The quote is taken from Hutchin’s inaugural address as the fifth president of the University of Chicago in 1928 and is presented as evidence that the concept of SOTL existed long before Boyer popularized the term. The last sentence suggests that faculty in all departments should carry on experiments in undergraduate teaching and learning … a fundamental activity of SOTL. The sentence further suggests that graduate students preparing for academic careers should learn from these experiments.

Note that Hutchins also presaged the plight of many undergraduates, and the need for programs to prepare graduate students to teach … programs like the Preparing Future Faculty (PFF) initiative of the 1990’s.

“What is certain is that most Ph.D.’s become teachers and not productive scholars as well. [A Ph.D. candidate who plans to be a teacher] must know his field and its relation to the whole body of knowledge. It means too that he must be in touch with the most recent and most successful movements in undergraduate education, of which he now learns officially little or nothing. How should he learn about them? Not in my opinion by doing practice teaching upon the helpless undergraduate. Rather he should learn about them through seeing experiments carried on in undergraduate work by the members of the department in which he is studying for the degree….”
Robert Maynard Hutchins

In the first sentence, Hutchins also expressed a truth still not internalized by many faculty who prepare graduate students in doctoral institutions today … that research productivity that advances the discipline ends with the dissertation for most Ph.D’s. Today, the vast majority (95% is a figure often quoted) of new Ph.D’s who take positions in Academe do so in teaching institutions rather than research universities. In other words, though they may acquire their Ph.D’s in research universities as researchers, teaching is what they will primarily do in academic careers.