@Chrchhill at #118 - nah. Not at all. And my I remind you and everyone that attributing intent to someone’s post breeds a bit of discord. Rather than react, inform.
Since you mention Nobels here’s something for you to look into: MIT’s list. It’s been growing. And their endowment is currently twice the size of UChicago’s. I know I know - MIT is not a “peer school”. But guess what - in economics it actually is, which is why it leapt over UChicago to be placed at #1 (tied with several other big guys). This slip is not surprising - it only confirms what I’ve been hearing from academics about UChicago. MIT, Stanford and Yale have all been hiring the top guys away from other places and they likely will continue to do so.
There’s big money in academics and you need money in order to keep up with the biggest. You can optimize your admissions plans, shore up your career services and build wonderful new dorms for the undergrads, but if your academic departments start lagging the big guys, you will slip. Where the academics go, so goes the reputation.
Programs like the $750 Knight/Hennessey scholarship at Stanford helps ensure that 100 of the best grad students in Business, Law, or Medicine will choose Stanford. Does UChicago have something equivalanet to compete? What is it paying it’s social science grad students? Because Yale is paying them big bucks right now (for a PhD student, at any rate). You. Need. Money.
We do agree that money matters. Uchicago just increased its fund drive to 5 billion from their already successful 3;5 million. Look at the converse however. Columbia and Penn have bigger endowments and UChicago tops them in the vast majority of academic fields except life sciences / medicine. UChicago law and Booth top Columbia law and business schools. Wharton and Penn are Neck and neck. CHicago law is in different league than Penn law. UChicago needs to get serious about the med school. That one has been declining.
@Chrchill said: " UChicago needs to get serious about the med school. That one has been declining."
And that one costs by far the most money… @Chrchill - the difficulty is that Chicago’s life sciences/med school is ALREADY behind Columbia, Penn (and Yale, Duke, etc.), but Chicago is only raising a comparable amount of money to these other schools.
My math here is rough, but if one med school is seen as top 5, and the other is seen as top 15, and they both raise about the same amount of money, how does the top 15 school catch up? Logic would dictate that the lower ranked school would have to raise a LOT more to cover the lost ground.
Yes. Agree. Part of the problem is also that UChicago has not made the real concerted effort needed for the med school. Law and Business were always the favorites. However, UChicago remains top of the line in PHysicas and Astronomy. @JBStillFlying How doesyiur theory e nobles square with Harvard and Yales not even being in top ten since 2000 ? Money is key. But it is not dispositive. In fact, that UChicago has outnobellled the much richer Harvard and Yale speaks volumes about UChicago.
@Chuchill at #119: You are correct absolutely correct. Right now. Top competitive undergrad. programs tend to be correlated with - but do not cause - a university’s elite status. The undergrads will follow the ranking which is partly determined by peer reviews and academic reputation. UChicago has done an outstanding job with it’s undergraduate program, but it might be falling short in a few departments when it comes to hiring the stars who will keep the academics at top levels.
When Schonnenschien started to increase the undergraduate presence, there was big blowback due to concern that the grad departments would suffer from lack of resources. Given the university’s endowment, this was a legitimate concern. It’s a give-and-take. The biggest underutilized asset at the university was, obviously, the undergrad. program so the decision to restore to the glory days of the university is not only smart, it was necessary. Undergraduate tuition funds the grad students, whether the faculty and grad students realize that or not.
Now that the College is rightfully in the place it belongs (top 5), it’s time to focus on hiring and retaining top faculty and grad students. No doubt the College was following a university-wide effort to compete with Stanford et al. It’s ambitious and delightful to watch. It’s also offensive to many, who believe that somehow universities aren’t (or shouldn’t be) subject to the forces of the market or competitive bidding. But as we progress along as a knowledge-based economy, those forces are only going to become more apparent. There are huge returns to a college education and universities understand that more than anyone else.
@Chrchhill, nobel laureates are wonderful assets to brag about but they are based on work done in the past. Particularly in economics and business. If UChicago doesn’t hire today’s stars, they won’t be able to brag about the nobels tomorrow (or 20 - 30 years time).
Totally agree with you on it’s rep. for physics and astronomy. And I have no insider information on those areas since my kids, sadly, are shying away from the hard sciences in terms of a career choice.
UChicago should be ahead of Penn and Columbia. It’s what it takes to mainain in the top 5-6 that I’m referring to.
