Robert Maynard Hutchins was just 30 when, in 1929, he became president of the University. The “boy wonder,” as the press nicknamed him, remained until 1951, first as president, then as chancellor—the longest tenure of any University leader to date.

In his day, Hutchins was famous. He was on the cover of Time magazine twice. He was a frequent guest on The University of Chicago Roundtable, a nationally syndicated radio show. He published numerous popular books on his educational theories. He was even considered as a possible running mate for Franklin D. Roosevelt in 1940.

Today Hutchins is mostly famous for one thing: abolishing the football program. (“Football has the same relation to education that bullfighting has to agriculture,” he observed.) But his equally radical experiments with the College have been largely forgotten.

In the Hutchins College, papers, tests, and attendance did not count. Instead, a student’s entire grade was determined by a “comp”: a comprehensive exam given at the end of the year.

During World War II Hutchins pushed through more changes. Sophomores in high school were encouraged to apply; soon the campus filled with 15- and 16-year-olds. The curriculum became more prescribed, requiring all undergrads to take the same courses, focused on a canon known as the Great Books.

In 1953 Hutchins returned to campus for a series of lectures, later published as The University of Utopia (University of Chicago Press, 1953). “It happened to have the same curriculum as University of Chicago,” James Vice, EX’52, AM’54, recalled. “So he was talking about us.”

Hutchins’s innovations were bold but short-lived. He expected other colleges and universities would follow UChicago’s lead. They did not.

By the late 1950s, little of the Hutchins College remained. High school degrees were once again required; the Great Books canon was deprioritized. Even football (at the Division III level) returned in 1969. Unlike other influential presidents—William Rainey Harper and Edward Levi, LAB’28, PhB’32, JD’35, for example—no buildings on campus are named after him.

“My mistake was that I thought I was a successful evangelist, when I was actually the stopper in the bathtub,” Hutchins wrote to a former colleague in 1964. “I thought I had convinced everybody, when all I had done was block a return to ‘normalcy.’”

Speakers

• Maurine Kornfeld, AB’42, AM’48
• Nancy Given, SB’45
• Marion Shorts, AB’46
• Rosemary Miller, AB’47, MBA’50
• Enid Rieser, AB’47, AM’52
• Richard Theriault, PhB’48
• Richard Greene, AB’50
• Michel Paul Richard, AB’51, AM’55
• Thomas Clark, AB’53, SM’55
• Bernie DelGiorno, AB’54, MBA’55, AB’55
• James Redfield, LAB’50, AB’54, PhD’61
• Jan Berkhout, AB’55, PhD’62
• Ronne Hartfield, AB’55, AM’82
• Arline Meyer, AB’55
• Coleman Seskind, AB’55, SB’56, SM’59, MD’59
• James Vice, EX’52, AM’54
• Eiichi Fukushima, LAB’52, SB’57, AB’57
• Remington Stone, AB’57, AM’60
• Keith Johnson, AB’58, AM’64
• Ken Green, SB’59

Interviews by Carrie Golus; Vivian Li, Class of 2028; Shiloh Miller, Class of 2026; and Brady Santoro, Class of 2027. Interview excerpts have been edited and condensed.

The boy wonder

Not a very good university ... simply the best there is.
—Robert Maynard Hutchins, Time magazine (November 21, 1949)

Maurine Kornfeld, AB’42, AM’48: I lived in the wilds of Montana. We didn’t have a lot of contact with the world, but we did have radio. On Sunday mornings, there was a broadcast of The University of Chicago Roundtable. Robert Hutchins often led the discussion.

I heard on the Roundtable that President Hutchins conducted a class. When I went to the University of Chicago in October 1941, I said to myself, “I want to be in that class.” It was called The History of Ideas.

Michel Paul Richard, AB’51, AM’55: Hutchins abolished football. I think we did very well without it. Football is a very damaging sport.

