When a university demands a great faculty as Chicago does, it must, of course, demand an outstanding student body as well. When the university opened, it largely attracted the brightest children from Chicago and the Middle West. But as its academic fame began to spread, it soon began drawing students from all over the country, a pattern that persists today.
You have to be smart to get into the undergraduate college, usually in the upper 5 percentile of graduating high school seniors nationally. Of the 3,000 undergraduate students at Chicago, less than a third come from Chicago and Illinois; the rest are evenly divided among other regions of the U.S.
Most prestigious universities in this country rely on a few favored
”feeder” high schools to send them the nucleus of each freshman class. Northwestern University in Evanston, for example, relies heavily on graduating seniors from several of Chicago`s north suburban high schools, along with affluent high schools outside Cleveland and New York City.
The University of Chicago, according to its dean of admissions, Dan Hall, has never had that luxury. Last year`s freshman class of 771 students came from 525 high schools around the country.
”An awful lot of our kids are children of academics,” Hall says, ”or they are outstanding high school scholars who came here on the recommendation of a high school teacher. We like to think of our kids as `self-selecting,`
kids who really enjoy studying, reading and discussing. It demands a little more of an individual to come here. Just because you were the smartest kid in your high school doesn`t mean much here because that`s what everybody here was in high school.
”But out of that come some tremendous strengths that many other universities would like to have. The kids are a little different here than at most places.”
There is something different about university students who camp out overnight in front of their advisors` offices to be first in line for class registration the next morning. It happens every year at Chicago. It may be the only college in the country where a favorite professor is accorded, if not the same status as a rock star, esteem to the extent that undergraduates will spend an uncomfortable night on the lawn to make sure they can enroll in his class.
There really has to be something different about the Chicago students when you consider who their favorite professor is and what he demands of them. Karl Weintraub is the professor, and he teaches one of 15 sections on the History of Western Civilization. It`s a required course for all
undergraduates, whether they are physics majors, history majors or preparing for dental school. The class is supposed to meet for one and a half hours two times a week. Weintraub doesn`t think that is enough time to get through the material, however, so he makes his students attend an extra evening lecture every week on the history of Western intellectual development from the ancient Greeks to Karl Marx.
”Past generations have a valid right to be heard and respected,” he tells his students. ”Rather than handing you solutions like ripe fruits, I invite you to rethink some of man`s best thoughts.”
Despite the added workload that he demands, it is Weintraub`s class that the kids line up to get into. In droves. Every year.
Another course the students camp out in the quadrangles to enroll in is a five-year-old course called the ”Little Red School House.” It is so difficult that many of the students take a minimal course load for the semester to devote most of their time to it. It is a sort of remedial writing course for the learned, designed to teach future academics to write in plain English without academic jargon.
Three Chicago English professors originally thought up the course over a poker game one night as they discussed how dismally lawyers and judges write. They invented a grueling short course that teaches lawyers how to write legal briefs and opinions in understandable English and began an outside consulting business with large law firms and bar associations. It became so successful that they adapted it to the needs of undergraduates.
The undergraduate school as a whole demands more work and a higher standard of scholarship from its students than most institutions would dare to ask for. Its undergraduate program may well be the most rigorous in the world. Course work is so difficult that, to the best of anybody`s recollection, nobody has ever been graduated from the college with a straight-A grade-point average.
”The workload here is just too heavy for somebody to get through four years with a perfect 4.0 grade average,” says a Chicago administrator, surprised anyone would suggest the possibility. ”A `C` is a respectable grade here, representing a good deal of work and comprehension on the part of the student.”
