Education: Fusilier

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Also a Purple Tie. Adler was rapidly developing his ideas on education, and Hutchins enthusiastically egged him on. If Adler could have had his way, he would have abolished textbooks, lectures, grades, electives, possibly professors. When Hutchins & Adler tried to put some of these ideas into practice, the fur flew. The philosophy department threatened mass resignation rather than let Adler stay; Hutchins had to create a new post for him—professor of the philosophy of law. An air of civil war overran the Midway. One goaded professor once denied that two & two make four, merely because a pro-Adler student said they did. Even Adler's clothes provoked his colleagues—justifiably: he sometimes sported a lavender shirt and purple tie.

To many students, he became a hero. Recalls one: "He'd never let go a point until a protagonist or antagonist understood it. He would ask questions, leading you step by step through your answers, to the rational conclusion. If that failed, he'd dash to the blackboard and draw a diagram. If the student fought on, he might say: 'I'll take this home and see if I can find an error in my logic.' I've seen him come back and admit he was wrong. In Adler's world, there is truth in every situation, and he insisted that his students stay on the track trying to find it."

Flood for Babel. Faced with Adler's passion for logic, a lot of people began to feel like Gertrude Stein who, shortly after meeting him, hit him on the head several times with her fist and declared: "Adler, you are obviously the kind of young man that's used to winning arguments. I won't argue with you any more."

Adler has an almost naive conviction that if he can show people in open, logical argument that he is right, they will be convinced and not take offense. In Crime, Law & Social Science, he showed the social scientists why they were not scientific. In What Man Has Made of Man, he showed the psychoanalysts what was wrong with psychoanalysis. In several writings he explained what was wrong with St. Thomas (among other things, Adler felt, the angelic doctor had failed to prove the existence of God). Though he had written learnedly and reverently of Aquinas, Adler was now snubbed by most Thomists. Caustic colleagues nicknamed him a "peeping Thomist."

In How to Read a Book, Adler showed Americans that they could not even read intelligently, and brilliantly told them what to do about it. (The book, which he wrote because he needed $1,000 to pay the rent of his expensive apartment, became a bestseller, and earned him $60,000.)