The University of Chicago, founded in 1892 by John D. Rockefeller,
long had the reputation of being one of the most serious
undergraduate colleges in the country. Students who applied
to Chicago knew about its socially inhospitable reputation. What
other university would tear down its football stadium to make way for
a new library? If students nevertheless chose Chicago, they did so
because what they wanted most from college was not recreation but
education. The core curriculum put into place in the 1930s by Robert
Maynard Hutchins, president and then chancellor of the university,
was among the most rigorous “Great Books” programs in the country.
“The result,” as the sociologist Edward Shils observed in a memoir
about Hutchins, “was an atmosphere of extraordinary exhilaration
among students and teachers… . The students responded to this
mode of teaching
… with the enthusiasm which comes from the
sense of doing something of intrinsic importance.”

Readers will note that we use the past tense. In this relativistic age,
when the very idea of “intrinsic importance” is widely ridiculed,
it is hardly surprising that serious attention to the liberal
arts should be an early casualty of fashion. And so it has been at the
University of Chicago. This is not news. The quality and tenor of
education at Chicago have been declining for years. But word of these
developments seems finally to have penetrated the sanctum of The New
York Times. Like the man who chanced upon an elephant for the first
time and then rushed about to disseminate news of his extraordinary
discovery, the Times last December 28 ran a front page article
informing its readers that “Winds of Academic Change Rustle
University of Chicago.” Imagine! The Times reported that “with
colleges today increasingly viewed as employment credentialing
stations, students as customers and learning for its own sake as a
quaint idea whose time has passed, the University of Chicago finds
itself a victim of its own high-mindedness and in a painful identity
crisis.”

So what else is new? One of the main issues currently confronting
the University of Chicago is the dilution of its required core
curriculum from twenty-one required courses down to fifteen or
eighteen, depending on which revisionist wins out. But it was not so
long ago that virtually the entire course of undergraduate study at
the University of Chicago was mapped out ahead of time for its
students. As a friend of ours who attended the university in its
heyday recalled after reading the article in the Times: “When
someone asked Hutchins why there weren’t electives for
undergraduates at the University of Chicago, he patiently explained
that if we knew enough to determine what we should be taught, we
shouldn’t be students.”

In fact, the same things are happening—
and have been happening for
some time—
to the University of Chicago as have happened to
liberal arts education elsewhere in the country. At the top, there
is a crisis of leadership, well exemplified
by a statement, quoted in the Times, made by Hugo F. Sonnenschein,
the University of Chicago’s current president. “Chicago has a
special role and responsibility because it has a reputation as
embodying what a great university should be. But the commodification
and marketing of higher education are unmistakable today, and we
can’t jolly dance along and not pay attention to them.”
Once upon a time, of course, one would look to the president of a
distinguished university to provide intellectual leadership—that
is, to resist pressures to trivialize and cheapen the integrity of
the university’s educational offerings and jolly well dance to a
different drummer.

Higher education cannot be a popularity contest without compromising
its very essence: to strive for the best. When top university
administrators start using words like “commodification” and
“marketing,” the game is up. They might as well be in the business
of selling widgets. Accordingly, as part of its effort to increase the
university’s “market share,” administrators plan to increase the
undergraduate enrollment by some 35 percent, to 4,500 students. Never mind
that the University of Chicago has trouble attracting enough
qualified students to fill the places currently available.
The Times article quoted several observations
by Michael C. Behnke, a new vice president “hired to improve
marketing and recruitment.” (He is also described as “the
vice-president in charge of enrollment.”) “I don’t know how many
students we can attract if we go after those who only seek the life
of the mind,” Mr. Behnke said. “Kids aren’t sure they can lead a
balanced life here. My job is to convince them that they are not
joining a monastery.” He added later: “We are in a culture of
choice, of doing your own thing.” Why then have any requirements at
all? Doubtless the university’s students—we mean its “customers,”
its “consumers”—would prefer a diet of continual entertainment
(what the Times called “expanding its recreation and service
areas”). Why not give them what they want? After all, they are
paying for it.

The quoted statements from Chicago’s new vice president for enrollment
exemplify what happens when commercial concerns trump education
principles. But this isn’t the only thing wrong with
Chicago today. Like many other institutions, its crisis of
leadership and its wholesale pandering to commercial pressures are
supplemented by an ideologically driven intellectual frivolity.
Hence even at the University of Chicago, supposedly a bastion of
tradition, we find that one can major in such pseudo-disciplines
as “media/cinema studies” and “gender studies.” There is even a new
Center for Gender Studies whose director, mirabile dictu, was
quoted as saying she supported cutting the core curriculum further
so that students had more time for “new fields of inquiry”
like … well, like gender studies. We tend to feel about academic
disciplines with the word “studies” in their titles the way that George
Orwell said he felt about saints: that they should be considered
guilty until proven innocent. With “gender studies” the presumption
is not even necessary, since it has consistently proven itself
to be little more than a haven for radical feminist claptrap.

It is difficult not to feel a special sadness about what is
happening at the University of Chicago. For although it has long
since ceased being the bastion of traditional rigor
its enthusiasts like to remember, it has until recently
done a better job than many institutions at resisting the philistine
and ideological attacks that have undermined many educational
institutions. We deeply sympathize, therefore, with Ken White, a
twenty-one-year-old,
fourth-year student at the university who
lamented: “This is one of the very last places that has a rigorous
curriculum. It’s a test case. If you lose Chicago, I don’t know what
you’ll have left.”