In other words, nobody survives in the college unless he demonstrates a serious pursuit of knowledge. The students resent being pictured as ”grinds” who rarely have time to look up from their books, but they constantly joke about how much studying they have to do, too. Consider this paragraph from an account of a track meet in the sports pages of the school newspaper written last spring:
”Chicago`s best performances occurred in the 5,000. On a blazingly hot day which saw the mercury soar to 86 degrees, Stephen Thomas burned up the track to place fifth in a personal-record time of 15:46.6. Mike Rabieh didn`t fare quite so well in the heat, but he ran well enough to take eighth place in 16:07. Although his time was certainly respectable, Rabieh was a little upset with his race. `I really wish I had hung with Stephen,` he moaned. `If I had been able to run as fast he did, I would have gotten an extra 20.4 seconds to study.` ”
Though it sometimes appears that the university is demanding mostly blood, sweat and tears from its undergraduates, it costs $14,250 a year for room, board and tuition to keep a student at Chicago. Even though 70 percent of the undergraduates receive some form of financial aid, it still is one of the most expensive private schools in the country. Parents gladly pay, even though the university makes no bones about the fact that its first priorities lie with research and with its graduate students.
In spite of all that, or probably because of it, five high school students apply for each available spot in the freshman class. The university likes to think it attracts its students by its high standards and one-of-a-kind faculty.
Chicago can`t lure them with the cachet used by such old-line Ivy League schools as Harvard, Princeton and Brown because it doesn`t have an ”old boy” tradition. As a group, Chicago students are not from wealthy families. Its students tend to come from middle-class intellectual families and working-class families who are sending a child to college for the first time.
Nine percent of the undergraduates, for example, are Oriental, a large percentage of them recent immigrants. Less than 3 percent of the school`s undergraduates, however, are black, despite being in a city increasingly dominated by blacks.
Hanna Gray, the current president of the university, admits that the low enrollment of blacks is an embarrassing situation for the school, a result in part of its rigorous standards.
”We are competing with every other great university in the country for the brightest black students,” she says. ”The allure of going out of state to a prestigious place like Harvard or Yale really hurts us when it comes to recruiting minority students from the Chicago area. Still, it`s no excuse, and we should be doing better than we are. We`re trying right now to set up a program with several inner-city schools to attract more blacks and
Hispanics.”
The school can`t lure students with the aura of big-time athletics, either, because it has none. Fifty years ago Chicago was a Big Ten Conference football powerhouse, but now it plays schools like Concordia and Carleton colleges, and it plays the game mostly for fun. Gray, an avid professional football fan, ruefully admits that one year she didn`t realize Chicago`s football coach had resigned until the Christmas card she sent him was returned to her home stamped: ”Moved. Left No Forwarding Address.”
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What Chicago does lure prospective students with is a student-faculty ratio of 9 to 1. Chicago does not believe in big survey-course classes found in most universities, where lecturers talk in arenalike rooms filled with 200 or 300 students at a time. Not only are Chicago`s classes small, they are always taught by professors, never by graduate assistants.
To be an undergraduate student at Chicago means you run a fair chance of taking a course or two from somebody who has won a Nobel Prize. If the professor is teaching in a subject for which there is no Nobel Prize, he is probably one–if not the–world authority on that subject. And if a student is lucky, as it sometimes happens, the professor might enlist some of his undergraduates as research assistants to help him in his work.
Though the primary reason for the university`s existence is research by its professors, the school has always pushed its faculty to make a strong commitment to teaching on every level, especially on the undergraduate level. That is why you find men of the stature of James Cronin teaching undergraduates every year. Cronin says he teaches undergraduates not out of a sense of altruism but because it helps him in his own work.
”A graduate student is more like a colleague,” Cronin says. ”The undergraduates are more precocious and less sure of themselves. When I have to explain to them what my current work is, I find myself having to think things through very clearly in order to explain it to them, and in the process I sometimes find myself thinking about the problems I am working on in new ways. ”At the base the university is committed to research and the expansion of knowledge. You try to get across to your students the feeling of what the cutting edge of knowledge is in your field. Through that you hope you inspire in the undergraduates a thirst for knowledge and the search for it.”
There is little doubt that having a teacher like Cronin in your undergraduate courses can leave its mark.
