University of Chicago

The University of Chicago is a private university located principally in the Hyde Park neighborhood of Chicago, Illinois. Founded in 1890 by John D. Rockefeller, the University of Chicago held its first classes on October 1, 1892. Chicago was one of the first universities in the country to be conceived as a combination of the American interdisciplinary liberal arts college and the German research university.

The University of Chicago was the site of the world's first self-sustained nuclear reaction. It is also home to the largest university press in the country. Historically, the university is noted for its unique undergraduate core curriculum as well as other educational innovations pioneered by Robert Maynard Hutchins in the 1930s (including the academic quarter system), and for influential academic movements such as the "Chicago School of Economics," the "Chicago School of Sociology," the "Chicago School of Literary Criticism," and the law and economics movement in legal analysis.

Overview

The University of Chicago is located seven miles south of downtown Chicago, in the neighborhoods of Hyde Park and Woodlawn. The university's campus is noted for its neo-Gothic architecture, which was constructed entirely out of limestone in the late 19th century.

The buildings of the historic Main Quadrangle were deliberately patterned after the layouts of Oxford University and Cambridge University. Mitchell Tower, for example, is a smaller-sized reproduction of Oxford's Magdalen Tower, and the University Commons, Hutchinson Hall, is a duplicate of Oxford's Christ Church Hall.

Contemporary buildings have attempted to complement the style of the original architecture, with varying degrees of success. One of the most striking modern additions is the Regenstein Library, designed by architect Walter Netsch and constructed on the grounds of the former Stagg Field, the site of the world's first nuclear reaction. The campus is also home to Rockefeller Chapel, designed by Bertram Goodhue, and the Robie House, designed by Frank Lloyd Wright.

The University of Chicago's campus is bisected by Frederick Law Olmsted's Midway Plaisance, a large linear park created for the 1893 World's Fair. The bulk of the campus, including the Main Quadrangle, is located north of the Midway, while several of the professional schools are located south of the Midway.

A recent two billion dollar campaign has brought unprecedented expansion to the university, including the unveiling of a new dormitory, a new athletics center, a new hospital, and a new science building. The university plans to direct the next stage of its campaign towards revamping and consolidating dormitories, many of which are far from campus and aging poorly. Plans are underway for the construction of a new dormitory on land south of the Midway Plaisance.

The university's Yerkes Observatory, constructed in 1897, is home to the largest refracting telescope ever built (though Yerkes was never able to match the observation conditions afforded by the mountaintop location of its main competitor, the Lick Observatory).

In 2003, the university's Paris Center opened. The Paris Center, a campus located on the left bank of the Seine in Paris, hosts various undergraduate and graduate study programs. The university's Graduate School of Business also maintains campuses in London and Singapore.

In 2005, construction began on the Jules and Gwen Knapp Center for Biomedical Discovery, a ten-story medical research center, which when completed in the spring of 2008 will be the tallest building on campus, surpassing Rockefeller Chapel. The facility will provide a new venue for translational research programs in children's health, cancer, and other medical specialties at the university.

The campus is also home to the Oriental Institute, an internationally renowned archeology museum and research center for ancient Near Eastern studies. The Institute is housed in an unusual Gothic building designed by the architectural firm Mayers Murray & Phillip. The Museum has artifacts from digs in Egypt, Israel, Syria, Turkey, Iraq, and Iran. Notable possessions include the famous Megiddo Ivories, various treasures from Persepolis, the old Persian capital, a 40-ton human-headed winged bull from Khorsabad, the capital of Sargon II, and a monumental statue of King Tutankhamun.

The Oriental Institute's collection of Persian valuables became the center of controversy in 2006, after a U.S. federal court ruled to seize antiquities held at the University of Chicago. See Chicago's Persian heritage crisis for more information.

Across the street from Oriental Institute is the Seminary Co-op book store. The labyrinthine Co-op, located in the basement of the Chicago Theological Seminary on University Avenue, stocks the largest selection of academic volumes in the United States.

