Monday, June 04, 2007

President Past

In some of the archival research I was doing today, I found a letter to ex-University of Chicago president Robert Hutchins. Wanting to provide myself the finest education about this man's past, I turned (where else?) to Wikipedia. Hutchins was the one who axed the football team and made Chicago the nerdtopia it mostly remains today. (He was president from '29 to '45, thus must have known and perhaps even hired great-g-pa Simeon Leland.) Well, this quote was good for a laugh, from 1954, still true enough today: [our universities have become] "high-class flophouses where parents send their children to keep them off the labor market and out of their own hair."