That’s just not true re: Pubpol. Check the Maroon article before the College Council meeting for the link, moderation blocked it.
Anything with the name of a professional program followed by “studies” is pretty much going to be pre-professional. Thats a no-brainer. If not, maybe the College can rename the “business econ. major” to be “business studies”.
I’ll check for the Google Doc link. Are you referring to the Jan. 26 Katie Akin article? Didn’t see a link on that but maybe looking at the wrong one. Yeah, per TOS CC is going to block references to google docs etc.
The 2/13 one by the same author
I am having trouble, @JBStillFlying , following your speculations regarding these hidden faculty manipulators. If they or he/she truly have a strongly held contrary position on this matter and want to go public with it (as opposed to having an internal discussion with those in charge) are you saying you would be OK with that? I assume that those in charge would not be OK with that. Do I have that right? It would seem to entail at the least a violation of decorum, a break with the chain of command, a breach of collegiality. Having never been an insider in academia I admit I don’t understand the protocol of these things, but I doubt that human nature’s propensity to punish violations of the natural order have been repealed inside walls that happen to have ivy on the outside. Hence my would-be jocular references to the draught of Hemlock and being sent to Coventry. Yes, I believe it would be nice for some of these dissenters to summon the courage to go public. But if those in charge don’t want them to go public, what are they to do except either martyr themselves or have a word with the editors of the Maroon?
I keep making the point and will make it again that the Maroon - with or without input from dissident faculty - is not in full-throated battlecry against this major but is merely seeking some form of disclosure of the details to the whole of the University community. Is that the best the dissidents, if they are operating behind the scenes here, can manage to get from their puppets?
You say that the case needs to be made for the innovation of involving the whole of the University community in the discussion of a new major. But how is that case to be made when the necessary information to make it is ex hypothesi not being provided? How does anyone with a question or potential objection get off that dime?
We are dealing with two innovations here. One of them seems at first blush to be entirely inconsistent with the history of liberal education in the College. The other may be inconsistent with the normal process for introducing a new major. I have to ask myself which of these innovations is the more radical and which should be made first given the inherent conflict between them. To me that’s an easy call. I think any reader of the collected “Aims of Education” talks would find it an easy call. The great figures of the College were always ready to talk about the meaning of a liberal education, and such talk is meaningless if it can’t deal with something as potentially disruptive of the College’s traditions as the introduction of a major designed to teach business skills. It is quite possible - indeed, overwhelmingly probable - that I know nothing of the content of the courses that lead to this major. That is the very reason people like me, including perhaps many current and prospective students, need the enlightenment that an open and robust discussion would bring. I could be convinced by proper information and argument. Being told that it’s no big deal and not something that we need to be concerned about is what upsets more members of the university community, I think, than merely me.
Re: Yale Course of Study Committee. I was never deeply interested in the details of the committee; I just had a crush on one of its members. I believe the students were voting members of the committee. There were only three of them, so even if they voted in a bloc – which would have been rare on any issue in contention – they would need substantial support from faculty/administration to determine the outcome. And the committee didn’t have ukase. It could block proposals, but all it could do positively was to send the matter to the faculty.
As a practical matter, if there was something the administration wanted, it would not have had trouble getting it through the committee over student objections unless it was something really radical (like maybe a business major). Also, in style, Yale – both back then and, I think, still – had a pretty strong culture of respect between the faculty and the undergraduate students. There were a lot of structures that created ties between individual faculty or administrators and students – faculty were associated with residential colleges and often showed up there, everyone always had a faculty advisor, and there were all sorts of back-channel lines of communication through the senior societies or institutions like the Elizabethan Club. There was not a lot of Us vs. Them at all.
@JBStillFlying I am really puzzled by your association of the word “Studies” with pre-professionalism. I associate it with a near utter lack of practicality, since it usually indicates a bunch of disparate methodologies directed at a somewhat diffuse object of study defined geographically – East Asian Studies, African Studies – or by identity politics – Women’s Studies, African-American Studies. There’s nothing pre-professional about it.
“I am having trouble, @JBStillFlying , following your speculations regarding these hidden faculty manipulators. If they or he/she truly have a strongly held contrary position on this matter and want to go public with it (as opposed to having an internal discussion with those in charge) are you saying you would be OK with that? I assume that those in charge would not be OK with that.”
It wouldn’t matter if those in charge are OK or not - tenure decisions are overwhelmingly determined at the department level with minimal interference from those above - and if someone’s already tenured they would have to commit something eggregious like academic fraud or a capital crime to be dismissed.
As to whether I’m personally for academics speaking out - I have no opinion. To me it’s just another issue at UChicago. Faculty manipulating students - on this or anything else - would be another matter - obviously I’d be against that.
