Fred W. Beuttler, PhD’95, CER’19, knew that he was “called to be a historian,” as he phrases it, from the age of 8. Initially interested in colonial America, he shifted his focus to twentieth-century American history during his doctoral studies at UChicago.
One day Beuttler was browsing in the stacks at Regenstein Library when he chanced upon 18 volumes from the Conference on Science, Philosophy, and Religion; he was struck by the subtitle, “and Their Relation to the Democratic Way of Life.” The conference, which met regularly from 1940 to 1968, was founded by a group of American intellectuals in response to the rise of totalitarianism in Europe. It became not only the focus of Beuttler’s dissertation, “Organizing an American Conscience: The Conference on Science, Philosophy, and Religion,” but also defined the fields of interest he continues to pursue.
During his long career as a teacher and a scholar, Beuttler has served as associate university historian at the University of Illinois at Chicago, deputy historian of the US House of Representatives, and associate dean of liberal arts programs at UChicago’s Graham School. In his prior role at Graham, Beuttler oversaw the Master of Liberal Arts degree program as well as the certificate-level Basic Program in Liberal Education for Adults, which centers on the great books, or in Beuttler’s preferred term, “the great conversation.”
The great conversation “means something very specific,” Beuttler says. The term originated with Robert Maynard Hutchins, the University’s longest serving president and a passionate advocate for education centered on the great books. “The tradition of the West is embodied in the great conversation that continues to the present day,” Beuttler says. “The spirit of Western civilization is the spirit of inquiry and dialogue. You’re in dialogue with Plato, with Machiavelli, with Milton.”
I teach people who are so hungry to learn.
Beuttler shares Hutchins’s conviction that a liberal arts education can lead to wisdom. “The liberal arts are probably not going to get you your first job or your second job,” Beuttler says. “But they will get you your fourth and fifth. The liberal arts equip you for higher-order thinking—to synthesize your life experience, education, knowledge, and research.”
Beuttler’s current work in progress centers on the University’s founding president, William Rainey Harper, and his vision for the early University. Harper imagined an institution with three divisions: the University proper, the University press, and the University extension, which became the Graham School. From the beginning, Beuttler says, Harper wanted the University extension to not only accommodate working people unable to attend classes full-time, but also to foster lifelong learning. “Harper didn’t want to merely advance knowledge,” Beuttler says. “He wanted to extend it.”
Beuttler continues to teach an array of liberal arts courses at the Graham School to this day: Civic Virtue and the Common Good, a masters-level course for teachers called Perfecting the Union: Ethical Leadership in American History, and a two-quarter sequence called American Ideas and Ideals. Beuttler sees these adult courses as a way to further his research in the ethical foundations of the democratic way of life. “My mission is to equip adults to participate in the great conversation,” he says. “I teach people who are so hungry to learn.”