”To have somebody like him willing to teach you and share his knowledge with you is something you almost can`t describe,” says Mark Weyrich, a 19-year-old biology major from Elmhurst who was in one of Cronin`s classes as a freshman. ”It`s really a special feeling.”
One of Weyrich`s classmates in the course, Rainer Hollerbach, a senior physics major from Fairbanks, Alaska, who Cronin says is one of the best undergraduate students he has ever had, also treasures the experience of having attended the Nobelist`s classes.
”I think it does have an effect on you,” Hollerbach says, ”because you see how people think and analyze. I think students get a lot from that. A lot of students tend to be too mathematical by looking up an equation and cranking out an answer without understanding the problem. Taking a course from Cronin, you can see when he`s working out something on the blackboard that he is not too good at algebra, which he freely admits, but he always comes up with the answer because he really understands the physics inside and out.”
Richard Taub, a sociologist and former associate dean of the undergraduate college, says there is no other school in the nation that takes its education of undergraduates quite so seriously as Chicago. He says the feeling within the faculty is that Chicago`s core curriculum is the first step to making its students truly educated.
The ”core,” as it is commonly referred to on the campus, is an idea developed in the 1930s at Chicago under the school`s young, innovative president of the time, Robert Maynard Hutchins. He was famous for developing a controversial and ultimately unsuccessful program of allowing exceptionally bright and able 14-year-olds, who became known as Hutchins` ”whiz kids,” to enter college. But his most lasting legacy is the ”core,” a much admired and copied college curriculum in which the faculty determines half of the classes each student takes in his four years of study.
”There is a very strong feeling here that an education is not just filling up a person`s head with knowledge,” Taub says. ”In the core curriculum we don`t use textbooks at all. In a core course on the History of Western Civilization, the students are reading actual documents, letters, government reports and diaries written in the era the students are studying. They aren`t reading somebody else`s version of what people were saying 200, 500 or 2,000 years ago. They are reading the actual words, and we keep asking the students, `What is going on here, what are these people trying to say?`
”We make sure that education is not going to be a passive act where students sit in a class and take notes. They are going to have to sit in small discussion groups and assert and defend themselves. The theory is that we`re going to give them skills to make them educable for the rest of their lives.” Thus there have been several generations of Chicago graduates who, whether they go into careers in science, business or education, have something in common. They are conversant in Plato, Aristotle, Jefferson, Marx, calculus, chemistry, psychology and probably a foreign language.
”We are not preparing our students for a specialization,” says Herman Sinaiko, dean of undergraduate students. ”We are providing them the training in humanistic skills and sensitivities that we think an educated person must have. We think somebody with broad-ranging interests is really ready to dig into the specializations. That`s why we don`t turn out chemists from the college; we turn out liberally educated people who have a concentrated interest in chemistry.”
The criterion Chicago has always used to judge the success of its undergraduate program is how many of its graduates apply to and are accepted into graduate and professional schools. Sinaiko says, for instance, that nearly every graduating senior from Chicago who applies to go on to medical school, either at Chicago or elsewhere, is accepted immediately. They are accepted, he says, even though more than half of them took undergraduate degrees in such fields as English, music, philosophy or history rather than in the sciences.
”We think the liberal arts are a very good base from which to start a medical education,” Sinaiko says. ”The last thing we need is narrow automatons manning the nation`s hospitals.”
If the general public doesn`t understand what it means to have a degree from Chicago, academics in other schools do. Chicago graduates in all fields usually have little difficulty getting into graduate programs elsewhere.
In fact, Chicago sends proportionately more graduating seniors on to graduate and professional schools than any other college in the country. Sinaiko says about 50 percent of its graduates go immediately into graduate school, and another 30 percent go on to some sort of graduate training after working for a few years.
”It really bugs me when I go out to Elmhurst and I run into friends from high school who ask me where I`m going to college,” says biology major Weyrich. ”They hear University of Chicago and can never figure out if I`m talking about the University of Illinois Circle Campus or Chicago State University. They have no idea what this school is.”