History

Much of the information below is adapted from the University of Chicago's official website.

The University of Chicago was founded by oil magnate John D. Rockefeller, who later called it "the best investment I ever made." The University's founding was part of a wave of university foundings that followed the American Civil War. Incorporated in 1890, the University has dated its founding as July 1, 1891, when William Rainey Harper became its first president.

Westward migration, population growth, and industrialization led to an increasing need for elite schools away from the East Coast, especially schools whose focus would be on issues vital to national development. Though Rockefeller was urged to build in New England or the Mid-Atlantic region of the United States, he ultimately chose Chicago. His choice reflected his strong desire to realize Thomas Jefferson's dream of a natural meritocracy's rise to prominence, determined by talent rather than familial heritage. Rockefeller's early fiscal emphasis on the physics department showed his pragmatic, yet deeply intellectual, desires for the school.

Though founded under Baptist auspices, Chicago has never had a sectarian affiliation. The school's traditions of rigorous scholarship were established primarily by Presidents William Rainey Harper and Robert Maynard Hutchins. Chicago opened its door to women and minorities from the very beginning, at a time when their access to other leading universities was extremely rare. In fact, it was the first major university to enroll women on an equal basis with men.

The University of Chicago was also the first major predominantly white university to offer a black professor a tenured post. In 1947, the university assigned Professor Allison Davis to a tenured post in anthropology.

Unlike many other American universities at the time (with the notable exception of Johns Hopkins), the University of Chicago was set up around a number of graduate research institutions, following Germanic precedent. The College itself remained quite small compared to its East Coast peers until around the middle of the 20th century. As a result, the graduate population at the university, to this day, dwarfs the undergraduate population two-to-one (its undergraduate student body remains the third smallest amongst the top 15 national universities). The faculty-student ratio is also the second-lowest amongst national universities, at four-to-one, and all faculty members are required to teach undergraduate courses.

During the presidency of Robert Maynard Hutchins, the university and the president of rival Northwestern University met to discuss the future of the two institutions through the Depression and the looming war. Hutchins concluded that in order to secure the future of both universities, it was in the best interest of both for the two campuses to merge as the Universities of Chicago, with Northwestern's campus serving as undergraduate education, and the Hyde Park campus serving as the graduate studies campus. What President Hutchins had initially envisioned as the preeminent university in the world was eventually extinguished by the Northwestern's boards of trustees, a result that Hutchins called "one of the lost opportunities of American education."

On December 2, 1942, the world's first self-sustained nuclear reaction was achieved at Stagg Field on the campus of the university under the direction of Enrico Fermi. A sculpture by Henry Moore marks the location where the nuclear reaction took place (now deemed a National Historic Landmark). Stagg Field has since been demolished to make way for the Regenstein Library.

In addition to its groundbreaking work involving nuclear energy, the University of Chicago is also recognized for numerous other significant discoveries, including:

The technique of carbon-14 dating, developed in 1949 by Willard Frank Libby and his team during his tenure as a professor at the university. Libby was awarded the Nobel Prize in Chemistry in 1960 for this discovery.
The discovery of the atmosphere's jet stream.
The discovery of REM sleep.
The development of agent orange, a highly-toxic herbicide that would gain notoriety for its use during the Vietnam War.

In 1955, the University of Chicago became the birthplace of improvisational comedy with the formation of the undergraduate comedy troupe, the Compass Players.

In 1978, Hanna Holborn Gray, then the provost of Yale University, became President of the university, the first woman ever to serve as the president of a major research university.

In 1999, then-President Hugo Sonnenschein announced plans to relax the university's famed core curriculum, including reducing the number of required courses from 21 to 15. When The New York Times, The Economist, and other major news outlets picked up this story, the university became the focal point of a national debate on education. The National Association of Scholars, for example, released a statement saying, "It is truly depressing to observe a steady abandonment of the University of Chicago's once imposing undergraduate core curriculum, which for so long stood as the benchmark of content and rigor among American academic institutions." The changes were ultimately implemented, but the controversy led to Sonnenschein's resignation in 2000.