Maurine Kornfeld: When I went to register, I was told there would be no Hutchins-Adler class in Autumn Quarter. Later I learned why.

It was during the war in Europe. The reading that we were supposed to do was Saint Thomas Aquinas. The printing presses that turned out his book had been bombed by the Germans. There were no books available. So they typed up the book and mimeographed it, and we bought it. And the class started in the Winter Quarter.

Eiichi Fukushima, LAB’52, SB’57, AB’57: He shouldn’t have gotten rid of the football program. He could have done something part way, like gotten out of the Big Ten.

Maurine Kornfeld: The class met Tuesday afternoons from 4 to 6 p.m. We read a chapter of Summa Theologica every week. We also wrote a paper every week. It was a discussion class with 15 or 20 students. I was semi-terrified. I didn’t know anything. But both Adler and Hutchins were always very kind and gentle.

The class was small but rather well known. People would come literally from all over the world and sit on the periphery of the classroom to hear the discussion.

Richard Theriault, PhB’48: I was our house representative on the BJ [Burton Judson] Council. Hutchins was our guest at a dinner one night in early ’48. There was a great deal of discussion about “Should Chicago have football?” of course, and about Hutchins having said, “When I feel like exercising, I lie down until it passes.”

I asked him, “Dr. Hutchins, what is the real story about that claim?” This was the era of the Great Books and Adler’s How to Read a Book. Hutchins said, “Well, if you had just learned to read, you’d know I actually said—”

I said, “I’ve only heard stories, so my reading ability isn’t the culprit here.”

Richard Greene, AB’50: Hutchins believed that education should not be facts, but ideas. He didn’t want students to learn, This is what light is. He wanted us to learn the thought processes of the scientists who discovered what light is.

Richard Theriault: After the dinner Hutchins gave a speech in the Judson lounge, where he was mobbed by students. At one point I got out a cigarette and started to tap it when a lighter appeared in front of me. It was Hutchins, lighting my cigarette.

James Vice, EX’52, AM’54: Hutchins’s problem with the faculty was his Great Books did not seem that relevant to them.

Richard Theriault: The dorm head was getting more and more concerned because everyone wanted to ask him questions to try to impress him: “Dr. Hutchins, what do you think about Plato’s proposition …” and such. He was never going to get out of there.

Finally, I worked my way through the crowd and said, “Dr. Hutchins, your car is here if you’re ready.” Since he had walked across the Midway, this got a “My what?” and then, “Oh, the car!” I led him through the kitchens to the central courtyard where he could leave on foot. He turned to me with a huge handshake and a fervent “Thank you!”

Marion Shorts, AB’46: He had a very good reputation. I never saw him, but I admired him.

Enid Rieser, AB’47, AM’52: I saw him once in passing. Somebody said, “There he goes!” We all looked up to him.

Bernie DelGiorno, AB’54, MBA’55, AB’55: I saw Hutchins march in with his fraternity, Alpha Delta Phi, at the Interfraternity Sing. I was too far away to see if his lips were moving or hear if there was sound coming out.

Rosemary Miller, AB’47, MBA’50: I ran into Hutchins one time on the lawn. He seemed so huge. I was only 5'2". I looked up to him as if he were a god.

James Vice: Hutchins was remote. He had little direct contact with students. In a sense, he was on Mount Olympus.

Maurine Kornfeld: I was a rather quiet, shy one in class, because I didn’t know anything. I remember answering once. And Mr. Adler said, “Now you’re cooking with gas!” and Mr. Hutchins added, “And the front burner, too.” I thought that was the world’s greatest compliment.

Richard Greene: Hutchins was arrogant. He didn’t sell his ideas. He alienated people.

James Vice: Hutchins, unfortunately, could be very insulting. He supposedly was hosted at Princeton to give a critique of the educational program. His faculty host said, “Well, Mr. Hutchins, we hope you’ve enjoyed your visit. Perhaps in closing, you’d like to tell us something you liked about Princeton.” Hutchins said, “Nothing. Absolutely nothing.”

