Nussbaum: Why I Turned Down Harvard for UChicago

[truth123]

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<p>This is from a few years back but Nussbaum eloquently states why UChicago is preferable to Harvard:</p>

<p>STATEMENT BY PROFESSOR MARTHA NUSSBAUM ON HER DECISION TO TURN DOWN HARVARD AND BROWN AND REMAIN AT THE UNIVERSITY OF CHICAGO</p>

<br>

<p>I was enormously impressed by the offers made me by both Harvard and
Brown, and I can’t but be grateful to them both for all they did to
make those offers appealing; but the terms of those offers were met
and even exceeded by Chicago, and, in the end, it became very clear
to me that Chicago is the place for me. I am a very
interdisciplinary person. Here at Chicago I belong to Law,
Philosophy, and Divinity, and other units in varying lesser degrees.
When I teach, I don’t like to offer this course for this unit and
that course for that unit, I really like to have students from
different units in the same classroom. Chicago is virtually unique
in the ease with which one can do this, since all units are on the
same calendar and the same campus. I just announce a course title
and a prerequisite, and things take care of themselves, the course
gets five or more different course numbers without any bureaucracy,
etc. Harvard is much larger, more bureaucratic, and more impersonal,
and it is difficult to link law to philosophy and other humanities
subjects, because the law school has a different calendar.</p>

<p>But equally important for me is the culture of the University of
Chicago Law School, which has an intellectual intensity and fertility
that is unique. People talk voraciously across lines of
specialization, with a sense of everyone’s equality. There are no
stars; the entry-level assistant professor is treated with the same
respect as the tenured professor. The ideas are what matter, not
fame or glamor. This has been so for a long time, but I give
particular credit to Saul Levmore, the current Dean, for his
extremely fine leadership, both intellectually and in building a
community in which this type of equal respect flourishes. I am sure
that his very generous concern for each faculty member, from the
youngest to the most senior, is a large part of what led me to stay.
Levmore has been doing a lot lately to build the law-philosophy side
of our law school, with the appointment of Brian Leiter and the
creation of the law-philosophy postdoctoral fellowship program. So
that only increases my regard for the law school.</p>

<p>I would also want to mention the strength of our philosophy
department, which is currently growing, with the growth of the
humanities across the university. I love my graduate students, and I
know that they are among the most unusual and interesting in the
country. (Indeed, I’ve just signed a contract to co-author a book on
patriotism with one of them, and I’ve never co-authored a book before
in my life.)</p>

<p>Finally, the new University administration of Robert Zimmer
(President) and Thomas Rosenbaum (Provost) is doing exciting things
for the university as a whole — and, in particular, fostering
interdisciplinary initiatives linking law to the humanities. I feel
like a part of a team that is working together to do these things,
and the whole university seems to me like a family, in which I can
play a role that I would not have been able to play in a larger more
impersonal institution.</p>

<br>

[jamesbond1]

<p>Seriously, as an admitted EA applicant this year who has absolutely loved the school, I am saddened by the degree of insecurity exhibited by some posters on this thread (a few posters specifically). Good thing I applied to other schools.</p>

[zhangvict]

<p>@ James As a current student, I agree with your observations, and I hope you don’t see this as a representation of most people here.</p>

<p>Why does the OP need to keep posting things and bashing other schools, almost desperately. Reading the beginning, it is clear that one of the primary reasons she remained is also due to how Chicago matched or exceeded the terms of the other schools, presumably in terms of salary and job benefits. Great she likes Chicago’s academic atmosphere so much, but whats the point of constantly posting things like this and why not just chill?.</p>

[littlepenguin]

<p>I’ve only been here for a little over half an academic year, but I haven’t encountered a single conversation in which someone expressed any sort of insecurity for not having gone to a “more elite school.” I hope you realize that collegeconfidential itself festers with insecurity (and trolls and lies and general insensitivity), and that 99.9% (repeating) of people affiliated with the university don’t post here.</p>

<p>In other news, I’m a human rights minor and am totally excited to take a class with Martha Nussbaum :3</p>

[jamesbond1]

<p>haha guys thanks for the message. I understand that CC is a VERY small sample of the UChicago population, and I doubt that any institution of higher learning, especially a great one as is UChicago, is filled with insecure students constantly trying to justify how great they are. It’s just a tad bit sad that we have a few posters here that are very insecure, while I’ve almost never run into any in the other sections – schools that are constantly bashed as being inferior here.</p>

[LearningLover]

<p>Well it’s college confidential. I mean seriously, who gives a crap?</p>

<p>People on CC are like, obsessed with rankings (the exact opposite of UChicago people) see a meteoric rise from UChicago and are caught in the double bind of ‘is it as good as it is good?’ and look for confirmation of Chicago’s rise when, in reality, Chicago was always super awesome and it’s recent rise was just people getting around to confirming that.</p>

<p>When we say that the 5-10 people that actively post about UChicago (4 of which are insecure and two of which probably actually go there) don’t represent UChicago’s thousands of undergraduates. It’s true.</p>