In 2002, college students at the University of Chicago successfully organized a campaign to remove Taco Bell, one of the nation's largest buyers of American tomatoes, from their campus, scoring one of the first major victories in a nationwide "Boot the Bell" campaign in support of migrant farmers in Florida. The University of Chicago became the national focus of the campaign after students were informed that Taco Bell would be removed from their campus only if there was a show of "demonstrated student support." Within two weeks, members of the campus Anti-Sweatshop Coalition gathered over 45 pages of signatures and endorsements from 14 student organizations and 36 community organizations calling for the removal of the restaurant. Taco Bell was removed from the university's campus in the fall of that year.

In 2006, the University of Chicago's Oriental Institute became the center of controversy when U.S. federal courts ruled to seize and auction its valuable collection of ancient Persian artifacts, the proceeds of which would go to compensate the victims of a 1997 bombing in Jerusalem that the United States claim was funded by Iran. The incident has been seen by Iran as an example of the United States' hostility toward the Iranian people and the Persian heritage. The ruling threatens the university's invaluable collection of ancient clay tablets held by the Oriental Institute since the 1930s but officially owned by Iran.

Divisions and schools

The University of Chicago currently maintains twelve units, grouped into divisions for graduate research, professional schools, the College, the Library, the Press, the Lab Schools, and the Hospitals.

The Divisions: Biological Sciences, Social Sciences, Physical Sciences, and Humanities.

The Professional Schools: the Divinity School, the Law School, the Graduate School of Business, the Pritzker School of Medicine, the Harris School of Public Policy Studies, the School of Social Service Administration, and the Graham School of General Studies.

Faculty and students at the adjacent Toyota Technological Institute at Chicago also collaborate closely with the university.

The university also operates the University of Chicago Laboratory Schools (from day care through high school, founded by John Dewey and considered one of the leading preparatory schools in the United States), the Hyde Park Day Schools (for the learning disabled of otherwise exceptional ability), and the Orthogenic School (a residential treatment program for those with behavioral and emotional problems). The university also administers two unaffiliated public charter schools on the South Side of Chicago.

The University of Chicago Press is the largest university press in the United States. It publishes a wide array of scholarly and academic texts, including the influential Chicago Manual of Style, as well as several academic journals (including Critical Inquiry).

The university's Regenstein Library is committed to providing physical, "browsable" access to print books, in stacks in a single location, rather than relying on offsite storage as many libraries do. At 6.5 million volumes, Regenstein already has more "browsable" volumes than the 3.5 million available in Harvard's Widener Library building. A planned expansion will raise this to 8 million volumes, surpassing the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign (currently the largest with 7.5 million volumes onsite) and making the Regenstein the largest such university library in the United States.

Chicago also operates a number of off-campus scientific research institutions, including the Argonne National Laboratory, part of the United States Department of Energy's national laboratory system. The university also owns and operates the Oriental Institute and has a stake in the Apache Point Observatory in Sunspot, New Mexico. It is also a founding member of the Committee on Institutional Cooperation.

In February 2006, the University of Chicago announced its bid for a U.S. Department of Energy contract to obtain complete management rights to the Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory, which maintains the Tevatron, the world's highest-energy particle accelerator. Fermilab is currently one of the world's primary scientific research centers in the fields of elementary particle physics and astrophysics.

Specific programs

The University of Chicago's economics department is particularly well-known. In fact, an entire school of thought (the Chicago School of Economics) bears its name. Led by Nobel Prize laureates such as Milton Friedman, Ronald Coase, George Stigler, Gary Becker, Robert Lucas, James Heckman, and Robert Fogel, the university's economics department has played an important role in shaping ideas about the free market.

The university is also known for creating the first sociology department in the world, which later founded its own school of sociology. Scholars affiliated with this first school are considered pioneers in the field and include Albion Small, George Herbert Mead, Robert E. Park, W. I. Thomas, and Ernest Burgess.