Richard Theriault: A few months after the dinner at BJ was convocation at Rockefeller. We were all lined up alphabetically. The marshal for my line told me to switch with the person behind me. We were right, he was wrong, but he was insistent.

So there we were, moving to the point position in the chancel as Dean [Harold] Swift [PhB 1907] called names. As the person ahead of me reached the point, Dean Swift said, “Richard B. Theriault.” Nobody moved. He called my name again. Nobody moved. He looked at me and mouthed, “That you?” I broke out of line and walked across to the pulpit chair. There was Hutchins with four diplomas fanned out. “Pick a good one,” he said. “I hope it’s yours.”

Maurine Kornfeld: Mr. Hutchins handed me my diploma and said congratulations and gave me a big smile. It was like being sainted.

Richard Theriault: The degree I received was for the guy ahead of me. We traded when we got back to the pews.

Ronne Hartfield, AB’55, AM’82: Hutchins had left by the time I was in the College, but the whole place was suffused with him. He had a dominant personality and was so tall and glamorous. I can’t think what it would have been like to be the president after Hutchins. Nobody even knew his name.

Early entrants, optional attendance

A university that is not controversial is not a university.
—Robert Maynard Hutchins, The University of Utopia (1953)

Jan Berkhout, AB’55, PhD’62: Our classes contained Korean War veterans over 25, early entrants under 18, and hardly anyone in between.

Michel Paul Richard, AB’51, AM’55: I was 15 when I started in 1948. I was in the dormitory with World War II veterans. So it was an interesting time.

Richard Theriault, PhB’48: I was 17. I got one quarter in before I got drafted.

Ronne Hartfield, AB’55, AM’82: I was 16.

James Redfield, LAB’50, AB’54, PhD’61: I was 15. You could go back to high school if you wanted. I had a friend who finished up high school in Michigan someplace.

Coleman Seskind, AB’55, SB’56, SM’59, MD’59: I was 14. I wasn’t the youngest. Edward Gottesman [AB’54] was 13.

Marion Shorts, AB’46: It was very interesting for me at 17 to move into this world of people from all over the world and of all ages.

James Redfield: The whole idea of the Hutchins College was, if you treat students like grown-ups, they’ll be grown up. And that’s just crazy.

This eccentric place, which didn’t have a football team, where all people did was study, and where they talked about Plato and Aristotle and Aquinas day and night. I thought, that’s for me.
—Susan Sontag, AB’51, quoted in A Great Idea at the Time: The Rise, Fall, and Curious Afterlife of the Great Books (2008)

Ronne Hartfield: They didn’t use the term they use now, the Core. You took 14 courses if you didn’t pass out of anything.

Jan Berkhout: Most courses ran for three quarters. There were 14 courses that everyone had to take, plus two electives, for a total of 16. At four a year, this would get you a BA in four years.

You could place out of a course by taking a day’s worth of exams. It was a gamble, because taking the exams was expensive—the equivalent of the course tuition fee—and you might not pass.

Bernie DelGiorno, AB’54, MBA’55, AB’55: I placed out of Social I and Humanities I. Unlike some of my bright friends who placed out of four or five or more courses, or the geniuses who placed out of all of them.

Nancy Given, SB’45: People who had gone to Hyde Park High School, a lot of them skipped English because they were so well trained.

Ken Green, SB’59: We were almost brainwashed into thinking that, to be a well-educated person, you had to know the content of those 14 courses, comprising all areas of knowledge. I think every student believed his education made him the kind of person he wanted to be. And he wanted to be the kind of person that his education was making him into.

Hutchins soon convinced most of Chicago’s undergraduates that they were indeed the hope of the world because they were getting such a good education. … Hutchins himself remained stubbornly sophomoric, seeking truth, scorning compromise, and, every so often, impugning established authority with his characteristic barbed wit.
—William H. McNeill, LAB’34, AB’38, AM’39, Hutchins’ University: A Memoir of the University of Chicago, 1929–1950 (1991)

Richard Greene, AB’50: When you either completed or placed out of the college courses, you could take graduate courses.

