@MohnGedachtnis at #17: Like anything else, the outcome of these specific policies remain to be seen. For MAPSS/MAPH, the challenge would be to increase quality of admit along with numbers, especially if there are legitimate concerns with the latter. For the PhD programs, they need to understand that HYPS are offering tens of thousands of dollars in fellowship funds guaranteed every year. Can UChicago truly match that? As well as they have been doing lately (I tend to agree with Diermeier that UChicago punches above its weight) the big guys are doing even better.
- Sure it did. From the article: "Baicker said in January 2019 at a faculty senate meeting that Harris had begun using strategies employed by College admissions dean James Nondorf. Baicker said Harris wants “to grow the pipeline, identify those students who would be a good fit for the Harris School’s program, and strategically deploy scholarship resources in order to attract the most desirable candidates and generate the most impact.” "
Grow the pipeline. Identify the good fits. Strategically deploy funds to attract the best ones. THAT’s the Nondorf method, and we’ve been discussing the implementation for a few years now.
@JBStillFlying - those sound like generalities. ALL schools want to grow the pipeline, identify good fits, etc. How do you grow the pipeline? That’s probably the biggest question. After you grow the pipeline, how do you scale the operation to review all the apps? What sort of budget increase is needed? What’s the process to identify good fits?
Those sentences in the article don’t even skim the surface about the Nondorf strategy.
You say at #19 that the concerns raised by the Maroon (and by extension the profs) are not your concerns, but you spend a lot of time on this thread making the same points they do and you call them “valid concerns”. That’s pretty slippery, Cue. One might conclude that when it comes to beating on your alma mater logical consistency doesn’t count for much: any stick will do.
@Cue7 at #22 - Beats the heck outa me. What WERE all those marketing materials and trips across the country about, anyway? And what’s this I’ve read on CC about some sort of modeling? Do they mean Play Doh or clay? And then something about different admissions plans and “Something Early” (or is that Early Something?). No method to the madness. Not in the least. 
I guess you can always ask Dean Nondorf himself the next time you visit campus. Make sure he’s in town first!
@marlowe1 - here’s another article outlining student dissatisfaction for the administration: https://www.chicagomaroon.com/article/2020/1/31/admin-meetings-students/
Those concerns - about senior admins not being accessible, not being open to rigorous debate, etc. - are all valid, too. I can certainly argue in the alternative (as I have upthread) about the merits of these concerns. At the same time, from my perspective, they are counter-balanced by the admin’s hyper focus on standing.
Further, bloated masters programs with questionable intellectual quality can raise eyebrows at Chicago, too. Again, if it’s bringing revenue in, it’s worthwhile in my eyes.
I raise points counter to my own position (that Chicago’s admin is doing exactly what it should - with eyes toward money, prestige, and eminence) because this is worthy of discussion. I do think there is indeed something to see here - although you and @JBStillFlying - true to past form - have shrugged this off.
If I was a parent of a student, I’d be concerned about the aloof nature of the senior admins. I’d be concerned about an expanding college and a shrinking amount of top-level Phd talent to RA/teach.
Cue, you misunderstand the meaning of arguing in the alternative. It’s not arguing in support of contradictory propositions but of making alternative arguments in support of the same proposition. Your arguments in this thread are simply incoherent. You are in violation of Aristotle’s doctrine of the excluded middle. Or to put it in less esoteric terms: “He got on his horse and rode off in all directions.” Except in your case all roads lead to the denigration of the University of Chicago.
As for students being upset with the administration, ho hum. That was so in my day, I assume it was in yours. It is what students at the University of Chicago do. We’re supposed to grow up and get over it - or at least reserve the outrage for specified unwise actions. I’m not thrilled by some of the things the administration has done in the last dozen or so years. You generally approve, though you over-interpret and exaggerate the effects. Still, why not take some pleasure in that?
@marlowe1 - ah! You are correct “argue in the alternative” has a very specific meaning - all to prove the original viewpoint. I meant I could argue the alternate viewpoint - and I see merit in it, just not nearly as much as the supposed true goals of the admin.
