Phillip Marchand’s Marshall McLuhan: the medium and the messenger describes McLuhan’s interaction with the University of Chicago and specifically with its then president, Robert Hutchins, in 1946.¹ But Marchand was apparently not aware of the background to that meeting: the recommendation of McLuhan to Chicago by Sigfried Giedion in 1943 and McLuhan’s attempts to interest Hutchins In Wyndham Lewis at that time. Nor in this context does he mention McLuhan’s published writings concerning Chicago: his 1940 review of Adler and his 1946 essay (originally a 1944 lecture), ‘An Ancient Quarrel in Modern America’. But Marchand did interview Cleanth Brooks about the 1946 interaction with Hutchins and Brooks’ account, although not always factual, is noteworthy.

McLuhan dreamed of various projects. One of the more exciting resulted when Cleanth Brooks asked him to visit the University of Chicago, where Brooks had just spent six months as a guest professor. Brooks had left that university disappointed in its rigorously “logical” approach to literary criticism. Robert Hutchins, then president of the university and ally of Mortimer Adler in the Great Books approach to education, had asked Brooks, whose reputation as a literary critic was then rising steadily, to speak to him personally about what might need to be changed. Brooks agreed on condition that McLuhan accompany him. Brooks had been enormously impressed by McLuhan’s Cambridge thesis and its historical review of the trivium. That account, he felt, had a direct bearing on what was wrong with the University of Chicago.
In June 1946 McLuhan went to Chicago with Brooks and argued the case for change. Basically he told Hutchins that if he wanted to produce graduates who were capable of “learned eloquence” instead of mere technical expertise — as Hutchins had told the world he was going to do — then he would have to do something about his deans, who were all complete dialecticians, strangers to rhetoric and grammar. “Marshall spoke brilliantly”, Brooks recalls. “He put into what seemed to be very cogent, lucid English, in concise form, what I was thinking in inchoate form after six months of teaching there. He who had never set foot on that campus before had it all beautifully diagrammed.” (90)

Was Brooks not aware of the earlier exchanges between Hutchins and McLuhan? Why did he think Hutchins would agree to meet with an unknown academic from an obscure Catholic college in rural Canada? In fact, Marchand’s interview with Brooks must have taken place more than 40 years after the events in question at a time when Brooks was more than 80 years old himself. He simply did not have a firm grip on the facts of the matter anymore and doubtless had no particular care to.

Marchand’s description of McLuhan’s 1947 proposal to Hutchins following their 1946 meeting is particularly uninformed:

McLuhan returned from Chicago with more than his usual share of optimism, sat down, and wrote a 10,000-word brief expanding on what he had said at the meeting. Ernest Sirluck, a colleague at the University of Toronto who saw that brief, was amused many years later to note that it “was an enormous piece of special pleading, the most blatant preaching for a call.” McLuhan, in a not so subtle fashion, urged Hutchins to hire him and a few friends to take over his program in the humanities. As McLuhan wrote to one of those old friends from St. Louis, Felix Giovanelli, Hutchins was being offered a plan to revamp his university that would allow McLuhan, Brooks, Muller-Thym, Giovanelli, and others to form a cadre of New Critics and like-minded metaphysicians on his campus. The “circle of fine intellects” McLuhan had been dreaming of since his undergraduate days in Manitoba would be given an institutional power base and institutional prestige. 

Here again events were being recalled from a remove of more than 40 years. Sirluck was a friend of McLuhan (they edited at Chicago University Press series together) and was a fellow ‘Winnipigeon’. But he had doubtless given little thought in the interim to the matter and no longer had much recall of it. The proposal was less than 3000 words, had no mention of the supposed ‘cadre’ and was not necessarily aimed at the University of Chicago.

Marchand’s conclusion to the story is not mistaken, except for the fact that McLuhan’s essay — ‘The Failure at Chicago‘ — was written in anticipation of his meeting with Hutchins and not in reaction to it.

Hutchins ultimately resisted his proposal — he was planning to leave the university shortly anyway and had no intention of overhauling it before he departed. McLuhan was left to take revenge by writing an essay, never published, denouncing the University of Chicago’s instruction in literature. In that essay, McLuhan cited, with devastating effect, some examples of multiple-choice questions on Hamlet and Tom Jones from University of Chicago exams. These examples, he claimed, were symptoms of the university’s “naive rationalism”, the kind of rationalism that reduced literature to categories and concepts instead of training students to sharpen their perceptions of literature through the analysis of the effects sought by writers. The argument in this essay, like that of his oral presentation to Hutchins, was a variant of a theme McLuhan had pursued since his Cambridge thesis. According to this theme, the rational, or dialectical, mind must be controlled by the other two disciplines of the trivium: by rhetoric, which emphasized the relationship between the author and his audience, and by grammatica, which emphasized verbal analysis.² (91)