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Club Introduction

Members of the Commonwealth Club, our speaker today belongs to that very select group of thinkers down through the ages who, without seeking controversy, have managed by some device to remain constantly the center of controversy. Professor Adler received his education, practically all of it at the higher levels, at Columbia University at a period when Columbia University, under the leadership of the late Dean Hawkes of Columbia College, had managed to become the chief center of ferment at the college level. I think that all that is good and most of what is bad in college teaching today stems from the Columbia of that period.

Dr. Adler got his technical training there as a psychologist. And then, in 1929, Robert Maynard Hutchins left the deanship of the Law School at Yale to become the President of the University of Chicago. Hutchins thought that he needed someone to dynamite the place, and so a year after he went there, that is in 1930, Dr. Hutchins took Mortimer Adler on as what might be called the official stirrer-upper of the University of Chicago.

Mortimer Adler went to Chicago as Professor of the Philosophy of Law. That, apparently, meant almost anything he wished to do. He promptly made himself intensely unpopular with all of his colleagues for two reasons: In the first place, he asked basic questions and gave unfashionable answers. In the second place, he wrote books, which not only could be read but were read by enormous numbers of people. Both of these crimes were unforgivable and, so far as I can see, in his 20 years at the University of Chicago, his unpopularity did not diminish by a jot or a tittle.

He got the Great Books movement started and that has insinuated itself over the country and now the Great Books are being merchandised for $249.98, I believe. They are labeled the Great Books, some of us think of them as aren't they? Oh, just leave off the article. The implication has been the, some of us think some. But they are great books and this is the man who really is responsible. Mr. Adler has now induced the Mellon Foundation and the Ford Foundation to subsidize his thinking, and we San Franciscans should be greatly flattered that he has chosen to do his thinking among the fogs of Pacific Heights. Obviously, the Parnassus of the 20th, if not of the 21st century.

There is a fine lack of immediacy about this project. He, apparently, believes that it is going to take more than one election to solve all of our difficulties. This sense of the long view may have something to do with the topic, which Dr. Adler has chosen today: The 21st century. Dr. Mortimer Adler.

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