Re the ho hum nature of this, I don’t recall so much strife with admins for at least the past 20 years. The last upheaval I can recall was when the core changed in the late 90s.
Maybe this is the maroon making a mntn of a molehill, but they’re essentially calling zimmer et al a sham- that they stand for vigorous debate, but then actively try to quell it when it comes to administrative matters. I didn’t see this during the (short) randel regime, and harkens back to the sonnenschein days. Not ho hum from a historical perspective, from what I can see.
You’re getting closer, @Cue7 , but neither of the bare words - “alternate” (in substitution for) or “alternative” (a secondary possibility) - will do to describe what you’re up to here: The word “equivocating” - or in plain English, “having it both ways” - is more like it.
Now if you were to seriously analyze either of your mutually exclusive positions, take on board objections from the other one, weigh and reply to those objections, then you’d be cooking with gas. Then I would cease my carping and dub you a dialectician and a true graduate of the University of Chicago.
- @Cue7 - didn't you graduate in 2000?
@marlowe1 - careful, it’s not in your purview to determine who are the “true” graduates of the University of Chicago. (This power, I believe, is ultimately vested in the board - which is happy to offer many more Chicago degrees to potentially under-qualified masters students!)
Having said this, the root of my “equivocation” is this: I lament that Chicago is in a financial position where they feel a need to go in this direction (or else, per the provost would need to institute “austerity” measures at the U). If finances were not such a significant issue, I don’t think Zimmer and Provost Diermeier would be seeking to expand the masters programs so significantly, or avoid conversations with students and faculty, or make so many closed-door decisions. But I think every day they get up in the morning and wonder “how do I compete with the 800 lb gorillas in the room?”
I suspect that, behind those closed doors, they make lots of zero-sum decisions because they constantly struggle to maintain the U.'s standing, vis a vis the resources that are available. And, as I’ve said in other threads, given how rankings/standing measures heavily favor wealth, Chicago may (at the college level, and possibly in some world rankings), be anywhere from 4-6 spots away from where they want to be.
@JBStillFlying - I graduated at the tail end of the Sonnenschein era, but followed the Randel era closely, mainly because relations between admin-students in my time were fairly tumultuous. Randel seemed to have a calming effect on the institution.
JB and marlowe, you may know better than I, but I don’t remember seeing such a concentrated set of concerns about the admin since the Sonnenschein days ~20-25 years ago. That’s why I’m asserting this isn’t such a ho hum matter.
Where else do you see evidence for “such a concentrated set of concerns about the admin” except in this last bit of reportorial overkill in the Maroon? Sure, it’s a story that ought to be covered, but I try to imagine reading it as a student in the College - it would have bored the daylights out of me. Almost all of it concerns bickering issues of governance raised by some profs in some of the grad schools (and not even all of them, mainly humanities and to a lesser degree social sciences). Does any of this rise to the level of student outrage we have seen in the past? Consider the failure of the Sociology Department in 1969 to accord tenure to a well-loved radical prof. That and related matters in the highly charged and politicized campus of those days resulted in a several-weeks-long occupation of the Administration Building and the subsequent expulsion of some 42 (some put the number in the seventies) of students. Now that was a “concentrated set of concerns” for you. You could say, in the words of a popular film of those days, “What we had there was a failure to communicate.”
Do you expect the kids in today’s College to rise up because some tenured profs in some departments (not the ones most of them want to major in) don’t want to teach all those darn M.A.s in their midst?
There are no doubt many issues at all times in a world and at a university of limited resources. Only at HYPS have the laws of economics been repealed. Chicago has special financial concerns that they don’t have. No doubt they have some concerns Chicago doesn’t have. There are never not going to be concerns in this world. Your constant refrain (and on this you are not equivocal!) is that wealth and standing, your twin gods, are the nirvana to which Chicago should aspire but which it will never reach because Harvard et. al. got there so long before it and will forever remain in its own unreachable world of perfection. Sigh and woe is me.
