KATIE CALLOW-WRIGHT: John is going
to join us on stage here just to make some closing remarks.
JOHN BOYER: OK, I think I have about 10 minutes to close.
So I thought I would just say a little bit
about the perennial and wonderful issue of our identity
and then maybe something about the kind of thorny
but equally wonderful issue of our size
and then maybe close with a word about our virtue.
And with the identity issue, I wanted
to start with Hutchins, who was one
of our more famous presidents.
People like to quote Hutchins, and he liked to be quoted too.
So it, kind of, worked both ways.
And Hutchins once observed that, quote,
"the greatest obstacle to the development of a university
in this country is the popular misconception
of what a University is.
The two most popular misconceptions
are that it is a kindergarten and that it is a country club.
And of course, what Hutchins was saying
is that we are neither a kindergarten or a country club.
That was, kind of, Yale, where he
would make all kinds of insulting comments about Yale.
Apologies to the alums in the room.
And in a way, what I'm suggesting is
this is a place that we all love,
and I have to say that both panels are so incredibly
impressive because of the quality of the people who
have run--
who are running and who will in the future run this place.
So the folks in the room, the alums, the parents, it's
in pretty good hands when you have folks
like this running the place.
But everybody likes to--
And I think Don suggested this, there's a, kind of, a conceit--
it's a special place.
It's a unique place.
And we love to really talk about how unique we are.
In some ways, Hutchins was perfect at that
because he was the master of our uniqueness.
And so we're not a kindergarten, and we're not a country club.
So what are we?
The life of the mind, the fellowship of reason
and so forth.
But I was thinking about that because it's, kind of, hard
to imagine in Chicago as a kindergarten.
But of course, we do have scav hunt
where you have kids hanging out of windows--
their parents don't know this is happening--
defying the laws of gravity.
And then those same kids after they have not
fallen outside the windows are creating nuclear reactors
without the approval of the Atomic Energy Commission
probably violating federal law.
And so maybe we're not a kindergarten,
but you might say we engage in forms of what we might
call adult kindergartenitis.
And there's a, kind of, a carnivalesque quality
to the place and its student culture
that is not kindergarten like but is certainly
highly playful, occasionally, deeply irreverent,
and sometimes violating the criminal laws
of the state of Illinois.
OK, so that's the kindergarten.
For the country club, now we don't--
we're not a, kind of, swanky place.
We've built good and sturdy buildings.
But I do remember a story that I once
met a prospective student whose parent father told me
that this young man was really talented
and had been admitted to Chicago and a couple
of other top schools in the Ivy plus.
And he was on the--
he couldn't make up his mind because he was a golfer.
And he really wanted to come to a place that had a naturally
competitive golf course.
That's called a country club, OK.
And so I said--
and the father wanted the boy to come here.
So I said, OK, well, maybe we can do something.
So we got a picture of a wonderful place
called the Jackson Park Golf course over--
and if you go there at dusk on a beautiful summer's day
and with a certain camera angle, you can take a picture of--
it's not a fake picture.
And so I actually did this.
I had somebody do it.
And we mailed this to the kid.
And he accepted our offer of admission and came to Chicago.
Now he later found me out once he had visited Jackson Park,
and he, kind of, berated me because I tricked him.
And I said, young man, no, I didn't trick you.
I didn't offer you a country club.
I offered you a public golf course and, kind of,
the spirit of that.
So he quickly then switched from golf,
which is, as you all know, involves hitting little balls
around the grass to debate and became a formidable debater.
Instead of hitting little balls, he
was hitting his opponents with a barrage of words, many of which
he learned in the core curriculum.
So my point is that Hutchins is right about what we're not,
but it turns out that on some occasions
modest compromises can do wonders to move history
forward.
Or to put it differently, our identity
is actually both one and many.
It's malleable, and it's changeable.
And I think one of the ways we've
been able to protect the, kind of,
venerable fellowship of reason is that there are
many different ways to reason.
And many different kinds of people can reason.
We can reason together.
But over time, I think we would miss so many opportunities
if we were not flexible in the way we took pride
in that identity all the while trying
to protect that identity.
And I think one of the great things that my colleagues have
managed to do over the last 30 years
is to do both simultaneously.
So that's the issue of identity.
It's a wonderful thing to have once you take it seriously
but not so seriously that you can't go golfing
and can't hang out of windows with nuclear reactors.
The issue of the size.
