Robert Hutchins born in Brooklyn, New York, and educated at Oberlin College and Yale University. He was dean of the Yale Law School from 1927 to 1929. At Yale he helped to establish the Institute of Human Relations for the study of social sciences. Hutchins was president (1929-45) of the University of Chicago and then its chancellor (1945-51). He subsequently served as associate director of the Ford Foundation and then as president of the Fund for the Republic, a research organization in the field of civil liberties.

A leading advocate of the advancement of the intellectual level of society, Hutchins opposed what he considered the disproportionate emphasis placed by American universities on practical, scientific, and technical studies; he favored study of the great writings of the past, grammar, logic, rhetoric, and mathematics. He removed football from the University of Chicago while president, and made what he considered a number of other reforms, although many of these were overturned upon his departure. He believed in exit exams rather than merely counting the number of years a student had spent in school.

In 1959, Hutchins founded the Center for Study of Democracy, to be a learning center in which scholars from all over the world could meet and discuss the world.

Publications

The Higher Learning in America (1936)

The University of Utopia (1953)

The Learning Society (1968).