Robert Maynard Hutchins (January 17, 1899 – May 14, 1977) was an American educational philosopher. He was president (1929–1945) and chancellor (1945–1951) of the University of Chicago, and earlier dean of Yale Law School (1927–1929). His first wife was the novelist Maude Hutchins. Although his father and grandfather were both Presbyterian ministers, Hutchins became one of the most influential members of the school of secular perennialism. A graduate of Yale College and the law school of Yale University, Hutchins joined the law faculty and soon was named dean. While dean, he gained notice for Yale's development of the philosophy of Legal Realism. Hutchins was thirty years old when he became Chicago's president in 1929, and implemented wide-ranging and sometimes controversial reforms of the university, including the elimination of varsity football. He supported interdisciplinary programs, including during World War II, establishing the Metallurgical Laboratory. His most far-reaching academic reforms involved the undergraduate College of the University of Chicago, which was retooled into a novel pedagogical system built on Great Books, Socratic dialogue, comprehensive examinations and early entrance to college. Although parts of the Hutchins Plan were abandoned by the University shortly after Hutchins left in 1951, an adapted version of the program survived at Shimer College. Hutchins left Chicago for the Ford Foundation, where he channeled resources into studying education. In 1954 he became president of a Ford Foundation spinoff devoted to civil liberties, the Fund for the Republic. In 1959, he founded the Center for the Study of Democratic Institutions, a think tank in Santa Barbara, California. Early life and career Robert Maynard Hutchins was born in Brooklyn in 1899, the second of three sons of William James Hutchins, a Presbyterian minister and future Berea College president. Eight years later, the family moved to Oberlin, Ohio, site of Oberlin College, where William Hutchins became an instructor. Oberlin was a small community dedicated to evangelical ideals of righteousness and hard work, which had a lifelong influence on Hutchins. Hutchins studied at Oberlin Academy and subsequently Oberlin College from 1915 to 1917. At age 18 in 1917, shortly after the United States entered World War I, Hutchins joined the ambulance service of the United States Army, together with his brother William. The Hutchins brothers served in an all-Oberlin unit, Section 587, which for much of the war was stationed at the Allentown Fair Grounds, where they were tasked with creating a barracks.