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There are no tangible tests of success for such a scheme as the New Plan, and it is still quite new. But in the enthusiastic judgment of president, faculty and students, the Plan works. University attendance has increased since it started. More important, student calibre has kept step. Dullards are afraid of it. The high-school average of last year's Freshman class was an astounding 90. Applicants write in from all corners of the land, half of them saying they want to enter University of Chicago solely because of the New Plan. Given a chance to proceed under their own steam, students have found that learning is exciting. They pile into extra lecture sessions just for the fun of it, or take examinations without any previous classwork whatsoever and generally pass with higher marks than those of classmembers.
The New Plan has proved itself an administrative blessing. Instead of a regiment of department heads, President Hut chins has only a handful of "vice pres-idents"—Deans of divisions and professional schools—to deal with on matters of finance and appointments. Individual budgets have dropped from 72 to twelve. Some 400 over-specialized or overlapping courses have been eliminated. To this economy of organization, plus the able assistance of sturdy, white-haired Vice President Frederic Campbell ("Fritz'") Woodward, President Hutchins credits his success in bringing the University through Depression relatively unscathed. As income from real estate, mortgages and Standard Oil stock plummeted, he has had to dip heavily into a $1,000,000 reserve fund. But no professors have been discharged, no salaries cut except those of the medical faculty (now mostly restored) and of administrators, including the president. Midway's Hutchins. Aboard a Manhattan-bound express train a fellow passenger once cheerfully asked Chicago's president: "Where are you going?"
"Where," replied Bob Hutchins, "is the train going?"
Chicagoans on & off the campus agree on two facts about President Hutchins:
1) he is exceedingly smart and able;
2) he is entirely too flip and smart-alecky. Friends excuse his brusque manner, his acid impatience with fatuity, on grounds of shyness. But when the Hutchins manner first made itself apparent on the Midway, that explanation did not salve the feelings of oldtime facultymen, already angry at having a youth brought in over their heads. Businessmen in the Loop were equally galled by his domineering ways when he served on Chicago's Unemployment Relief Commission. His popularity reached a nadir in 1931 when he caused the chairman and two members of his philosophy department to quit their jobs in high dudgeon.
Since then Chicago has become better acquainted with Bob Hutchins and his popularity, especially in the past year, has soared. Most facultymen who still dislike him fall into three classifications: 1) mossbacks; 2) peanuts; 3) strangers. Young fellow members of the faculty's X Club (wives have an X's Club) have found him a companion of first-rate wit and charm. Students lucky enough to get into his erudite course on "Classics of the Western World," which he teaches by dialog with smart young Philosophy Professor Mortimer Adler, think it the high spot of their campus lives.
Bob Hutchins still betrays his youth.