The Maroon piece struggles mightily to discover a “willful obfuscation of the status quo” and speaks vaguely of large class sizes and related matters having “a serious impact on the undergraduate experience”, but this is all a lot of huffing and puffing about nothing much: it is the writer herself and not the the description in the materials that makes the link to the LACs. Nevertheless, there ARE many small classes at the U of C and many somewhat large classes at the LACs, as many commenters have pointed out. Likewise that large lecture-type classes can be both efficient and entertaining and a pleasant respite from the intensity of smaller seminar ones. It has always been that way at the U of C. I myself took several such large lecture classes in my day - one in Vertebrate Biology, two in History (American and English), an Eng. Lit survey course, and Joshua Taylor’s “Philosophy of Art”. They were all taught superlatively well. The faculty who taught them were no doubt chosen for those skills. In some cases it was their very popularity that swelled the numbers. If those classes had a “serious impact on [my] undergraduate education”, it was all for the good, as the writer herself halfway admits in her own case.
One could argue about which of the versions in the Admissions materials is preferable. I liked the greater detail of the earlier version and the historical framing of it in the figure of Hutchins, though the text was not very elegant. The later version is snappier, making me half-wonder whether someone with an advertising background was involved in the writing. That would explain the conflation of class sizes as between the HUM-SOSC components of the Core and the Science portions, although as some commenters have pointed out, that is not a perfect description either. The words actually used would have benefitted from a qualifier. However, I doubt anyone who read them was substantially misled. And, yes, there are certainly important elements of the LAC atmosphere in the curriculum and classroom experience at the U of C, if not the overall small scale of the operation or the devoted core of non-researcher teachers. That comparison was being claimed for it in the sixties when I myself was reading the College catalog of the day. Even more importantly, then and now, was the “idea itself of a liberal education”, represented by the Core. That is an idea that Chicago has remained faithful to since the days of Hutchins, while almost all the ostensible LACs abandoned it if they ever embraced it at all.