This project identifies the particular strain of humanism animating Marshall Hodgson’s scholarship and traces it through his departmental and administrative functions at the University of Chicago, where Hodgson played a major role in the building period of Islamic Studies between 1956 and his death in 1968. This project makes substantial use of Hodgson’s papers at the University of Chicago, along with the archives of the John U. Nef Committee on Social Thought, the Ford Foundation Cultural Studies Program, and faculty members with whom Hodgson had contact. Hodgson’s extant departmental and personal correspondence and notes record a profoundly felt obligation, which Hodgson connected to his status as a humanist and a Quaker, that historians should be “architects of community.” This view is synthesized in every mode of Hodgson’s expression: from his Doctoral exam responses to his Christmas letters; from his recommendations on grading policy to his writings in the Quaker House newsletter. This paper focuses on the way that Hodgson’s unified sense of his mission as a scholar and person played out in his professional life. As the creator of the first interdisciplinary Islamic History and Civilization course in the United States, as a founding member of the new Committee on Near Eastern Studies, as Chairman of the Committee on Social Thought, Hodgson stressed true cooperation across disciplines (including with scholars from the natural sciences) and the teacher-student relationship. These preoccupations are reiterated over ten years of his professional actions. Among these, Hodgson was instrumental in founding the New Collegiate Division at the University of Chicago, an interdisciplinary fifth division of undergraduate study that partially reflected Hodgson’s ideal vision of the university laid out in his notes and letters. In Hodgson’s fantasy, classes were done away with and the foundation of study was the individual relationship between tutor and student. Hodgson imagined a university as a place where visiting tutors and students of all ages and disciplines interacted outside of prescribed programmatic structures (the doctorate would be abolished), coming and going as they pleased, with progress measured by a series of exams and certificates awarded. The profound impact of Hodgson’s scholarship on the fields of Middle Eastern and Islamic studies is well-documented. This project examines the notable unity of Hodgson’s preoccupations as they extended to his professional life, and provides a new perspective on the humanistic activism of a singular scholar and man.