Hutchins was thirty years old when he became Chicago's president in 1929, and implemented wide-ranging and sometimes controversial reforms of the university, including the elimination of varsity football.

[4] Oberlin was a small community dedicated to evangelical ideals of righteousness and hard work, which had a lifelong influence on Hutchins.

The Hutchins brothers served in an all-Oberlin unit, Section 587, which for much of the war was stationed at the Allentown Fair Grounds, where they were tasked with creating a barracks.

[8] However, Hutchins did not enjoy the same level of financial support, and in his junior and senior years, he worked menial jobs for up to six hours per day to cover living expenses.

[13] After spending a year teaching high school History and English in Lake Placid, New York, he was hired to become the Secretary of the Yale Corporation.

Skeptical of the received rules of evidence that he had taught as a professor, he worked to integrate the findings of psychology, sociology and logic with the law.

[17] Hutchins played a key role in convincing the Rockefeller Foundation to fund an Institute of Human Relations at Yale, to foster partnerships between the social sciences and law and medicine.

"Hutchins stood behind his faculty and their right to teach and believe as they wished, insisting that communism could not withstand the scrutiny of public analysis and debate.

"[19] Hutchins was able to implement his ideas regarding a two-year, generalist bachelors during his tenure at Chicago, and subsequently had designated those studying in depth in a field as masters students.

He moreover pulled Chicago out of the Big Ten Conference and eliminated the school's increasingly struggling football program, which he saw as a campus distraction.

[6] Hutchins heaped scorn upon schools which received more press coverage for their sports teams than for their educational programs, and the trustees provided the support he needed to drop football in December 1939.

[20] Within a year, however, an overwhelming majority of students, alumni, and professors had aligned behind Hutchins's vision for a University that emphasized education above athletics.

Hutchins today serves as a model for those who argue that commercialized college sports are incompatible with the academic and intellectual aims of institutions of higher learning.

While he exhibited great fervor for his curricular project and numerous notable alumni were produced during the period, nevertheless, the business community as well as donors became highly skeptical of the value of the program, and eventually were able to have the four-year, traditional A.B.

The College's financial clout, which had been considerable prior to his tenure, underwent a serious downgrading with decreased collegiate enrollment and a drying up of donations from the school's principal Chicago area benefactors.

As such, his critics view him as a dangerous idealist who pushed the school out of the national limelight and temporarily thwarted its possible expansion, while his supporters argue that it was his changes that kept Chicago intellectually unique and from taking on the vocational inclinations that he denigrated in his writings.

Due to the rapid growth of the US automotive industry in the early 1950s, the Ford Foundation was running such large surpluses that it attracted unwanted attention from the Internal Revenue Service.

[22] After leaving the Fund for the Republic, Hutchins founded the Center for the Study of Democratic Institutions[23] in 1959, which was his attempt to bring together a community of scholars to analyze this broad area.

While modified and reduced in form, the collegiate curriculum at the University of Chicago to this day reflects the Great Books and Socratic method championed by Hutchins' Secular Perennialism.

Carl Sagan in The Demon-Haunted World says that he was "lucky enough" to have studied under Hutchins, "where science was presented as an integral part of the gorgeous tapestry of human knowledge.

In his interview in 1970 titled, "Don't Just Do Something", Hutchins explained, "...the Great Books [are] the most promising avenue to liberal education if only because they are teacher-proof."

Additionally, he served as coeditor of The Great Ideas Today, Chairman of the Board of Editors of Encyclopædia Britannica from 1943 to 1974, and also published extensively under his own name.

According to Hutchins in The University of Utopia, "The object of the educational system, taken as a whole, is not to produce hands for industry or to teach the young how to make a living.

Here, however, the focus shifts from learning the techniques of communication to exploring some of man's principal concepts of the world and the leading ideas that have propelled mankind.

If they choose to matriculate to University, students begin to specialize, but they do not study collection of data, technical training, or solutions to immediate practical problems, but rather they explore the intellectual ideas specific to their chosen field.

During their initial schooling and college, students had to prove that they could learn independently; if they then chose to attend a University, they were expected to make effective use of those skills.

Hutchins asserts that students should be exposed to these conflicting ideas so that they may weigh and balance them in their own minds, boiling down the arguments and synthesizing a view of their own.