The University of Chicago, founded in 1892 by John D. Rockefeller, long had the reputation of being one of the most serious undergraduate colleges in the country. Students who applied to Chicago knew about its socially inhospitable reputation. What other university would tear down its football stadium to make way for a new library? If students nevertheless chose Chicago, they did so because what they wanted most from college was not recreation but education. The core curriculum put into place in the 1930s by Robert Maynard Hutchins, president and then chancellor of the university, was among the most rigorous “Great Books” programs in the country. “The result,” as the sociologist Edward Shils observed in a memoir about Hutchins, “was an atmosphere of extraordinary exhilaration among students and teachers… . The students responded to this mode of teaching … with the enthusiasm which comes from the sense of doing somethin ...

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