THE SPIRIT OF THE TIMES
How “the break from religion” changed higher education, the University of Chicago under Robert Hutchins, and how this all relates to Barbara Harris.
“I think that theater and religion and education are very closely connected.”
Paul Sills said.
“The authentication of the spirit–which has something to do with the church–is vital to the theater and is something that the theater can and must do…Something has to be created in connection with the spirit or else it’s bullshit.”
Amazing then, that the University of Chicago flipped out over the word SPIRIT and Sills formed what would become The Second City nearby. Professors were outraged at Robert Maynard Hutchins, their college president, “for summoning imaginary entities such as ‘the spirit of the times.’” For this reason — good reason — his class should be abolished.
How great is that? And that’s exactly what that moment was all about — reason.
I wish I could have been that person. Walking down the hall, hearing “spirit of the times,” and pushing the door open into the room where these famous debates took place. Fuel all over the floor, strike a match. It was hot, baby — hot. Anything — anything — that could be interpreted as religious was flammable material, burned to a crisp. Rejected. Outright. With rage. One could even call “the spirit of times” intense, volatile, explosive. Fertile, even.
I feel like I can draw a parallel between the anti-religious sentiment that defined the era if not the evolution of education in the United States and today. Oddly. One could argue that we’re in the midst of a kind of neo-spiritual, to invent a word, movement, even. I worked for a mental health app designed to accompany patients through clinical ketamine treatment. I could not use the word “mystical” in the copy because it was too “triggering” given its religious connotation though John Hopkins University attributed the benefits of psychedelics to “the mystical experience” in major publications.
“We are religiously a mad culture,” Harold Bloom wrote in The American Religion, “furiously searching for the spirit, which must be for the original self, a spark or breadth in us that we are convinced goes back before the Creation.” (Harold Bloom, 4)
I didn’t quite realize that the break from religion impacted higher education so fundamentally, that is, it changed how subjects were approached and taught. Medicine was no exception and Barbara Harris interfaced with psychiatric care rather early from what I understand which is why I stuck around and decided to investigate further.
“In any case, the influence of sects on American society has been enormous. They are a major source of individualism and of the pervasive American idea that all social groups are fragile and in need of constant energetic effort to maintain them.” (Habits of the Heart)
Higher education breaks away from religion
In 1626 Harvard University established higher education in the United States followed by William and Mary, Yale, Princeton, Columbia, Pennsylvania, Brown, Rutgers, and Dartmouth. They all had one thing in common — they were founded by religious sects. Dartmouth, in particular, had a mission to “Christianize” or “civilize” Native Americans. I know. A couple of years ago I went to the National History Museum and they superimposed corrections on their depictions of Native Americans. Religious sects all started and funded colleges, in short.
After moving west to save people from “the atheists, the slaveholder,” and of course, “the Pope,” the tides started to change around the mid-19th century. Higher education shifted towards reason, intellectualism.
Let’s plant our flag, the moment that marked the end of a sectarian stronghold on higher education: the founding of John Hopkins University in 1876. The event took place, the first, I read, without the presence of clergymen. After all, the keynote speaker was none other than Thomas Huxley also known as “Darwin’s Bulldog.” I doubt that clergymen would have remained.
He advocated Darwin’s theory of evolution with a canine commitment which shattered and offended the fact that God, as Michelangelo rendered in the Sistine Chapel, extended his Almighty finger and brought Man into existence.
To bring in an example from my life, I got to Catholic junior high and we were finally, if you can imagine, accepting the theory of evolution. That took over a hundred years and my Catholic Church was liberal. “God still did it,” obviously.
Huxley approached the podium at the end of an era, the beginning of another, a momentous occasion for the future of education. He probably knew we had a long way to go. He was not the least bit impressed with all of our things, our size. “Size is not grandeur and territory does not make a nation.”
He wondered what were we going to do with all these things?
Here’s a link to the full speech in The New York Times archive.
BALTIMORE, September 12, 1876–here are a couple of lines:
- The event which has brought us together is in many respects unique.
- Ecclesiastical sectarianism shall be permitted to disturb the impartial distribution of the testator’s benefactions.
- In my experience of life a truth which sounds very much like a paradox has often asserted itself, viz., that a man’s worst difficulties begin when he is able to do as he likes, so long as a man is struggling with obstacles, he has an excuse for failure and shortcoming; but when fortune removes them all, and gives him the power of doing as he thinks best then comes the time of trial. There is but one right and the possibilities of wrong are infinite.”
I have to pull out the research I did on how this adieu to religion impacted individual departments but medicine moved away from homeopathy, again, any approach that could be deemed religious. What happened to psychiatry? That’s my question as it relates to Barbara Harris.
