John Boyer, dean of the College and professor of history at the University of Chicago, also moonlights as the chief scholar of the school’s history. After writing a series of monographs on various aspects of the University’s heritage, Boyer finally decided to write, as he put it in an interview with the Weekly on October 23, “a proper book.” Weighing in at a substantial 676 pages, The University of Chicago: A History is by far the most comprehensive account of its kind yet published. Boyer begins with the small, failed Baptist college founded by Stephen Douglas in 1856-1857, examines its reestablishment in 1890 under William Rainey Harper, and follows its development all the way through to the present day.
And yet, even considering Boyer’s broad vision and weighty qualifications, one might be tempted to dismiss his work as thinly veiled PR material, given Boyer’s job at the university and the coinciding of its release with the school’s 125th anniversary. There is no hiding that Boyer has great faith in the UoC, and several passages have an unabashed emotional tinge, such as “The grandeur of the University […] is that it is a courageous and fearless place, a place of strong liberty and vibrant convictions.”
Fortunately, Boyer is sensible enough to directly confront concerns of bias and objectivity in his brief introduction: “This is also a history written by someone who has played a modest role in many of the events of the past twenty years,” he writes. “This position affords advantages but also hazards, and the reader should be aware of both.”
Boyer, in explaining his role to me, compared himself to a biographer: “People rarely write biographies unless they very much admire or very much hate the people they’re writing about.”
On the whole, Boyer manages to walk the line between scholarly objectivity and administrative obligation better than one might expect. Rather than undermining the book’s project, the tension between the two serves as an animating force, perhaps as interesting as the content itself.
Boyer is most intriguing when the tension between his roles is most visible. Take for example his portrayal of Robert Maynard Hutchins, a legendary figure in the school’s history. Though Boyer credits Hutchins for his defense of academic freedom and general education, he harshly criticizes him for his dangerous fiscal practices, raiding endowments in a manner only “technically legal,” which, he argues, critically endangered the University’s financial stability for the years to come. As a spokesman for the school, Boyer cannot deploy such criticism lightly. “A rather strong body of our alumni are not only Hutchins sympathizers, but Hutchins fanatics,” he told me. “They would like me to defend Hutchins.”
That said, Boyer is at times quite charitable toward the University, as in his analysis of urban renewal, a huge political sore spot that continues to haunt its relationship with the South Side. In the 1950s, the area surrounding the University experienced increased levels of poverty and crime, which administrators worried would make Hyde Park deeply unattractive to faculty and students, thus threatening the University’s existence. Administrators such as Julian Levi and Lawrence Kimpton initiated a complex assortment of policies, the most controversial of which seized and demolished deteriorating buildings containing 4371 families, most of whom were poor and black. Many of these families were permanently uprooted, black residents disproportionately so, causing critics to accuse the administration of discrimination. Boyer argues that such accusations distort the character and intentions of administrators. He quotes Kimpton: “The enforcement of zoning, housing, and building codes, the prevention of overcrowding, the insistence upon proper standards of maintenance have nothing to do with race, creed, or color of either the owner or occupant of any building.”
It is difficult to dispute, as Boyer writes, that Kimpton primarily “wanted a stable, prosperous, and substantially middle class neighborhood” so as to make Hyde Park an appealing locale for students and faculty. Still, it is ethically troubling that UoC, as a private institution, felt free to exercise such great unilateral power over the surrounding community in the first place. Furthermore, urban renewal in Hyde Park was tied to race whether Kimpton liked it or not. Hutchins, whose presidency preceded the urban renewal projects, saw Hyde Park’s social crisis as fundamentally racial. Though he found discriminatory policies distasteful, he also claimed “the University would probably have to go out of business if it were surrounded by Negroes.” Boyer’s preoccupation with intention seems beside the point. Even if administrators pursued their goals untouched by malice, they had no choice but to engage with issues of race in addressing social change; Kimpton’s professed colorblindness was not a meaningful position since his policies primarily affected black residents in black neighborhoods.
One might take the administrators’ good intentions at face value, acknowledge the extreme difficulty of their task, and still remain critical. “It’s a question of what options they had,” Boyer told me, “not what options do we think they had.” Yet the UofC’s history largely consists of fair-minded administrators facing nearly insoluble challenges. Difficulty alone cannot fully mitigate criticism, and Boyer is not so charitable to administrators elsewhere. Perhaps Boyer believes that their challenge was so exceptionally great in this instance that the university had no choice but to advance these troubling policies to survive. Yet this reasoning seems to reject all the unpredictable possibility of history in favor of a more deterministic account, one that lacks both historical imagination and the strict scrutiny that such ethical problems deserve.
Most of the book, however, does not approach such levels of controversy. While such sections are not as immediately intriguing, Boyer has a gift for communicating the subtle challenges of managing a university; one gets the sense of an enormously complex balancing act in which administrators must please students, faculty, alumni, philanthropists, and the city itself, all the while trying to revitalize and improve.
The key ingredient in this balancing act is money, which the UofC has historically struggled to manage. “This school feeds off its own ambition,” Boyer said to me. “But ambition costs money.” William Rainey Harper became notorious for his hounding of John Rockefeller, the University’s single most significant benefactor. Even now, fundraising continues to constrain the University’s ambitions, as it persistently lags behind peer institutions in endowment growth. This account is particularly vivid, no doubt a result of Boyer’s firsthand involvement.
Boyer’s work is on the whole enjoyable, comprehensive, and impeccably researched, but it must be taken for what it is and read critically. This is not to say that Boyer is never critical of the school, or that he is willfully misleading, but the fact that he is a dean of the College and has great faith in its values cannot help but affect the way he tells its story. Fortunately, Boyer is forthright about his perspective and does not encourage the fantasy of perfect neutrality. There is a lot to be learned here about the UofC and higher education in general, even and perhaps especially in the handful of sections where Boyer’s unique perspective is most obvious.
John W. Boyer, The University of Chicago: A History. University of Chicago Press. 704 pages. $35.00