JOHN W. BOYER
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ur traditions of general education date back to the
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late 1920s, when a group of colleagues at Chicago decided to revolutionize the world of higher education by creating what was called the New Plan, a bold attempt to synthesize broad fields of knowledge
in an explicitly interdisciplinary framework for first- and second-year students in the College. The New Plan was our first Core curriculum, and the current curriculum, passed in 1998, owes much to the spirit and practices of the New Plan. The New Plan was the brainchild of Dean Chauncey S. Boucher, about whom I have written in the past. Briefly, during the late 1920s, Boucher came to be dissatisfied both with the level of intellectual accomplishment of undergraduates at Chicago and with the marginal and lackadaisical way in which the University treated undergraduate education. Even before Robert Hutchins assumed the presidency in the summer of 1929, Boucher had conducted a lobbying campaign to create a new curriculum of general education courses based on a comprehensive examination system and a new approach to undergraduate education.2 Boucher was convinced that a more challenging and more imaginative 2. See Chauncey S. Boucher, “Suggestions for a Reorganization of Our Work in the Colleges, and a Restatement of Our Requirements for the Bachelor’s Degree,” December 1927, Archive of the College, Box 27, folder 6; and “Report of the Senate Committee on the Undergraduate Colleges,” May 7, 1928, ibid., folder 7, Special Collections Research Center, University of Chicago Library; unless otherwise noted, all archival documents cited in this essay are located in the center.
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