The "New" UChicago

JHS
Thu, 17 May 2012 10:19:56 +0000

Wow. Way to choose misleading excerpts from the interview with Andy Abbott, and then to present them out of context. (For instance, the part about finding out his students weren’t really learning was describing the early part of his career when he was teaching 600-person lecture classes at Rutgers.)

Here’s the part of the interview that is really pertinent to this discussion:



The central problem for the University of Chicago is really very simple. Between 1930 and 1990, the University of Chicago pursued what the non-profit world would call a “spend-down” strategy. They allowed the College to get very small by indulging in all kinds of wild experiments. Basically, the University spent a substantial chunk of its endowment being an extremely unusual place. An unusual college, a very small college, a university that was heavily graduate-focused, that had more graduate students than it had undergraduates. There’s never been a university like that anywhere else. Wildly exciting. Wildly alive. Filled with faculty, most of whom were not teaching any undergraduates. It was completely—it was the most exciting place in the world. It was also going broke because there’s not a business plan that could sustain that over the long haul.

The decision was made to stop the spend-down strategy. We were probably the most unusual university in the world for 40 or 50 years. We did that by spend-down. We would like to continue being one of the most unusual universities in the world, but not continue spending down. That means the central question for the University going forward, the big challenge, is to figure out how to do that. I think that means we have to do it basically off of pure intellectualism. We have to envision a kind of university, a way of approaching knowledge, and a way of thinking about things that makes us unique and that people are going to come and be excited about. . . .

Most of what happens to you in college is a function of what you do. It’s a function of the student, not of the University. This is a place that certainly affords the possibility to get an extraordinary education, to just study all different kinds of things, to open your mind up in new ways at the same time, maybe, as you’re specializing in something…. The central issue is whether students take advantage of that.

What it looks like from the faculty’s side, and I think especially from the advisor’s side, is there’s this huge, wonderful table spread out and most people just eat a Big Mac with fries, or whatever. They just eat food that they like. I think there are many of us, the older folks, the advisors and faculty, who feel that students are very unnecessarily tracked. We think that students have this relatively narrow vision of what they can take.



Abbott is a very big deal at Chicago – the former chair of the Sociology Department and a member of the Faculty Senate committee that basically mediates between the faculty and the administration on academic matters. (Although elsewhere in the interview he points out that Chicago has only a handful of full-time administrators, and that everyone important is – or was until recently – primarily a working faculty-member.) He’s a flamboyant throwback to the old days when faculties were something of a preppy aristocracy.