Here’s something for the Chicago exceptionalists to chew on. I checked the educational backgrounds of the four faculty members who were most important to each of my children’s experience at Chicago – the people who really made college there worthwhile educationally. None of them had been an undergraduate there; four of the eight got their bachelor’s degrees from Harvard. There were three Chicago PhDs (in large part because two of the eight were grad students at the time). Only one of the eight went to college in the Midwest, a respected LAC, but he was from Panama. And he teaches at Harvard, now.
Then I checked the administration. Not a single Dean, or the President or Provost, is an undergraduate alumnus of the college. (A number of them are Midwesterners, though.) I got a little obsessed, and checked some other notable Chicago figures. One – Allan Bloom – got his undergraduate degree at Chicago.
My point isn’t that the undergraduate experience at Chicago isn’t good, or special. I think it’s both. But it is created and maintained largely by people who were educated elsewhere, and at places – Harvard, Texas, Wesleyan, CapeTown – that Chicago partisans hardly consider similar to Chicago. Except, of course they are.