Fall 2001 was a lousy time to start a magazine; the Common Review had just put out its inaugural issue when the World Trade Center was attacked: The difficulties were huge, says editor Daniel Born. “We had to totally rethink [the next] issue. Do you make it topical or timeless?” Ultimately, Born shot for both, writing in winter 2001 that “the life of the mind must go on, and ideas need not and cannot be suffocated under the weight of headlines or even keening, unquenchable grief.”
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The Chicago-based nonprofit foundation was founded in 1947 by University of Chicago president Robert Maynard Hutchins and philosopher and educator Mortimer Adler. Hutchins believed that a liberal education had become the province of the academic elite but that the “common man” required higher learning to engage in the public dialogue that makes a democracy great. Toward that end, the foundation started informal adult discussion groups, led by trained facilitators, for the purpose of reading and discussing the classics: Jane Eyre, Anna Karenina, Moby-Dick.
“Do you need a liberal education? I say that it is unpatriotic not to read great books. You may reply that you are patriotic enough without them. I say that you are gravely cramping your human possibilities if you do not read these books.”
Born already had Chicago connections. He was born in Montana in 1956, the son of Mennonite missionaries, and spent his formative years in Brazil, where his father taught the New Testament at a seminary in Curitiba. He came back to the States in 1974 to study English and philosophy at Tabor College in Kansas, then went to the University of Kansas for his master’s. He could’ve taken a teaching job at a small Mennonite junior college in Kansas, he says, but his wife, Mary Classen, got a job as a social worker in Chicago and they decided to move to the city. Born found work at Kroch’s & Brentano’s, and the couple settled in Lakeview for two years.
“A lot of magazines are extremely focused on personalities and trends,” says Born. “It’s the influence of People on high culture. What is that ‘average reader’? I’m more interested in an article that talks about Stanley Fish’s ideas rather than the color of his tweed jacket or the way he likes to talk like a tough plumber from time to time. And we published an article that did that. What are the lasting ideas going to be when the personalities fade?”
