U of Chicago campus architecture

JHS
Sun, 07 Jun 2009 09:38:30 +0000

That’s interesting. If you ever have a chance, ask John Boyer, Dean of the College, who is the only person reasonably likely to know. In general, it seems like a catalogue of respected American universities at the time, but the exclusion of Princeton seems inexplicable from that standpoint (California and Columbia aren’t missing). The foreign universities seem a little more random. I am surprised that Toronto and McGill are missing, too. Uppsala may not have made the grade, like Salamanca or the various ancient universities in Latin America. It looks like they only used one university per non-Anglophone country, and in Germany Heidelberg would almost certainly have come third after Berlin (which was really the model on which Chicago was designed) and Konigsberg.

As to Chicago’s status, in 1900 it was the host and one of five convening founders of the Association of American Universities, which was the central organization of the elite institutions of higher education here. The other convenors were Harvard, Columbia, Johns Hopkins, and California. The remaining founding members were Cornell, Penn, Michigan, Clark, Yale, Princeton, Stanford, and Wisconsin. (There was a 14th founding member, too, but I don’t know what it was. Almost certainly one of Brown or Dartmouth, but which I’m not sure.) I think that gives you a sense of what were considered the most elite universities in this country 100 years ago, probably with some bias towards those considered most educationally progressive. It is interesting to see that Chicago and Stanford were part of the club from the outset, despite the fact that both were spanking new at the time, institutionally speaking.