ABSTRACT
"The Higher Learning" was first used by Robert Hutchins as the title for an address to a Chicago student convocation in which he asserted, "The gadgeteers and data collectors, masquerading as scientists, have threatened to become the chieftains of the scholarly world". When The Higher Learning was published by Yale University Press in 1936 it sold 8,500 copies, a considerable circulation for a book of its kind, and the reaction of the lay press was generally favorable. There are even rumors—incredible as it may appear—that the faculty of the University of Chicago, nourished by Scholasticism, is to take the lead in charting this new course for the higher learning. When Hutchins wrote a preface for the 1962 paperback edition of The Higher Learning he began by listing the vast changes that had reshaped the world in the twenty-five years since he delivered the Storrs Lectures.