James Vice, EX’52, AM’54: I placed out of 12 of the 14, which meant I could go into the three-year master’s program. When my adviser saw my placement results, he first asked where I had been in college before and then decided I must be brilliant.

Keith Johnson, AB’58, AM’64: We would compare how many quarters we placed out of, including subjects we knew nothing about.

James Vice: The placement tests were mostly multiple-choice tests, which I was very good at. I placed out of biology, although I’ve never in my life had a course in biology, because I subscribed to Science Digest.

Nancy Given: The school had a good reputation as a difficult place. But the interesting thing was, you didn’t have to go to class if you didn’t want to.

Michel Paul Richard: They didn’t take attendance, so some people were chronically absent.

Enid Rieser, AB’47, AM’52: Most people went to class. They were the brilliant ones who didn’t. Or the dumb ones.

Arline Meyer, AB’55: Nothing depended on what you did or didn’t do in class. You could take the exam even if you never went to class. But most people went, because it was interesting.

Bernie DelGiorno: There were very few students in most classes. Some had five or six.

Keith Johnson: If you found a class that was really good, you would tell your friends, and they would sit in. The classes that you were enrolled in were not necessarily the classes where you went.

Eiichi Fukushima, LAB’52, SB’57, AB’57: The better teachers’ classes got bigger and bigger, and the poorer teachers’ classes got smaller and smaller. I thought that was kind of an interesting capitalistic system.

Michel Paul Richard: I don’t think it was well thought out. I think it’s better to have more frequent examinations and take attendance.

The Great Books

The idea that liberal education is the education that everybody ought to have, and that the best way to a liberal education in the West is through the greatest works the West has produced, is still the best educational idea there is.
—Robert Maynard Hutchins, Great Books: The Foundation of a Liberal Education (1954)

Nancy Given, SB’45: I never read so many books in my life.

Jan Berkhout, AB’55, PhD’62: One of Robert Hutchins’s ideas was to learn things in the same order in which they had been discovered. The UC course in physical sciences started with reading the actual publications of Galileo and Lavoisier and learning how the periodic table of elements was first proposed and filled in during the 19th century.

Richard Greene, AB’50: We didn’t read contemporary science texts.

Coleman Seskind, AB’55, SB’56, SM’59, MD’59: They emphasized reading the original stuff. Not somebody’s interpretation. The original.

Jan Berkhout: The course in number theory was Hutchins’s way of introducing mathematics. We started out doing long division with Roman numerals, followed by a discussion of what exactly was a number.

Ken Green, SB’59: In Natural Sciences I you duplicated Galileo’s and Newton’s experiments. You rolled balls down inclines and measured how long it took, then tried to figure out what you could learn from that observation. But we weren’t as smart as Galileo or Newton, so I’m not sure we learned anything. The professor had to tell us what we were seeing.

Jim Vice, EX’52, AM’54: When students asked Fermi what he thought of the physical science course, which he had taught, he said, “Well, it was very interesting. It wasn’t science.”

Coleman Seskind: The humanities were as important as anything else. They were in no way denigrated the way they are now.

Thomas Clark, AB’53, SM’55: I read Plato in every course except calculus.

Jan Berkhout: A session might start off like this: Imagine Plato, Karl Marx, and Sigmund Freud sitting around this table. What would they have to say to each other about the Spanish invasion of Mexico? That conversation could last all week.

Michel Paul Richard, AB’51, AM’55: Hutchins didn’t favor the lecture method. We had lectures once a week, but the rest of the time it was discussion. It was not always very effective, because 15-year-olds are not capable of discussing anything.

Bernie DelGiorno, AB’54, MBA’55, AB’55: My favorite professor was Richard M. Weaver, whose book Ideas Have Consequences [1948] should be a must-read for everybody.

