The Chicago Plan
The following letter was sent by President Hopkins to the Daily Maroon of the University of Chicago in answer to its request for comment on the recently projected educational experiment at that institution: The Daily Maroon:
The whole world of higher education ought to feel indebtednesss to the University of Chicago for the liberalizing influence of its proposed reorganization program. The plan ignores the bugaboo which so frequently impedes progress in educational groups, namely, the super-sensitive dread of what will be thought by the official corps of other universities or colleges. It attacks the inept practice of judging a man's intellectual acumen or his potential development by his ingenuity in securing grades or his dexterity in juggling courses so that without spoiling his act by dropping one, he can keep two in hand and three in the air. The plan is courageous in that it divorces itself from the autocracy of the departmentalized curriculum, wherein assumption exists that a man can become educated by the acquisition of a few fragmentary bits of knowledge, whether he knows anything about the articulation of these with each other or what their importance is in the body of knowledge as a whole. A liberal education ought to cultivate some sense of proportionate values in learning, as elsewhere. Too frequently, no sense of this is given in the college curricula turned over to departmental jurisdictions.
The ultimate capacity of American higher education to render maximum value to society, which it serves, is dependent upon the various institutions utilizing their respective environments and their respective opportunities for intelligent and carefully devised experimentation. In spite of this, the inevitable tendency, meanwhile, is for colleges and universities to submit to the authority of custom and to become standardized in theory and in practice. Chicago's official resistance against this tendency is an incentive to others to go and do likewise. May this stimulus prove effectual.
Yours very truly, ERNEST M. HOPKINS
