@Cue7 My point was that in 1918 UChicago had barely existed as a university for a whole generation. No question, it was part of the forefront of American higher education, but it wasn’t “Stanford” then any more than Stanford was “Stanford” then. As I remember it, the Rockefeller endowment basically vanished by the 1930s – but that happened to other colleges, too. Chicago recovered from that (but I don’t think anywhere near where it had been, relative to other colleges), but its endowment failed to take off when others were benefiting from the affluence of the 80s and 90s, in large part because of its missteps with the college in the postwar period.
Throughout it all, Chicago has maintained its high level of academic excellence and intellectual leadership. Its endowment today is nothing to sneer at – I, for one, don’t have that many billions in my investment accounts, on top of incredibly valuable real estate and buildings. While I agree that Harvard’s and Stanford’s wealth is one more factor why it will be hard for any university to challenge their hegemony in the next decade, I expect Chicago to be able to raise enough money to compete effectively with most if not all of the other top schools.
Fundraising? That is absolutely doable in the near term, especially now that the texture of the university has changed.
Proof: Booth used to not lead in funds, now its Number 3 in all business schools and second only to Harvard if you count the separately managed Booth Naming Gift fund. This is why Booth can go toe to toe with Harvard and Stanford with scholarships and professorships and research grants and centers of excellence - to put it in Snyders words “(to be the) best business school in every dimension”. That will be how UChicago will go toe to toe with the likes of Harvard - by narowing the $$ gap. It does not have to match it, just narrow it. UChicago can do more with less - it has done so in all its history.
In fact, there are people at UChicago who already have the track record to do the fundraising stuff, as well as earning higher returns - in both Booth and the Law School. Recently, the College has been showing that it has been cross-pollinated as well. The biggest hurdle really is:
The University (or the weak programs in the university) just has to get over their “fear” of Booth and the Econ Department being so influential.
As an aside, the “decline” of UChicago began when it banned sports, which though not unwarranted, the action taken was an overreaction. By doing so, it changed its original real ethos of “life of the mind” too far to what we now refer to as “where fun comes to die”. The reintroduction of sports and reintroduction of what some derisively call “pre-professional” programs, and reintroduction of cutting edge applied sciences (it was computer engineering masquerading as applied physics and applied math back then, it is Molecular Engineering now)… through these reintroductions - the university is slowly going back to where it used to be when it was founded. And as we see it now, it is getting the University back on track to where it once was - somewhere at the top of the heap.
UChicago has a clear path to top 3, and based on my observations, it has slowly been rolled out starting in 1998.
“Whither Uchicago?” is a good question, @grreat , but there is more than one way of thinking about it. For me it is a matter of whether the qualities that have historically made the University of Chicago - and especially its College - a different sort of institution from others will persist in form and purpose despite all the material changes the University is undergoing. I care very little about rankings or wealth - I care about those things only to the extent that they are sufficient to sustain the institution. If I worry about anything on that front it is that these things will become their own raison d’etre and will corrupt the institution.
Aristotle thought the most important thing to know about any human activity was its end - its final cause - the good for which we do it. Yes, every action also has material and efficient causes - the necessary basis for the action. But these things do not tell us why we do it. Money and rankings fall very much into these latter categories. If we make fetishes of them and talk about them as if they were important in their own right, we mistake the slaves for the master and we miss what really matters - the form, the spirit and the purposes of the activity we call education.
That bundle of aspirations and achievements we call the University of Chicago stands, I believe, in some danger of losing its distinctiveness. That is what bears watching here, not balance sheets and rates of return. In the unlikely event that Chicago’s endowment rose to the levels of its peer schools, it might have sold its soul for that dubious achievement. If Chicago became another Harvard or Stanford I would no longer care about it.
Does UChicago have to be poor and always in the brink of insolvency in order to to keep its character?
I ask this only because some people on this board fetishize and idealize this “where fun comes to die” thing as if it is what the school is really about.
No.
The school is about “life of the mind”. Big difference.
To conflate the two is to misunderstand what the university is.
@FStratford , it’s rather easy for “life of the mind” to become an empty mantra, a slogan only, when one doesn’t face up to what it actually entails - the sometimes excruciating but frequently also exhilarating experience of replacing vacancy and ignorance with knowledge and understanding in a young human mind. A real education is not an easy slide down into the arms of contentment. Certainly not at the University of Chicago. If the real challenge of learning is taken seriously, none of the good things it leads to come easily. It is frequently dull, frequently painful, frequently tormenting. But, then, the things in life that bring meaning - and surely education is meant to do this preeminently - are seldom very much fun in the usual sense of the word. The fun that is actually achieved in a significant education requires a much more luminous word than that. Keats called life itself a “vale of soul-making”. That sounds about right for four years at the University of Chicago.
