Harper`s insistence on creating a community of scholars changed the nature of the university in ways even he could not have foreseen.
Henry Ives Cobb, the architect Harper hired to design the campus, laid it out so that each building would be connected to the others. It was a design that was supposed to symbolize the links between the various disciplines of knowledge. But with such high-powered men and women (9 percent of the faculty was female by 1899) taking up academic posts at Harper`s new university, it turned out that there was more than mere symbolism involved.
By 1910, Albion Small, one of the leaders of Chicago`s department in the fledgling science of sociology, was complaining in published lectures about the lack of cooperation within most university faculties.
The social sciences at most institutions were, he said, ”pretty nearly water-tight compartments . . . where each subgroup practiced its own critical technique from its particularistic viewpoint, with precautions against contagion from groups occupying a different ground.” The disunity among the social sciences, Small said, was a negative force in academia, ”merely preparing predigested mental food for adolescents instead of developing all the resources of fully grown men for cooperative research.”
Small had a rather simple but revolutionary idea for his colleagues: A sociologist examining some problem of the human condition need not limit himself to a sociological view of the problem. He could consult with academics from many different disciplines–anthro pology, history, psychology, political science, law, economics, for example–and come to a much richer understanding of the problem under investigation.
”In order to discharge their function of interpreting to all the experience of all, scholars must raise their work to its highest power by coordinating their labors so that they may as far as possible constitute means proportional to the task,” Small said, challenging his colleagues in 1910 to revolutionize the Chicago faculty. ”Sooner or later . . . some American university . . . will encourage its scholars in the social sciences to resolve themselves into a body of cooperating investigators such as I have sketched.” Small pressed for years for his idea of collaborative research, gradually gaining allies in other powerful scholars at Chicago, including Robert Park in sociology, Charles Merriam in political science and Leon Marshall in economics.
In 1923 the university acted upon Small`s idea, forming a research body called the Local Community Research Committee. Taking Small`s
multidisciplinary approach, the committee was to use the entire city of Chicago as a social science laboratory. It was to study questions of poverty, race, employment, voting patterns, housing and family life in a comprehensive way never attempted anywhere before.
Small proved to be prescient as well as persuasive. A 1980 British study of the evolution of the social sciences in this century concluded: ”The Local Community Research Committee between 1923 and 1930 was a prototype for the organization of university-based social science research, not only in America but throughout the world.”
Chicago was the undisputed leader in social sciences in the 1920s. Research being done in sociology and political science was unmatched anywhere in the world.
As for archeology, an elementary school pupil named Edward Levi at the university`s lab school was busily making models of the ancient Egyptian tombs uncovered and deciphered by expeditions sent out from Chicago. The university`s celebrated archeologist guiding the expeditions, James Henry Breasted, was a world-famous figure. His discoveries whetted a public curiosity about tombs, mummified temple priests and forgotten treasure that was insatiable.
Leon Marshall was a pioneer in academic economics, a scientist who examined the everyday marketplace to analyze real economic behavior. By the 1930s the distinguished economics faculty that came after him was strongly influenced by his work, including Frank Knight, Henry Simons and Jacob Viner. They were a group of scholars who very much mistrusted government intervention as an economic and political tool.
That faculty in the early 1930s attracted a group of graduate students whose equal may never be seen again. Among the doctoral candidates studying together were Milton Friedman, George Stigler, Kenneth Boulding, Sune Carlson and Allen Wallis, and there was an undergraduate, Paul Samuelson.
Those students would eventually bring a good deal of fame to the university, making the ”Chicago school” synonymous with the monetarist approach to economics. Three of the students would go on to win Nobel Prizes, Samuelson (1970), Friedman (1976) and Stigler (1982). In fact, since the Nobel Prize for economics was established in 1969, nine of its recipients have been scholars associated with the university.
Recalling his student days at the university, Stigler says it was his first exposure to the life of serious intellectuals. ”I met and got to know three economists on the faculty I still consider outstanding,” Stigler says. ”Frank Knight, Henry Simons and Jacob Viner. Knight communicated beyond any possible confusion the message that intellectual inquiry was a sacred calling. Viner was the founder of the Chicago tradition of detailed training in neoclassical micro-economics, including training in its application to real problems.
”Among the very able people I met were several students, and of course we knew each other in a way one could not know the professors. The give and take among us students was the first experience I had of constant exchanges in a circle of first-class minds, and I acquired a lifelong taste for it.”
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When Stigler eventually joined Friedman in 1958 as a professor at the university, the round-table discussions started in their student days resumed. The talking and arguing has not stopped since. Economic seminars within the department`s own faculty have become an institution in themselves, famous in the world of economics.
”If somebody is presenting something new, we have a rule that papers be presented in advance,” Stigler says, ”so that the meetings are given over totally to discussion. We`re all friends, but the arguments can get pretty harsh and hard in there, let me tell you. It is no place for rank or privilege. It`s a place where people are undressed.”
The students who emerged from the 1930s to become the faculty of the economics department a decade or two later began to expand the innovations of their own teachers. Henry Simons, for example, in 1938 pioneered teaching a course on the economics of law to students in the university`s law school. A young law professor who had just joined the faculty, Edward Levi, was impressed by Simons` application of economics to legal questions.
What Simons started, Levi and economist Aaron Director picked up in the 1940s, creating the course, Law and Economics. Director became the first economist in the world to take a faculty appointment in a law school, developing a whole new field of study on the economic impact of lawmaking and law enforcement, particularly in regard to antitrust legislation. After Levi became dean of the law school in 1950, he expanded the use of all the social sciences to analyze legal problems.
It is an idea that has taken firm root. Now nearly every law school in the country has at least one economist on its faculty, and many schools are using social scientists within their faculties, but it is Chicago`s law school that remains the leader. And it is Chicago`s law faculty that has been courted intensely by Washington to fill federal court judgeships and cabinet posts.
The ”Chicago School” of economic analysis, arguing always for less government intervention, has spread throughout the university departments
–especially into the business school and into political science and sociology.
Stigler pioneered economic studies of government regulation in business, an undertaking which he says has ”half taken me into political science.” He studies the reasons government regulatory policy is enacted, who is and isn`t affected by it, and whether it achieves its intended purpose. Taking minimum wage laws as an example, he found that they actually add to unemployment and inflation, giving no visible benefit to anyone.
Stigler`s approach to studying government regulation has stimulated a good deal of interest in economic analysis by political scientists as well as lawyers. Another economist at the school, Gary Becker, has welded a strong and growing union between economics and sociology.
Becker, who received a Ph.D. in economics in 1955, returned to Chicago as a professor in 1970 because ”I thought it had the most stimulating economics department in the world.” It also has, he says, the best sociology department in the world, and his own academic interests lie as much in sociology as economics.
At Chicago he has applied economic analysis to subjects heretofore thought to be strictly within the realm of sociology. He was widely quoted, for instance, after publishing a paper in which he claimed, through economic analysis, that crime does pay, that criminals take up a life of crime as a rational decision, not because they are destabilized creatures of an unjust environment. He has used the same sort of analysis on many other subjects: why people choose to marry, how they decide on the number of children they will raise and the economic benefits and drawbacks of child rearing, the costs of racial discrimination, why people attend church.
Though his work is controversial, Becker has probably done more to extend the boundaries of economics than any other scholar in this century. He, along with Robert Lucas, also at Chicago, are considered to be almost sure winners of the Nobel in economics within the next few years.
Becker`s approach has so impressed sociologists he now holds a joint appointment, teaching graduate students in sociology as well as economics.