Annual Report of the Provost, 1996–97

From 1993 through 1996, we directed much of our attention to addressing significant short- and long-term challenges to the financial strength of the University. Having effectively responded to the short-term challenge, the work now before us is to continue to enhance research and education at the University for the long term and to take those steps now that will ensure a future that is even brighter than our past. In this annual report, I would like to share with you some of the progress we have made in the past year in our ongoing effort to meet our most fundamental responsibility: to foster long-term excellence at the very highest level at the University of Chicago.

New Initiatives

University Professorships

In his State of the University address last winter, President Sonnenschein observed that “the last time we sought to recruit University Professors we added Jim Coleman, Jim Cronin, and Gary Becker to our faculty.” Noting that “that is not a bad aspiration for the future,” the President set for himself the goal of raising a substantial endowment “over the next three years to attract the most talented scholars to the University.” With some of that endowment now in hand, we have invited proposals for outside appointments at the rank of University Professor. As we explained in a memo to the deans setting forth this program:

The standards for such appointments are clear: These must be individuals who are acknowledged internationally to be at the cutting edge of academic fields that are fundamental to the mission of the University; they must be individuals whose appointment would have a major impact on intellectual life at the University; and they must be individuals whose appointment would be recognized internationally as an important statement about the aspirations and values of the University of Chicago.

Although these appointments will formally be in the divisions or schools, as is our custom, the salary and benefits of these University Professors will be covered entirely by central University resources and will not in any way limit the number of appointments otherwise available to academic units.

Library

Last year, using both internal and external review committees, we undertook the most comprehensive “assessment of the overall … quality of the library’s collections and services” in more than fifty years. The internal review committee, chaired by Professor Robert Pippin, observed that “the library’s collection has been and remains a glorious and an indispensable asset to our own, to national, and to international culture.” The committee expressed concern, however, that “if we are to remain within the top ranks of research libraries, …aggressive measures need to be taken to improve our acquisitions and cataloguing, our level of staff support, and our preservation and replacement efforts.”

In response to this recommendation, we have initiated “aggressive measures” to enhance the funding and operations of the library. Specifically, we have committed $2.1 million to enable the library to complete the conversion of the general card catalogue to the on-line catalogue; we have budgeted more than $10 million for additional on-site storage of more than one million more volumes in Regenstein Library; and, perhaps most importantly, we have increased the acquisitions budget of the library by a special increment of $300,000 for 1997–98, with the goal of permanently increasing this increment over the next several years by more than $1 million per year.

Information Technology

Because the University’s central information-technology system is increasingly essential to research, teaching, and learning, we have authorized a capital investment of $7 million to enable significant upgrades to this system. As a result, under the direction of Associate Provost Gregory Jackson, we will see a ten-fold increase next year in the capacity of the campus data network and its connection to Internet2; replacement of a large number of aging public-cluster computers; several classrooms newly equipped for fully networked multimedia presentations; the establishment of a new video-conferencing facility; upgraded dormitory networking; and a score of more specialized improvements. Complementing these capital investments, the number of central staff dedicated to academic-computing support will increase significantly in the next year, and, in an effort to make the University’s overall computing environment more manageable and more affordable, we have instituted a new program to appreciably reduce prices and increase support for recommended desktop computers.

College Curriculum

Throughout the 1996–97 academic year, Dean John Boyer led a broadly consultative process that produced a recommendation to the College Council for “the reform of the College’s curriculum.” The proposal calls for a revised fifteen-course Core and a curriculum that is more or less evenly divided among the Core, the concentration, and electives. As Dean Boyer has explained, “the proposal preserves our strong, traditional commitment to systematic and interdisciplinary general education by asking our students to undertake three quarters of study in Core sequences in the humanities, in the social sciences, and in civilization studies, as well as an integrative cluster comprising six courses in the natural sciences and in mathematics,” but at the same time “adds a much bolder commitment to serious opportunities for free elective choice than our College students have heretofore had available to them.” The proposal is designed both to provide students with a “more common experience” by enabling them “to complete most, if not all of their Core requirements during their first two years,” and to foster “a new level of intellectual exploration that [will] build on the interdisciplinarity of the Core.” As the discussion of the past year affirms, the University of Chicago continues to address the most fundamental issues of undergraduate education with a unique sense of responsibility and mission.

Interdivisional (BSD/PSD) Research Institute

Last year, the Council of the University Senate approved the creation of a new interdisciplinary Research Institute “to establish the principles and concepts which enable the information present in the genome to give rise to macromolecular and mesoscopic structure, function, and dynamics, and to elucidate the self-assembly of macromolecular and mesoscopic structures into cells and tissues.” By integrating research in such fields as structural biology, computational biology, and genetics-based approaches to physico-chemical problems, this Institute will enable faculty, students, and other scientists at the University to work at the very cutting edge of the interface between the physical and biological sciences.