I’m not entirely opposed to the more frivolous aspects of college life, which are what people usually label as fun - I indulged in a few of these myself - but they’re not the important part. The important part often goes missing when we start talking about an educational institution as if it was a sausage factory with a business model based on luring rich kids with thoughts of fun, making it easy for them while they’re in school, delivering them to wealth - all to extract big donations… so that the school can be made even more fun, attract more rich kids and so on. That’s a caricature, of course. But is it not also a concern if you take “life of the mind” seriously?
You point it out more succinctly than I do. Life of the mind is fun, if you’re into that sort of thing! In that case the amount of learning one gets is not measure by the amount of suffering one experiences. (Although some of the latter is unavaoidable it should not be the defining experience)
For me if one suffers through UChicago that implies that there was a mismatch somewhere. And that’s the only value that I see in the where fun comes to die mantra. It scares away those who are likely not going to be a match for the school. (Just like that gal on that other post)
Most posters here are either College graduates or had/have kids enrolled in The College. Yet looking forward for the whole university, you have to take into account of the bigger picture: the Graduate Schools, Booth, Law School, Pritzker, Graham School, Divinity School and others. U of C is NOT a LAC. The whole school will suffer if its only attention is on The College.
Booth and Law School are doing great and I expect them to stay on the top 5 in the next 10 years. The crown jewel Dept. of Economics will have $125 million to spend and it should stay at the top. Physical Science also seems to be doing fine (tell me if I am wrong). I have absolutely no clue how the Humanities and Divinity School are doing. The biggest chink in the armor (as @Cue7 repeatedly points out to us) is the BSM area. Zimmer and his successor need to work hard to stem the decline (at the very least) .
My guess is that in 10 years U of C will be even better known among laypeople and will have a bigger endowment. Unbeknown to the misguided “gal on that other post”, U of C has been well known to business world and lawyer circle for decades. Still to drive up the endowment you need name recognition. U of C has to stay intellectual but it doesn’t have to be the proverbial “poor graduate student”. A bigger endowment will allow more risky ventures. I don’t know what’s going on inside the Board of Trustee but my guess is that this is the direction they are taking: higher school name profile and bigger donation to fuel more growth in high cost STEM area.
@85bears46 said Chicago will seek: " higher school name profile and bigger donation to fuel more growth in high cost STEM area."
Wouldn’t all top research Us follow the same path? How can Chicago make up ground? That’s the biggest question. For Law, Business, Div School, etc., Chicago didn’t have to make up much ground. Chicago’s been top 5 in many of those areas for decades.
It’s much harder to go from top 20 to top 5, than it is to go, say, from #4 to a #2 or even #1 ranking in some year. And that’s where Life Sciences seems to be - toward the bottom of the top 20.
Again, I just don’t know how ground can be made up when the peers are already moving so fast. Also, say what you will about Chicago College’s rank, it’s probably still behind the tippy top in terms of actual student preference, outcomes, etc.
To close - lots of schools are looking to bring in funding to support resource-intensive subject areas. How does Chicago bridge the gap with its more well-heeled peers?
Zimmer has to start somewhere. What do you expect him to do? Wave the white flag and let you your beloved UPenn take over the world?
Obviously, there is no easy and simple solution to the funding problem and BSM decline. I don’t pretend that I have one. But just saying the well-heeled peers are better won’t solve the problem either.
Don’t understand the obsession with “closing the gap” - something Cue believes to be impossible in any event. Not only does that suppose that there is only one univocal model for every institution, but even if that were so, it seems odd that one would celebrate the status of a sole dominating institution and lament a condition in which all institutions are pushing ahead and making improvements, each according to its own lights.
I detect in our beloved Cue a champion of the Darwinian struggle for survival. Is that the way it works among educational institutions? Or could it be that each of these organisms occupies its own niche and has its own unique destiny and goal? Let’s grant that Chicago will never achieve the many-hued splendor of Harvard. The case has been made, and I don’t need any more data points in confirmation… though how Harvard can fire anyone up will always be a mystery to me. But then I have never understood how anyone could be a Yankee fan. Harvard, the Yankees - being a fan of either is too much like being a coupon clipper.
@85bears46 - what’s wrong with a realignment of aspiration? Is there any problem in saying Chicago aims to be world leaders in areas such as law, business, econ, etc., and having a healthy, regional hospital system is germane to the U’s research interests?
I’m not sure why the aspiration on the life sciences end is so lofty and unrealistic. Chicago’s real peers on the med school end are places like Vanderbilt, Emory, Case Western, and UNC. There’s no shame in that. Why not realign expectations and set our performance in that area based on those peers?
Part of Chicago’s problem is the albatross of history - it used to be world-leading in so many areas, and the aspirations never really re-aligned to fit the current reality.
