New President Announced

JBStillFlying
Sat, 06 Mar 2021 00:57:56 +0000

ED1 and ED2 aren’t going anywhere, nor has Alivisatos been hired to eliminate them or tinker much with the College. Berkeley is a premier research institution with a deep field of top programs - both academic and professional - and an endowment that’s about half the size of UChicago’s despite its size, and a stipend situation that will only see more cuts as funds are diverted to pay the state’s public pension liabilities. So this was a smart move on Alivisatos’s part; he can do a lot more good at UChicago. And they were smart to hire the chief academic officer of one of the premier research institutions in the world; it’s far less an upward move than Zimmer’s promotion from Brown.

IMO, the fortunes of the professional schools are tied to the strength of the academic divisions. That’s probably true everywhere but at UChicago specifically, no one academic division or school exists in a vacuum. Keep econ tops and improve the other social sciences, and law/bus/Harris will retain or improve their own rankings. Strengthen the physical and bio sciences, and you’ll put PME on the map and see the med school’s academic reputation improve. (Harris too, as a center for top health policy work). UChicago’s particular niche is that their professional endeavors are so strongly grounded in theoretical scholarship. Shore up those academic departments, and you will attract top people and funding for the professional schools.