This was a really hot button issue.
And I have to say Jeff Stone and our friend,
our much revered colleague Hugo Sonnenschein who's
no longer with us, we thought a great deal
about this issue in the 1990s precisely because of something
that Mark mentioned.
That is to say when I started as Dean,
I noticed that we didn't have many children of our own alumni
coming to the place.
And I would ask alums this and that.
Again, just to quote mark, I would
hear I got a great education comma,
but I don't want to put my kid through that.
And then I would have all these interesting like what was that.
And it had very little to do with the kind of quality
of the intellectual experience, but it just
had to do with a kind of relentless sense--
a kind of grunt sense.
I understand our distinguished current President Paul
Alivisatos us was here during that era.
So I have to--
because when you're talking to alums,
you have to be like what year did you go to the school here
before I say what I'm about to say.
But still, I don't want to put my kids through that.
And so in a way but what we began in the '90s
was an attempt to try to change that into something
that would be productive and helpful
to the university as a whole.
This issue of the size was quite interesting
because, as Jeff will remember, we
were told that we had this very small college,
and we were going to try to make it bigger.
And it really messed up and then a bunch
of dummies who bring disgrace to themselves
and discredit everybody else.
It turned out that this was a flaw
in the statistical calculations of the folks making
that argument because most people didn't realize
before World War II half of the undergraduate population
was counted as members of the divisions, not the college.
And so if you recalculate it, actually we
had a very large college before 1940, larger than Princeton,
larger than Stanford, about the same size as Harvard.
And it was only after World War II
that the whole thing collapsed for reasons
that were alluded to this really profound miscalculations
on Hutchins part.
And so that the-- it wasn't that we
were trying to, kind of, abolish or undo a small college.
We were trying to bring back what
was really quite a successful college before World War II.
And if the mistakes that were made--
and I think they were genuinely well-intended but disastrous
mistakes in the '50s, which Kimpton then
talked about quite candidly, if they had not been made,
we would have ended up with the college of our current size
of about 7,000.
We would have had that 30 years ago.
And as Jeff and I often talked about, what this meant
is that we had tens of thousands of missing alumni.
They're missing.
They didn't die.
They never existed because they didn't come here.
And the ones that did had come here, many of them dropped out.
And so that this issue of size became very important.
I think it was a hugely controversial issue,
but I think it was the right decision to do.
And the faculty supported it because I
think it involved the broader welfare of the university.
And I think today the fact that we
have 7,000 really bright enthusiastic students
with a 99% retention rate is a real tribute to all
of the faculty sitting in this room and all the people who
came before you.
And we need to continue to protect that.
Finally, virtue, and I think this comes back to a point
that Jeff made at the end about free expression.
One of the reasons I think we've been
able to sustain free expression is the quality
of the student body.
When I was doing the research on the-- for this little monograph
I wrote on free expression, there were these big, kind of,
pre-Red Scare events like the Walgreen affair
and then the Red Scare events of the Broyles affair in the '50s.
And when Hutchins-- and Hutchins was a real champion
of free expression.
All of our presidents have been so, but Hutchins in a sense
began that.
What struck me was not that he would defend free expression
or that the faculty would defend free expression.
I have to say that many of the board of trustees
were rather uncertain about what is this, but in the end
they strongly supported it as well.
But what struck me was how strongly the undergraduates
defended the idea of free expression
and academic freedom, both not only for their own interest
but for the university's interest.
This kind of a student culture did not just come about
because Hutchins wished it so.
It came about because of the work of the core in the '30s.
And I mentioned this yesterday, the men
and the women who created the core in the 1930s
were not simply creating a new curriculum or a new way
of education.
They were trying to create a new student
culture and more academically orient the student culture.
People would take the idea seriously--
who would take their education seriously
would take the project of the university as a fellowship
of reason seriously.
And we are blessed with that kind of student culture today.
I think we strengthened it.
We've undone some of the damage that was done
in the '50s for other reasons.
But we should never take that for granted because it's
so rare to have a student culture that
is so closely aligned with the faculty culture.
And this does not just happen.
It happened because men and women in the 30s and 40s
worked to have it happen.
And one of our responsibilities is
to protect that unity of the University we find today.
Harper's vision of the place was it
was supposed to be one university, and this rhetoric
of oneness, this goes through the history of the University.
Again, it's something you can say.
It's like pronouncements.