Further, in terms of raising the name profile, why not try something out of the box there? Right now, UChicago could partner with Manchester United to offer data analytics to the football club, and probably has loads of phd students and undergrads who could provide quant analysis. It could get (close to free) world-wide advertising that way. Or, partner with the NFL. Make “UChicago Economics” a brand that’s known in football circles, and not just academic ones. If we’re the “Free Speech” university, plant a flag in DC that stays close to the epicenter of this. Partner with NPR and deliver broadcasts from Hyde Park every week (I think the Vice Chairman of NPR is a Chicago alum, actually). Broaden and diversify the ways Chicago reaches households.
Chicago’s not going to catch up playing the same game as its peers. And, from what I can see, it’s just playing the same game, more or less. I can’t name a single thing Chicago is doing that seems distinct, in terms of development and fundraising and profile-building, than any of its peers.
UChicago does not and never has played “the same game” as other universities. It is and always has been a hyper- intellectual “life of the mind” refuge for those who would seek it. And it does just fine setting up its graduates for life and career success achieved by using the highly developed cognitive skills it so ably fosters.
UChicago has an excellent argument for donations to increase the endowment. Defining productivity as Output / Inputs UChicago excels. For example, this year UChicago outstripped Harvard in new American Academy of Arts and Sciences members 15 - 10 despite its smaller endowment. Just think how much more outstanding achievements will come out of UChicago if it achieves funding parity (inputs) with its Ivy League “peers.”
While I can say I was at the first football game reintroducing football, “football circles” is probably not a fertile or even desirable market for UChicago. The most useful tie in between NFL football and UChicago I can think of is the use of the Halstead-Reitan neuropsychological test battery (invented at the medical center) for a longitudinal study of football players cognitive status.
@Cue7 - “Part of Chicago’s problem is the albatross of history” - The history you refer to (~ 1915?) goes back to before the lifetime of posters on this board. For my lifetime the mission and quality of UChicago has been constant to improving. The College has more than doubled in size and is attracting amazing students. The campus is more beautiful than ever. The professional schools are in great shape. Yes, UChicago finances can improve. Given that UChicago does more with less it makes an excellent case for donations. While the medical center may be facing challenges my preventive cardio care there is outstanding. When I went in for a totally detached retina last August with complete blindness in my left eye Dr. Hariprasad did an amazing job returning me to 20/25 vision in my operated eye. No whining here!
Law Letters & Society is nothing like Business Econ. The professor in charge of the program has, for years, made applicants all but sign in blood that they have no plans to attend law school. The major is much closer to philosophy than it is to anything resembling a dedicated pre-law program.
We have one. It’s called political science.
Hardly unique sentiments in this thread. On the other hand: at a brunch with alumni over the weekend, I spoke with two very involved Booth alums. Both were fervent believers in the abolition of business schools - including, and perhaps starting with, the GSB. What do they see about Booth that the rest of us don’t?
in practice, this is really a pre-law. How could it not be when the flexibility it offers is tailor made for a Law school application? I is also practically a pre-banking course because of its high selectivity, which banks love (law and mba are graduate degrees that get you into Banking, so it makes sense that their undergraduate counterparts do as well.). The creator of the major may have designed it to be more like Philosophy but he has failed in that regard. I suspect that the University is okay with that.
“We have one. It’s called political science.”
I was thinking more like the way Harvard’s IOP has 15 programs for undergraduates. Harvard’s may not be degrees but they definitely make for happier and more employable students. ergo, happier alumni. My thought is that UChicago’s IOP should even do 1 step further and actually confer a specialized degree, a la Committee on Social Thought but for undergraduates. I think something like that would be interesting…
“Both were fervent believers in the abolition of business schools - including, and perhaps starting with, the GSB. What do they see about Booth that the rest of us don’t?”
Sample of 2, and obviously outliers.
Ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha
-I mean really, thank you. This is so funny, you made my day.
The idea that LLS entrants are practically signing their name in blood eschewing any intent to pursue a law degree down the road is as ludicrous as it is unenforecable - and Prof. Head-Honcho Law School Guy knows that as well as the kids undertaking the major (or their parents, most of whom are well versed with the law themselves and see through this ruse as easily as the rest of us). If there truly is such an “understanding” at the time of acceptance to the major, it’s a big “wink-wink” - anyone perusing the curriculum can easily construct a pre-law program of study from the course offerings. By the way there is nothing more eye-catching than an influential law faculty member’s rec. letter that begins: "We both agreed there would be no Law School in this person’s future, but upon observing [name] over the past three years I have come to observe . . . ".
Would love to know the plans of those graduating with this major. The College embraces pre-professional preparation so highly doubt there’s any shame in considering LLS in the same light.