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"Current fears are reflected too in the present attacks on higher education. From one point of view these attacks are justified. From the point of view of those who believe that Heaven is one big country club, universities are dangerous things. If what you want is a dead level of mediocrity, if what you would like is a nation of identical twins, without initiative, intelligence or ideas, you should fear the universities. From this standpoint universities are subversive. They try to make their students think. . . ."
When President Hutchins was done his audience, the first one to behave so in the memory of any chapelgoer, beat their palms.
Come of Age. More than the touch of grey in his close-cropped dark hair, this commencement speech revealed the maturity which is overtaking the golden boy of U. S. Education. Six years ago the nation gasped at the bright promise implied in his prodigious chronology—War-decorated by Italy at 19, Secretary of Yale at 24, Yale Law School lecturer at 26, full professor and dean at 29, President of University of Chicago at 30. To a large section of the U. S. public he is still a brilliant boy theorist, miraculously allowed to tinker a university to his mind's content. But Robert Maynard Hutchins, once the youngest and handsomest big-university president in the land, is now only the handsomest. After six years of guiding a great university through Depression he stands not on his promise but on his performance.
Second Greatest. John D. Rockefeller and a prodigious predecessor from Yale gave Bob Hutchins the kind of university he has to run. One "delicious May morning'' in 1889 the nation's No. 1 industrialist, trim, erect and in his prime at 49* was pacing up & down before his Manhattan home with the Secretary of the American Baptist Education Society. Suddenly, a few steps from Fifth Avenue, Mr. Rockefeller stopped, faced the Baptist secretary, announced his decision. He would give $600,000 toward founding a Baptist college in Chicago, provided other acceptable donors would give $400,000. When this proposal was announced to a convention of the Education Society in Boston, delegates spontaneously burst out in "Praise God from whom all blessings flow." Mr. Rockefeller concurred in this judgment when he paid his first visit to the Chicago campus seven years later. Said he: "The good Lord gave me the money, and how could I withhold it from Chicago? ... It is the best investment I ever made in my life."