COLUMBIA FORUM
Mortimer J. Adler (1902-2001)

When Mortimer J. Adler died in June 2001, America lost a true original, a scholar and teacher whose unabashed championing of the “great books” had profoundly shaped the curricula at Columbia, the University of Chicago, and American intellectual life in general. In this tribute, Charles Van Doren ’59 GSAS, who collaborated with Adler at the Encyclopaedia Britannica and other projects, remembers his friend, one of the 20th century’s most influential and iconoclastic intellects.

Mortimer J. Adler ’83, ’29 GSAS, died on June 28, 2001, in San Mateo, Calif. That was a long way, both in space and time, from home. Adler was a New Yorker, born and bred. And he was a Columbian, too, but thereby hangs a tale.

Considering his career as a whole — he was the author of more than 50 books — Adler’s formal education was decidedly irregular. He voluntarily retired from high school at 15 to become a journalist. In his spare time, he decided to go to college. He couldn’t go to a regular college, as he was too young and hadn’t graduated from high school, but he could go to Columbia’s Extension Division. The first course he chose was in Victorian literature (then, of course, a recent subject) taught by Frank Allen Patterson, the division’s director.

The students read the standard literary types, but the only one that struck Adler was John Stuart Mill, whose Autobiography changed his life. He discovered that Mill, tutored by his father and Jeremy Bentham, had learned Greek by 3 and had read several dialogues of Plato by 5. By 5! In Greek! Mortimer was already 16 and had never even heard of Plato and knew not a word of Greek.

Here was a challenge! The boy next door had a set of the Harvard Classics, containing a few Platonic dialogues. Adler wanted more. He bought a second-hand copy of Plato, which he then read twice in a month. Another boy might have fallen into Plato’s honey head; Adler became a philosopher, deciding then and there that he had found his life’s vocation. He never changed his mind.

Patterson, recognizing his young student’s passion and genius, recommended him for a full scholarship to Columbia College, where he matriculated in 1921. A sophomore because he had so many extension credits, Adler found himself eligible for John Erskine’s new General Honors course. Here was another revelation — and challenge. Adler read and reread what were to be called Great Books, and learned from Erskine — the master — the art of the seminar. What he didn’t know, he learned a few years later when he joined Mark Van Doren in co-moderating the course that came to be Humanities. Colleagues for a while and lifelong friends, the poet and the philosopher shared their different viewpoints on the world.

Adler’s undergraduate career ended not with a bang but with a whimper in 1923, when he was accepted as a teaching assistant in the psychology department. For him, this was decidedly second best. He loved philosophy more — but Columbia’s philosophers didn’t love him. Alas, the eager youngster had more than once offended them by trying to point out — for their own good! — how little they knew. He was banned from some classes (Irwin Edman’s) and forced to be silent in others (John Dewey’s); at department convocations, when he was allowed to speak, he continued his attacks. His pleas fell on ears that would remain deaf to him throughout his life.

And then lightning struck. He received the kind of lucky break that every great man has enjoyed at some time in his life (whether he’s willing to admit it or not). Because of a misunderstanding, Adler was invited by the dean of Yale Law School to discuss the law of evidence, which the dean mistakenly thought Adler knew a lot about. He arrived at New Haven, found the dean’s office, knocked on the door, and waited for the secretary.

Instead, a very young, very handsome man some six inches taller than Adler, wearing white flannels, a white shirt open at the neck, and tennis shoes, held out his hand.

You’re Dr. Adler? I’m Bob Hutchins. Come on in!

Robert Maynard Hutchins, 27, had served in World War I, graduated from Yale at 21 and its law school at 25. He was named dean two years later. This wasn’t an ordinary occurrence, nor was Hutchins an ordinary man. He was brilliant in every way. Adler was bowled over and, despite his own undoubted brilliance, never ceased to look up to his new friend.

Before the summer was over, Hutchins had offered Adler a Sterling professorship, which Adler turned down because he thought he could never leave New York. But there were meetings, assignments — well paid — and plans. And letters. Hutchins always addressed Adler as “Dear Doctor.”

At the same time, Adler’s department chairman, Professor A.T. “Poff” Poffenberger, was prodding him to get his Ph.D. Adler didn’t want a doctorate in psychology, but there was no alternative — the philosophers wouldn’t have him. Adler formed a committee of friends to help him do the required experimental work and then typed up 77 pages of explanatory text in 20 straight hours.