The university is home to several committees for interdisciplinary scholarship, the most famous of which is the Committee on Social Thought. Members of this program have included Hannah Arendt, T.S. Eliot, Leo Strauss, Allan Bloom, Nathan Tarcov, Friedrich Hayek, Leon Kass, Mark Strand, Wayne Booth, and J.M. Coetzee.

In 1983, the University of Chicago implemented the University of Chicago School Mathematics Project, a comprehensive mathematics program for students from kindergarten through twelfth grade. Today, an estimated 3.5 to 4 million students in elementary and secondary schools in every state and virtually every major urban area are now using UCSMP materials.

Faculty and alumni

Presidents

For each president, the University of Chicago commissions a large portrait that is hung in Hutchinson Commons, located in the Reynolds Club, one of the university's central buildings. The presidents of the University of Chicago have been:

William Rainey Harper, 1891-1906
Harry Pratt Judson, 1906-1923
Ernest DeWitt Burton, 1923-1925
Max Mason, 1925-1928
Robert Maynard Hutchins, 1929-1951
Lawrence A. Kimpton, 1951-1960
George W. Beadle, 1961-1968
Edward H. Levi, 1968-1975
John T. Wilson, 1975-1978
Hanna Holborn Gray, 1978-1993
Hugo F. Sonnenschein, 1993-2000
Don Michael Randel, 2000-2006
Robert J. Zimmer, 2006-present

Notable faculty and alumni

Notable faculty and alumni of the university include: political theorist Hannah Arendt; former U.S. Attorney Generals John Ashcroft, Ramsey Clark, and Edward H. Levi; Nobel Prize-winning economists Gary Becker, Milton Friedman, and Friedrich Hayek; acclaimed Nobel Prize-winning writers Saul Bellow and J.M. Coetzee; former U.S. Senator Carol Moseley Braun (D-IL); current Governor of New Jersey and former U.S. Senator Jon Corzine (D-NJ); influential philosopher, psychologist, and educational reformer John Dewey; Nobel Prize-winning Modernist poet and dramatist T.S. Eliot, Nobel Prize-winning physicist and developer of the first nuclear reactor Enrico Fermi; Nobel Prize-winning experimental physicist and researcher of the photoelectric effect Robert Millikan; Academy Award-winning film director Mike Nichols; prominent philosophers Martha Nussbaum, Paul Ricoeur, and Leo Strauss; current U.S. Senator Barack Obama (D-IL); Pulitzer Prize-winning novelist Philip Roth; current judge on the U.S. Court of Appeals Richard Posner; astronomer and highly-successful science popularizer Carl Sagan; notable anthropologist Marshall Sahlins; current U.S. Supreme Court justices Antonin Scalia and John Paul Stevens; novelist Kurt Vonnegut; and current U.S. Deputy Secretary of State and head of the World Bank Paul Wolfowitz.

See the list of University of Chicago people for a listing of several hundred notable people associated with the University of Chicago.

Faculty, students, and researchers affiliated with the university have received a total of 79 Nobel Prizes. This total is the highest amongst all American universities, and second only to Cambridge University worldwide. For details, see Nobel Prize laureates by university affiliation.

For a survey of other major awards earned by Chicago scholars, such as the Rhodes Scholarships, see the University’s news service report.

Ranking and reputation

The University of Chicago is consistently ranked as one of the top 20 universities in the world by the Times Higher Education Supplement. The international academic rankings table produced in 2005 by the Shanghai Jiao Tong University also listed the university amongst the top 10.

In 2004, the Princeton Review rated the university as having the "Best Overall Academic Experience For Undergraduates" among all American colleges and universities. The College ranked fifteenth (tied with Brown University) among undergraduate programs at national universities in the annual 2006 edition of the U.S. News and World Report college rankings.

High-ranking professional schools include the Graduate School of Business, the Law School, the Pritzker School of Medicine, the Harris School of Public Policy Studies, the School of Social Service Administration, and the Divinity School.

