Some Academics, Mainly in Chicago.

Abstract

university of Chicago in the early 1930s was a wonderful place for a young man without social airs and without social ambitions, poor, rather ignorant, serious, and intellectual, launched on a quest without knowing what he was looking for. It was a great place for me to grope with confidence that I would not go astray. It was a very different kind of place from what I had imagined a university to be. Even as an undergraduate I had still thought of a university as a place where the professors knew clearly what was right and what was not right. Perhaps that was because I retained from my tenth year the belief that the knowable was finite and that genuine professors had mastered that; perhaps it was because I had formed, from what sources I do not know, the notion that German professors were the true professors, the very idea of professors, and German professors, I thought, were dogmatic and commanding. That was not the way it was in Chicago. The two best men at Chicago at that time were always tentative and disarming by their tentativeness. They were both men of very clearly formed character. One of them could be querulous and as persistent in a discussion as a bulldog; he was sharp and subtle and had an exceptional acumen in detecting contradictions in others' and in his own positions. While he always complained about the errors of others, he never ceased to confess his own ignorance. He had an exasperated certainty when he referred to what was unlikely to be true, but when it came to the truth of his own assertions he was modest to the point of humility. The other professor who brought me at once into his vast, bewildering intellectual universe was like a bear built like a bear, hunched over like a bear, putting his nose into everything like a bear, and growling and grunting like a bear. The first was Frank Knight; the second was Robert Park. When I came to Chicago on September 22, 1932, Park was prowling about in the Orient and Frank Knight was in the depths of a deep depression about the state of and prospects for liberalism. When the 1932 presidential campaign was coming to an end, the Communist Club an-