Robert M. Hutchins

An Institute of Human Relations

The Institute of Human Relations at Yale is an organization for the co-operative study of man. Research in the biological sciences and their applications in medicine is here connected, through psychology, with research in the social sciences and their applications in law. The Institute is a co-ordination and expansion, made possible by a grant from the Rockefeller Foundation, of previously established mental-hygiene work, the Institute of Psychology, and the Department of Research in Child Hygiene. Research is the primary object, although graduate seminars overlapping the boundary lines of the traditional disciplines will be provided. The task of coordinating research projects and eliminating duplication is so difficult that increased centralization in administration may be necessary. The first project approved is a five-year study by Dr. William Healy and Dr. Augusta F. Bronner of the family factors in child adjustment. The interest of the medical and law schools in the Institute has its origin in the new conceptions of preventive medicine and preventive law, which require practitioners to have a better understanding of the people and society in which they live. The experience in co-operative research should be useful to social scientists, psychologists, and other specialists in freeing them from their departmental rigidities and broadening their understanding of human relations.

Ideals in Education

The character of education is determined by the character of society. The love of money, and the desire for freedom to make it and equality of opportunity to purpose it, are the current ideals of the United States. The consequences of these ideals in American education have been to emphasize vocational education, to base the curriculum on obsolescent knowledge, to omit the consideration of mora questions, and to sacrifice intellectual development in favor of vocational techniques and the acquisition of information. The educational system reconstructed according to the ideal of the common good as determined in the light of reason will have as its primary object the cultivation of the intellectual virtues. Accordingly, general education in the college will center upon the communication of our intellectual tradition and upon training in the intellectual disciplines of grammar, rhetoric, logic, and mathematics. The university, excluding informational and vocational courses, will become an institution where professors and students join in studying fundamental intellectual problems, those of natural science, social science, and metaphysics or philosophy. The graduates of a university so organized and so conducted should after three years of study have some rational conception of the common good and of the methods of achieving it.

What Price Freedom

In an attempt to make David Brin’s1 privacy-free ‘transparent society’ more palatable to civil libertarians, Robert Sawyer2 has proposed an “Alibi Archive” in which everyone’s activities are meticulously recorded in a centralized, judicially controlled archive, with the archives legally accessible only under court order and only upon request of the person whose activities were recorded. In a criminal investigation, this person would be able to access (and make public from the archives) those records of his activities that would definitively establish an alibi for him, thus conclusively proving that he was elsewhere when the crime was being committed. Potential criminals would know that they would not be able to establish an alibi in this manner, and thus would be deterred from committing crimes. Regardless of the merits of this idea (and there are many aspects that can be debated), it seems that it is workable only with respect to perpetrators who actually care if their illegal activities are discovered. In the unique case of suicidal terrorists who plan to kill themselves during the achievement of their objectives, the alibi archive simply won’t work as a deterrent. Suicidal perpetrators plan on being dead after the commission of their crimes. They won’t care what, or whether, anything can be proven after they’re gone. We need some additional ways of deterring them and disabling their ability to act. Perhaps some sort of highly intrusive and actively monitored nanotechnology-enabled omnipresent recording system could be employed to this end.

What Is a General Education

GENERAL EDUCATION General Education Program General Education provides a common intellectual experience for all university students. The program develops strong communication and critical thinking skills, a broad understanding of disciplinary areas, and the knowledge and skills necessary for responsible citizenship in an interconnected world. General Education is the foundation of all undergraduate degree programs at The University of Akron.

The Issue in the Higher Learning

HE most characteristic feature of the modern world is bewilderment. It has become the fashion to be be717wildered. Anybody who says he knows anything or understands anything is at once suspected of affectation or falsehood. Even the President of the United States has been forced to say repeatedly that he does not know what he is doing, that he is merely experimenting, and that he expects to have to abandon many things that he is trying. Consistency has become a vice and opportunism a virtue. We do not know where we are going, or why; and we have almost given up the attempt to find out. This is an extraordinary situation. Certainly we have more facts about the world, about ourselves, and the relations among ourselves than were available to any of our ancestors. We console ourselves with the delusion that the world is much more complicated than the one our ancestors inhabited. It does not seem possible that its complexity has increased at anywhere near the same rate as our knowledge of facts about it. If, as Descartes led us to believe, the souls good is the domination of the physical universe, our souls have achieved a very high degree of good indeed. If, as we have been convinced since the Renaissance, the advance of the race is in direct proportion to the volume of information it possesses, we should by now have reached every imaginable human goal. We have more informa-

How should a university administrator respond to radical activism among students

Four Fellows from The Center for the Study of Democratic Institutions, each with extensive experience in education, respond to a question being asked the world over.

In Defense of Science and Freedom-Speeches at the Condon Dinner

To make clear their high regard for Dr. Edward U. Condon and their complete confidence in him in the face of the attack by the House Un-American Activities Committee, a dinner was arranged in New York City on April 12 by The Emergency Committee of Atomic Scientists and sponsored by some hundred and fifty scientists. We present significant remarks about freedom, justice and scientific endeavor made on that occasion by Robert M. Hutch ins, Chancellor of the University of Chicago, Harold C. Urey, vice chairman of The Emergency Committee of Atomic Scientists and member of the Institute for Nuclear Studies at the University of Chicago, and by Dr. Condon himself.

THE ORGANIZATION AND SUBJECT MATTER OF GENERAL EDUCATION

Since you have two other college presidents on the program to tell you about college education it is obvious that you do not expect from any one of them the answer to your questions about it. You believe, like the rest of the world, that all presidents are liars, and you hope from a study of the differing lies of the three of us to discover the truth for yourselves. Speaking for myself, I find Mr. Conants lies very persuasive, so much so that I shall drop out of this paper as I go along any lies of my own that are in conflict with his. I assume that we are all agreed on the purpose of general education and that we want to confine our discussion to its organization and subject matter. I believe that general education should be given as soon as possible, that is, as soon as

The Organization of a University

T HE object of a university is the advancement of knowledge, but to disseminate the knowledge it has gained is not a necessary part of the obligation of a university. A university may be a university without doing any teaching; it cannot be one without doing any research. There is an essential conflict between teaching and research. Education is synthetic and generalized; research is analytical and detailed. Education is becoming more generalized; research is becoming more specialized. The college teacher, after intensive training in a minute field of physics, is expected to teach a general course in the natural sciences. The teacher aims at comprehension. But in the natural sciences in this country alone twenty thousand research workers are digging up important new facts and announcing new discoveries, some of which are as yet incomprehensible to their sponsors, to say nothing of those who are compelled to fit them into an intelligible scheme which may be communicated to the rising generation. Nor is this all. American education confronts certain national peculiarities which present almost insoluble problems. A much larger proportion of our population gets into higher education than in any other country on earth. Enormous numbers of students have poured into the colleges and universities since the beginning of the century. Such numbers mean that you must have elaborate machinery, and before you know it, the machinery becomes an end in itself, cherishing its own special sanctity, and standing between you and education like a lattice-work screen, obscuring the vision and blocking the path. The number of students has been swelled in recent years by the association of the formal indicia of education with certain vocational opportunities.