6 CHICAGO MAROON | GREY CITY

For a university to be considered

great these days, it must have both

great teachers and a great deal of

money. Its administrators must

weigh the research needs of its faculty with the

financial needs of the corporation. But a group of

University of Chicago faculty claim that too much

of University administrators’ time and resources

are spent attending to the bottom line—that there

is a new, structural hunger for money that seems

to leave faculty’s interests by the wayside.

At the heart of the matter is the fear that the

administration no longer shares the faculty’s val-

ues, especially after a vocal protest two years ago

against the controversial Milton Friedman Institute

produced few results. It is born of a feeling that the

University Senate, which represents faculty, can’t

or won’t exercise the power it is given. “I think this

is a University that’s more responsible to its faculty

than most, but the idea that we are a faculty-run

university with some kind of democratic structure

and where major policy issues percolate upward

from the Faculty Senate” is a fiction, English pro-

fessor W.J.T. Mitchell said.

President Robert Zimmer and Provost Thomas

Rosenbaum defended the way the University is

run at length in a June letter to faculty. In an inter-

view yesterday, Zimmer expressed confidence in

the way his administration makes decisions and

faith that they are made for the right reasons. “We

are in a constant effort, and we need to be in a

constant effort, to make sure that this is the place

that faculty can do their best work. That’s a huge

piece of the University’s responsibility,” Zimmer

said.

But faculty aren’t so sure the University is liv-

ing up to that promise. Many concerns over the

corporatization of the University were outlined

in a petition circulated among faculty in May. It

argued the University’s intellectual life has been

corrupted by certain administrative actions. “The

University becomes an instrument through which

other kinds of actors—some well-intentioned, and

some decidedly not—seek to advance their own

pet projects and interests,” the petition said.

A recent flash point in the Near Eastern

Languages and Civilizations (NELC) department

exemplifies this alleged change in mission—where

fundraising for a faculty project takes precedence

and faculty interest becomes an afterthought.

According to professors Janet Johnson and

Cornell Fleischer, who both signed the petition,

Martha Merritt, a study abroad administrator, told

NELC faculty this summer that a wealthy donor

had provided funds for a study abroad program in

Cairo. The program seemed to have been directed

by the donor’s wishes, though Merritt and NELC

chairman Theo van den Hout are adamant this

was not the case. The faculty took umbrage at the

fact that it hadn’t been consulted on the program’s

direction until what seemed like the eleventh hour.

“The University of Chicago calls itself a university

that is run by its faculty. If that’s true, then faculty

should be involved in major discussions of things

like this,” said Johnson, who also said she didn’t

think administrators acted in bad faith.

Though the program was soon changed on

the advice of faculty, the move came just a few

months after the petition that alleged that money

has undue influence on University decisions. “The

administration is quite frank in saying that [the

Cairo program] was not going to happen without

a donor,” Fleischer said, “and that doesn’t neces-

sarily sound very good to those of us who are

concerned about the galloping corporatization of

University life and governance.”

Signed by 174 faculty members, or about eight

percent of the faculty, the June petition was

released after months of bad feeling over the

establishment of the Milton Friedman Institute for

Research in Economics (MFIRE). The petition,

released by a faculty group called the Committee

for Open Research on Education and Society

(CORES), called MFIRE part of the trend

toward corporatization: “We would hate to think

that the University’s evident fixation on financial

assets and its desire to exploit the Friedman brand

name for fund-raising purposes would lead it to

neglect its most valuable assets—its students, fac-

ulty and staff—while committing itself to a project

whose very name reinforces a narrow, retrograde,

and now demonstrably failed set of social and

economic policies,” the petition said.

A collaboration between the Economics

Department, the Booth School, and the Law

School, the Milton Friedman Institute for

Reasearch in Economics is so named because

CORES organized in opposition to its founding

as simply the Milton Friedman Institute in 2008.

