Education: Planner

“My plans are fashioned and practical; I shall roll up my sleeves—make America over!”

When Rexford Guy Tugwell was a youth of 24, he wrote these Whitmanesque lines in a windy piece of free verse. America paid little attention. At Columbia University the regents sometimes seemed to resent Professor Tugwell’s attempts to remake that small corner of the U.S. But he won the admiration of his next-door neighbor, Professor Raymond Moley, and packed off to Washington with him in 1933, to become one of Franklin Roosevelt’s first brain-trusters. Disfavor, as it must to all favorites, came to blunt Rex Tugwell; he was shipped off to Puerto Rico, where for the past four years he has been the island’s controversial governor.

Last week, the University of Chicago announced that Tugwell would teach political science and direct a new department of civic planning there, starting next July 1. His job, says his new boss, Dean Robert Redfield, will be to develop planning as “a science instead of guesswork . . . [to provide] special research instead of hunches, for instance, to predict population changes . . . [to] develop a coordinated view of the community as a whole.”