Education: Clearance in Chicago

In his nine years as chancellor of the University of Chicago, Lawrence A. Kimpton, 49, has had to tame a particularly unruly section of the Midwest. He has hacked down slums that were hemming in Chicago's campus, trimmed overblown courses that were smothering the curriculum. Last week he announced his resignation because he felt he had at last put Chicago in order.

A Cornell-and-Stanford-trained philosopher, Kimpton took over a campus intellectually stirred by the sweeping changes of restless Idealist Robert Maynard Hutchins. College courses of broad generalization had buried traditional academic details. It fell to Kimpton to attend to details: an alarming drop in undergraduate enrollment because other schools feared Chicago's experimentalism; seedy living conditions because of an ugly, sprawling slum; a $1,400,000 deficit.

Ignoring much of Hutchins' broad-based undergraduate education, Kimpton restored specialization, regrouped courses in their traditional departments. He upped college enrollment from a low of 1,350 to its current 2,119, raised endowment by $60 million to $133 million, put the university comfortably in the black. To wipe out the slums, he helped form a city-university commission, later wangled Government backing for a $106 million redevelopment program.

Kimpton feels that his predecessors lingered long after they did their useful work: "The head of a university is analogous to the head of a political organization. At some point he wears out his powers of persuasion." The next chancellor, Kimpton admits, will need to persuade good teachers to come to Chicago. The faculty, particularly in the humanities, is Kimpton's weakest legacy: "I think there's less interest in the humanities than at any time in American history."