of Lord & Thomas and Logan (advertising agents), John Stuart of Quaker Oats Co. (Chairman of Princeton’s trustees).

Induction. A block east of the dun-colored house provided for the University of Chicago’s president (in the barn of which Mrs. Hutchins will sculp and not keep an automobile), facing the broad Midway across the street from John D. Rockefeller’s $1,500,000 chapel, stands Ida Noyes Hall, the women’s centre, given by the late La Verne Noyes (“Dealer in People,” inventor of the aeromotor) in memory of his wife. Here the induction procession formed, young President Hutchinspreceded by the trustees and by five-score other college presidents, including his father, and by the faculty. (In store for Hutchins Sr. and Trustee Ryerson were honorary LL.D’s.* Also preceding him were delegates from leading learned societies, education boards, foundations. After the grave march to the chapel, Inductor Swift conducted ceremonies of which his own short speech was a major part.

Said he: “We ask from you courage and wisdom, united with enthusiasm for scholarship. We ask for zeal in the search for truth. . . . We ask for inspiration of our young men and young women. . . . for broad sympathy, high perspective on the values of human life, and helpfulness in the problems of our civilization.”

Replied President Hutchins: “No man can come to the presidency of the University of Chicago without being awed by the University and its past. . . . We are studying and propose to study problems that do not fit readily into the traditional departmental pattern of a university. . . . What is clear is that we must proceed to give opportunities for cooperation to those who have felt the need of them. We must regard the University as a whole. . . . Comparisons of salaries among universities are irrelevant and harmful. For the question is: can we now get the kind of men we want to go into education? It will never be settled until professorial salaries are such as to make scholarship respected in the United States.”

Display. In the afternoon and all the next day the University showed off. Induction evening there was a huge banquet at the Palmer House. The students had no classes Induction Day, but the faculty were at their posts. Visitors were taken through classrooms, laboratories, clinics; were allowed to poke into the University press, oldest (1892) U. S. college printshop; saw Police-Professor August Vollmer’s sphygmanometer (lie detector) in the Social Science Building (TIME, May 27). In the Haskell Museum, housing the Oriental Institute’s work, upon which much Chicago money is lavished, was exhibited the archaeological reseasch of Professor James Henry Breasted, whose red-bound ancient history many a school must study. Through its local Community Research Committee, the University makes its closest contact with the city. In the research committee’s workshop were shown compilations of information of education, commerce, government,†labor, vice and the gangsterism for which Chicago is ill-famed, to which the University is a standing, striving antidote.

*Cravens who refuse to compete are ducked in the slime of botany pond.

*Biggest U. S. enrollments:

Columbia 36,000

N. Y. U 24,000

U. of Calif 18,000

C. C. N. Y 15,000

Boston U. 13,000

Illinois 13,000

Chicago 12,000

Minnesota 11,000

Nebraska 10,000

U. of Pittsburgh 10,000

Michigan 9,000

Pennsylvania 9,000

†The three others: Harry Pratt Judson, 1906-23; Ernest DeWitt Burton, 1923-25; Max Mason, 1925-28.

*Chicago’s forte is research and post-graduate work. Half its graduates go forth as preachers and pedagogs; 119 of them have become college presidents. Last week University of Chicago students voted the Bible their Favorite Book. More than 40% of the enrolment are graduate students. President Hutchins says: “A University is not primarily for social contacts. You can get those at any country club.”

*Still a third who was to have received an L.L.D. was Secretary of the Interior Ray Lyman Wilbur. Day before the ceremony, he telegraphed that he was unavoidably detained in Washington. His reason: Constant vigil at the bedside of Secretary of War Good, who died a few hours before it was time for Secretary Wilbur to entrain for Chicago.

†Professor Charles Edward Merriam of the Politics department ran for mayor in 1911. He was called “unofficial premier of Chicago” during the mayoralty (1923—27) of his good friend William Emmett Dever.