Colleges similar to UChicago?

ssn137
Wed, 18 Nov 2015 09:46:54 +0000

Would offer Williams as a place that (I don’t think) has been mentioned yet. Chicago and Yale have a lot in common–for example, WR Harper, Chicago’s founding president, was recruited from Yale, and James Angell (whom the trustees wouldn’t elevate to the presidency at Chicago because he wasn’t of Baptist faith), eventually went on to be the Yale president who built the core of the housing system that may be Yale College’s most distinctive feature. Columbia gets mentioned along with Chicago, but I don’t quite get it–think it has more to do with the fact that they are lumped in as the high SAT/non-tech schools that finish just outside the money in the HYPS sweepstakes. As for St. John’s, the comparison gets made, but I think it’s inapt. In the Hutchins era at Chicago (regarded as the UofC’s golden age by many), the faculty specifically rejected the “Great Books” curriculum that Mortimer Adler advocated, and which Hutchins approved of. The Chicago core, which lives on in some form today, is informed by the Great Books, but is definitely not based on them.