Who Is Being Liberal?
FROM QUOTED REMARKS by President Robert M. Hutchins o£ the University of Chicago, it would appear that in his opinion the thing we call "liberal education" survives at present chiefly at Chicago and at St. John's College at Annapolis, and that he believes it is either lagging everywhere else, or is already dead. During the past half-century, he seems to feel, colleges have drifted far from the ancient moorings and devoted too much time and effort to the social side of their existence—an indictment that has enough behind it to make the charge at least a plausible one, though one likes to believe that things are not really as black as Dr. Hutchins paints them.
If it were true that liberal education is dead, save at Chicago and Annapolis, it would perhaps be true that war cannot ruin it or peace revive it, which would seem to be one of Dr. Hutchins' hypotheses; but is it true? One should avoid judgments based on the peculiar circumstances of a nation at war, diverting every effort from other matters to the one crucial necessity of winning the conflict. The vital thing is no doubt to be sure that liberal education shall exist in order that it be saved—something that this eminent Chicago educator appears to doubt—or that, if temporarily submerged, it may be revived when drawn back to the beach at the end of the war.
It is hard to believe that liberal education is too dead to be revived, or that it is still to be found only at St. John's or at Dr. Hutchins' own university. Whatever may have been the divagations of collegiate education from "liberal" standards prior to the war, it is at least true that at no time in the past fifty years have educators revealed a greater anxiety to preserve it than they show at present. To change metaphors, it is permissible to believe that in the embers a spark may be found capable of being fanned to flame, elsewhere than at the two points mentioned by President Hutchins— certainly one hopes it may be found true at Dartmouth. The sun is not annihilated because occasionally the moon obscures it to the terrestrial eye. Naturally the war blinds us for the moment; but one effect of this eclipse has been to make us more surely aware of what we appreciated somewhat less before and are determined not to lose.