“I keep making the point and will make it again that the Maroon - with or without input from dissident faculty - is not in full-throated battlecry against this major but is merely seeking some form of disclosure of the details to the whole of the University community. Is that the best the dissidents, if they are operating behind the scenes here, can manage to get from their puppets?”
- Actually, @phoenix1616 has named the ringleader of the Poster People - the person wrote an Op Ed in the Maroon and here is that link: https://www.chicagomaroon.com/article/2018/1/30/business-usual/
I still can’t seem to locate that google docs link on the 2/13 Katie Akin piece so wondering if my regular browser won’t let me see it? That seems odd. This parent needs some tech support!
“You say that the case needs to be made for the innovation of involving the whole of the University community in the discussion of a new major. But how is that case to be made when the necessary information to make it is ex hypothesi not being provided? How does anyone with a question or potential objection get off that dime?”
- I don't necessarily think a case needs to be made. I'm actually for resolving these things in faculty committees and letting the major play out for a bit before any tweaks and changes (kind of like what happened to LLS). I AM saying that those demanding transparency so that a case COULD be made need to be just as transparent. Perhaps that's happening.
I simply don’t see how this major can be assumed to contradict a liberal education. The Liberal Ed. requirement wouldn’t change. Number of electives won’t change. Approximately 1/3 of total course work would be in the major compared to 2/3 if it was a professional program. You guys are fixated on a concept of liberal ed that defies what UChicago is doing currently, never mind with this new major.
@JBStillFlying I am really puzzled by your association of the word “Studies” with pre-professionalism. I associate it with a near utter lack of practicality, since it usually indicates a bunch of disparate methodologies directed at a somewhat diffuse object of study defined geographically – East Asian Studies, African Studies – or by identity politics – Women’s Studies, African-American Studies. There’s nothing pre-professional about it.
@JHS - couldn’t agree more on that most of what you just listed! What I said was ’ anything with a professional school name followed by “studies”’ (paraphrasing myself here). So Media Studies, Legal Studies, Public Policy Studies, etc. I suppose you can include Film Studies in that as well, but not sure.
re: the link provided in post #125 to the Chicago Maroon, the last comment is funny.
That makes no sense. First, even if that were a general trend, PBPL breaks it. As you would expect from a department whose members all have PhDs in economics or political science, it’s just a mix of economics and political science, two fields which are not generally considered to be preprofessional. Second, the trend you posit does not exist, at least at Chicago. Cinema and Media Studies at Chicago is nothing like actual preprofessional film departments like USC SCA, for example, but a mix of art history and English with a focus on film.
Eero Arum sounds very sincere but he’s totally confusing the proposed bus. econ. Major with an undergraduate business Program.
The bus. econ. Major would take up roughly 1/3 of your total college credits needed to graduate (we’ll see the final number when and if they release that). The rest, of course, will be the Liberal Ed (ie Core) at about 1/3 and Electives (or flexibility to major/minor in something else) for the remaining third. Everyone agrees on that, per comments made on this thread.
An undergraduate business Program, on the other hand, takes up roughly 1/3 of your total college credits needed to graduate with Required Business Core Courses, another 1/3 with your Major (Accounting, Marketing, Finance, Supply Chain, Info. Systems, Int’l Business, etc) and the remaining third with the university-wide Gen. Ed. required of everyone (including all the undergraduate professional schools). Note: that’s a 2/3 weighting of general and specialized Business courses. That, folks, is the difference between a Professional education and a Liberal one.
Young Eero would have a lot more cred by taking a close look at the curriculum of the country’s top undergraduate business Programs: Wharton, Ross, Haas, Kelley, Carlson, and then using that info. to assess the bus. econ. Major.
“Law schools, graduate programs, and employers broadly consider undergraduate business programs unserious and disreputable.”
- Not even sure where this comes from but yeah, that was on the posters. This person was definitely connected to those.
“That makes no sense. First, even if that were a general trend, PBPL breaks it. As you would expect from a department whose members all have PhDs in economics or political science, it’s just a mix of economics and political science, two fields which are not generally considered to be preprofessional.”
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Out of the 1200 credits for the PubPol major, up to 800 are classes with the designation of PBPL. While the area of specialization (300) need not be PUBLIC policy, it must still have a strong POLICY component. And, of course, if you DO take PBPL courses for your specialization, that’s 1100 of the 1200. So where are these PBPL courses taught?
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There are PhD economists and psychologists teaching at Booth. Professional schools and Pre-professional majors rely on experts from other fields all the time.
“Second, the trend you posit does not exist, at least at Chicago. Cinema and Media Studies at Chicago is nothing like actual preprofessional film departments like USC SCA, for example, but a mix of art history and English with a focus on film.”