Eiichi Fukushima, LAB’52, SB’57, AB’57: I had English with Richard Weaver. The first day he said, “I’m well known on campus as an archconservative. Don’t let that bother you, because I’m going to teach you how to write English well.” He was just a spectacular teacher.

Jan Berkhout: William McNeill [LAB’34, AB’38, AM’39] taught World History, and he always looked for interactions between the world’s major civilizations. A typical trick of his was to pick a date and have the students write about several different civilizations. When Caesar invaded England in the year 54, what were the Chinese up to? The Aztecs?

Richard Greene: The teacher I remember best was my Humanities III teacher, Henry Rago. He was a good poet, not very well known, who became editor of Poetry magazine. He used drafts of a poem that I wrote for a class discussion.

Ronne Hartfield, AB’55, AM’82: A teacher who was extremely important in my education was Herman Sinaiko [AB’47, PhD’61]. He was young. He thought Huck Finn was one of the greatest books in the American language, and I did not. I explained it wasn’t because of Jim, but the Rousseauian idea of the noble savage that I had trouble with. After that he added Rousseau to the syllabus, so we could inflect what we were talking about.

Ken Green: I was a biology major. My science courses were harder than the Core courses. You couldn’t get away with not going to class or having an opinion that wasn’t based on fact.

Thomas Clark: I had Harold Urey for physical chemistry. He was doing a derivation on the chalkboard and got lost. He turned around and said, “Where did I go wrong?” I pointed it out. It tickled me, helping out a Nobel Prize winner my first week of class.

The aim of higher education is wisdom.
—Robert Maynard Hutchins, The Higher Learning in America (1936)

Enid Rieser, AB’47, AM’52: If you passed out of things, you could take an elective your senior year. I chose OII: Observation, Interpretation, and Integration. This course was a combination of everything, from philosophy through physics. You read these bits and pieces and were supposed to find out how they fit together, if they did.

Marion Shorts, AB’46: I thoroughly enjoyed all the classes, even that Observation, Interpretation, and Integration. That was the oddest one. We spent a whole week going over a paragraph from Plato and talking about life. Well, as a 17-year-old, how much did I understand about life? It was over my head, and I just enjoyed it.

Richard Theriault, PhB’48: They never told us, and wouldn’t tell us, what we were supposed to be learning. Later we realized it was the name of the course: Observation, Interpretation, and Integration. How to observe, how to interpret what you have seen, and how to integrate that into your body of knowledge. But nobody would ever tell us that.

James Vice: It was always called the Hutchins College, but there has been a series of Hutchins Colleges. The curriculum changed, the course names changed. The OMP course, for example: Organization, Methods, and Principles. In the late ’40s it was OII: Observation, Interpretation, and Integration.

Jan Berkhout: The Hutchins OMP course was the usual salad of contrasts. Freud and Marx reappeared as philosophers, along with Plato, Aristotle, Thomas Aquinas, Thomas Hobbes, Francis Bacon, William James, W. E. B. Du Bois, Sidney Hook, and Jean-Paul Sartre.

Ronne Hartfield: To somebody like me, that sounds like heaven.

Richard Theriault: A common Core has a very strong virtue. I think it is essential to have a good, solid basis of knowledge. Not specialized into little compartments, but knowledge of the world, of the universe—of how things are.

Ronne Hartfield: I learned nothing about the Far East. I learned almost nothing about Africa. So there were deficits, definitely, but it was worth it, in terms of developing a philosophy—a philosophy you kept with you your whole life.

Coleman Seskind: There was no leftist indoctrination. They were teaching us how to think, not what to think. But the joke was that the University of Chicago is the place where atheist professors teach communism to Jews.

Remington Stone, AB’57, AM’60: I think the Hutchins College was an absolute success, a complete success. What college really should be about is making people the best, most broadly informed citizens they can be. Citizens who can participate in a functioning democracy.