CORES’s outcries spurred the first full meeting

of the faculty in 14 years, an annual event that

had fallen by the wayside. The group was con-

cerned that the Institute was created mainly as a

fundraising tool, to capitalize on the recent death

of Milton Friedman. “I think that signaled to us

the University’s aggressive interest in fundraising

and its willingness to function in a novel fashion,

creating academic units and programs for their

fundraising appeal,” said religion professor Bruce

Lincoln (Ph.D. ’77), a CORES leader, in a recent

interview.

There were public protests, panel discussions

between prominent economics professors and

CORES co-chairs, and a closed meeting of

the University Senate, as the collected faculty

is known. CORES wanted Zimmer to put the

Institute’s establishment to a vote; instead, there

was a compromise—an addendum to the name

that clarified its research-oriented mission. Yet the

name change didn’t allay CORES’s concerns.

The allegation of corporatization is a seri-

ous one at a school whose president often touts

its longstanding guarantee of an environment

where academics can argue unimpeded. In a

long response to CORES’s complaints, Zimmer

and Rosenbaum—both U of C professors as

well—asserted the need for faculty involvement

in University governance while defending recent

investment decisions. “Our donors support our

work because they believe in the values of the

University of Chicago and want to enable us to

achieve our highest aspirations,” they wrote on

June 9. “These donors understand the importance

of academic freedom and the essential role of

unfettered inquiry. This University has stood firm-

ly on the principle that such external support must

never direct or limit our intellectual pursuits.”

But MFIRE is only one part of CORES’s

scattered constellation of evidence that purports

to show the influence of the corporate on the

University. They say another donor, the Chinese

government, will play an even more active role

in directing the curriculum of Chinese language

study at the University. China backs the U of

C’s recently established Confucius Institute, one

of over 300 set up around the world, including

one at the University of Michigan and one in

the Chicago Public Schools. The Institutes run

Chinese language training centers funded by the

government of China. They have been called an

organ of propaganda by Sweden’s Parliament and

Canada’s intelligence agency, and in 2007, faculty

at the University of Pennsylvania voted against a

proposed Confucius Institute on their campus.

The U of C’s Confucius Institute was approved

without ever coming to a faculty-wide vote, but

Zimmer and Rosenbaum discussed it with a com-

mittee of faculty from the East Asian Languages

and Civilizations Department before giving it the

go-ahead; a June press release said it will be run by

a number of University administrators. Professor

Donald Harper, who has since taken the chair-

manship of the Center of East Asian Studies, said

the discussion with faculty was meant to vet the

proposal more than offer final approval. “It wasn’t

as if it was on the vote of the China Committee

that it happened,” said Harper, who also signed

the CORES petition, though he did not discuss it

or corporatization with Grey City.

Lincoln described such discussions of adminis-

tration-backed initiatives with groups most closely

concerned as “theater of consent,” meaning con-

versations held more to produce the impression of

accord than to generate alternatives or create real

compromise. These displays are a way of glossing

over dissent while being able to note that admin-

istrators received input on contentious issues,

Lincoln said. However, administrators always

maintain the importance of input received from

any group during decision-making processes.

Another major concern for CORES is the redi-

rection of University resources away from Ph.D.

programs and towards undergraduate programs,

professional schools, and one-year, terminal M.A.

programs like the Masters of Arts Program in the

Humanities (MAPH), Masters of Arts Program

in the Social Sciences (MAPSS), and Master of

Science in Financial Mathematics.

The University of Chicago of the 1970s was

a more informal, less bureaucratic place with

a much different way of thinking about its

students—especially undergraduates, who made

up a much smaller proportion of the population.

But the school changed in the 1990s, when an

analysis of University finances by President Hugo

Sonnenschein led him to conclude that enroll-

Esprit

Faculty wonder whether a business mentality is steering the University's

research focus

by Asher Klein

de

MATT BOGEN/GREY CITY

6 CHICAGO MAROON | GREY CITY

7CHICAGO MAROON | GREY CITY

ing more College and M.A. students would help

sustain the University’s finances. “Even saying that

created a furor among many faculty who don’t

like economic thinking,” said Richard Shweder, a

professor of human development and psychology

who has been at the University since 1973.

Sonnenschein created three faculty-led com-

mittees that spent a year assessing the University’s

educational work and its strained finances.