Faculty Salaries

As President Sonnenschein noted last year, “our respect for scholarship and scholars, our faith in the process of unencumbered discovery, our fierce intellectual rigor, are the most precious pieces of our institutional capital,” and our capacity to preserve and nurture these values over time “depends most fundamentally on our ability to identify, hire, and retain the most extraordinary scholars.” The President expressed concern, however, that “in too many areas, faculty salaries at the University, particularly in the arts and sciences, lag behind those at our most vigorous competitors.” He therefore declared our intention to “implement a salary policy that makes more money available to compensate our best faculty.” To this end, I am pleased to report that over the past three years we have authorized permanent, above-guideline, carefully targeted salary increases in the cumulative amount of more than $800,000, and that we intend to continue this policy for at least the next several years.

Campus Master Plan

Last spring, at the President’s initiative, the University embarked upon a comprehensive master planning process for only the fourth time in our history. The first comprehensive master plan, led by Henry Ives Cobb in the 1890s, resulted in the central quadrangles; the second such plan, led by Eero Saarinen in the 1950s, produced Regenstein Library and the South Campus; and the third major planning effort, the Sasaki plan of the 1970s, sited the Science Quadrangle.

For at least three reasons, this is a good time to initiate a new master plan. First, prior plans are now out of date and no longer provide useful guidance. Second, in recent years we have increasingly found ourselves making important facilities decisions without an overall philosophy to guide us. And third, and most important, we plan in the next decade to address a variety of important facilities issues, including the need to build a new athletics center and swimming pool; provide improved facilities for the Research Institutes; expand and reconfigure Regenstein Library; locate appropriate office space for alumni relations, development, and College admissions; construct new undergraduate dormitories; provide additional classroom and office space for the Graduate School of Business; and build new research laboratories for the biological and physical sciences. These projects will have a dramatic and lasting impact on our campus, and it is essential that we do them well.

Three steering committees consisting of faculty, trustees, and administrators will oversee the planning process, which will produce a final report in the fall of 1998. The first step in the process was the selection of a lead consultant. After interviewing half-a-dozen candidates, the steering committees selected the firm of NBBJ, which has an excellent record in guiding master plans at such institutions as Stanford, Michigan, and the University of Washington. As President Sonnenschein has noted, a well defined campus master plan is essential to the future well-being of the University, for “anything we build on this campus must be first class, must respect the University’s rich architectural heritage, and must leave appropriate flexibility and space … to meet future University needs.”

Faculty

William Rainey Harper, the first president of the University, made clear that it was worth creating the University of Chicago only if it would be “unlike any other university in the nation.” Thus, the initial plan for the University called for an unprecedented emphasis on scholarly research and a faculty of unparalleled quality. That commitment to faculty excellence continues to this day, and I am pleased to report that during the 1996–97 academic year we promoted seventeen members of the faculty to tenure and appointed sixty-eight new faculty members. Among our new colleagues are:

Pierre-Andre Chiappori, from Centre Nationale de la Recherche Scientifique (DELTA), an economist who has made major theoretical and empirical contributions to the study of consumer demand;
David Cohen, from Berkeley, a distinguished historian of ancient Greece whose most recent research focuses on the legal theory of war crimes;
Bruce Cumings, from Northwestern, an international/diplomatic historian whose research has fundamentally altered our understanding of Korea and of the origins of the Korean War;
Dean Eastman, from IBM, a specialist in the field of spectroscopy and the electronic properties of materials, who now serves as Director of Argonne National Laboratory;
Robert Kendrick, from Harvard, a scholar of sixteenth- and seventeenth-century monastic music whose work merges anthropology, gender studies, historiographic methods, and literary theory;
Charles Larmore, from Columbia, a philosopher whose work in political philosophy has largely shaped the debate on political liberalism and liberal neutrality;
Ann McGill, from Northwestern, a specialist in consumer and manager decision-making whose research emphasizes causal explanations, comparative processes, and the use of imagery in product choice;
Norbert Scherer, from the University of Pennsylvania, an experimental chemist who has made exciting new discoveries in the field of ultrafast chemical dynamics;
Martin Stokes, from Queen’s University of Belfast, an ethnomusicologist who has made important contributions to the fields of music history, anthropology, and Turkish studies;
Alwyn Young, from Boston University, an expert in East Asian economic growth and cross-country comparisons of productivity growth, international trade, and specialization;
Toni Morrison, from Princeton, a Nobel laureate in literature, who will serve as a visiting scholar at the University for six weeks each year, beginning in 1998;
Catherine MacKinnon, from Michigan, one of the nation’s most influential feminist legal scholars, who will serve as a visiting professor for at least one quarter each year, beginning in 1997–98;
Mark Strand, from Johns Hopkins, the 1990 Poet Laureate of the United States, who will serve as a visiting professor for at least one quarter each year, beginning this past spring.