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That may be so. For instance, there is no Media Studies or, I guess, Legal Studies (since @JHS insists that LLS is anything but) at UChicago. So one can maybe make an argument that THOSE specific pre-professional majors don’t conform.
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Don’t know much about the Film Studies major but pretty sure it includes a creative senior project, right? Do Film Studies majors at UChicago go on to work in the entertainment industry or attend Film School? I have two older kids in the arts and this path is one that some aspiring film makers do pursue: they don’t want to specialize in production till grad school so spend their undergrad in a more liberal artsy major like Film Studies. Not sure how UChicago’s specific curriculum compares to others but yes you are spot on, some of the CA schools undergrad film/animation programs don’t offer the BFA but do track right to places like Cal Arts, UCLA etc. not to mention connections to industry. Film tends to be a location-specific discipline - most film studies majors throughout the US are not going on to film school or working in the industry.
Eero et al realize that - there’s no such thing as a program as opposed to a major at UChicago. For better or for worse, their position is that not only are programs bad, business majors are bad as well - the Core isn’t enough exposure to liberal arts for them. Just to get that straight.
PBPL students take most of their classes in the PBPL dept, but the dept itself is in practice a second, more quanty/econy political science dept. For example, that’s why the Pearson grant was seen by many as a slap at the political science dept - they’re very similar. The MPP is preprofessional but the undergrad major is not, and PBPL students do not consider themselves preprofessional. Accordingly, most are not preparing to enter public policy as a career. Even for the MPPs, Harris is a bit of an outlier among policy schools for its research focus and math reqs, and there’s at least one variant of the MPP explicitly designed to be a terminal MA to prep for economics PhD admissions.
As for film, there is an option to do a creative component, but it’s not required and it requires special approval. I really have no idea how many go to film school, but I imagine that at least a few do - it’s the most obvious thing to major in if you’re in that situation and it does offer some filmmaking classes.
“Business Major” “Business University”
Its not a business degree. Its a business econ major. There is a difference. By conflating the two, he is basically making an argument that a business econ major somehow magically transforms the university to a “business university”, whatever that means. But that is illogical… how in the world does 1 major nullify the character of all the other majors, including his own (philosophy and politics)? It is just not logical.
“Law schools, graduate programs, and employers broadly consider undergraduate business programs unserious and disreputable. No academic institution of the caliber of the University of Chicago offers a business major—unless one includes the Wharton School…”
Ha ha ha ha ha ha. This is a bunch of baloney. UPenn/Wharton, Cal-Berkeley/Haas, MIT/Sloan, Cornell/Dyson… Even if we accept the misrepresentation that the major is a business degree not a business econ major, have UChicago students really gone so far as to refer to these schools as if they are trash? I mean, they repeat at number #3 in USNWR and all of a sudden everyone else but H/S is “disreputable” now? Wow, just wow…
If the info being talked about is right, the College is where they mostly will be in their first year and second year. The world-class Econ department is where they get many of their classes in their third. And the world-class Booth school is involved in their fourth.
I see zero weak spot in terms of quality. It’s definitely better than any biology pre-med considering that Pritzker is a second tier US program or fifth tier worldwide program. One can make an argument that this Business econ will even have a better reputation from the get go than even Comp Sci, or Math, or Chem, or… This makes his claim of “less academically demanding and intellectually rewarding” bunk.
And no, Booth faculty, except for the adjuncts who mostly teach entrepreneurship, are all PhDs in Econ, Sociology, Psychology, Math, Linguistics,… so the whole idea that business econ will be taught by less than qualified teachers is nothing but uninformed bias masking itself as informed opinion. I mean, a “technical vocational school”? Has this kid attended one class at Booth? Self-aggrandizing much?
“But from its inception…”
I’m sorry but this revisionist article is plain wrong. Booth started as an undergrad institution in commerce and politics. This erasure of UChicago history is fake news, period. His ignorance of the university’s history is not an excuse for passing off fiction as fact.
Hard to take the author seriously with so much #fakenews
@phoenix1616: (@marlowe fyi on a couple of ideas for business and lib. ed)
“Even for the MPPs, Harris is a bit of an outlier among policy schools for its research focus and math reqs, and there’s at least one variant of the MPP explicitly designed to be a terminal MA to prep for economics PhD admissions.”
That’s actually interesting, esp. as these tend to be run from the dept. of economics at other schools. Unusual that it’s at Harris.
