Education: On With the Best

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Some of Chicago's most prominent citizens will be unavailable for 18 Wednesday evenings beginning Oct. 27. For a fee of $100 ($150 for a married couple) they will pass those evenings at the University Club, talking with the University of Chicago's President Robert Maynard Hutchins about some of the books which are currently on his list of the world's most eligible literary productions.

Among those who will thus seek enlightenment from Plato to Marx are Packer Harold Higgins Swift, Department-Storekeeper Hughston Maynard McBain (Marshall Field & Co.), Publisher Marshall Field, Lawyer Clay Judson, Chicago Daily Timesman Richard James Finnegan.

Theirs will not be so tough an assignment as President Hutchins' undergraduate students get; they will prepare for class not by reading whole books, but by biting off and chewing 50 classic pages a week.

Last week, too, the University of Chicago gave the best books notion its greatest merchandising improvement since the idea originally occurred around 1915 to Columbia's Musician-Novelist John ("Roaring Jack") Erskine. The Encyclopaedia Britannica, owned by the University of Chicago (TIME, Feb. 1), earmarked $400,000 to prepare the Hutchins Edition of approximately 100 great books. The University's Vice President William Burnett Benton called this "the backfire approach in bringing educational ideas to the public against the invested interests of education." The backfire is scheduled to reach the public in 1946.