Occasional Papers on Higher Education, Volume: XXI

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“ T E A C H I N G AT A U N I V E R S I T Y O F A C E R TA I N S O R T ”

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gained a powerful ally who, as a new man with the sovereign force of the University presidency behind him, had the credibility to force the plan through the faculty. As it happened, the implementation of Boucher’s ideas took place coterminously with Hutchins’s decision to restructure the governance of the arts and sciences by creating four graduate divisions and a separate undergraduate College, each as an official faculty ruling body and each with an executive dean. Boucher henceforth was no longer dean of the Colleges, but dean of the College, and it was this new “College,” created with the explicit mission of “doing the work of general education in the University,” that became the operational site of the new curriculum. The final stages of the implementation of Boucher’s New Plan took place in January 1931, during weeks of intense debate as to what exact curricular elements would be presented to the faculty for a formal vote. We know from a stream of private letters from Mortimer Adler to Robert Hutchins in early 1931 about the rearguard action fought by several key faculty members to keep department-controlled courses in the first two years of the new curriculum, a form of opposition that Adler viewed as a sign of their general disdain about anything other than their own fields: The department advocates were “all greedily protecting their private diggings and what gets me sorest is that they are doing [so] under the false banner of educational theory.”112 Still, the curricular maneuverings generated much local attention. Adler reported to Hutchins that “the place is still bubbling. The volcanic quality is still discernible in the many round table discussions at the [Quadrangle] Club. On all sides you hear discussion of ‘the plan’, or ‘a plan’, or ‘our plan’ or ‘their plan’. The 112. Adler to Hutchins, January 1931 [marked “Saturday”]. Mortimer Adler Papers, Box 56.


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