Now here is something even more interesting and also something I didn’t realize existed before checking out the Harris website: There’s also the five year BA/MPP. Does anything like this currently exist w/r/t Booth - say, five year BA/MBA? The way it works, in part, for Public Policy is: “During their final year in the College, undergraduates register for the first year of the master’s curriculum. Upon fulfilling the College requirements and satisfactorily completing the nine Harris courses, students are awarded a Bachelor of Arts in Professional Option: Public Policy Studies.” So how does that work exactly? If you are taking 9 Harris courses that’s already a full load, correct? When do you find time to complete your College requirements? Also, you do have to apply independently to Harris, I think in your junior year.
Regardless of the logistics, and because apparently you wouldn’t be restricted in what you can take for your undergrad major and would need to complete all of that, what’s wrong with a Bachelor of Arts in Professional Option: Business Studies?
“Eero et al realize that - there’s no such thing as a program as opposed to a major at UChicago. For better or for worse, their position is that not only are programs bad, business majors are bad as well - the Core isn’t enough exposure to liberal arts for them. Just to get that straight.”
- well, a "program" does exist in that it's a liberal arts as opposed to professional program. To be very accurate (and I think I have this correct), a program culminating in a professional degree - be it undergrad: B.Eng, B.Nurs, B.Bus, BFA, B.Arch, etc. or grad: MBA, JD, MD, Master's of Policy or Health or Gov etc. - is a professional program. A program that does NOT so culminate may have a pre-professional track or major but is not considered in and of itself a professional degree program. This sounds very esoteric and most don't distinguish between a degree program and major but they ARE distinct one from another. The professional program is going to be a lot more concentrated in that subject. Architectural studies is a great example: some colleges offer a BA or BS in Architectural Studies (ah - yet another preprofessional "studies" major!) but it's definitely not the same thing as a B.Arch which is a five year studio program and very intense.
Be that as it may, Eero has made a detailed case for not liking business as an undergraduate pursuit. To be fair to the College requirements, a “business” major is still one third of the total. Eero might not think that the Core is enough - but what about the other 12 or so electives? What if someone double majored in Business Economics and Philosophy or Business Econ. and Poly Sci? OK might not happen. But it could - the students might come up with all sorts of interesting combinations.
“Booth started as an undergrad institution in commerce and politics. This erasure of UChicago history is fake news, period.”
Wow - had forgotten this! An important point to remember the College’s history! (also re-affirms that Bus. Econ/Poly Sci not so outlandish after all 
)
There’s no joint degree program with Booth. There are actually a couple with Harris – the BA/MPP, and the BA/MA in International Relations. Among my kids’ friends, there wasn’t anyone who did the former, but there were three people who did the latter (one of whom is now in a PhD program at the Kennedy School). It was an unbelievable amount of work – they basically all became hermits their fourth years, and none of them actually finished on time (they all needed the summer quarter after their nominal graduation). An MA in IR is not exactly a professional degree, although it was definitely a qualification to work at Washington consulting firms.
Story about Chicago vs. the rest of the world: My kids were in graduate programs at the same time. One was getting an MPP at NYU Wagner, the other effectively a Sociology MA through MAPSS at Chicago. They were both taking the required basic Stats for Grad Students course at the same time, which at Chicago also included all of the Harris students. At NYU, the basic text for the course was the manual for one of the leading social science statistical software packages, and the course consisted of learning how to use the software to produce specific types of analyses (a very useful skill). At Chicago, the course began with a mandatory two-week full-time boot camp on linear algebra and proofs for everyone who didn’t clear an assessment test. Then the course itself was entirely proof-based and consisted of learning the math underlying the software package the other kid was studying. Kid 1 wound up with plug-and-play report-generating and -reading skills she could use in her job, but only a very superficial idea of how the reports were being generated, while Kid 2 might have been able to write a new version of the software himself, but he needed further training if he wanted to generate a practical report.
@JHS 's example might tell us something about how business will be taught Chicago-style in the courses for the new major. Isn’t there something in the UChicago DNA that drives things ineluctably in the direction of theory, fundamentals and meanings? If Aristotle Schwartz ever returns to Chicago, we might find him sitting in an entrepreneurship class and pondering the meaning of running a root beer stand.
This is only tangentially related, but as we talk about the potential rise of Whartonites at Chicago, did anyone (maybe current students) know this is a thing:
https://www.chicagomaroon.com/article/2018/2/27/moda/
UChicago students host a fashion show at a downtown club?! And, in the video linked, are those actual UChicago students? It just looks so… cool.
I could make a very snarky comment about what a UChicago student fashion show from circa 1994 would’ve looked like…
Yeah? MODA’s been a thing for a while (2003, apparently)
They have a blog and magazine, too
https://modachicago.squarespace.com/
https://issuu.com/modachicago
Whoa, again, this just looks very… cool.