Maybe all the Naviance data got logged wrong. I hear that most of the Chicago data got reported under this upstart university in California UC - Hicago. I hear it is a good UC school, and Hicago is the hottest town in CA right now, which is growing rapidly. Many CA residents have told me that UC - Hicago is a strong competitor to UC - Berkeley and UCLA
@denydenzig This is why I’m glad about “UChicago”. We called it U of C and that’s also what I called Cal Berkeley back in the day. Over the past 30 years these uni’s have established a solid national rep. and now it’s a matter of having a worldwide identity. Everyone needs their own name.
UChicago’s on a roll–new Dean of Booth from Stanford, new Dean of Harris from Harvard, new Director of Smart Museum from Stanford, new Comp Sci Chair from Berkeley, etc., etc.
re the Ellison Letter, and @exacademic 's daughter’s reaction to it:
100% of the current Chicago students and recent alumni with whom I have discussed this disliked the letter, including several comparatively conservative students. Not a big data set, of course. But people are fooling themselves if they think Chicago students are somehow vastly different than their counterparts in the Ivy League and elsewhere on these issues. All of them thought that the question of academic freedom vs. inclusiveness for marginalized students was an important one, and all of them thought the letter was not sufficiently subtle for the University of Chicago, did not reflect the actual, more nuanced campus culture, and was effectively a PR stunt that was not worthy of the institution.
And just to prove that anecdotes are not data, the UChicago alums near me were in favor of the lettter. Don’t know any current students well enough to ask.
Yup, those were exactly my D’s reactions (and those of her HS classmate who was also headed to UofC), though she sought reassurance on the actual campus culture issue. Was relieved to find, once she arrived, that her initial impressions had been accurate and that the Ellison letter was the outlier. But, initially, both kids felt really betrayed (bait and switch) when they received the letter. It wasn’t what they expected from a school that prides itself on intellectual rigor. For them, the letter functioned more as a Mosquito* than a “dog whistle.”
Every Chicago alum of a certain age that I know cheered the letter, including some who were sending their kids there last year. Not sure how their kids reacted.
There is, without doubt, a “generation gap” on this issue. I’ve watched a couple of youtubes by current students who explained the letter and their reaction to it - one in particular was quite thoughtful. The issue of safe spaces and trigger warnings are very important to this age group, and this young woman was no different. She was putting the letter in context after having done a ton of research on the arguments for and against. Her overall take it that 1) it was NOT what practically all of her fellow students were saying it was, and that 2) you absolutely had to read the booklet that accompanied the letter or else you just didn’t understand the purpose of it.
The university is taking a long and wide view of the issue, which is very much in contrast to the “here and now” majority viewpoint. As much as I respect the integrity, thoughts, and feelings of the student community, most of them simply don’t have the historical knowledge or long-term understanding prompting the university’s issuance of letter and booklet. For instance, the idea that it somehow doesn’t reflect the university is plain ignorance of the university’s own history and historical statements on the subject (because, believe it or not, this is not the first time this subject has arisen). Everyone is welcome to go and read Harper, Grey, et al. on the subject.
The Ellison letter was ham handed. He would have be much better off if he sent out a letter which said, “See the attached”, and then enclosed the Chicago principles written by a group headed by Prof. Stone, which is an exquisite piece of writing–especially for a legalistic document.
@kaukauna If he had done that Chicago would have received no publicity at all. They got non stop coverage for over a week and if you look at the comments in various news outlets the positive comments far outstripped the negative. Free publicity, overwhelmingly positive reviews from the outside world and setting up Chicago as the poster child for free speech? That is brilliant marketing in my book. I maintain that it was primarily a positioning strategy done to induce specific response not to be intellectually pure. Most marketing campaigns are not meant to be pedantic. They are deliberately meant to be viscerally emotional
Not exactly sure that the booklet was put together by the marketing or development office. It was an academic explanation of why the university was stating this position.
Edit to add: Not sure it was press-released either. It was distributed to the community. Naturally, it made its way to the press. I could be misremembering how it all went down but most of the commentary I recall mentioned that it was something that was distributed to the students and their families.
The book was real UChicago, but if they had just sent the book nobody would have even talked about it. The letter was inflammatory, in your face, controversial, perfect marketing trick. People barely mentioned the book. Everybody talked about the letter. The academic Chicago was captured in the book. The marketing campaign just wanted a sparkling soundbite that would force the news outlet to take notice.
An institution comes out and says they don’t condone trigger warnings and safe spaces because such practices lead to shutting down speech, and they are accused of being inflammatory. The irony of that is beautiful.