In the meantime, Adler had written his first book, which would have been his dissertation if the philosophers had let him. Dialectic traced the history of the term, from Plato to its transformation in the hands of Hegel and Marx, and proposed that dialectic — i.e., intelligent, controlled, and informed conversation — was the true business of philosophy and the only way to the truth. Furthermore, the book listed the greatest works in Western thought, proposing that philosophers analyze them as though they were really only one great work, a single great conversation in which all men could engage although they might disagree.

The idea, although it seemed preposterous at the time, turned out to be amazingly fruitful. Philosopher Scott Buchanan was inspired to found St. John’s College in Annapolis, Md., where young students (they could enter after only two years of high school) were educated by the Great Books alone; the college, together with its twin in Santa Fe, N.M., continues to prosper. An offshoot, Adler’s How to Read a Book (1940; rev. ed. 1972), continues to be a best-seller. And the so-called New Program at Chicago also was an offspring, although it didn’t live to see the full light of day.

Hutchins became president of the University of Chicago at the unprecedented age of 30. He and Adler, who was only 27, immediately began to scheme how to reorganize the university — and in the process all American higher education. Hutchins offered Adler a position as an associate professor of philosophy at a salary of $6,000. Adler’s Columbia salary was $2,400, and when he told his chairman, Poff smiled grimly.

It’ll be years, Mortimer, before Columbia will equal that — if it ever will. I’ll hate to lose you — many of us will — but you have to accept.

You realize, Poff, that this would be the end of a dream I’ve had for — well, half my life. I always thought, despite everything ... You’re absolutely sure?

It’s the “everything,” Mortimer. You can’t go back, and neither can they.

The move was made in 1930. But this dream, too, soon turned sour. Hutchins had misjudged his faculty. The president can’t appoint professors without the approval of the department, the philosophers said, and we don’t approve. Hutchins, still quick on his feet, went to the dean of Chicago’s law school, who agreed to hire Adler as a professor of the philosophy of law.

The refusal of the faculty willingly to accept most of his reforms was at first a challenge that Hutchins thought he could overcome, but after 20 years of practically constant warfare, Hutchins gave up. Some changes were made, and a portion of incoming freshmen undertook, after only two years of high school, a program that earned them a B.A. after four years and an M.A. after six. In addition, they enjoyed required courses similar to Columbia’s Humanities and Contemporary Civilization. But most of the senior faculty refused to teach these courses because they included readings “outside their field,” and the students, seeing this, turned against them, too. Hutchins alternately pleaded and stormed, but to little effect.

Some pleasures relieved his disappointment. One was a great books seminar moderated by Hutchins and Adler for the trustees and their wives. This was so much fun for everybody that the trustees didn’t object when it started being called the “Fatmen’s Seminar,” because of all the fat cats who attended. One of them was a Yale classmate of Hutchins, William Benton, who, with his business partner, Chester Bowles, another Yalie, had founded Benton and Bowles and who had retired when he made a million dollars, which he did at a very early age.

Benton was a tough and pugnacious “student,” but he also was enthusiastic about the books he was reading, many for the first time, and he saw possibilities. On Hutchins’s advice, he had recently purchased the practically insolvent Encyclopaedia Britannica from Sears Roebuck.

You know, Bob, we’re having a lot of trouble finding copies of these books you want us to read. Do you think it would make sense to publish them myself? I mean, would anybody buy them?

Adler’s eyes gleamed. Yes, yes! he spluttered. But only on one condition — that they are a set of books having something truly distinctive. Another Harvard Classics — nobody needs that. But …

You’re right, Mortimer, said Benton. Bob, you choose the books, and Mortimer, you come up with something truly distinctive. Let me know how much it will cost.

Thus was born Great Books of the Western World, with its Syntopicon, one of the great publishing successes of the post-war years. Even so, it almost died aborning. Adler, building on Dialectic, designed a vast analytical study of the most important ideas in the most important books in the Western tradition — which, at that time, was the only “tradition” deserving of the name. The only trouble was that it cost more than twice what he had told Benton it would cost, and took more than twice as long to complete. Benton threatened to stop the project, but never did.

The Syntopicon isn’t just a publishing coup. It is also a magnificent and outrageous intellectual endeavor. It’s difficult to describe it without having it in your hands, and I won’t try to do so here. If you have never seen it, and don’t understood how it works and why it works the way it does, I urge you to investigate it — not least because it, like many other splendid Adlerian intellectual tools, may not survive the current onslaught of triviality engendered by the Internet.