You might be right. I myself want to see the University allocate its resources in the best possible way so as to perpetuate its historic mission and maintain its distinct culture consistent with the hard realities. It has lately been doing a pretty good job of that, and its prestige, for what that is worth, stands pretty high. Why not give a cheer for that? It troubles me not that “Chicago will never be Harvard” or any other such pathetic aspiration. If it’s the hard drugs of wealth and standing you’re after go to Harvard for your fix.
The force behind these Maroon articles is, of course, faculty; to be specific, faculty who are worried that their department will come under new scrutiny. And this isn’t even remotely comparable to the Sonnenschein era. Among other things, Sonnenschein ended up taking a bullet for the team (the Bill Clinton incident didn’t help, of course), and at least some of the press coverage during his era was unflattering. Do you think there is even a remote chance that Zimmer will suffer the same fate? 
If anything, they seem to have learned something from Sonnenschein’s experience.
The Randel era, as I - and likely Cue - recall, was remarkable for the College in part because it ended up backtracking in the rankings. Some of that “meteoric rise” under the dynamic and energetic Jim Nondorf was just returning to their old position. However, a lot was going on behind the scenes during these six years as well, and kind of laid the groundwork for later on: 1) The College was continuing to implement and take even further the changes that Sonnenschein had initiated, namely, increasing size and supporting a “lighter” Core that was 1/3, rather than 50%, of grad requirements; the College is what it is today first and foremost due to these changes; and 2) Under Behnke’s leadership in Admissions, both applications and yields were increasing - as were SAT scores; this fact began to convince faculty that the changes were NOT compromising academic strength. The specifics of year-to-year growth can be looked up, but I know that when Sonnenschein retired, the College was around 4,500 and by 2013 (so six years of Randel and another six of Zimmer) it had grown to about 5,700. It’s now 6,800 and will top at around 7,000.
Randel seemed to be a quieter, thoughtful type. He raised money and increased the presence of the arts on campus. He was the right guy for the right time. But so was Hugo Sonnenschein. IMO very few others could have been as straight-forward and so willing to deal with so much faculty and student outrage in order to turn things in the right direction.
Any current plan to increase the master’s programs has this history to work from, as well as a very successful model of recruitment and admissions. Faculty complaints about some program or other being “too big” and sacrificing quality are age-old at this point and, if history serves as a guide, will be obsolete by 10 years down the road, to be replaced by some other lament-du-jour.
@JBStillFlying and @marlowe1 - as you may recognize the name Marshall Sahlins, here’s his take on what’s going on at Chicago:
https://www.chicagomaroon.com/article/2020/2/5/lessons-sonnenschein-dont-alert-faculty-plans/
Maybe this is just a few faculty members and students kicking up a fuss. Some of the arguments, though, seem fairly cutting. They refer to the undergraduate and masters expansion as “bloat” which is a pointed word. I’ve never thought of Zimmer as an “alter-Hugo” (Sonnenschein) but there is a fundamental tension here:
What US News reports doesn’t align nicely with what Chicago did. Chicago seems to be changing to fit a new mold, for sure.
I am in favor of the change, but I recognize there are tradeoffs. JB and Marlowe, do you?
Let’s have no equivocation, Cue. Are you citing this letter from Sahlins because you agree with him?
Who is Marshall Sahlins?
Edit to add - Ah ha! Just read this. See the end of my first para. in comment 32. How insightful of me (and so modest too!),
Now, let’s see how Anthro does on thru-put. Anthro matriculates 11-13 students per year and graduates a similar amount, ten years later. (Princeton gets them out in <7 years.)
https://provost.uchicago.edu/sites/default/files/ProgramStatisticsSSDAnthropology.pdf
^ yeah, Anthro might be one of the PhD programs being cut back. Looks like they might be two years behind their peers, according to Maroon data from last fall.
@Cue7 seems to have missed this counter-punch:
https://www.chicagomaroon.com/article/2020/2/5/successes-masters-programs-social-sciences-divisio/
Marshall Sahlins was a towering figure, and that’s a serious letter. But part of what it underlines is that the University of Chicago that he valued is meaningfully different from the various Universities of Chicago that inspire Robert Zimmer, marlowe1, Cue7 and JBStillFlying (which of course differ among themselves as well).