Goodbye to Chicago

When breezy Superintendent Herold C. Hunt first blew into Chicago in 1947, he found himself at the head of just about the sorriest school system in the country. It was riddled with corruption, its buildings were shabby, its textbooks antiquated; 4,000 of its teachers held nothing more than temporary certificates that could be revoked on a politician's whim. Nonteaching jobs were given out as patronage, and the third floor of the administration building was notorious as a distribution center of political plums. Things were so bad that the powerful North Central Association of Colleges and Secondary Schools came very near to placing Chicago on its blacklist.

An old hand at superintending--in Kalamazoo, Mich., New Rochelle, N.Y., and Kansas City, Mo.--Hunt started setting things to rights. A friendly, glad-handing Rotarian ("It's not what you eat that makes ulcers, but what eats you"), he could be ruthless if necessary. He put school jobs under civil service, withdrew temporary certificates, set up a series of stiff examinations for prospective teachers. He doubled his budget to $146 million, started a $50 million building program, streamlined his schools from top to bottom. He raised teachers' salaries almost 50%, relieved them once & for all from political pressure. "They'd come to me," he recalls, "and say: 'Do I still have to kick in to my ward captain? Do I have to ring doorbells in the next election?' And I would tell them: 'Those days are gone forever.' "

Last week those words had a double meaning in Chicago: his mission accomplished, Herold Hunt resigned to become Charles W. Eliot professor at the Harvard Graduate School of Education. Though he will probably have to take a 50% cut in his $30,000 salary, Hunt is looking forward to his new job. "I want to give back to education," he says, "the lessons I've learned in the last 30 years." As anyone in Chicago could testify, that would be quite a dose, even for Harvard.

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