You draw your own conclusion. But here are my observations:
7,000 students for The College => 1,750 per class. So for class 2023, the admission rate will be lower.
College going to semester will be a major violation of U of C history and tradition, not to mention the spirit of the school. I do not see it happening anytime soon.
The 15 course Core likely will remain the same to keep at least the basic identity of U of C unchanged in the near future.
And I would like my fellow seasoned U of C commentators to focus on the potential impact on current and future College students instead of ranking and other admission aspects.
I have no interest triggering any debate about ranking.
It would be hard to imagine the College without a quarter system. Having what for most schools would be a semester’s worth of material covered in 10 weeks amplifies the intensity of the place and creates simply a greater number of subjects to study and more to learn through a college career. I have never before heard the idea floated that a semester system would be desirable at Chicago and was shocked to hear Boyer doing that. It does reinforce a certain concern one has about him that he is not, with all his long service to the College, respectful of its traditions. No doubt there’s an argument to be made for it. If so, he ought to have given us some of it rather than have simply put the bare and unsupported thought out there, immediately followed by the caveat that it wouldn’t happen because the faculty is opposed. What was he up to there? It almost sounds like a personal vanity project - the overturning of something as basic as that being the capstone of his long project of dilution of Chicago-style rebarbativeness. Perhaps he has earned that right, he loves the school and may even have been its savior: but a good substantive discussion of the matter, if it is serious, would have been more in the spirit of the place. Perhaps that discussion is taking place elsewhere, and this is merely the first tantalizing report of it.
And why not provide some more cogent rationale for fixing the College’s enrollment at 7,000 than merely that that is Harvard’s enrollment? It sounds suspiciously like he wants the College to emulate Harvard College in more respects than the number of its students. That’s rank heresy. Leave Harvard out of it, please.
Boyer did provide his rationale for considering a semester system and his rationale specifically mentions his understanding of Chicago traditions.
“As for the semester system, I have long (since the 1990s) been an advocate of our going on the semester system, but this is definitely a minority opinion, since I suspect that the great majority of the faculty favor retaining the quarter system. This issue has nothing to with under- or over-enrollment, and right now we are neither under- nor over-enrolled. Rather, it has to do with my sense of the relentless nature of the quarter system, as experienced by students, and that the semester system would afford our students a better educational learning environment. But, as I say, I doubt that the University will ever abandon the quarter system. We have had it since 1892, and it seems to have become a permanent fixture of our identity.”
I love Marlowe’s comments if for no other reason that he often forces me to visit my dictionary. And in his honor, when I do this, I consult a real paper and cardboard version of Noah Webster’s original.
It is a reference to Chicago tradition but a negative one - as are many of Boyer’s references.
I suppose “relentless nature of the quarter system” is a rationale, if a poor one. However, he’s really on to something when he calls the quarter system “a permanent fixture of our identity”. I very much remember the eternal recurrence of that quarterly rhythm, playing out over ten weeks, with a beginning, a middle and an end, as Aristotle would approve. In the first few weeks there was a deceptive leisure and expansiveness. That tone began to change in the middle weeks, as one struggled to synthesize the material. Hints of despair started up. Could one really understand this stuff? Then came the iron finale in which one accepted one’s limitations before the limitlessness of the subject. Now there were only these practical objectives left - to produce a paper, to pass an exam. The denouement of any course brought a degree of satisfaction, even exhilaration, however limited had been one’s success.
The acquisition of knowledge is hard and endless. Shoehorning the drama into ten weeks, and then another ten and another ten, keeps the struggle at high tension. Two semesters would be a dilution. However, doing something entirely different in the summer is certainly a good idea.
You do realize, don’t you @marlowe1, that Chicago is hardly alone in using a quarter system? Stanford, Northwestern, Dartmouth, UCLA . . . all have pretty much the same calender. It’s part of their character, too.
True. I wasn’t claiming, for once, exceptionality. However, even with a few other schools - and some important ones, at that - on the quarter system, they are still very much a minority and one more indicator of something just a bit eccentric. Someone with more patience than me may total up the numbers for the top schools.
