Education: Fusilier

(5 of 9)

After two years in high school ("I had a difference of opinion with the principal about who was running the school"), he got a job as a copy boy on the Sun, and broke into print writing editorials at $7 a column. One day he read in John Stuart Mill's autobiography that the great Englishman had read Plato before he was ten. Not having read Plato at 15 made Adler "feel like a savage." Then & there he drew a pay advance and bought Plato's Republic. Immediately afterwards he decided 1) to go to college, 2) to become a philosopher.

Fateful Footnote. At Columbia he studied furiously. Saturdays, before the library closed, he would take out a stack of books and tote them home; he knew he could not possibly read them all, but he wanted at least to look at them and read the table of contents. He took John Erskine's General Honors Course, the first "great books" course in the U.S. (it was never known by that name).

Soon he was himself teaching the Honors course.* He also got a job as a psychology instructor (his feud with Professor Dewey kept him out of the philosophy department), and launched vigorously into experiments. When he was trying to measure fear, he calmly dropped a four-foot live boa constrictor on to people's shoulders. "Boy," he recalls happily, "would their pupils dilate!"

His love was still philosophy. One day he discovered St. Thomas, and one by one, as he managed to save the money, young Adler bought the 21 volumes of the Summa Theologica.

In 1927, Adler married pretty Helen Boynton, daughter of an Illinois manufacturer. To support her in a style he considered adequate, Adler held down not only his two teaching jobs at Columbia, but taught psychology at C.C.N.Y., lectured at the People's Institute and gave a Great Books course in the basement of a church. His total income (pasha-like for that day): $11,000. Far too busy to work for his Ph.D., he hired students at $1 an hour to do research, and whipped out his thesis on musical appreciation in 24 hours. He got his Ph.D., all right, but never his A.B. That degree was withheld because he would not take the swimming test ("I refuse to take my clothes off in the middle of the day").

Then destiny struck, in a footnote on the law of evidence which Adler wrote into his first book. A bright young man named Robert Maynard Hutchins, then acting dean of the Yale Law School, saw the footnote and asked Adler to come up to see him. Adler, who really knew nothing about the subject, studied the law of evidence night & day for two weeks. Then he went to New Haven, in his best black suit. The dean, aged 28, received him in tennis ducks. They instantly impressed each other as great men. When Hutchins became president of the University of Chicago, he took Adler along. Thereupon, the academic battle of the century began.