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Last year he began contributing a column to the Daily Maroon (student newspaper). Excerpt:
"Cambridge, Mass. Harvard University has announced that it will increase or diminish (I have forgotten which) the size of its diplomas. All true friends of education will applaud this great forward step."
Some Chicagoans still think that President Hutchins' manner has hurt the University, that the town might have done more for the gown during Depression if he had been a bit more mellow. Friends and philosophers, however, are glad that Bob Hutchins has escaped the fate which Critic Carl Van Doren ascribes to Author Christopher Morley: "He got mellow before he got ripe."
His father is president of Kentucky's Berea College and his younger brother vice president of Yale-in-China, but Bob Hutchins might never have turned to Education if it had not been for beauteous Maude McVeigh. He was 22, penniless and wanted to be a lawyer, but a prep-school teaching job looked like the only way he could earn enough to support a wife. Like nearly all university presidents' wives, Maude Hutchins has been roundly criticized for snobbishness. Mrs. Hutchins, however, is a New Englander with a mind of her own. Scores of faculty folk have sat at her board but she figured out long ago that if she entertained six faculty folk per night, five nights per week, it would take practically a year to go down the list. Hence she and her husband live quietly with their 9-year-old daughter Mary Frances ("Franja") and their Great Dane "Hamlet" on the second floor of the big, yellow-brick President's House overlooking the Midway, entertain intimates there. Instead of an automobile their garage houses a studio where Mrs. Hutchins ably sculpts and draws.
Hutchins Midway. No man could rise so high as President Hutchins has in half his life without causing the world to wonder what the second half may hold for him. Just now not even his intimates can get Bob Hutchins to say any more than that he is vastly interested in Education. Having launched a program which should eventually transform U. S. Education, he is brimful of ideas for extending and improving it. But, though he thinks with vigorous independence about educational problems, he is not primarily a theorist. The New Plan, as he has often pointed out, is the work of many minds. His genius lies in possessing the courage and vision to effect new plans, the ability to administer them to success. As yet he has no political tie-ups, though he has served on the Chicago Regional Committee of the National Labor Relations Board, chair-manned numerous long-named public commissions.
Somewhat ambiguously, President Roosevelt may have pointed the way to Bob Hutchins' future last autumn. President Hutchins called at the White House and for a few days the Press was rife with rumors that he was slated for a front-rank New Deal job, probably as NRA enforcement officer (TIME, Oct. 29). Then silence.