James Redfield, LAB’50, AB’54, PhD’61: We were terrific snobs. We thought we were the only people in the country, maybe the world, who were thinking adequately.

Ken Green: A full four years of liberal arts is good for a person. At least that was what they made us think then at the University of Chicago. And I think they were right.

Comps

Do you need a liberal education? I say that it is unpatriotic not to read great books. … The death of democracy is not likely to be an assassination from ambush. It will be a slow extinction from apathy, indifference, and undernourishment.
—Robert Maynard Hutchins, Great Books: The Foundation of a Liberal Education (1954)

Marion Shorts, AB’46: You took one test for every class. That was it, that was your grade. So if you weren’t feeling well that day, too bad.

Ken Green, SB’59: Your final grade was based on the comprehensive exam at the end of the year. Any exam you took before then was a practice exam.

Rosemary Miller, AB’47, MBA’50: Oh, the comps were terrible. That’s one thing I disagree with Hutchins about. The last week, I had four comps of six hours each. It was not fair to base your grade on that. At least to have a halfway point would have been more decent.

Thomas Clark, AB’53, SM’55: It was a scary system. Probably the most brutal way of running an institution that you could devise.

Michel Paul Richard, AB’51, AM’55: It was anxiety producing.

Richard Theriault, PhB’48: It was harrowing. Harrowing.

Ronne Hartfield, AB’55, AM’82: It was not intimidating. We all took the same courses. We talked about them all the time. There was this luminous conversation going on all the time. So when you took your test, you weren’t so worried or intimidated.

Arline Meyer, AB’55: The math exam was nine hours. Most of the others were six. I was thinking I really messed up, and then I got an A.

Enid Rieser, AB’47, AM’52: Bartlett Gym was where we took our exams. It didn’t have a solid floor. It had sand, for running around.

Believe me, you are closer to the truth now than you ever will be again.
—Robert Maynard Hutchins, Class of 1935 Commencement Speech

Richard Theriault: They really dragged out of you everything you knew. They were masters of the multiple-choice question.

Remington Stone, AB’57, AM’60: The questions were really, really good. It’s very hard to write absolutely clear-cut, yet clever and insightful, multiple-choice questions.

Enid Rieser: I was a terrible student. Really a terrible, terrible student.

Bernie DelGiorno, AB’54, MBA’55, AB’55: I had a straight C average, which was not that far from the average. Very few people got A’s then. The professors did not make up the final exam. Exams came from the Examiner’s Office.

Nancy Given, SB’45: You just prepared for it. Made sure you got a lot of sleep the night before.

Enid Rieser: I was up late talking the night before the exam. I looked at the first question, and I thought, “There’s no way.”

So I put my head down on the desk. We all had these simple desks. I slept for two hours of a three-hour morning exam. Then I wrote furiously for an hour. In the afternoon I wrote furiously for another three hours. I barely passed, but I passed.

Rosemary Miller: I took four comps during the week and got married on Sunday.

I was so exhausted from taking the comps, I cried all during the ceremony. I always told my husband, “I never said, ‘I do,’ so we were not legally married.”

Arline Meyer: When I eventually went to graduate school, it was disappointing compared to what Chicago was.

Eiichi Fukushima, LAB’52, SB’57, AB’57: Chicago was just this hotbed of capable people. Everywhere else I went, I excelled at whatever I did. At Chicago, I was just an also-ran.

The last Hutchins student

Chicago’s students came to bear a common mark. … Veterans of the blizzard of words that the Hutchins College provoked among its faculty and students can often recognize one another by the assurance with which they are ready to discourse on almost anything and everything.
—William H. McNeill, LAB’34, AB’38, AM’39, Hutchins’ University

Remington Stone, AB’57, AM’60: My father saw a pamphlet about a University of Chicago summer course in the humanities to be given in Aspen, Colorado, in the summer of 1954, starting in a few weeks. I didn’t want to do that. I was just a punk kid.