By 1951, Hutchins could stand the infighting no longer. He retired from Chicago, and with a large grant from the recently founded Ford Foundation, moved to California where he established the Fund for the Republic. He didn’t abandon his friend, however. Hutchins gave Adler money to start the Institute for Philosophical Research in San Francisco, which would carry the Syntopicon one step further toward the grandiose plan broached in Dialectic. There were “100 great ideas,” the creators of the Syntopicon had decided; now each could be studied much more carefully, with references to hundreds of thinkers across the centuries.

The first idea was freedom, which was not only important at the time (it was a few years after the war’s end) but also seemed relatively straightforward. The work could be done quickly, Adler thought, and the institute could move on to other, probably more complex ideas, such as being, or democracy, or God. It soon became apparent, however, that the terms “freedom” or “liberty” had been used in six quite different senses over the millennia. Unwinding these different senses, and precisely defining the differences among them, took a large staff several years, at which point Adler still had to write the two-volume The Idea of Freedom (1958–61). It is a marvelous book, and remains, I believe, the definitive treatment of the subject. Its cost, however, was again much greater than expected; reluctantly, Adler had to give up similar treatments of the Syntopicon’s 99 other ideas.

Enough money remained, however, to treat four ideas, albeit more modestly, with a single person responsible not only for writing the book but also doing most of the research. The institute was thus able to publish volumes on happiness, justice, love and progress (I wrote this one). All are, if not definitive, at least required reading for anyone interested in their subjects. Alas, all are now out of print.

In December 1962, Adler celebrated his 60th birthday. For his friends, there were many things to celebrate. This jovial, loving man with his wonderful ideas and expansive plans had lived a full and successful life, and those who loved him wanted him to know it. Scores contributed to a birthday book, and he said he was pleased. In fact, however, he was in despair. His Institute for Philosophical Research was dying, he could see no future for himself as a professional philosopher, his marriage was broken and he owed more money than he could pay. While everyone else drank to his health, he sat, head hanging, unable to believe the fine words.

Again, Benton came to the rescue.

Come back to Chicago, Mortimer, and help me make a new and greater Encyclopaedia Britannica. I’ll not only pay you a princely salary and fund the institute, but I’ll also support a series of Benton Lectures at the University of Chicago that can be the first step toward a new career for you — and an education for them.

It didn’t take long for Adler to decide, especially as another woman, the young and beautiful Caroline Pring, had agreed to become his second wife. In 1963, Adler returned to the city where he now probably felt most at home. He had lost New York while still a young man; San Francisco, even with its heartbreaking beauty, had been a disappointment. He had come to Chicago in his 20s; now he was returning in his 60s, despair overcome and full of ambitious plans for a new family and a new life.

He couldn’t know it, but he would have 35 more years to live, and he lived them well and for the most part happily. He and Caroline had two sons, and they bought an apartment on the lake and a house in Aspen, where he returned to the Aspen Institute as the eminence grise of the Executive Seminar program, a popular lecturer on difficult subjects and an honorary member of the Board of Trustees. In no time at all he became an Aspen institution, and Caroline, an excellent skier, enjoyed the city in ways Mortimer could not.

The Benton Lectures at Chicago were the basis of an entirely new intellectual career. For decades, Adler had suffered from the contempt or, worse, the silence of America’s professional philosophers. Now, at last, he realized he didn’t need them. While they wrote articles and sometimes books that were unreadable by the average intelligent person, Adler recognized that this was exactly the person he wanted to write for. He produced, over 30 years or so, an astonishing number of serious, readable and best-selling philosophical works that, among other things, introduced Aristotle to a large audience that, without knowing it, needed his help to pursue happiness in the right way.

Soon, Adler began to write at least one and sometimes two books a year, defending his view that philosophers went off the right track three centuries ago and could only get back on it if they paid attention to their ancestors. That most of his books were widely read — and sold well — shouldn’t be taken as a sign that they weren’t good.

While all this was going on, Adler had not forgotten his agreement with Benton. As usual, he had a new idea, namely, that an encyclopedia, to be really good, must have an overall plan and not just be a series of articles. In other words, an encyclopedia, to be really great, must not only have an alphabetical index but also a table of contents that would guide the reader seeking understanding (rather than just information) about a broad area of knowledge and help the editors fill the lacunae that inevitably afflict traditional encyclopedias.

Such a table of contents, he soon realized, was an analytical outline of all human knowledge, because that, after all, is the real subject of any general encyclopedia. A large staff was assembled, with editors assigned to parts, but the whole was constructed in meetings, sometimes lasting two or three days, with experts in particular fields. Not infrequently these experts, having been involved in planning, offered to write articles — an unexpected benefit of Adler’s approach.

