Liberal education, residential practices and collegial life in the age of Great Universities in the US. Chicago and President Hutchins’ policy
DOI:
https://doi.org/10.14516/ete.600Keywords:
Liberal education, collegial life, University of Chicago, Robert M. HutchinsAbstract
Robert M. Hutchins has gone down in history as one of the leading advocates of liberal education and one of the most celebrated reformers of twentieth-century American higher education. As President of the University of Chicago (1929-1951), his main legacy is considered to be in the promotion, development and implementation of a series of organizational and curricular reforms aimed at restoring the general educational role of colleges, deeply damaged in the United States since the last third of the 19th century, due to the flourishing of the great universities and their greater focus on specialized research and professional training. However, the policy of his administration in residential matters is distinguished by a firm resistance to the development of facilities for student accommodation and by a serious opposition to the promotion of college life. Both features represent a notable distance from the ancient tradition of English origin, again in vogue during the first third of the 20th century in large universities such as Princeton, Harvard, Yale or Chicago itself, which combined the exercise of the liberal arts with the life in a residential community with a view to the integral formation of the individual. This article examines the exceptional nature of President Hutchins’s policy in the context of the history of the residential function in American higher education and explains it from his critical approach to a university conceived as a «service-station» and markedly anti-intellectual.
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