President Conant and Robert M. Hutchins, Chancellor of the University of Chicago failed to agree, last night, on the "functions of a modern university." The pair spoke at a symposium in Buffalo, New York sponsored by the State University of New York.
It is the function of the modern university, Conant said, to provide students with a synthesis of professional training and instructions in the humanities.
Hutchins objected. He said universities had already absorbed an "array of vocational schools of incredible variety and insignificance' and should concentrate on formulating answers to great general questions such as the place of the United States in world affairs, the relation of church and state, or the responsibility of the public for the heath of the community.
GE Base for Training
Because of the changing nature of the technological world, vocational and professional programs at college should be planned for a broad base of general education, Conant said. Highly specialized training should be obtained on the job.
Conant decried the trend on some campuses where faculties of arts and sciences are reduced to "operating service stations for undergraduate professional schools." He urged that professional training in applied sciences be confined to graduate schools so that undergraduates will be "going through a process of education that will not be by itself a basis for a subsequent professional or vocational career."
Hutchins wanted to rid universities of any sort of specialization. He said it made universities "mere housing projects for men pursuing unrelated studies without the needful intercommunication."
Unanimity Sought
The modern university might well "be aiming at a summa dialectical achieved by restoring the conditions of conversation and reinterpreting basic ideas," he said. Specialists, he claimed, cannot think together.
The two educators also disagreed on the usefulness of the university in the development of western culture. Hutchins said he believed universities have "never fashioned the mind of any epoch after the middle ages. Minds of this age have been fashioned by individual men with little or no university connection--for example--Mars, Darwin, and Freud."
"In the speculative realm, the American university is chaotic. In the practical realm, it is silent."
Conant said, on the other hand, that a group of devoted and loyal men united at a university for a special purpose, "governed by its own traditions and perpetrated by its own rules, yet given a recognized status by a higher authority, must be an unconscious agent for the spread of ideas hostile to all forms of tyranny. No authoritarian state, past, present or future could tolerate for long such foci of anti-totalitarian infection."
"May not our universities prove to be essential to the preservation of the ideals of a free society?" Conant asked.
Disagree on Faculty Setup
Another point of disagreement between Conant and Hutchins focused on what should be the makeup of a university faculty.