The making of the T/C, as it was called, took five years. Then there was the enormous job of gathering the text, setting and proofreading it, and acquiring thousands of illustrations. More years passed, and the only person who never seemed to tire was Adler, now approaching his 70th year. The 15th edition of Encyclopaedia Britannica, first published in 1973, was an enormous success, though Benton didn’t live to see it.

Adler was a wonderful story teller. He particularly liked to tell stories about the old days before he left New York, when he was a brash young philosophy student in Columbia College. One of his favorites — perhaps the favorite — was about how he didn’t graduate from the College.

The careful reader will have noticed the apparently mistaken dates in the first line. In fact, Adler didn’t graduate from Columbia College in the year when he completed his undergraduate work. Here’s what happened.

The year was 1923; Adler was 20. Having accumulated 139 points of academic credit, having been elected to Phi Beta Kappa, and having paid $20 — a lot of money in those days — for his diploma, Adler was called into Dean Herbert Hawkes’ office on the eve of Commencement.

I’ve been looking at your record, Mortimer, and I find that you have failed to meet the requirement of four years of physical education. It seems you hardly satisfied a quarter of that. And you never learned to swim.

Yes, Mr. Dean, that’s true.

Can you tell me why?

PE came at 10 o’clock, my logic class was at 9 and my French class at 11. It was too much of a bother to dress and undress and dress and undress. I only had time to get dressed once a day.

Then you can’t graduate, Mortimer.

But I bought my diploma!

You have 139 points of credit, exceeding the required number. I believe you will be accepted into graduate school if you want to go. But you can’t graduate from Columbia College. I’m sorry, and I wish you luck. Henceforth … You can keep the unsigned diploma as a souvenir.

A very good-natured man, Adler was, after his first bitter disappointment and after gaining his Ph.D., more amused than chagrined at having received a doctorate without ever having graduated from high school or college — or earning a master’s degree. He thought he might be the only person who could claim this distinction. And he liked telling the story, which he embroidered in various ways.

Some tried to act on his behalf. He received more than one baccalaureate degree honoris causa, and an honorary master’s degree or two as well. But despite efforts of some influential friends — usually unknown to him — Columbia was unmoved. He hadn’t attended PE, he hadn’t learned to swim, and that was that.

Finally, however, Columbia relented. In 1982, the year of his 80th birthday, Robert Pollack ’60, dean of the College, asked Adler if he would agree to receive the diploma the following May. Adler replied that he would be delighted. He had learned more in his three years at the College than any time in his life, he wrote the dean, and he had nothing but the warmest memories.

That day in May 1983, the 60th anniversary of his bitter disappointment, was, he said, one of the happiest of his life. President Michael Sovern ’53 honored Adler at a luncheon; Adler marched with the undergraduates wearing his Ph.D. gown and hood; and he was interviewed by a host of reporters and pundits. Stories appeared in newspapers and, despite being hardly the most important achievement of his life, or even one of any real significance, he said, it received more attention than anything else he had ever done. To cap it all, he received as a graduation gift a pair of bright red swim trunks.

When Adler moved to Chicago in 1930, he was at first very homesick. He rented an apartment that looked out on one side at Lake Michigan, which reminded him of New York (although there were too many trees), and on the other looked down on the tracks of the Michigan Central. He would stand at the window, staring at the trains headed for New York City and dreaming of what might have been.

What might have been! For Adler himself, his life could hardly have been more successful despite disappointment and disillusion. His achievements were many, and his disappointments were largely his own fault. He never ceased to insist that the writings of most of his philosophical colleagues were wrongheaded and without merit. Was it surprising that they ganged up on him and stayed ganged for the rest of his life?

He had his revenge, although the philosophers never admitted it. Starting at 60, Adler wrote serious philosophical books for us, not for them — for all of us who aren’t pros. And I remember MJA telling me, a few years before he died, that all those books were still in print. Perhaps no other philosophers besides Plato and Aristotle could say the same.

In the last analysis, then, Adler’s departure from New York and Columbia was — for him — a retrievable loss. For New York, it was no great loss, either; the city is both a place and every place, it has a short memory and is always finding new things and people to be interested in. But for Columbia, I think, the loss was great.

Poff was right. Whether Columbia knew it or not, or whether it was willing to admit it, it missed this cocky, impatient, brilliant and quintessential New Yorker who stirred every pot he ever glanced at, and disturbed every tradition he ever met. The fact is, it tossed him - and made him wait 60 years for his diploma!

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