I’ve been lurking on this forum for a while and I now think I have some thoughts and observations to add. First, some background. My spouse and I both got our B.A.s and graduate degrees (in humanities fields) from Yale, I also went to graduate school at Oxford. Thanks to my career (in “the higher journalism”); my friendships with a lot of academics; my occasional lectures, talks, and seminars on campuses; and my family background (my dad was a university professor), I believe that I have a glimpse–a partial and distorted one, no doubt–into trends and developments in academe.
Our son attends what has traditionally considered the most academically rigorous New England prep school. My spouse and I strongly encouraged his inclination to apply early to UChicago, and he was lucky enough to be admitted in December. His test scores, unusually rigorous course of study, very high GPA, national prizes, and high-achieving activities would have made him a competitive candidate for admission to any college. But he believes, and his parents have long believed, that the University of Chicago offers an unrivaled–and unique–learning environment. He loves drama and sports and certainly does not plan to pursue a career in academe, but he thinks that college is, or should be, well, primarily an intellectual activity and that the only real point of attending an institution of higher learning is to immerse oneself in “the life of the mind.” Given those priorities, and after visiting and/or querying friends at HYPS, etc., he became convinced that UChicago was the best place to continue his education.
To him, and to his parents, the main feature that distinguishes the College of the University Chicago from its peers is its longstanding and straightforward (and, in its own way, modest) embrace of its mission to provide its undergraduates with a rigorous education, and to define broadly for its students what they must learn to emerge from the College as educated people. That is, the College of UChicago still seems to define its goal almost wholly in scholarly and intellectual terms. Our son examined closely the explicit and implicit mission statements of, and the admissions policies pursued by, UChicago’s peer institutions. From that endeavor he came to believe that those schools elevate the pursuit of other goals, however worthy, as of equal or nearly importance to–and thus place those goals in competition with–their academic purpose.
From my understanding, there’s really nothing new about this difference. The colleges of HYPS have always seen their primary mission as nurturing regional and national leaders through the inculcation and advancement of certain non-intellectual values. Those values have changed over time (from, say, a muscular Christianity, to a WASP-led progressivism, to today’s “social justice”), but the mission has remained the same. In contrast, it seems to us that UChicago takes and has always taken an academically and intellectually purer path. It has sought to train its students minds and has implicitly taken the position that what the College’s graduates choose to to do with their intellectual training is their business. It’s an approach that was pretty much unconcerned with outcomes–again, be those outcomes the creation of leaders in business and politics, or the inculcation of “character.” In his college search, our son kept saying that most elite colleges seemed to see it as their goal “to make the world a better place” (echoing the tagline of the series “Silicon Valley”). Again, that goal might be laudable, but it is really unrelated to the purpose of higher education, which is the acquisition and pursuit of knowledge–however much that acquisition and pursuit might ultimately contribute to that 'Silicon Valley" goal. Certainly, many graduates of the College of UChicago have made and will make the world a better place. Others have pursued and will pursue pure scholarship with no worldly application; others have pursued and will pursue social justice; others might pursue revolution–or reaction. Most graduates, of course, have made and will make little or no impact on the wider world–but their minds and therefore their lives have been and will be immeasurably enriched by the demanding training that their UChicago education gave them. This isn’t to suggest that a great undergraduate education cannot be pursued at Chicago’s peer institutions. But because those institutions define their purposes so expansively and so extracurricularly, those purposes (which crucially of course include the supposed enrichment that accompanies the recruitment and fielding of 30 or so D1 athletic teams) can and will work at cross purposes with the academic and intellectual pursuit that defines UChicago’s traditional mission.
Do some of the changes at UChicago threaten that traditional mission? I’ll leave it to others on this forum, who are far more familiar with the past and present UChicago, to debate and decide that question. It seems to me that the answer is “yes, probably.” I, for one, I’m concerned about the apparent intensification of interest in attracting more and better athletes. And while the College’s efforts to secure better jobs for its graduates is commendable, I’m concerned that that those efforts might inculcate a pre-professional ethos on campus. (Also, a lot of the trends in academe, itself, seem to me hostile to the University of Chicago’s traditional mission. I’m less than thrilled with a lot of the upper-level course offerings in the humanities, especially in English, which seem to be academically trendy and to be striving to be relevant to contemporary, and ephemeral, concerns.)
But I also know that so many of the changes at UChicago are laudatory. Our son, for one, was certainly not interested in attending an urban university that could not guarantee four years of campus housing. In the ancient days of my own college search, the U of C seemed in some ways ideal–but it also seemed unnecessarily grim. More important, given the then pretty wide disparity between the median SAT scores of students at UChicago compared to those at HYP, I had a sense (echoed by at least one contributor to this forum) that not all of UChicago’s students were of top academic quality. To the extent that my sense was correct, the situation is now completely different. (I should add that in the late 1970s/early 1980s, the median SAT scores at Stanford, which had not yet fully emerged as the world-class university that is today, were also significantly below those of HYP).
I felt that UChicago’s motto kind of sang to me and I felt that today’s Chicago fulfills its motto more authentically than Harvard does.