what's M.Phil.?

[sagehen]

 I remember the Hutchins years -- or some of them -- both my mother and
brother were at the U of C  during one of those years:  she in grad school,
he a second year undergrad. That was '45-6, so I suppose if he'd stayed on
there he might have had one of those last PhB's. ( Meanwhile, out in the
northern suburbs where I was staying, a good deal of asparagus was being
flung around about the "Boy Wonder" Hutchins.) A couple of years later my
brother & I were both at Reed College where a program somewhat similar to
Hutchins's Great Books had been in place for some time: most of one's first
two years were given over to a wide-ranging Humanities course designed to
provide a thorough grounding in Western Civ using primary sources.
(Unfortuntely, in my case, my placement exam had been intrepreted to load
me up with the two years simultaneously, which I was unprepared, at 17, to
handle.) Twenty-odd years later, my daughter had a similar program at St
Johns/Santa Fe, adopted, I think, under Meiklejohn, and probably also
influenced by Hutchins.
A. Murie