The University of Chicago invents college football
The Ivy Leagues followed Hopkins’ lead but they were just becoming the Ivys when the University of Chicago opened its doors in 1892 with “the aim of discovering new knowledge rather than transmitting established truths” as a center for research.
There was nothing new about its mission though the professors would probably attack me in the debate room for using the word “mission” the second I said it. MISSION? GET OUT. So, statement of purpose. Excuse me.
(Who doesn’t want to be in the professor’s debate room?)
At the time, the United States didn’t have a developed educational system so presidents turned to German colleges for their model. I have to verify this because I took such a fun detour and had to turn my wheel — this is not my subject matter — but it allowed people to teach and study freely, ungoverned by an institution. Maybe that implies a secular approach. In any case, more than 10,000 Americans studied at German universities between 1815 and World War I.
The Baptists financed the University of Chicago in the beginning but its first president William Rainey Harper ended the relationship. He was an Old Testament scholar, a champion of German methods of textual criticism. His appointees disagreed with the 19th-century American Protestants. They believed that human beings wrote the Bible thus imperfect and capable of making errors.
Some Christians and Jews agreed but the Baptists were not about to subject the Bible to scrutiny thus Harper had to get funding elsewhere from none other than John D. Rockefeller, one of its main and enduring benefactors, so businessmen and professionals began to replace the clergy.
I’m taking out what I read and backing it up now. Rockefeller might have been there already, so I don’t know what happened behind the scenes. He founded the school. This is the joy of research…you have to question everything you read, basically. In any case, it takes a second to open a school, no?
How did he raise money? His big idea? College football.
College football was invented to fund colleges. The American pastime also provided something equally important: national publicity. To attract a student body, even. Is football sort of an American religion? Well, baseball definitely has a spiritual undertone, doesn’t it? “Angels in the Outfield.” Sports, funny enough, might legitimize spirit for some. I guess depending on the sport.
At first, football didn’t quite catch on. Think about farmers…um, why would they support this “sport” when they spend every day on a field? Is this a pastime? Perhaps they’d prefer to do something else. Football…?
That’s how it began, at the turn of the last century, so the break from religion is the reason why college football exists. Amazing, no?
Political theorist Hannah Arendt coined the phrase “the break from belonging” to describe what happened at this time. She was right. Higher education broke away from religion and it stunned me to read in the Habits of the Heart that American sects exploited our need for community by stimulating fears that our ties were “fragile.”
Barbara Harris’ life statement was “Confidence comes from belonging.” For her, The Second City though it went through a few stages beforehand was about belonging. And for Sills, theater had a spiritual drive, purpose.
Robert Maynard Hutchins
There might be no better example of someone who truly embodied this break from religion than the one and only Robert Maynard Hutchins whose contribution to higher education might be singular as the youngest college president ever elected in history at the University of Chicago at the age of 29 in 1929 just before the stock market crashed.
Born in Brooklyn, NY in 1899 — at the turn of the century — Robert Maynard Hutchins was the son of a prominent Presbyterian minister, the faith’s highest calling. His father built an impressive congregation. His father caught Oberlin College’s attention which had been founded by missionaries. They offered him a position as a professor of homiletics, the art of preaching and writing sermons. He passed this gift to Hutchins who was known for his speeches and commanding presence.
He grew up on a college campus in a respected religious family. Hutchins understood that higher education pursued “truth” as much as religion did, the two went hand in hand. It was the point. As Calvinists, however, Presbyterians aren’t emotional like the Baptists and Methodists. They’re dry, anchored in the Bible. It’s about the text. That’s Hutchins.
But Hutchins couldn’t do it. He respectfully probably unemotionally declined to take his father’s path to truth and tried to find another way. To skim over his Yale years, since I got sucked into his life, he was a star, always was, couldn’t help it. He became Dean of Yale Law in his twenties, something like this. I found this funny blurb about him in The Yale Alumni Weekly.
So, the stock market crashed almost immediately after Hutchins took office. In the volatility of that moment, a world crashing down, Hutchins took one last look at the rule book for higher education and tossed it. Don’t need it. All wrong. He abolished sports, first. Hutchins couldn’t stand sports. He only wanted to play sports laying down. No football. Imagine? Today?
Speaking of Oppenheimer: he goes to the University of Chicago in the movie. As a result of getting rid of sports, “okay,” you can imagine that professor, Enrico Fermi was able to take his class to the unused squash courts to perform the first demonstration of nuclear fusion. Hutchins didn’t know.
A student looked at Fermi, about to do this.
What would we, um, lose? If he didn’t do it right?
Chicago.
Another student in my mind nods — ”okay” — on this empty squash court.