But the summer course was absolutely delightful. I heard all about the College, and I thought, “It sounds like a lot more fun than high school.” Nobody told me anything about the Hutchins College being on the verge of being canceled.

So at the start of my third year, I went to visit the dean of students, Dean [John] Netherton [AB’38, AM’39, PhD’51], having made a legalistic argument in my head. I said I had started in the summer, in a special course in Aspen, and the ban on new students didn’t begin until fall. Therefore, I should be able to get the old degree. His total response was “Okay” and a smile.

I have since been proud to say that I was the last student admitted to the Hutchins College, two years after it ended.

The social whirl

It was marvelous to be young in such a time and place.
—William H. McNeill, Hutchins’ University

Jan Berkhout, AB’55, PhD’62: Courses turned out to be the least of what was going on.

James Vice, EX’52, AM’54: There was not a lot of drunkenness, but there was a lot of late-night bridge playing.

Richard Theriault, PhB’48: Bridge was sacred.

Coleman Seskind, AB’55, SB’56, SM’59, MD’59: In College they kept you pretty goddamn busy. I deliberately didn’t learn to play cards. I didn’t want my friends to ask me to be the fourth.

Rosemary Miller, AB’47, MBA’50: There was one group of girls in the dorm who just played bridge and never went to class. They were not there the next year.

Marion Shorts, AB’46: I had never been any place where it wasn’t just Caucasians. There were people from India and Asia and all over the place.

Eiichi Fukushima, LAB’52, SB’57, AB’57: About half of the student body was Jewish. There were Caucasian and Black and occasional Asian or South American kids. It wasn’t until some years later that I found out that was a very unusual setup.

Jan Porter [Gump, LAB’52, AB’56], who was Black, was the homecoming queen sometime in the early ’50s. We thought nothing of it. She was just a fellow student.

Richard Greene, AB’50: We’d spend hours discussing the things we were reading.

Ronne Hartfield, AB’55, AM’82: Social life was flowing, is what I would say. It didn’t focus around events. It was just there as a part of the breathing life of the place. Woodlawn Tap was a part of that.

Richard Theriault: We spent a lot of time at the Hi-Hat. Jimmy’s and the Hi-Hat, they were both on 55th. Our little crew always went to the Hi-Hat, and everybody else went to Jimmy’s.

Rosemary Miller: We used to go to the jazz joints. Louis Armstrong performed at one of those little jazz joints right around campus. All the college kids went over there.

James Redfield, LAB’50, AB’54, PhD’61: On 55th Street, within walking distance, there were something like 20 different bars.

Rosemary Miller: I don’t know if they still have those little clubs anymore.

James Redfield: Urban renewal aimed to demolish that, and it did.

James Vice: We went to 63rd frequently. There were excellent Chinese restaurants. There were two big movie theaters—huge theaters that also had live entertainment—and four small movie theaters.

Jan Berkhout: There was an astronomy club that had access to the Yerkes Observatory, about a two-hour drive away. Carl Sagan [AB’54, SB’55, SM’56, PhD’60] chaired that club and the science fiction club. The joke was he often forgot which group he was leading.

Coleman Seskind: Carl was always talking about space. In 1951 we had not gone into space yet. He said you couldn’t fire a gun in space, because there’s no oxygen up there. I said, “Carl, are you serious?” I explained that the explosive is like rocket fuel—it carries its own oxygen. And he said, “Okay, you’re right.”

Jan Berkhout: Listening to classical music was a major occupation. An alumnus had contributed a hi-fi system to the BJ lounge. Students who knew how to operate it were on duty several hours a day. If you had a favorite record, they would play it for you. Four or five students would order a pizza and listen to a Mahler symphony. Loud.

Ronne Hartfield: Kids like me had never encountered much classical music. Then there were people like Phil [Glass, AB’56], who was like, “You’ve got to listen to this.”

