Two articles about the U of C.

In recent weeks, I happened to stumble across two totally unrelated, but interesting, articles about the University of Chicago.

Here's a nice page with some historical information about the nuclear missile base that was once in place just across the street from my dormitory at the UofC. I lived in Shoreland Hall from 1980-1981, during my first undergraduate year.

The missiles were gone by the time I arrived at the UofC. As the story was told to me back then, during the later years of the Vietnam War there were intense protests against the military-industrial complex, as well as more directly against the presence of the base, and it was removed around 1970 (?).

We knew that space as "the Point"; it was a public park and we used to walk out there regularly for fresh air and frisbee and to enjoy the views and the fresh air off the lake. Even in the hottest summers, you could almost always find relief from the heat down at the Point. In the winters, however, the storms blew lots of water up onto the big blocks of conrete that reinforced the shoreline, and the icy paths were treacherous.

I don't recall anyone referring to it as Promontory Point. That seems wrong to me, it seems like something that the Departmant of Redundancy Department (also known as the Squad Squad) would have shot down straightawy.

Moving on...

I found myself fascinated by a recent article by Professor Clifford Ando of the U of C: The Crisis of the University Started Long Before Trump.

When I talk to friends and colleagues about my times at the U of C, they are uniformly amazed at my experiences. I don't believe I ever had any classes with more than 40 other students in them; many of my classes had barely a dozen other students enrolled. Nearly all my classes were taught directly by professors; I never had classes where some grad student was the teaching assistant who led the class, nor do I recall cases where my work was graded by anyone other than the professor themself.

During my time at the U of C, one of the few policy debates that I remember affecting me was the question of adding Computer Science classes to the curriculum. That happened soon after I left, and was even underway during my final years; I remember in particular taking a Complexity Theory class in the Mathematics Department that was truly better classified as a Computer Science course. The resistance to adding Computer Science classes was based in a feeling that the university needed to avoid topics that were industrial or vocational in nature, and instead prefer only those subjects that were rooted in the pure pursuit of knowledge. Although it was already decades old, the Great Books program at the U of C was still strongly held during my time there.

But according to Ando, substantial change was already underway during my time at the U of C; he cites several examples:

The Bayh-Dole act [of 1980] provided for the private licensing of discoveries made during federally funded research. It was motivated by a concern that discoveries made in the preceding decades had not been fully exploited because the lack of opportunity for private gain deprived the system of incentive for development. In short, it granted intellectual property in discoveries made during federally funded research to the universities that hosted the projects and the people who did the research—not, as before, to the people of the United States, who funded that research.

...

The Bayh-Dole act has also fundamentally corroded policymaking at universities. Within perhaps a decade of the act, universities had begun all to pursue each latest fashion in applied science, hoping to score a windfall via licensing that would pay for all: from biomedicine, to imaging, to molecular engineering, to quantum computing, to AI.

Ando also weighs in on the question of whether universities should see themselves as having a duty to provide their students with a direct path to financial success, connecting it back to the same debates that I remember from my years in Hyde Park about whether vocational programs should be a goal of the university.

And of course, just as universities themselves have nearly always failed to make money as they flit from fashion to fashion, so students who were deceived into thinking of higher education as a kind of pre-job are now discovering that the path from coursework to salary is fraught: economics PhDs are going unemployed; finance and computer science BAs have higher unemployment rates than do Art History graduates; coding is a path to Chipotle.

The present landscape, in which AI is coming first for the supposedly high-paying jobs that involve rote forms of data analysis or ground-floor coding, recalls an earlier moment in the history of the University of Chicago. In 1982, a committee at the university published a report on the history and future of doctoral education. It is a remarkable piece of analysis and offers a stunning affirmation of the ideals of the university. It allows that interest in doctoral degrees in STEM fields had plummeted so far that one could fairly pose the question of whether these should be sustained as fields of advanced education at all. The answer, according to the report, was emphatically yes, because that was the duty of the university—to sustain inquiry and training into all things that touch on human existence, both for them in themselves and because we as leaders of universities cannot possibly know the fashions and needs of the future.

I was extraordinarily lucky to receive the education that I got at the U of C. I hope the institution can find a way to continue helping others the way it helped me.