About University of
Chicago
The University of Chicago came
to life in the twilight of the 19th century, with the state of Illinois issuing
its official certificate of incorporation in September 1890. A $600,000 pledge
from oil magnate John D. Rockefeller helped to get the university off the
ground, while local department store owner Marshall Field donated land. The
vision of the university’s first president was of a “bran splinter new”
institution “as solid as the ancient hills” – a modern research university with
a commitment to equal opportunities and non-sectarianism.
This vision has been at the core of Chicago’s existence,
enshrined in its motto: Crescat scientia; vita excolatur (“Let knowledge grow
from more to more; and so be human life enriched”). The university has lived up
to this by being at the forefront of major academic endeavour and discovery. It
has connections to more than 80 Nobel laureates, 30 National Medal winners
(across humanities, arts and science) and nine Fields Medallists. It has also
been awarded nearly 50 MacArthur “genius grants”.
Current faculty who have won a Nobel prize while at
Chicago include economists Robert E. Lucas (1995), James J. Heckman (2000),
Roger Myerson (2007), Lars Peter Hansen (2013), Eugene Fama (2013), and
physicist James Cronin (1980). Ngô Bao Châu, the first Vietnamese to win the
Fields Medal (2010), is the Francis and Rose Yuen distinguished service
professor in Chicago’s department of mathematics.
Notable alumni of Chicago include authors Saul Bellow and
Susan Sontag, astronomer Edwin Hubble, film critic Roger Ebert, and everyone’s
favourite celluloid academic and archaeologist, Indiana Jones – who also taught
at the university.
While Chicago routinely ranks in the world’s top
institutions academically, its prowess extends to the sporting arena. It was a
founding member of the Big Ten Conference, the oldest, highest-level
intercollegiate athletics conference in the US. Today the university sponsors
19 intercollegiate sports, which cater for more than 500 participants and 330
competitions taking place each year. They all play under the same name, “the
Maroons”, which the university was nicknamed on account of its official colour.
The university’s campus sprawls over more than 210 acres
in the Hyde Park and Woodlawn neighbourhoods, which lie south of downtown Chicago.
Its first buildings were modelled on the Gothic style of the University of
Oxford, but by the mid-20th century, modern buildings had begun popping up to
intersperse old and new. It now blends a mix of classical and contemporary
architecture from the Mitchell Tower and Robie House, architect Frank Lloyd
Wright’s historic residence, through to the Laird Bell Law Quadrangle.
The city of Chicago itself is the university’s
“laboratory, playground, and muse”, with downtown highlights encompassing
restaurants, shopping and cultural attractions. In one day you could visit the
Navy Pier amusement park, the Art Institute of Chicago or shop on the
Magnificent Mile.
With satellite campuses and facilities overseas, UChicago
has transcended its US geography to make itself an international institution.
It invites prospective students to step inside its walls and “walk along the
paths of Nobel laureates, pathbreaking researchers, and tomorrow’s leaders”.
Administration
and finances
The
University of Chicago is governed by a board of trustees. The Board of Trustees
oversees the long-term development and plans of the university and manages
fundraising efforts, and is composed of 55 members including the university
President. Directly beneath the President are the Provost, fourteen Vice
Presidents (including the Chief Financial Officer, Chief Investment
Officer, and Vice President for Campus Life and Student Services), the
Directors of Argonne National Laboratory and Fermilab, the
Secretary of the university, and the Student Ombudsperson. As of May
2016, the Chairman of the Board of Trustees is Joseph Neubauer, and the
President of the university is Robert Zimmer. In December 2013 it was
announced that the Director of Argonne National Laboratory, Eric Isaacs,
would become Provost. Isaacs was replaced as Provost in March 2016
by Daniel Diermeier.
The
university's endowment was the 12th largest among American educational
institutions and state university systems in 2013 and as
of 2015 was valued at $7.6 billion. Part of President Zimmer's
financial plan for the university has been an increase in accumulation of debt
to finance large building projects. This has drawn support and criticism
from many in the university community.
Research
In
fiscal year 2014, the University of Chicago spent US$390,082,000 on scientific
research. It is classified by the Carnegie Foundation for the
Advancement of Teaching as an
institution with "highest research activity" and is a founding member of the Committee on Institutional Cooperation and the Association of American Universities.
The
university operates more than 140 research centers and institutes on campus.
Among these are the Oriental
Institute—a museum and research center for Near
Eastern studies owned and
operated by the university—and a number of National
Resource Centers, including the Center
for Middle Eastern Studies. Chicago also operates or is affiliated with a
number of research institutions apart from the university proper. The
university manages Argonne
National Laboratory, part of the United
States Department of Energy's national laboratory system, and co-manages eermi National Accelerator Laboratory
(rmilab, )a
nearby particle physics laboratory, as well as a stake in the Apache Point Observatory in Sunspot,
New Mexico. Faculty and students at the adjacent Toyota Technological Institute at
Chicago collaborate with the
university. In 2013, the
university formed an affiliation with the formerly independent Marine Biological Laboratory in Woods Hole, Mass. Although formally unrelated, the National Opinion Research Center is located on Chicago's campus.
The
University of Chicago has been the site of some important experiments and
academic movements. In economics, the university has played an important role
in shaping ideas about the free
market and is
the namesake of the Chicago
school of economics, the school of economic thought supported by Milton Friedman and other economists. The university's sociology department was the first independent
sociology department in the United States and gave birth to the Chicago school of sociology. In physics, the university was the
site of the Chicago Pile-1 (the first controlled, self-sustaining
man-made nuclear chain reaction, part of the Manhattan
Project), of Robert Millikan's oil-drop experiment that calculated the charge of the
electron, and of the development
of radiocarbon dating by Willard
F. Libby in 1947. The chemical
experiment that tested how life originated on early Earth, the Miller–Urey experiment, was conducted
at the university. REM sleep was discovered at the university in
1953 by Nathaniel Kleitman and Eugene
Aserinsky.
The
University of Chicago (Department of Astronomy and Astrophysics) has owned the Yerkes Observatory in Williams
Bay, Wisconsin since 1897, where
the largest operatingrefracting telescope in
the world and other telescopes are located.
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