I I
A MEMBER OF THE WIDER UNIVERSITY
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made Chicago seem an unsafe and inhospitable destination for high school students, whether they were sixteen or eighteen years of age. The problem of neighborhood deterioration became so severe that by 1953 Woodlawn had become the site of one of the highest rates of violent crime in the city. The neighborhood issue was important not only because of its effects on the general milieu of the University, but because in the early 1950s we were much less an on-campus residential college than today, and trouble in the neighborhood meant direct trouble in student life as well. The net result of both factors could be charted in the fact that by the autumn of 1953 enrollment in the College had sunk to less than 1,350 students. The entering class in that year—275 first-year and 39 transfer students — was less than half of what it had been twenty years earlier. And, equally significant, in spite of (or perhaps because of ) the growing independence of the College’s faculty and its success in creating a veritable master plan for general education, many faculty members whose primary appointments were in the divisions manifested considerable skepticism about a curriculum that seemed to claim that a first-rate liberal arts education should consist primarily of general education sequences and their attendant comprehensive exams. Arguing that the College and its faculty had allowed themselves to become too divorced from the rest of the University, they asked, indeed they even demanded, that opportunities for more specialized study be given greater weight and prominence in our students’ bachelor’s programs. The perceived crisis in undergraduate enrollments was accompanied, moreover, by a second and perhaps more ominous crisis experienced by the wider University. At its core lay the truly parlous state of University finances. By 1950–51 (the final academic year of Robert Hutchins’s tenure), the University was running a budget deficit of $1.2 million on