Overview of the University of Chicago

(Adapted from One in Spirit: A Retrospective View of the University of Chicago on the Occasion of Its Centennial, 1991; and from Report of the Faculty Committee for a Year of Reflection, 1998)

The University of Chicago opened in 1892 thanks to the efforts of John D. Rockefeller, biblical scholar William Rainey Harper, and Chicago-area Baptists who wanted to establish a nondenominational college. The University's Articles of Incorporation committed the institution to excellence in both undergraduate and graduate education, an explicit policy of coeducation, and an atmosphere of non-sectarianism. Harper agreed to become the first President of the University on the condition that he be allowed to establish a university that would be unlike any other.

Today the University of Chicago consists of an undergraduate College, four Divisions (Biological Sciences, Humanities, Physical Sciences, and Social Sciences), six graduate professional schools (business, divinity, law, medicine—which is a part of the Division of the Biological Sciences—public policy, and social service administration), a school of continuing studies, the Laboratory Schools (nursery—12), a University press, a professional theater, and a diverse collection of libraries, research institutes, clinics, centers, and museums.

From its beginnings, Chicago has had a large (in comparative terms, a disproportionately large) graduate program, and a College deeply influenced by research ideals and the idea of learning for its own sake. The University's unique organization into the four Graduate Divisions and the unitary College underlying them was a development of the late 1920s, and this same decade witnessed the first proposals for an innovative general education program. The divisional structure has given the University an active middle level of administrative and disciplinary identification—broader than departments but narrower than the "arts and sciences faculty" as a whole—that has shaped academic experience here ever since.

The University's ethos has always been comparatively more experimental than that of other universities, sometimes radically so. It has had a major impact on American higher education, opening new areas and modes of scholarship (urban sociology, law and economics, literary criticism), inventing the four quarter academic calendar, developing extension courses and programs for adults in the liberal arts, establishing a unique program of general education for undergraduates, and initiating a full-time medical school teaching faculty. It has reinvented its own structure and curriculum not just once by several times, often in ways widely influential throughout the nation, and it has fostered a culture of self-examination and intense pedagogical self-consciousness. Faculty members have felt encouraged to develop their research or pursue their interests wherever that research or those interests led them. Chicago is thus widely regarded as a leader in inter- or trans-disciplinary research—basic departmental boundaries are much more porous here than elsewhere.

The fact that we spend so much time explaining ourselves to one another, often across barriers that loom larger elsewhere than here, helps explain why the question of intellectual discipline is always in play. The other side of this coin—our preoccupation with explaining ourselves to ourselves—is a conspicuous emphasis on the question as a form of discourse. Chicago has developed a celebrated—some would say notorious—brand of academic civility. It is a place where one is always in principle allowed to pose the hardest question possible—of a student, a teacher, or a colleague—and feel entitled to expect gratitude rather than resentment for one's effort. We have a reputation as a testing site for new arguments. The highly successful institution of the graduate workshop, inaugurated in the 1980s, has fostered this spirit of inquiry in the graduate units, but the workshops were also an incarnation of an already existing spirit, long recognized by those who reflected on the University at earlier moments.

Since its inception, the University has been dedicated to excellence in research and in the education provided to all its students. The University of Chicago is a strong intellectual community whose faculty, administration, and students are committed to the importance of ideas and the necessity of critical inquiry.