The university also operates the University of Chicago Hospitals, which was ranked the fourteenth best hospital in the country by U.S. News and World Report. It is the only hospital in Illinois ever to be included in the magazine's "Honor Roll" of the best hospitals in the United States.

Sports and traditions

The university's sports teams are called the Maroons, and their athletic colors are maroon and white. They participate in the NCAA's Division III and in the University Athletic Association. At one time, the University of Chicago's football teams (known as the Monsters of the Midway) were among the best in the country, winning seven Big Ten Conference titles from 1899 to 1924, including a national championship in 1905 while playing at Stagg Field. The University is also one of only a few schools to be undefeated in football against the University of Notre Dame. In 1935, Chicago's Jay Berwanger was the winner of the first-ever Heisman Trophy. The following year, Berwanger also became the first player to be drafted by the National Football League.

However, the university, a founding member of the Big Ten Conference, de-emphasized varsity athletics in 1939 when it dropped football and withdrew from the league in 1946. The University maintains an affiliation with the Big Ten schools through the Committee on Institutional Cooperation, a consortium of twelve Midwestern research universities.

The school's mascot is the Phoenix, chosen in honor of the city of Chicago's rebirth after the Great Chicago Fire, and also in honor of the previous University of Chicago, which dissolved due to financial reasons (making the current University of Chicago the second university to carry the name). The gargoyle has become an unofficial mascot of the university, owing to the ubiquitous statues of gargoyles that adorn many of the buildings on campus.

According to a common superstition among university students, stepping on University Seal (located in the main lobby of the Reynolds Club) as an undergraduate will prevent the student from graduating in four years. Another common myth about the university is that nearly 50% of its students marry a fellow alumnus.

Traditions

Summer Breeze - The university's annual spring concert. Past musicians who have performed at Summer Breeze include Wilco, Eminem, Kanye West, Run DMC, They Might Be Giants, Method Man, Moby, Fuel, Nas, Jurassic 5, Talib Kweli, OK Go, Mos Def, and George Clinton. A three-day outdoor festival (including an all-night dance party on the Main Quads) accompanies the event.
Shake Day - Milkshakes sell for only one dollar every Wednesday at the Reynolds Club. The Einstein Bros. Bagels franchise were only allowed to open on campus after adhering to this tradition.
Midnight Breakfast - A midnight breakfast is held during every "finals week" of the academic year, attracting students and faculty members alike.
Track Team Streak - At 10:00 p.m. on the Sunday night before "finals week" of the winter quarter, the University of Chicago track team streaks through the Regenstein Library.
O-Week - Every year since 1934, the University of Chicago has set time aside before classes begin to provide an introduction to the University for all new students.
Lascivious Costume Ball - This event was begun in 1970 and the administration discontinued it in 1987. Students would pay no fee if they came and uncloaked in the nude, a half-fee for wearing an appropriately lacivious (in the eyes of the students running the ball) costume and full fee for remaining in "street clothes". The event was held in Ida Noyes Hall.

Scavenger Hunt

The annual University of Chicago Scavenger Hunt is a multi-day event in which large teams compete to obtain all of the notoriously esoteric items on a list. Held every May since 1987, it is considered to be the largest scavenger hunt in the world. Established by student Chris Straus, the "Scav Hunt" (as it is known among University students) has become one of the university's most popular traditions and has typically pushed the boundaries of absurdity. Each year, the list includes roughly 300 items, each with an assigned point value; the items vary widely, and often include performances, large-scale construction, technological construction, competition, and travel, as well as the traditional "find this item" listings. Most teams fall well short of completing half of the list and instead compete for total points amassed. The more difficult and time-consuming items earn more points, and teams typically devote more resources into these items.

Student organizations

Notable extracurricular groups include the University of Chicago College Bowl Team, which has won 118 tournaments and 15 national championships, leading both categories internationally. The Chicago Debate Society has had a top four team at the American Parliamentary Debate Association's National Championship tournament four out of the past five years.

The university's independent student newspaper is the Chicago Maroon. Founded in 1892, the same year as the university, the newspaper is published every Tuesday and Friday. Chicago Business, published by students in the Graduate School of Business, was founded in 1978.