My observations about the connection of the quarter system to academic intensity were specific to my experience at Chicago. Whether that is the effect at these other schools I can’t say. It’s bound to vary depending on school culture.
It would be interesting to know the chronological order of introduction of the system into the schools that do use it. Dartmouth is of course a very old school, but does the quarter system date to its origins? Probably not. It sounds to me like it might have been a new idea introduced by upstart schools like Chicago and Stanford. It smacks of some of those turn-of-century ideas inspired by concepts of industrial efficiency. Chicago was always said to have been conceived on the lines of the great German universities, as opposed to the British ones. That might also have been a factor.
Actually, I think you have it backwards. The academic year at Oxford and Cambridge consists of three three-month terms (including their breaks) from September through June, and a long summer vacation. Each term includes eight weeks of instruction, a reading period, exams, and a break. So . . . essentially a quarter system, with no summer quarter. German universities have always been on a semester system – Winter (October - March) and Summer (April - September) – which also includes breaks.
Since the mid-19th Century, all American universities have essentially been structured on the German model, even the ones that use quarters rather than semesters. I’m not really sure what any of them actually did before that, and how much if at all they modeled themselves after Oxbridge, but starting with the founding of Cornell American universities quickly adopted what were seen as cutting-edge German innovations – such as a focus on research, recognizing the importance of graduate education, organizing faculties into departments by subject matter, and having undergraduates have a major field of study. Chicago and Stanford were very much part of that trend, but the pre-existing American universities quickly restructured themselves to meet the modern standard.
The only one of those schools where I know how the quarter system was adopted is Dartmouth. There, it was contemporaneous with co-education, in the early 1970s. The Trustees had made a commitment to the alumni not to reduce the number of men enrolled because women were also being enrolled, but economic times were quite bad, and hardly anyone had money for new construction, much less Dartmouth. It couldn’t build any new dorms, and it had to expand the size of its class by at least 15-20% (the minimum number of women it could enroll without being obviously hostile to women). So it came up with its “D-Plan,” under which everyone would take classes three out of four quarters a year, but only freshmen and seniors could have those three quarters all in the September-June time period. Everyone in a cohort was required to spend their second summer in residence at Dartmouth, plus either their first or third summer, and to take off one of the standard academic year quarters in their second and third years. So, basically, at least 16-17% of the student body was not on campus during any given quarter, and that made room for women, at least for awhile.
Enjoyed and resonated with @marlowe1’s post #5 regarding how the quarter system felt, the beginning, middle, and end (in the way that only someone who knows someone at UChicago can understand lol.) That’s what it sounded like to us when my son says he’d better FaceTime us now because he has a ‘lull, before it picks up again’ as he calls it. We listened to him talk of his ups and downs. My son, having been there only 7 weeks, is a little bit on to this rhythm that @marlowe1 speaks of.
On a separate note, I’m not sure if Boyer is responsible, but my son is really enjoying his time at the university. He has been to visit his friends at many different universities, and he said that he realizes how much there is to do and so many events/offerings happening at UChicago (other than drinking.) whether it be student-led or the university sponsoring it.
His experience there has so far exceeded expectations more than we can imagine. I understand that the greatness of UChicago has much to do with their graduate and research divisions, but I love the way they are able to cultivate the younger up-and-coming ones. Or perhaps the students are able to cultivate themselves. Either way, it’s a once-in-a-life time experience in an unparalleled environment.
Coming from an East Coast university using semester, I find the quarter a rude shock to my system at first. Midterm came at as early as the third or fourth week. In my undergrad years, that was about the time I was getting used to go to that class . Yet in time I came to appreciate the quarter system. It just forced me to be a whole lot more self-motivated in learning or risk falling behind by so much that I couldn’t recover.
If anyone other than Dean Boyer said about a change to semester system, I would dismiss it as a joke. Why would he say that now so late in his career?
On a different subject of the interview, I think a 15-course Core is about the right number, albeit a bit on the low end. Assuming each students takes eleven courses per year, that would still leave plenty of room to explore more classes and dive deep into one’s major.
