Doing it the Chicago Way

by Steven Menashi

Dartmouth President James Wright provoked many Dartmouth students and alumni last year when he observed that the College is “a research university in all but name.” Whatever the merits of Wright's contention, it can be said that, until recently, the University of Chicago found itself in the opposite situation. “The University of Chicago has prided itself on being a large research university with a small college,” writes Chicago student Brad Henderson. No more.

In the 1993-1994 year Chicago produced a $22.7 million deficit. Though budgetary prudence yielded a surplus the following year, a McKinsey and Company study cautioned that the University was in dire fiscal straits if it was to undertake its desired capital improvements while maintaining competitive salaries for its faculty and sustaining its physical plant.

The solution? More students. The Chicago administration plans to increase its undergraduate population from 3,500 to 4,500 over the next ten years.

At the same time, in what Vice-President of Student Affairs Michael Benke insists is a grand coincidence, the University has decided to drop its common core curriculum from 21 to 15 classes. The real motivation is evident, however. A college that already boasts a 63% acceptance rate can't sustain a thirty percent increase in its student body without first attracting more applicants. Thus, the University must adopt, as Chicago President Hugo Sonnenschein has said, “a curriculum more appealing to seventeen-year-olds.”

The old common core required 21 courses; at Chicago, which operates on a quarterly academic term system, that constitutes one-half the average undergraduate's total coursework. The “Chicago Plan,” as the new system is called, consists of 15 courses — a third of all courses taken toward a BA or BS degree. Requirements in Science and Mathematics are reduced from eight courses to six. The Humanities, Civilization, and Art requirement is also now six quarters, down from seven. Whereas that requirement once mandated three courses in Humanities, three in Civilization, and one in Art, the Chicago Plan eliminates the subcategories, allowing any number of courses in any or all three areas to fulfill the requirement. The three-quarter Social Sciences requirement remains unchanged.

The foreign language requirement, however, has been completely replaced by a competency test. Moreover, since those with three years of foreign language study in high school — and many high schools mandate such study — are exempted from the language proficiency test, many see the reform as the effective elimination of mandated foreign language study. “I feel that this proposal is woefully inadequate. It seems absurd to have no standards for foreign language when receiving a Bachelor of Arts or Science,” bemoaned Professor Gene Gragg of Chicago's Department of Near Eastern Language and Civilization. “Foreign language is an indisputable part of every form of education. I am very worried by these proposals.”

Other faculty also voiced concern about the reforms. “I like the Core as it is,” insisted Director of Undergraduate Mathematics Paul Sally, who thinks that undergraduates should take at least two terms of mathematics rather than the one term required by the Chicago Plan. “The administration has not conveyed any intellectual rationale for curricular change,” Sociology Professor Andrew Abbott told the Chicago Weekly News.

Jose Quintans, master of the Biological Science Division of the College, disagrees, seeing simple auto mechanics at work: “We must make our curriculum similar to the 1998 4-cylinder Honda engine, which is very efficient in comparison to the V6 Ford Taurus engine, which is highly inefficient and polluting,” he said. “We should simply give students scientific tapas in order to give them a taste of what science is like. It should be little tidbits of information that create greater interest.”

Physics Professor Corbin Covault concurred with this view, saying that “I believe that most members of the Council [of faculty that reviewed the reform proposals] would agree that the proposal is a good compromise between giving students more academic freedom and maintaining the highest standards for an effective general education.”

What is curious is that no demands for “more academic freedom” have come from Chicago students. In an informal Internet poll of 115 random students, 77% opposed the removal of the foreign language requirement. A new student group — dubbed “Education First!” — has emerged to defend the Core and to introduce student input in what was, the students argue, a unilateral decision by the administration and faculty. “When the Core was cut, we were shocked it happened so fast, and we felt immediately that we had not had a chance to affect the course of events,” explained Chicago junior Aleem Hossain, a co-founder of the group.

The student editors of the Chicago Weekly News have termed the curriculum reforms a “betrayal” and judged it contrary to what Chicago students need or want. “The U of C is selling a product, after all, to the students it wants to matriculate and, in a larger sense, to the world that seeks to hire those students. By purporting to offer students more choice, the Sonnenschein administration is offering them less education,” they wrote. “Perhaps it shows Hugo Sonnenschein's true plan: Use the College to attract jet-set tourists to campus rather than people who care about education.”

Daniel Webster once said of Dartmouth, “It is . . . a small college, but there are those who love it.” Apparently, there are those who love Chicago, too, and they find the University's most cherished traditions under attack. Scrapping the core curriculum “is nothing short of a declaration of war on all the values that the College once championed,” declared the Chicago Weekly News. “This would destroy the social structural foundations that maintain our intense intellectuality,” Abbott explained, “and we would gradually come to look, in spirit as in structure, like the Ivies and Stanford.”

“It seems to have all the elements of a grand conspiracy” against the heart and soul of U. Chicago, claims John Mundy in the Chicago Criterion; he doubts that a clandestine plot is involved, however, though the changes do “devastate our unique academic culture and environment.”

Of course, there is no conspiracy at work here. Certainly, the primary motivation is money; a less demanding curriculum attracts more students and more students means more tuition checks. In attracting those students, though, the University of Chicago has fallen prey to the prevailing trend in academe in favor of specialization at the expense of general education.

Most faculty, after all, would rather focus on their particular area of expertise than bother with broad-based liberal arts courses. That's understandable, surely, but it denies students a general education in all the fundamentals of their civilization.

Moreover, a large university is able to maintain the vast research facilities that attract first-rate professors, but classes are often held in large lecture halls and teaching assistants grade papers and lead discussions.

So the new Chicago undergraduate college will probably feature even more big-name professors, attract more students, and amass more money; it will, therefore, increase its rank in US News and World Report.

But its rank will fall in the hearts of its alumni and in the minds of everyone else.