“Okay,” back in the debate room. “You did a demonstration of nuclear fusion…?” With your class? How did that phrase land? It was the first. Atom bomb? Excuse me? You could even call “the spirit of the times” volatile, explosive, fertile, fiercely engaged, enraged, innovative. Thrilling. Dramatic.
Not all were against him but famously, Hutchins had challengers over the twenty-two years in office, a tenure that brought The Manhattan Project and The Second City on campus. It attracted its original members.
When I felt the heat coming off these professor debates, all the same, Hutchins was attractive. I felt it. I put money on it. I searched for his name and “handsome.” I found an article on Jstor and the first sentence read: “he was the most handsome man I had ever seen. “ I laughed. It was pretty clear to me. I hadn’t looked him up yet.
The most radical experiment ever conducted in higher education
Hutchins presents himself as a strong argument for Plato’s suggestion that rulers should be philosopher-kings. Not ruler, another sore word, leaders. As an educational perennialist, he had a governing philosophy. Meaning, you can’t just say — get rid of it without having something to put in its place.
He believed that students should be taught ideas instead of facts because facts change and ideas are “everlasting.” They do not die. They remerge throughout time in different forms though Hutchins would specify in the form of Great Books. His Great Books program gained national recognition. Other universities adopted it. I imagine that the list needs an update but it’s a strong idea.
He thought textbooks were stupid. Why read about Plato when you could just read Plato? Then, through dialogue — not lecture, also stupid — students and teachers could engage with the content and students would learn how to think for themselves. Forget lecture, from what I understand, so I had to imagine taking a seat in one of these classrooms to think about how this worked. Seems like everyone was debating, even about this experiment.
“The spirit of the times,” that professor keeps coming to mind, shaking his/her/their head as he/she/they’re walking down the hall with voices, voices coming from these classrooms. “The audacity, the nerve. Might as well conjure up the ghost of Christmas past to verify our historical data is accurate.”
It was religion though not the imaginary entity that presented a problem.
“‘I never thought myself as a revolutionary at the time,’ a serene, silver-haired Mr. Hutchins said in…1972. At Yale Law School, for instance, in the late twenties, I said ‘let’s try and figure out what the school is for, apart from being a trade school.’ And I found that if I could make sense in suggesting changes I had a good chance of prevailing with a rational argument. It never crossed my mind that I was there to upset the existing order.”
Hutchins believed that colleges were just trade schools that were focused on employment rather than knowledge. You could call him totally unAmerican. In preparation for that job, a college divided the student body into disparate departments without the ability to communicate with one another. That’s facts-based teaching. Ideas however could be applied to any activity.
Let’s take New York University, my alma mater. Hutchins would have thought the school to be utterly useless. School of the Arts? Business School? Focused on trade. Gallatin is the school for independent study. A student can crossover and take classes in other schools, create their own major. It might be slightly more in line with his thinking, but he thinks, still, that we ask the youth to decide what they wanted to do too young, too soon.
That being said, bring them in sooner. A student could enroll in college after their sophomore year of high school as long as they passed the entrance exams so fifteen-year-olds walked into these classrooms. Didn’t have to finish high school.
Not to get too analytical but his critique made me think about Western medicine, how it divides the body into parts that don’t communicate with one another. Doctors specialize in one area like cardiology but if something else is going on, they’ll send you elsewhere. Functional and regenerative medicine, for example, disagree with that philosophy.
For the mysteries of the universe, you know, the human body might be the most puzzling, actually, in how we view it. No such real thing as the spirit of the times? There was so much spirit in it.
So here comes Paul Sills in 1948, the son of the mother of improv, at the end of Hutchins’ tenure. The spirit of the times returns, authenticated conceptually by Paul Sills. “Theater must authenticate the spirit,” he says. Theater, religion, and education all touch the spirit. And what about that? The company that he begins to assemble will invent a beloved American art form that endures to this day.
Hutchins sort of “tolerated them.” Theater was vocational but he didn’t shut them down. Extracurricular. They didn’t major in theater. Hutchins exited in 1951.
He, himself, and his reforms came directly out of that break with religion. That fuelled the direction of his life: find another way. A lot of heart, actually, and for me, that’s this original Second City group. If you think about it, Harris walked into an abandoned Chinese restaurant, lol, where they were all living.
Barbara Harris and what did the break of religion mean for psychiatry?
That’s where I stopped. Whoa. I looked up. Who knew Barbara Harris would lead me to spirit, our culture’s relationship to it? I mean, did the break from religion present a new avenue to explore her somewhat mysterious “struggles?” For which she was just as famous. Wasn’t expecting that.
She inspired a spiritual role, even, to digress a moment. Alan Jay Lerner and Burton Lane (Richard Rodgers originally) wrote On a Clear Day You Can See Forever for her. She has magical powers, is psychic, living in a parallel reality. Or, she regresses to a past self so she’s reincarnated. “I can sort of follow that,” Austin Pendleton laughed. Even that.