The University of Chicago's University Theater is one of the oldest student-run theatre organizations in the country, involving as many as 500 members of the university community, producing 30 to 35 shows a year, and selling on the order of 10,000 tickets. It also operates Off-Off Campus, the University's improv comedy troupe, started in 1986 by Bernard Sahlins, one of the founders of Second City.

Though Greek life is not predominant among the undergraduate population, there are many active fraternities and sororities that have established histories with Chicago, including Alpha Delta Phi, Alpha Epsilon Pi,Alpha Phi Omega, Delta Kappa Epsilon, Delta Upsilon, Phi Delta Theta, Phi Gamma Delta, Psi Upsilon, and Sigma Phi Epsilon (fraternities), as well as Alpha Omicron Pi, Delta Gamma, Kappa Alpha Theta, and Sigma Lambda Gamma (sororities). During the school year, Greek organizations usually throw house parties on every night of the week (with the exception of holidays and "finals week").

WHPK, a student-run and University-owned radio station, broadcasts out of the Reynolds Club on the university campus. DJ "JP Chill" has had a rap and hip hop show on WHPK since 1986. It was one of the earliest rap shows in the country and the first in Chicago.

Vita Excolatur, a student-published erotic magazine, began publication in 2004.

In 2006, students at the university launched Hype, a group designed to foster school spirit and unify the undergraduate student body. The administration has worked closely with students in recent years to combat the university's reputation as "where fun comes to die," which some claim have discouraged top students from taking the university into serious consideration when researching colleges.

In addition to "where fun comes to die", many other unofficial school mottos exist, such as "the level of hell Dante forgot" and "hell really does freeze over". Commenting on the supposed unattractiveness of the student body, "where the squirrels are more attractive than the girls" and "where the squirrels are more aggressive than the guys" are two other such mottos.

Doc Films

Doc Films, founded in 1932 (originally the Documentary Film Group), is the oldest student film society in the country. In Vanity Fair's "Film Snob's Dictionary", Doc Films is described as: "Hard-core beyond words and lay comprehension, the society is populated by 19-year olds who have already seen every film ever made, and boasts its own Dolby Digital-equipped cinema and an impressive roster of alumni that includes snob-revered critic Dave Kehr.""The Film Snob's Dictionary," Vanity Fair, March 2004, p 332

During the school year, Doc Films screens a different film on every night of the week. Foreign films and documentaries are typically screened on weekdays, while recent, mainstream selections are shown on weekends. Occasionally, Doc Films screens works that have not yet been released to the general public, such as Corpse Bride and Brokeback Mountain.

Doc Films has hosted many Hollywood luminaries as guests, including Alfred Hitchcock (Psycho, Vertigo, The Birds), Fritz Lang (Metropolis), and Woody Allen (Annie Hall, Manhattan). Most recently, in November 2005, director Ang Lee and producer James Schamus visited the University of Chicago to screen the film Brokeback Mountain a month before its American debut, and to participate in a question-and-answer session with students.

References

Image gallery

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External links

Official Pages

Official website
Map of the university campus
A Student Prospectus – A viewbook for prospective students of the College. (Recently updated.)
The University of Chicago Virtual Tour – A virtual tour of the campus.
The University of Chicago Marketplace – An eBay-like online marketplace for students and faculty.

Student Publications

Chicago Maroon – Independent student newspaper.
Chicago Weekly – Independent student weekly.
Chicago Review – The University of Chicago's literary magazine, published by the Humanities department.

Other Resources

Chicago Maroon blog – From the editors of the Chicago Maroon.
The University of Chicago Magazine blog – From The University of Chicago Magazine.
The University of Chicago wiki – Articles about the University of Chicago.
New York Times Article: "University of Chicago Comes to a Fork in the Road" – Article about proposed changes in the undergraduate core curriculum. First published in the December 28, 1998 edition of the New York Times.

Note

The University of Chicago is often confused with the University of Illinois at Chicago, a public university.

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