Wasting Away: Chicago's Declining Core

Academic Questions

Volumn 22, Issue 3, 2009, Pages 298-313

  Kissel, Adam ^a  

^a NONE

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EID: 79953842287     PISSN: 08954852     EISSN: 19364709     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1007/s12129-009-9119-5     Document Type: Article

References (21)

1. Other plans, however, will affect graduate education at Chicago, such as continuing to increase the army of tuition-paying master's students while decreasing the number of Ph.D. students, whose fellowships cost the university money.
2. The actual minimum is even lower than fifteen because a student can use Advanced Placement credit to fulfill some of the requirements. Students also must demonstrate a minimum level of personal fitness, including ability in swimming.
3. See also the statement released by Scholars for the University of Chicago, signed by Mortimer Adler, Saul Bellow, David Riesman, James Q. Wilson, and many more, at http://www.goacta.org/press/PressReleases/1995-1999PressReleases/5-25-99PR.htm.
4. John W. Boyer, Three Views of Continuity and Change at the University of Chicago (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1999), available from the University of Chicago Library. See also http://www.lib.uchicago.edu/e/spcl/introbib.html.
5. Levine categorizes these powers under eight heads in two quartets: powers of prehension and powers of expression. See chapters 8-10 and below.
6. The current catalog can be found at http://collegecatalog.uchicago.edu/liberal/index.shtml.
7. These calculations are based on publicly available enrollment figures as of January 18, 2009, at http://timeschedules.uchicago.edu. I am not counting in this analysis a new sequence, "Language and the Human," which does not offer a third quarter as an option. In winter 2009, 76 students were enrolled in Language and the Human.
8. Again, Language and the Human is not included in these calculations. All 76 students attend Tuesday lectures and Thursday discussion sections, for an average class size of 19. Hopefully this is not the beginning of the end of the traditional humanities sequence at Chicago.
9. In autumn 2000, HBC comprised 10 out of 45 humanities sections; in autumn 2001, 13 out of 49, in roughly similar proportions to those of recent years.
10. See http://collegecatalog.uchicago.edu/programs/huma.shtml for an outline of the various core humanities sequences.
11. On May 19, 2009, the Chicago Maroon argued aptly that "Both Hum and Sosc offer sequences that try too hard to cater to the myriad tastes of students while shirking the central mission of the Core Curriculum," in "Examining the Core: Hum, Sosc, and Civ," http://www.chicagomaroon.com/2009/5/19/examining-the-core-hum-sosc-and-civ.
12. This line is quite revealing: "In most courses on the history of European civilization or the history of Western civilization, as they are more commonly called and as it used to be called at the University of Chicago, too..." Constantin Fasolt, "Advice to Students of "History of European Civilization" (2008), http://home.uchicago.edu/~icon/teach/guideciv.pdf.
13. See a second letter from Scholars for the University of Chicago at http://www.goacta.org/press/PressReleases/2002PressReleases/5-1-02PR.htm.
14. See http://csrpc.uchicago.edu/resources_employment.shtml.
15. For course descriptions, visit http://collegecatalog.uchicago.edu/programs/sosc.shtml.
16. See also the Chicago Maroon's justifiably harsh assessment in Examining the Core: The Sciences, May 15, 2009, http://www.chicagomaroon.com/2009/5/15/examining-the-core-the-sciences.
17. One student wrote in November 2008, "There is often a heavy emphasis on 'why we know what we know' over 'what we know.'"
18. See http://talk.collegeconfidential.com/university-chicago/594663-u-c-science-core-curriculum.html.
19. See University of Chicago, College Center for Curricular Thought, Project 1984: Design Issues: Reports of the Task Forces (1984) and Proceedings of the Chicago Conferences on Liberal Education (1986), available, respectively, in the University of Chicago Library and University of Chicago Archives. Levine notes that the main outlay of the Project 1984 reforms was not money but "brains and energy."
20. Again, Advanced Placement credit also can be used to fulfill the university's core science requirements.
21. See Booth's autobiography, My Many Selves: The Quest for a Plausible Harmony (Logan, UT: Utah State University Press, 2006).