Stephen Wellman

Students in the college of the University of Chicago feel betrayed by the administration’s recent decisions to reduce the size of the school’s core curriculum. Most of the students in the college selected Chicago based on its demanding curriculum and its reputation as a place of serious intellectual endeavor. Many feel these changes in the curriculum were forced through by the administration in an attempt to compete with more trendy universities like Cornell, Duke, and Brown.

The University of Chicago has been dedicated to serious undergraduate liberal arts education since the initiation of the core under President Robert Maynard Hutchins. Unlike other universities who have abandoned strict curricula, Chicago has been sternly dedicated to offering a college education rooted in the Western canon. As a testament to its academic integrity, 70 Nobel Prize winners have been either students or members of the faculty

In an attempt to re-market itself in an era of trendy scholarship, the administration is introducing a new undergraduate curriculum which it titles "The Chicago Plan." The new curriculum will reduce the required number of courses from 21 classes out of 42 required to graduate, to just 15 out of 42. The reductions in the core also eliminate the requirement of a year’s study of a foreign language. The new curriculum is designed to allow students more flexibility in pursuing electives and extracurricular activities.

"I don’t know how many students we can attract if we go after those who only seek the life of the mind," avowed Michael Behnke, a new university vice president in charge of increasing the size of the college. In one of his previous positions, Behnke was responsible for re-marketing the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. "Kids aren’t sure they can lead a balanced life here. My job is to convince them that they are not joining a monastery."

The reductions of the core are not the only innovations in the curriculum at Chicago. While its course catalogue still offers many traditional classes, more trendy classes in areas like gender studies and gay theory are making their way into the school's classrooms. Classes like "Sexual Identity, Life Course, and Life Story," "Fetishism, Gender, Sexuality, and Capitalism," "Problems in Gender Studies," and "Nation: Feminist/Queer Politics and Theory" are becoming more commonplace.

The university is now actively hiring trendy scholars like deconstructionist Homi Bahba, author and leftist activist Toni Morrison, and radical feminist Catherine MacKinnon. Two years ago, Chicago inaugurated its Center for Gender Studies and established an undergraduate major in the field. Professor Leora Auslander, the director of the center, is a noted scholar of fetishism. Her area of academic expertise is the historical interpretation of the French Revolution through the furniture of the period. Chicago had been one of the last major universities in the country to refuse a program in women's studies.

Hugo Sonnenschein, president of the university and former provost at Princeton, has been the primary force behind the new curriculum. He was hired in 1993 to increase the school’s fund-raising apparatus and sagging endowment. His primary plan for this centers on increasing the size of the college. But, in order to do this, he thinks it is necessary to make Chicago seem more appealing to high school seniors who might otherwise opt to apply elsewhere. "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. One hears constantly from parents and students: ‘We are the consumer. We pay the tuition.’"

Several students have been quite active in their criticism of the core reductions. "Well, I suppose the thing that most attracted me to the University of Chicago was its reputation for academic seriousness," declared freshman Baird Allis in an interview with Campus Report. "I applied to Yale, Duke, Cornell, Vanderbilt, and Wake Forest in addition to the University of Chicago. I applied here early and withdrew my applications at all the other schools when I was accepted. That is how much I wanted to go here."

"I thought I could go here and get the world class education I wanted and get access to the great books of the Western canon. Now that’s gone. What reason is there for me to be here now?"

Allis is not the only student who feels slighted by the recent changes in the college’s core. Aleem Hossain, a third year student, founded the student group Education First! as a protest against the recent changes made to the common core. "Education First! was founded as a result of the core cuts. They really upset us [a concerned group of students]. We did not feel like students had been consulted." The group focuses its attention on several issues that face the college, but most importantly the core curriculum and the plans to increase the size of the college. "We do not want to set the precedent that students always get what they want, but we want to see some student consultation."

Hossain noted that the changes in the core were made by "a small committee" comprised mostly of members of the president’s administration. The plans were pushed through in a veil of "secrecy," he claims. He described the process as "undemocratic" and not being open to many alternatives. The group has received a great deal of support from older members of the faculty, but the younger faculty has taken little interest in their efforts.

The University of Chicago’s actions with its curriculum seem strange in an era when many educators are beginning to re-think the devolution that has ravaged the curricula of America’s colleges since the 1960s. The State University of New York is now pressing for a core curriculum, just as Chicago is weakening its core.

There is growing pressure to increase the academic merit of universities all across America. This pressure is resulting in the termination of race-biased admissions policies at several state university systems and promoting regents and trustees to take a more activist stance in favor of rigorous core standards.