You could put on the wall where one University--
it doesn't mean anything if you don't
have a student culture that shares
the values of the faculty culture.
And so much of our culture relies upon this--
the work that we do with undergraduates
and assimilating and making them--
helping them to understand what it
means to go to a great university as
opposed to a high school or a place
where people are afraid to talk and want
to make them afraid to talk and to defend their own ideas.
So I just wanted to say in conclusion that it's--
the work of the last 30 years and the working
of the last 50 years has had many different champions.
I mentioned and I've been grateful
that Hanna Gray was here yesterday,
and Don Randel is here today.
Paula Alivisatos, these are all great presidents.
I've mentioned Hugo Sonnenschein who was a truly great president
and is no longer with us.
One other leader I do want to mention
is Bob Zimmer, who is with us but not-- is in the city.
He can't be here today.
And the work that Bob did over the last 15 years
and in defending all of these values, free expression,
and supporting the expansion of the college
and the transformation of the college
and having done all of the other things has been extraordinary.
And I think the University has always
depended upon strong leadership of this president.
So we've been blessed by having a series of very
strong and enlightened leaders and Bob, certainly,
was among them.
And without his support, including
his for better or worse deciding to reappoint me
for endless months of term.
I mean, I had to get reelected.
The faculty had-- agreed to all of this,
but he could have said no.
Without his support, very little of this would have come about.
So thank you for your friendship,
and it is a very great place.
It is a unique place as long as we don't take that altogether
seriously and talk ourselves into myths like we don't have
to worry about student dropouts because they're all
self-selected.
I mean, talk about talking yourselves
into a myth that was so destructive.
And it is a place that is worth protecting,
and I think we should celebrate the collective work
of so many faculty, so many faculty and as look
around the room in doing so.
Now I want to say one final thing,
and that's my colleague Jim Chandler.
He did, you'll notice, offer a provocative comment
and this, kind of, disputational comment about you
might take that to be a challenge to our study
abroad model, OK.
So I have to--
he's shaking his said no, but let's play with this.
So is study abroad rigorous?
Now when we started the programs, many
of you will note-- and I Robert Morris,
I was accused of starting club ed abroad.
And one prominent faculty member was particularly
disturbed about this.
I remember he said this is really
bad you're going to ruin the University of Chicago.
And I said, well, if it's so bad, like, why don't you
go do it too because then you can really get the goods on me?
And so he went off and taught in a European city.
Let's put it that way in one of our--
and when he came back, he was avoiding me.
He was, kind of, like he'd seen me coming down the hall,
and he'd go the other way.
So I finally I said, look, how's it going.
He said.
Come on.
Tell me.
He says, I was wrong.
It was a great experience.
Can I go back again?
And I said, well, two things.
First of all, you got to get online.
And secondly, you have to stop bad mouthing our programs.
And as the emperor of France used to say
and in the Assyrian Empire, the emperor
was told once that so and so was a patriot.
And he said, yes, but is he a patriot for me.
And I said, I need you to become a patriot for a study abroad.
But to come to Jim's point, one of the things we
do when I teach in Vienna is we read The Communist Manifesto,
which is a great book.
Well, it is a book that some people deem great.
Other people deem pernicious.
And but very few people in America would, I think,
it's a kind of a historical text.
It turns out there are people in Vienna,
as in many other European cities who are still
living and breathing Marxist.
And one of the things I do is we read
and I take some friends in the Austrian parliament
and the socialist party who actually believe in Marx
and have them meet these folks.
And I took the kids over to have coffee
with the deputy leader of the socialist party who gave them
an hour lecture on Marx and the applicability of Marx,
the current housing policy in the city of Vienna
because they have running.
And the kids came away and said, Professor Boyer,
that guy really believes this stuff.
I said-- so I said, now that was a learning moment.
So they had read Marx.
They had-- I took them out for a tourt and some [INAUDIBLE]
later, but they had learned something
that they couldn't possibly learn in Kabul.
So I think that's rigorous additive.
It's not subtractive.
And with that great insight, I invite you all to do lunch.
So thank you very much.
[APPLAUSE]
KATIE CALLOW-WRIGHT: Well, that really is our closing.
Not much more should be said after that.
Thank you all for joining us this morning
to celebrate John and his tremendous commitment
and impact here at the University
and on thousands of lives of young scholars and all of us
and many others in our community.
So thank you all.
Have a wonderful afternoon.
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