The University Of Chicago Round Table

A detailed study of American public radio's early history

I personally learned to know Ralph Tyler rather late in his career when, in the 1960s, I spent a year as a Fellow at the Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences at Stanford. His term of office as Director of the Center was then approaching its end. This would seem to disqualify me thoroughly from preparing a Foreword to this "Classic Works. " Many of his colleagues and, not least, of his students at his dear Alma Mater, the University of Chicago, are certainly better prepared than I to put his role in American education in proper perspective. The reason for inviting me is, I assume, to bring out the influence that Tyler has had on the international educational scene. I am writing this Foreword on a personal note. Ralph Tyler's accomplishments in his roles as a scholar, policy maker, educational leader, and statesman have been amply put on record in this book, not least in the editors' Preface. My reflections are those of an observer from abroad but who, over the last 25 years, has been close enough to overcome the aloofness of the foreigner. Tyler has over many years been criss-crossing the North American con tinent generously giving advice to agencies at the federal, state, and local levels, lecturing, and serving on many committees and task forces that have been instrumental in shaping American education.

This book commemorates a place and a time in American law teaching, but more importantly, an outlook: the common law tradition. That outlook was empirical and tolerant. These values were carried into expression by a group of people who were not part of a cult or faction nor ruled by the herd instinct. Now in paperback, The Common Law Tradition is a collective portrait of five scholars who epitomize the tradition.The focus is Chicago in the 1960s. The five figures considered--Edward H. Levi, Harry Kalven, Jr., Karl Llewellyn, Philip Kurland, and Kenneth Culp Davis--did much to broaden the perspectives of the legal academy. Levi made use of sociology, economics, and comparative law. Kalven collaborated with sociologists on the Jury Project and with economists on tax law and auto compensation plans. Llewellyn's commitment to empirical research underpinned his work on the Uniform Commercial Code. Kurland's approach to constitutional law was highlighted by his insistence on the relevance of legal history. Davis was an energetic comparativist in his work on administrative law. What distinguished these Chicagoans is that their work was practical and rooted in the law, and hence yielded concrete applications. The group's diversity, the tolerant atmosphere in which they taught and wrote, and the attachment of its individual members to empirical approaches differentiate them from today's legal scholars and make their ideas of continuing importance.

The Collected Papers of Bertrand Russell, Volume 26 covers a period of transition in Russell's political life between his orthodox and sometimes pugnacious defence of the West in the early post-war, and the dissenting advocacy of nuclear disarmament and détente that started in earnest in the mid-1950s. While some of the assembled writings echo harsh prior criticism of Soviet expansionism and dictatorship, others register growing qualms about the recklessness of American foreign policy and the baneful effects on civil liberties of anti-communist hysteria inside the United States. Whether continuing to push for western rearmament, or highlighting in a more placatory vein the folly of the Cold War's divisions and rival fanaticisms, Russell's paramount objective was avoiding a war that threatened global catastrophe. Suspended between fear and hope, he expounded his evolving political concerns–and much else besides, including autobiographical reflections and typically common-sense guidance for living well–in a constant flow of newspaper and magazine articles, letters to editors, radio broadcasts and discussions and, of special note, a Nobel Prize acceptance speech. Russell also completed two lecture tours of the United States (the last of many), as well as a landmark such visit to Australia. All three of these journeys, and the textual record they left, are examined in depth using manuscript material and unpublished correspondence from the Bertrand Russell Archives at McMaster University, which is mined extensively throughout the volume.

Born in a log cabin on a Texas prairie in 1890, T. V. Smith—distinguished philosopher, teacher, politician, lecturer, and editor—left an imprint on the twentieth century seldom equaled by a university professor. Simply listing his activities reveals the versatility of this extraordinary man. He held posts as professor at Texas Christian University and the University of Texas, as professor and dean at the University of Chicago for a quarter-century, and as professor of citizenship and philosophy at Syracuse University for eight years. An independent Democrat, he spent four years in the Illinois State Senate before being elected to the U.S. House of Representatives as congressman at large from Illinois. He served as private ("no class") in World War I; he held the rank of colonel in World War II and was a military governor with the Allied Control Commission in Sicily and Italy, was Director of Democratization for Select German Prisoners of War, and was a member of the U.S. Education Mission to Germany and Japan. As a founder of the Chicago Round Table of the Air and one of its most frequent participants, he became one of radio's best-known personalities. He was editor of the International Journal of Ethics, and his democratic wisdom has found expression in more than twenty books and in hundreds of articles. In open forum he often tilted with such opponents as Robert A. Taft, Clarence Darrow, Harry Gideonse, Will Durant, and Norman Thomas. He was an orator of national renown. He held seven degrees from as many institutions. A maverick, intellectual as well as political, Smith never feared to strike off the shackles of conventionality and dogma when they hampered his search for truth, and his stout conscience challenged all comers. Long involvement with people of many ideas, backgrounds, and interests so permeated his thinking that his message was to and for all of America. He spoke of actual situations that affect actual human beings, illuminating his impressions with sensitivity and understanding. T. V. Smith's story has heart and vision. It manifests, in approximately equal portions, poetic imagination, resourcefulness, limitless energy, public service, and pride. Early in life Smith set his heart not on accumulating material possessions but on discovering how men and women of every station and degree can have the blessing of a sane and reasonable life in an increasingly complex society. What he says here is witty and wise, "nuggets mined from the hills of life . . . the living stuff of biography, the inner essence which transcends the world of fact." In such a record lies democracy's best boast.