Then came University-wide reform, resulting in

an increased focus on the College and profes-

sional programs, as well as the requirement that

all faculty teach undergraduate courses.. Shweder

and others said increased faculty responsibility

brought more money and more bureaucratic red

tape. Such bottom-line thinking persists, accord-

ing to Lincoln and other CORES members.

Lincoln gave a slew of reasons why Ph.D. work

needs to be prioritized, including challenging

faculty and training the next generation of think-

ers. “It’s where novelty occurs. It’s not just the

transmission of established wisdom, it’s where the

rethinking of critical problems is likeliest to occur,”

Lincoln said. The College, but especially the ter-

minal M.A. programs, bring smart students to the

University in a “broad and unfocused” program

that isn’t likely to produce deep, scholarly thought

in the same way as Ph.D. programs—professors’

time is better spent on students with more aca-

demic background and ability. “I think what those

[M.A.] programs do is well worth doing, but I’m

not sure this is the kind of institution that should

be doing it,” Lincoln said. “I’m pretty certain that

doing that is not in the best interests of this institu-

tion, except possibly in financial terms.“

Enrollment in MAPH, MAPSS, and the

Financial Mathematics programs have consis-

tently increased since their inception (see top

figure). The MAPH program had 102 students

last spring. With tuition and fees for a student tak-

ing three classes at $42,444, the MAPH program

would have brought in over $4 million that year.

The Ph.D. program has increased as well, albeit at

a slower rate (see bottom figure). While adminis-

trators have developed a graduate aid scheme that

works to ensure Ph.D. students receive funding

for four years of study, many think more funding

is necessary.

The flip-side of Lincoln’s argument is that the

terminal M.A. programs provide students with the

exposure to serious intellectual work that might

spur them onto great scholarship at the U of C or

elsewhere. Shweder called the programs “a bril-

liant institutional innovation,” bringing in needed

funding while allowing smart students to explore

stimulating graduate coursework. Philosophy

professor Candace Vogler, who co-directed the

MAPH program for a number of years, said

MAPH is a vast improvement over the system it

succeeded, in which many Ph.D. students were

cut after just a few years. To them, increasing M.A.

programs doesn’t supplant the intellectual mission

of the University, it enhances it.

Shweder did not sign the CORES petition this

spring, though he did publish a scholarly article in

2006 arguing that corporatization has broadened

oversight of faculty research, which is meant to

be unfettered. “The petition as it developed did

have a lot of points in it that should be discussed

and raised,” he said, but the opposition to MFIRE

seemed unreasonable. “To oppose something of

quality that has the support of brilliant members

of the faculty...I think there’s a live-and-let-live

quality that’s very important.” Shweder said the

opposition to MFIRE seemed instead to come

from those faculty who don’t like bottom-line

thinking.

But bottom-line thinking is a reality the

University must deal with every day. Clyde

Watkins (A.B. ’67) worked in the Development

Office for six years during the ’70s, eventually serv-

ing as an associate vice president, before becom-

ing an education consultant. In the 1970s, he said,

the University raised $30–35 million a year; in

2008, the U of C finished a five-year fundraising

drive that exceeded its $2-billion goal. $500 mil-

lion now goes to research each year, according

to the director of the Institutional Review Board,

which oversees research. CORES accuses the

University of “metastatic growth of administrative

staff,” but according to Watkins, all large research

institutions have adapted the size of their fundrais-

ing staffs.

CORES isn’t advocating for any specific

changes, but Lincoln said a medium for faculty

input on University-wide policy already exists,

and should provide the kind of check that would

have put MFIRE or the Confucius Institute up

for a faculty-wide vote. The body of the faculty

that engages with the administration is called the

Council of the Senate, a 51-member group

elected from the Senate that meets with Zimmer

monthly.

The voice of the faculty isn’t heard because

the Senate and the Council of the Senate have

become a sounding board for administration con-

cerns—a model the administration has espoused—

or a “theater of consent,” Lincoln argues. “I think

the structural forces that produce those kinds of

errors are clear, I think they’re large, I think they’re

powerful. I think you sound the alarm early,

and you make your concerns very clear to warn

against going further in those directions,” he said.