Just to note that while the Oxbridge system does have three terms per year, it is incorrect to state that “Each term includes eight weeks of instruction, a reading period, exams, and a break.”
In fact exams at Cambridge are only at the end of the year and Oxford doesn’t have exams each term either (though they do have college collections). So you have a full 8 weeks of lectures in the first two terms and then a shorter period of lectures (usually 4 weeks) in the summer and then a revision break before exams (1-2 weeks). The intensity comes from the weekly supervisions/tutorials, but that doesn’t vary through the term, and doesn’t count for anything towards your grades at the end of the day.
As a result the stress is very different in the summer term, due to the all or nothing nature of the final exams. Fortunately at Cambridge you then have a couple of weeks of May Balls (in June) to recover while you wait for results. I’ve never understood why Oxford holds its May Balls in May (before exams).
@85bears46 Apparently, Dean Boyer has been saying that for two decades. We just didn’t know. It it is perfectly consistent with his life’s mission to make Chicago a more pleasant place to be educated without sacrificing intellectual rigor: Does the intensity of the quarter system really have lasting value, or is it just intensity for it’s own sake? I don’t know . . . But people at Chicago do tend to see it as integral to the experience there. I don’t think there’s really much that Dean Boyer is likely to change that he hasn’t changed already.
@JHS I for sure am not aware of any major Dean (College, Business School, Law School or Graduate Division) that has been advocating for a switch to semester system. I do not know the details of internal politics of different academic divisions at U of C. But I will find it astonishing that Dean Boyer can ever make such a big change without at least the vocal support of the majority of the rest of the Deans. The fact that no a single dean has been advocating for it seems to confirm that Dean Boyer is the lone voice on this change. So this may be just his private musing for the last 2 decades and he finally decides to go public at the twilight of his career as a kind of to do list for future College Dean.
It won’t happen. There’s a lot of fat built into the extra 5 weeks of the semester. Most courses - particularly things like calc. and principles of economics - can be taught in 10-week increments, giving the student the opportunity to advance in the subject the next term or move on to something else. It’s lean, it’s mean, it’s a learnin’ machine. Not making a judgement, just passing on info from those who have taught under both systems and prefer the quarter to the semester.
Ok, I’m a noobie to UChicago and the quarter system, but don’t you think that 3 sequence quarter courses can be moved into two sequence semester courses? Calc I plus Calc II plus Calc III at UChicago = Calc I plus Calc II at semester universities?
Does anyone really believe that a UChicago student gets 33% more tools then their counterparts at Harvard or Princeton?
All of the divisions and schools do not have to be on the same academic calendar. At Stanford, the undergraduates are on the quarter system, but the law school (and probably others of the professional schools) has semesters.
Of course John Boyer, even as Dean of the College, can’t change the College to a semester system on his own say-so. As I understand the reports of his speech, he was mentioning that as something concrete that could be done to reduce student anxiety, but it was a battle he had lost definitively a long time ago, not as a proposal that was currently on the table with a possibility of coming to fruition in the foreseeable future.
By the way, I like #45 on the '85 Bears even better than #46. Boola-boola!
@JHS Really? Stanford Law School is on semester while college is on quarter? So how can college students take class in professional schools without a major conflict in schedule? That is news to me.
46 in my acronym refers to the 46 defense. I don’t’ really care about Doug Planck.
I know you would like Gary Fencik and your fellow Yalie. There are people who thinks he was a dirty player. Not me. I love a football player that could talk eloquently off the field and yet could hit with such ferocity on the field that could have warranted a 20 years sentence if he did it on Michigan Avenue against a normal civilian
IMHO, he was a very smart player and not just brute force like many other defensive players on the '85 Bears.
Here is the quote from John Madden about Fencik:
John Madden once said in a broadcast that “Gary Fencik played football at Yale; that is like saying clean dirt”.
. Yet in time I came to appreciate the quarter system. It just forced me to be a whole lot more self-motivated in learning or risk falling behind by so much that I couldn’t recover.