ABSTRACT
Clarence Ayres was born in 1891 in Lowell, Massachusetts, as the son of a Baptist minister. He studied philosophy at Brown and Harvard Universities. In 1915, he was hired at Amherst College in Massachusetts as an instructor, where the energetic institutionalist Walton Hamilton influenced him. Ayres then went to Chicago, intending to work with Robert Hoxie. But Hoxie committed suicide in 1916, and Ayres switched to philosophy, to specialize in ethics. Wesley Mitchell, Thorstein Veblen and John Dewey had already left the university.
