ADLER, MORTIMER 1902-

EDUCATOR, PHILOSOPHER, AND AUTHOR

Great Books Pioneer

Mortimer Adler became well known during the 1940s when he, Robert M. Hutchins, and others challenged the academic world by attempting to establish a Great Books curriculum for undergraduates beginning in 1946. Taking up writer and educator John Erskine's proposal of 52 books—reading one per week—and expanding it initially to 176 books before revising it to 76, Adler felt that the reading and understanding of these classics would provide all of the background an undergraduate would require. He convinced Hutchins, president of the University of Chicago, to implement his plan. While its success was limited on the larger scale, it did receive some acceptance at extension campuses, where the Great Books idea became something of a fad; courses, seminars, and lectures became popular among aspiring weekend scholars.

Early Scholarly Success

Adler was a brilliant student whose scholarship was second only to a self-described "anal-erotic compulsion—the need to order and arrange things and keep them rigidly fixed in the order I have imposed on them." His personality won him few friends and many detractors, and in 1923 he was denied his baccalaureate degree from Columbia University, where he was first in his class after finishing his degree work in three years, because he refused to take a compulsory swimming test. Five years later he received his Ph.D. in psychology from Columbia, and he began teaching at the University of Chicago in 1930. He believed that the dominant influence on the educational thought of his time—John Dewey, one of his Columbia professors—was a disaster, opting to believe in the existence of absolute and universal truths and values as opposed to Dewey's pragmatic rejection of fixed ends and his espousal of experimentation. Adler believed that values concerning a "good education for all men at all times" could be taught and tried to include them in his Great Books ideal. He felt that the implementation of these universals should replace the elective systems of higher education, which he believed only added to the aimlessness and superficiality of students. He expressed these views in his many articles, books, and lectures, especially in his best-known work, How to Read a Book: The Art of Getting a Liberal Education (1940). This volume topped the best-seller lists and made him a household name.

Curriculum Failure

However, his Great Books curriculum never became integrated within academe. Critics attacked the program for the works it included (they wondered about the universal value of Michael Faraday's Experimental Researches in Electricity) and those it omitted. An expanded version of the Great Books texts, the fifty-four-volume Encyclopaedia Britannica set (1952) including 442 works, had no introductions or commentary, forcing the readers to depend either upon discussion leaders to provide background and contextual information or upon the two-volume The Great Ideas: A Synopticon of Great Books of the Western World (1952), a comprehensive index he edited that one critic compared to "a footnote that went berserk for two thousand pages." Although Adler continued to promote his educational ideas and was involved with a 1990 revision of both publications, the Great Books idea gradually fell by the wayside.