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Before he was through Mr. Rockefeller had increased this best investment to $35,000,000, and his various foundations have since given almost as much again. But no such project was in his mind on that May morning in 1889. He thought he was establishing a small Baptist College in the Midwest. It was William Rainey Harper, college student at 10 and Yale Ph. D. at 19, who rid him of that idea. Chosen to bring the embryo institution to birth, fertile, vigorous, 35-year-old First President Harper set his heart on building a great university, scoured the world for its first requisite—great scholars. Before he died of cancer in 1906 he had set the liberal, experimental, scholarly course from which University of Chicago has never departed. Prodigious Yaleman Hutchins now heads the fourth richest (endowment: $59,475,148), sixth largest (enrollment: 13,000) university in the land, with 85 fine buildings, mostly Gothic, strung three-quarters of a mile along South Chicago's spacious Midway Plaisance. Indisputable intellectual leader of the Midwest, it has housed such world-famed scholars as Physicists Albert A. Michelson and Robert A. Millikan, Biologists Jacques Loeb and Frank Rattray Lillie, Philosopher John Dewey, Historian-Ambassador William E. Dodd, Astronomer Edwin Brant Frost, Medical Researchers Alexis Carrel, Frank Billings, Howard Taylor Ricketts. It still has Physicist Arthur Holly Compton, Physiologist Anton J. Carlson, Medical Researchers Maude Slye, Arno Luckhardt and George F. Dick, Orientalist James Henry Breasted, Classicist Gordon Jennings Laing, Political Scientist Charles Edward Merriam.
In the current Atlantic Monthly, President Edwin R. Embree of the Rosenwald Fund ranked U. S. universities on the basis of the American Council of Education's investigation of their scholarly eminence in each of 35 academic departments. He found University of Chicago second only to Harvard, its senior by 254 years.
New Plan-President Hutchins bided only a year before he turned University of Chicago upside down with his New Plan. At one stroke he wiped out the whole conventional university structure and paraphernalia: colleges, graduate schools, credits, course examinations, compulsory class attendance, arbitrary residence requirements. His new structure comprised a College and four Upper Divisions: Biological Sciences, Physical Sciences, Social Sciences, Humanities. A student was to lay a broad cultural foundation in the College, stop there with a certificate if he wished, or proceed to one of the Divisions for advanced work funneling up without interruption through A. B. and A. M. to Ph. D. General examinations would test not his ability to parrot back a set of facts dealt out by one professor, but his thoughtful grasp of a whole field of knowledge. Freed from oldtime academic harness, he could gallop or amble through his course as fast or slowly as he wished.