University of Chicago

UNIVERSITY OF CHICAGO

UNIVERSITY OF CHICAGO, which opened in 1892, was one of a number of cultural institutions established in the period of Chicago's growth, all of which were financed by a small group of entrepreneurs and visionaries in the merchandising, meatpacking, and shipping industries. Key leaders in the university's planning stages included Thomas W. Goodspeed, an alumnus of the original Baptist College (also called the University of Chicago, 1857–1886); Frederick T. Gates, secretary of the American Baptist Society; and William Rainey Harper, the university's first president. Gates persuaded John D. Rockefeller to finance the university on the condition that additional funds would be raised. Chicago's wealthy businessmen and philanthropists contributed money and land, and brought the initial funding to $1 million. Harper, young, gifted, and energetic, had been Professor of Semitic Languages at Yale's Divinity School, when the trustees appointed him in 1891. He and Gates envisioned a large research institution with a small college and a number of affiliations, where the first commitment of faculty and students would be to scholarship. Harper's ideas had been shaped in the 1870s and 1880s, with the establishment of the first graduate school at Johns Hopkins (1876) and of new research institutions, including Stanford (1891) and Clark (1889). The university opened with an academy, a college, two graduate schools, and a divinity school. In an unprecedented move, Harper hired nine women to the faculty in the 1890s. Undergraduate and graduate enrollments were coeducational; women exceeded 50 percent of the undergraduate student body by 1901. Fear of feminization prompted Harper to attempt an unsuccessful and short-lived program of separate classes for men and women. At the urging of deans Alice Freeman Palmer and Marion Talbot, Chicago also instituted a small number of graduate fellowships for women. Faculty and students became involved in Chicago's social, cultural, and political institutions, such as Jane Addams's Hull House, the Chicago public schools, the Field Museum, the Chicago Civic Federation, and the juvenile courts. The university established its own press and developed a variety of scholarly journals. Such expansion kept the university in debt for its first fifteen years, but Rockefeller continued his support. Harper's successor Harry Pratt Judson (1906–1923) placed the university on secure financial ground and expanded its faculty and graduate programs. By 1910, Rockefeller had contributed $35 million, augmented by donations from prominent Chicago families. In the 1920s, various Rockefeller Foundation units supported biomedical, social science, and other research in the university. Ernest DeWitt Burton (1923–1925) expanded student activities to enrich college life and instituted better advising and other services for undergraduates, before his untimely death. Max Mason (1925–1928) continued to build the science faculty and saw to completion a large-scale examination of undergraduate education. By the late 1920s, the university was considered one of the preeminent research universities in the United States. In 1928 the trustees appointed Robert M. Hutchins to the presidency (1929–1951). A young man known for his high intelligence and quick wit, Hutchins reorganized the university's college and graduate school into four divisions: social sciences, humanities, and natural and physical sciences; and pushed the faculty to form interdisciplinary committees and to initiate and maintain a new general education curriculum in the college, which included extensive exposure to the great books. This latter innovation occurred in the 1930s, when many colleges and universities were experimenting with curricular reforms. Chicago's program, emulated by a number of institutions, had the most lasting influence on the curricular reorganization of St. Johns' College in the late 1930s with an entirely great books curriculum. Hutchins faced much faculty opposition, but every proposal increased media coverage of the university and its reforms. Permitting the university to serve as the site of the first self-sustained nuclear reaction to release atomic energy contributed to Allied strength in World War II and enhanced the physics faculty. His staunch defense of academic freedom in the mid-1930s and again during the McCarthy era elicited faculty loyalty, but opening the college to students out of the sophomore year of high school and enabling them to finish college early stirred faculty opposition into the 1940s. During Hutchins's tenure, undergraduate enrollment declined. The curriculum was perceived as unrelated to students' future plans, and other graduate schools were not accepting the early Chicago bachelor's degree. Succeeding presidents, though quite competent, did not have the charisma or impact of Harper or Hutchins. Lawrence Kimpton (1951–1960) pulled the university out of debt, stabilized the neighborhood with rehabilitation projects, and increased undergraduate enrollment by abandoning Hutchins's early college plan.

Edward Levi (1968–1975) urged the faculty to experiment with undergraduate curriculum, connecting the reforms with the Hutchins era, which was viewed more favorably by the 1970s. Hanna H. Gray (1978–1993) encouraged reorganization of graduate programs. Hugo F. Sonnenshein (1993–2000) stabilized the university's finances and enriched undergraduate student life. Each president faced responsibility for maintaining and enhancing the university's international distinction as a first-class research institution, protecting the university's assets in the Hyde Park neighborhood, and offering undergraduate programs designed to attract some of the nation's brightest students.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Diner, Steven J. A City and Its Universities: Public Policy in Chicago, 1892. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1980.

Dzuback, Mary Ann. Robert M. Hutchins: Portrait of an Educator. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1991.

Goodspeed, Thomas W. The Story of the University of Chicago, 1890–1925. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1925.

Manuscripts and Special Collections, Joseph Regenstein Library, University of Chicago.

McNeill, William H. Hutchins' University: A Memoir of the University of Chicago, 1929–1950. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1991.

Storr, Richard J. Harper's University: The Beginnings; A History of the University of Chicago. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1966.

University of Chicago. One in Spirit: A Retrospective View of the University of Chicago on the Occasion of Its Centennial. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1991.

Mary Ann Dzuback

See also Education, Higher: Colleges and Universities .