Return of a Giant

In 1953 the University of Chicago was so close to academic anarchy that its graduate schools refused to honor degrees from its college, and only 141 freshmen entered the place. The limestone Gothic campus was marooned in a sea of slums and muggers; the trustees morosely considered moving the university out of Chicago. To sum up his problems, Chancellor Lawrence A. Kimpton told a story: "A Harvard professor about to come here went to his young son's room the night before they left Cambridge. The boy was praying: 'And now, goodbye, God. We're going to Chicago.'"

In 1963 things are dramatically different at Chicago. A vast urban renewal project, costing $195 million has given the university room to breathe again. Enrollment is up to 7,674 students, 2,055 of them in the now respected college. Endowment is $267 million, the nation's fourth biggest. And under way is a brisk faculty buildup by George W. Beadle, the Nobel prizewinning Caltech geneticist who succeeded Philosopher Kimpton in 1961. Beadle's aim at Chicago is "the incomparable thrill of discovery." His cigar-chomping provost, Lawyer Edward H. Levi, calls the renovation "the return of a giant."

Up, Down, Up. Giant it was in 1892 when it opened full-blown as the finest academic center west of the Appalachians. Coed Chicago boasted the money of John D. Rockefeller, the brains of President William Rainey Harper, and the homiletics of Football Coach Amos Alonzo Stagg. The Midway campus lured a constellation of famed scholars and scientists--John Dewey, Thorstein Veblen, Robert Millikan, Alexis Carrel, Enrico Fermi. Its graduate schools grew so important that they threatened to smother the undergraduate college.

In the tremulous '30s, Chancellor Robert M. Hutchins saved the college by declaring it independent, then overdid the revolution. Out went textbooks, attendance records and four-year degree requirements. To Kimpton, who took over in 1951, was left the task not only of stemming the slums, but also of saving "Hutchins College" from extinction by restoring the conventions. In came Dean Alan Simpson, a witty, no-nonsense Oxonian, who honors both orthodoxy and the Hutchins spirit. "Our kids are sensitive, aware, vital, terribly anxious to learn," he says. "And independent? Good God, are they independent."

The Midwest feeds that spirit, gives Chicago a kind of populist, grass-roots intellectualism. On test scores, Chicago freshmen lag behind Ivy Leaguers, but they take fire more freely. Says one professor: "There are no social barriers here, no image of what a student should be like to do well at Chicago."

Conservative Leaning. The graduate schools again reflect Chicago's special brand of scholarship--"a preference for the simple approach to the problem," as Social Sciences Dean D. Gale Johnson puts it. One result is faculty dissent from the fashions of academic liberalism. Agricultural Economist Johnson himself is an example: last week he backed the Farm Bureau, not the Administration, in the national wheat referendum.

The graduate economics department, where "classical" Economist Friedrich von Hayek long worked, now offers conservative Milton Friedman (Capitalism and Freedom) as Chicago's answer to Harvard's liberal John K. Galbraith. Yet the "Chicago School" is hardly hidebound; it recently imported a British Keynesian and was a little disappointed to find him too "sensible." Conservatism also marks the first-rate law school, headed by Dean Phillip C. Neal, which has lured the American Bar Association to a nearby national headquarters. In 1958, for example, Chicago law professors did the research for a prickly resolution by the chief justices of state courts that lambasted the U.S. Supreme Court for being "a policymaker without proper judicial restraint."

The medical school is unique: it is part of the university's division of biological sciences, puts stress on research and theory as opposed to the "humanitarian" approach at many other medical schools. "You could be the most humane doctor in the world," explains Dean H. Stanley Bennett, "and if you're uneducated, you're no good." Chicago's medical students learn alongside biochemists, microbiologists, pharmacologists. More than half go on to teaching and research at other medical schools.

Dean Bennett is overseeing one of Chicago's main gambles--that science in the next 20 years will grow fastest in biology. Geneticist Beadle, who won his Nobel in medicine and physiology, is fascinated with how the brain stores and releases knowledge. "Is there a molecular coding system as in genetics? If we just knew what goes on here," he says, tapping his head, "think of the problems we could solve in society, in education."

Few universities can pool so many resources to find out. Psychologist Bruno Bettelheim, for example, is pioneering rehabilitation techniques with "incurably" maladjusted children. "I hope we can help him," says Beadle. "There are tremendous possibilities." Also potentially involved: Chicago's graduate school of education, which non-education professors confidently call "better than Harvard's." Dean Francis Chase proudly points out that his school, unlike Harvard's, gives doctorates only in philosophy, not education. More than half the graduates become "machine tools," teaching at other education schools.

In pure physics. Chicago no longer has Fermi, Urey or Libby, but it does have the Enrico Fermi Institute and the off-campus Argonne National Laboratory, which it runs for the AEC on a $79 million budget (paid by AEC), compared with $68 million for the university itself. To help fill the Midwest gap in research and defense contracts. Beadle counts on a new 12.5 billion-volt synchrotron at Argonne to lure physicists. Last month NASA began building a new space lab adjoining the Fermi Institute.

To spur "the kind of thinking that wins Nobel Prizes," as Provost Levi puts it, Beadle set up a faculty-raiding "independence fund" that now stands at $3,500,000. While easing out many mediocre men, Beadle in 18 months has increased the faculty from 800 to 930. This year Chief Headhunter Levi has a rich catch, from Yale Historian Leonard Krieger to Michigan Law Professor Frank Allen and Negro Historian John Hope Franklin of Brooklyn College. Vows Levi grimly: "We are going to take the best men we can find, although we will probably raise faculty salaries across the country in the process."

Divine Discontent. Humanities are still hungry at Chicago. Yet in history and anthropology, for example, it already claims to be near tops in the U.S. In political science, it has Hans Morgenthau; the divinity school boasts Paul Tillich, Martin Marty and Dean Jerald Brauer, plans to build a separate Lutheran seminary.

The giant has never really wavered from President Harper's original aim: grown-up teaching and research. In "schizoid" Midwest fashion, as Orientalist John A. Wilson put it not long ago, Chicagoans "pound on our chests and proclaim fiercely that we are the corn belt or the pivotal center of the country or the home of American nationalism or the 'hog butcher of the world.' Yet secretly we long to out-Harvard Harvard, to out-Oxford Oxford, and to out-Sorbonne the Sorbonne as a citadel of pure intellectuality."

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