Enid Rieser, AB’47, AM’52: On Sundays Ida Noyes served a formal dinner with a white tablecloth. You had to dress properly to go.

Bernie DelGiorno, AB’54, MBA’55, AB’55: In 1951 I pledged Phi Gamma Delta. We always wore a jacket and tie to dinner. We had a cook.

Coleman Seskind: In the dorms there was a rule that you had to wear a coat and tie to the evening meal. Then some guys in BJ got the bright idea to wear only a coat and tie. No pants, no shoes. That was the end of that rule.

James Vice: On the first floor of Mead House, there was a phone booth. One night a bunch of guys tried to call Joseph Stalin collect. They did not reach Stalin, but they did reach the Kremlin. Somebody at that end asked why they were calling.

Jan Berkhout: The UC Rifle Club had a target range under the stands at the Field House. We fired heavy, single-shot Winchester Model 52 target rifles. Our coach was a crusty veteran of trench warfare in World War I.

Arline Meyer, AB’55: There was a skiing club. We went skiing, if you can believe it, at some small place on the outskirts of Chicago. To think I learned to ski outside Chicago.

Jan Berkhout: The University also sponsored a flying club, which offered flight instruction using a 1946 Taylorcraft two-seat taildragger. The small airport we used was developed out of existence decades ago.

Bernie DelGiorno: We had the best parties. We had the Fiji Island party—the Grass Skirt party, it was sometimes called. One of the secrets was to get some material and give it to your date to make costumes for both of you.

Richard Theriault: We would occasionally throw a dance at BJ. We had a surrealist ball. We wanted people to come in weird costumes, which they did.

Jan Berkhout: It was impossible to enforce the drinking-age law on campus. Everyone under 18 had at least one good friend in their late twenties.

Richard Theriault: At one point the head of the whole BJ housing system was there. I wanted to be sure he went to the right punch bowl—the one with no alcohol. Later on I was sure I smelled gin on him. He said, “Dick, I know gin when I smell it. You should have used vodka.”

Michel Paul Richard, AB’51, AM’55: I was interested in girls, but there were no girls. The girls had their own dormitories.

Ken Green, SB’59: It was hard to meet girls. You had to either go to a social or go to the girls’ dorm, which was like a fortified castle. Rosemary Miller: We had a curfew, but girls would leave the window open at the bottom so people could sneak in. I’m sure the housemother knew what was going on.

Ronne Hartfield: A girl in my dorm had to leave school because she had her boyfriend in her room. He was allowed to stay. He got another girlfriend.

Rosemary Miller: I remember one New Year’s Eve, I had a date on campus, and some boy tried to get fresh with me. I left, and I had to ride the L home on New Year’s Eve by myself with all the drunks. I never told my parents.

Ronne Hartfield: We had assigned study carrels in the Modern Language reading room. My maiden name was Rone, so I was next to Jamie Redfield. After I got married and had the name Hartfield, I sat somewhere else.

I got married when I was 17. If you were in love and wanted to be together, you got married.

James Redfield: My first serious girlfriend was named Mary Kight [AB’53, AM’55]. I married her right away.

Ronne Hartfield: So much of your social life was in the C-Shop. During one of those six-hour exams, the teacher came and stood over me and said, “So, Mrs. Hartfield, did you learn a lot in the C-Shop last quarter?” I was so upended by it, right in the middle of my test.

The fact is, I learned a lot in the C-Shop. I was hanging out with Mike Nichols [EX’53] and Elaine May and Phil Glass and so many others. You might seem to be ignoring your classwork, but you weren’t. You were talking about it and taking sides.

Richard Theriault: We had a little coterie of men and women who just had a lot of fun together. I never got to know Hyde Park. We were at the University, and that was our world.

I look back at it and think how funny that I’ve gotten so much enjoyment and so many good memories out of so much nothing special.

Coleman Seskind: I don’t know of anyone who didn’t enjoy their College experience.

Enid Rieser: We had a lot of fun. Maybe too much fun.