Shweder had a similar take on the root of corpo-

ratization: Zimmer and Rosenbaum have the best

intentions, but “it’s not personality, it’s structural

issues that you worry about,” Shweder said.

Zimmer views the structure of the University

as less problematic, arguing that University-wide

decisions are made through a system of distrib-

uted authority that is necessarily complex. “You

have literally hundreds of people making impor-

tant decisions about the Unviersity, and it’s good

that there’s this distributed authority. At the same

time, when you’re going to be dealing with people

who don’t like something or people who want

something, those things need to be addressed in

a vehicle that’s appropriate to the authority level

involved,” Zimmer said.

Lincoln, a Council member himself, said the

University statutes give the body jurisdiction over

all academic matters, but faculty rarely introduce

motions, something he attributed to a lack of real

information on day-to-day financial and adminis-

trative numbers. The reactive nature of Council

meetings means they are just “a top-down pro-

cess of disseminating the company line,” he said.

“Rarely is anything turned back.” Lincoln said that

among the information he would like to review

at Committee and Council meetings are detailed

budgets and an overview of administrative staff.

But when asked if the Council had access to the

information it requested, Zimmer said, “We’ve

attempted to give everybody the information

they’ve asked for, and if people want more infor-

mation, we can provide more.”

Another group, the seven-person Committee of

the Council of the Senate, meets every other week

with Zimmer and Rosenbaum. But there are prob-

lems here, too. “It really sits and listens and gives

some comments. It’s not like we can decide on

major things,” said statistics chair Yali Amit, who

serves on the Committee. Though he co-chaired

CORES in 2008, Amit didn’t sign the petition,

which he said raised no new issues on MFIRE,

and that its other complaints were not sufficiently

substantiated. Still, he said the Committee would

benefit from more information.

For Lincoln and CORES members, the ideal of

faculty leadership is a more of a myth than any-

thing, and one most faculty may not be interested

in pursuing—Amit questioned whether faculty will

ever want to be very involved in governing the U

of C. “The Administration is always going to set

the agenda. There are faculty initiatives, people

come up with ideas, but I think they’re the ones

sitting there, that’s their job. Large-scale agendas

are rarely set by faculty,” Amit said.

Zimmer said he told faculty at recent Council

and Senate meetings that his Administration is

always acting in the faculty’s best interest. “That

is what we need to keep asking ourselves at all

times: Are we responding to changing conditions

of all sorts so that we are ensuring that faculty

are continually saying that this is the best place

to do their work?” And he noted in the interview

that the Provost has set up a faculty committee to

assess any systemic problems raised by professors.

Lincoln heard Zimmer speak at the Council

and Senate meetings and took his words as a

tentative move towards a discussion of corporati-

zation. “I felt like he’s taking it seriously, and if so

that’s a hopeful sign,” Lincoln said. “It’s not con-

crete, material progress, no changes of policy were

announced, no reversals of decisions we really

think were very ill-advised, but there’s a discussion

that’s ongoing, and that’s good news.”

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ENROLLMENT IN PH.D. AND TERMINAL M.A. PROGRAMS

Key terminal M.A. programs were established in the 1990s, and in the last 10 years enrollment in some has doubled. Over the same period, most Ph.D. programs have stayed the same size or diminished slightly.

Lincoln says Ph.D. programs are where the meat of scholarly work is done on campus. The work professors do with M.A. students, Lincoln says, can be a drain on faculty resources. That the administration continues to invest in these programs, the CORES argues, is a sign the University is becoming more corporate.

UNIVERSITY ENROLLMENT ACROSS DIVISIONS

After years of modest growth, the size of the College and professional schools increased markedly in the mid-1990s after administrators reconsidered University finances.

Both programs bring in tuition, and CORES claims that developing them over more intellectually rigorous Ph.D. programs represents a trend towards corporatization. In a recent interview, President Zimmer was open to faculty reconsidering the relative size of the Divisions.