I enjoy mystery meets comedy, I find that to be “spiritual.”
Reincarnation is a religious concept. Yoga. Meditation. They might not be attached to their religious origins but why does spirit have to be then? I suppose mystical is attached to mystery schools so that’s another association. “The religious experience.” I can’t remember if I suggested “spiritual” and heard the same thing. Not exactly the same. I wonder what John Hopkins would say…since, you know, they were the first to break away from religion.
Not to project a role onto her real person but “yeah, that makes sense,” Austin Pendleton suggested. I wondered if she might have been more psychic.
I am psychic, apparently. I’ve had mysterious experiences, too. I only speak in terms of energy because everyone can agree that’s real and that’s everything. Energy cannot be destroyed, so neither can we. There is a spiritual dimension to the self, that too.
To add a spiritual detail — she’s sort of blown my mind, I have to admit since she’s passed. She’s made me more of a believer, even. Also energy cannot be destroyed; that’s what we believe. And then, Hutchins believes that ideas never die, so that would make sense.
In any case, she occupies a mysterious — another word — section of mental health, I thought, because she was a “genius” who had “an illness” and they might be related. A genius and a prodigy are also not the same thing. Prodigy might be the more accurate word…? A prodigy has “exceptional qualities or abilities.”
I heard “don’t talk about it” but you can’t talk about her without mentioning it: her struggles. I thought about how that might have affected her and my own experience looking at my families. Even the reality that someone in my position could treat this subject insensitively.
But improv is one of these mysterious exercises so “a psychic” would pass. Someone who is more geared in that way. One can access information intuitively — improvers know that. It makes sense that Paul Sills said what he did about spirit and why the improvisational method might have really worked for Barbara Harris. She’s one of its founders. An American art form.
What the University of Chicago made me consider though, education breaking from religion, was Barbara Harris’ medical history out of care. She was born in 1935. She was, from what I understand, on psychiatric medications very early. By the time she arrived in the Chinese restaurant…did I hear that right? So out of high school? So we’re talking about the early fifties.
I just looked this up quickly.
What’s the first generation? She was definitely on medications at that point. From what she said, she had been on antidepressants for a long time and expressed, simply, that they should take you off them sooner. Anything else, I don’t know, but in terms of reflecting on her and trying to understand her, one would, I hope, understand why I would wonder what the illness was and what her prescriptions were so I could look up their side effects.
I would even like to research the effects of these drugs over time. Have studies been done? With someone like her, who has been on them for a long time. She’s potentially significant for a whole other reason.
If she was on early forms of these medications, how did the formulations change? Any studies done about these differences, do you understand? Second generation? What did we learn from the first? I don’t know what she was taking in the end besides blood pressure pills and antidepressants.
She had a lot of health problems in the end. Couldn’t really deal with those, right? Unrelated to the emotional body? I know that her close friends knew about her “mental problems,” uh huh, and I’m listening to the language, so she used that phrase? I can’t really say yet if this factored into the equation, but considering the time, even today. I’m not going to approach it from a position of shame.
Were these the right drugs? Was she diagnosed, even, correctly? I know nothing about who prescribed these medications. What happened when she came to NY? These are my questions. Was there a trajectory that I can track?
She’s astonishing people by becoming someone else not the role and delivering Academy Award-nominated monologues in the middle of the night in a one-go…you know? And then, the struggles. I just wanted to alleviate whatever that pressure was.
Today, she might talk to Oprah about her journey to help others. Oprah would listen to her with curiosity and compassion.
I think her strength not so much her fragility might come to the forefront here. Vulnerability is a sign of courage and on stage that became artful. It’s not to say she wasn’t difficult, none of that.
She had a traumatic childhood, apparently, that’s a direct quote.
“Great ideas re-emerge throughout time” for many reasons. She’s one of them, coming up right now. Rather powerful, no? I wasn’t expecting this to be all wrapped up in the spirit. There’s something spiritual about that idea, I feel, for someone who left his father’s path behind. They have a life and they take different forms. Everlasting. Rooted in nature, even.
Mental health issues from an Arendtian perspective interest me: the break from belonging, the source of our “modern feelings of isolation and loneliness.” Harris was able to talk because she felt belonging. “Confidence comes from belonging.” That phrase came into focus, written on a piece of paper, at the end of her life.
How does belonging relate to mental illness?
I have to research how the break from religion affected the education of psychiatry and try to picture her…going through this time. I’m going to read a book about emotion and physical illness since she had health problems later on. I heard her old friend use the phrase “emotional problems.” We don’t consider the emotional body enough.
Thanks for reading.
*Robert Maynard Hutchins audio files on iTunes!
