Word: thoughtful
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: during 1940-1949
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...years later. At 30 he became the "boy wonder" president of the University of Chicago. Not long after, he invited Adler to come out and be a .professor. "I'm the president of a great university," Hutchins announced to Adler at lunch. "But I haven't thought about education." "Me either," said Mortimer. "I'm a philosopher." The only thoughts he had about education, he went on to say, had come from Columbia's John Erskine, who had taught a general course in "the great books" of Western civilization. Adler thought Hutchins should begin reading them...
...Robert Hutchins was slightly mellower in manner. But he could still get excited-now puffing a Fatima and pacing about, now plumping himself down in an easy chair to declaim across the room. Long ago, he had made up his mind what the ideal university should be. He thought Chicago was beginning to show signs of becoming one. "It is not a very good university," he said recently, in typical Hutchins-ese. "It is simply the best there...
Under its first president, William Rainey Harper, the school that John D. Rockefeller had founded in 1891 with a $600,000 gift (and which John D. had originally thought of as just a good Baptist college) became a first-rank university almost at birth. As its grey, Gothic-style buildings sprang up on Chicago's dreary South Side, notable minds had nocked to it: Philosopher John Dewey, Economist Thorstein Veblen, Archeologist James Henry Breasted. It was a place of exciting research, fired by the spirit of scientific inquiry and by the yeasty pragmatism of John Dewey. "The result...
...baggy Brooks Brothers suits and gay cravats, he could charm Chicago hostesses when he wanted to. But he was also irrepressibly flip. Asked what he thought of Yale, he replied: "Compared to Chicago, Yale is a boy's finishing school." Asked what he thought of Chicago, he said: "The faculty does not amount to much, but the president and the students are wonderful." When he prepared to testify before a committee of the Illinois legislature (after Drugstore Tycoon Charles Walgreen had charged that his niece was being taught Communism at the university), Trustee Laird Bell offered to pay Hutchins...
...victory over Army (in 1943), got his walking papers. One of his assistants, balding, 39-year-old Herman Ball, stepped up to become the Redskins' sixth coach in 13 years. Washington fans, who put the 'Skins ahead of the home-town university teams in their football favor, thought the change might cause at least one twinge of regret in George Preston Marshall, the ex-hoofer, ex-Hearst publisher (Washington Times) and millionaire laundryman who once exclaimed at a dinner party: "Congratulate me, folks, I've finally arrived socially-today I got the sheets of Mrs. Borden Harriman...