The national and, indeed, international distinction of our faculty is reflected in the extraordinary number of awards, honors, and fellowships they receive. Here is a small sample of those achievements from the 1996–97 year: the late François Furet (Social Thought) was elected to the Académie Française; Kevin Murphy (Graduate School of Business) was awarded the John Bates Clark Medal, which is bestowed by the American Economic Association once every two years to the most outstanding economist under the age of forty; Philip Gossett (Music) was named a Grand Ufficiale della Repubblica, Italy’s highest civilian honor, for his research in Italian opera; Marshall Sahlins (Anthropology) received the Huxley Memorial Medal of the Royal Anthropological Institute; Arnold Davidson (Philosophy) was elected to a Chaise d’Etat at the Collège de France; Robert Morrissey (Romance Languages) was named a chevalier of the Legion of Honor by the French government; Janet Rowley (Medicine) received the American Cancer Society’s Medal of Honor; Michael Turner (Astronomy & Astrophysics) received the Julius Edgar Lilienfeld Prize of the American Physical Society; John Carlstrom (Astronomy & Astrophysics) received the NASA Exceptional Scientific Achievement Medal; Mark Siegler (Medicine) received the Chirone Prize from the Italian National Academy of Medicine; William Fulton (Mathematics) was awarded the Leroy P. Steele Prize by the American Mathematical Society; Robert Lucas (Economics) and Leo Kadanoff (Physics) were elected to membership in the American Philosophical Society; Susan Lindquist (Molecular Genetics & Cell Biology), William Fulton (Mathematics), and Michael Turner (Astronomy & Astrophysics) were elected to the National Academy of Sciences; and Sidney Nagel (Physics), Donald Hopkins (Pediatrics), Arjun Appadurai (Anthropology), Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi (Psychology), and Richard Shweder (Human Development) were elected Fellows of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.

During the past year, members of our faculty published scores of new books on a vast array of subjects. Even a partial list of those that crossed my desk last year gives an impressive sense of the extraordinary breadth of the work of the faculty. Consider the following:

Arjun Appadurai, Cultural Dimensions of Globalization
Gary Becker, Accounting for Tastes
Lauren Berlant, Essays on Sex and Citizenship
Bill Brown, Amusement, Stephen Crane, and the Economies of Play
Paolo Cherchi, La Metamorfosi dell’Adone
Charles Cohen, The Art of Giovanni Antonio de Pordenone
Jean and John Comaroff, Modernity on a South African Frontier
Arnold Davidson, Foucault and his Interlocutors
Richard Epstein, Mortal Peril
Alan Gewirth, The Community of Rights
Sander Gilman, Smart Jews
Jonathan Hall, Ethnic Identity in Greek Antiquity
Reinhold Heller, Toulouse-Lautrec: The Soul of Montmartre
Elizabeth Helsinger, Rural Scenes and National Representation
Harry Hoffner, Perspectives on Hittite Civilization
Douglas Irwin, An Intellectual History of Free Trade
Rashid Khalidi, Palestinian Identity
Rocky Kolb, The Ideas That Shaped Our View of the Universe
John Lantos, Do We Still Need Doctors?
Howard Margolis, Dealing with Risk
Martin Marty, America’s Struggle for the Common Good
Susan Mayer, Family Income and Children’s Life Chances
Robert Morrissey, Charlemagne dans la mythologie de France
Norman Nie, Education and Citizenship in America
William Novak, Law and Regulation in Nineteenth-Century America
Robert Pippin, Idealism as Modernism
Michael Roizen, Anesthesia Practice
Barbara Stafford, Good Looking
Cass Sunstein, Free Markets and Social Justice
Katie Trumpener, The Romantic Novel and the British Empire
Wu Hung, Monumentality in Early Chinese Art and Architecture
Dali Yang, Liberalization and the Regions in China

Over the past year, many of you have graciously responded to my request for copies of new books you have written and scholarly journals you have edited. I do hope you will continue to send me these publications. It is a valuable way for the President, the Provost, and others of us on “the Fifth Floor” to keep up with your achievements.

Although many of the faculty’s contributions are captured in books, they often take other forms as well. To cite just a few examples:

The X-ray spectrometer, one of the key scientific instruments on board the Mars Pathfinder’s rover, was designed and built at the University of Chicago’s Enrico Fermi Institute by Professor Anthony Turkevich and Senior Scientist Tom Economou;
Professor Shulamit Ran’s new opera, Between Two Worlds (The Dybbuk), premiered in June to great acclaim at the Lyric Opera Center for American Artists;
An international research team led by Graeme Bell (Biochemistry & Molecular Biology) made a major discovery in the hunt for the genetic factor behind non–insulin-dependent diabetes mellitus—America’s seventh-leading cause of death;
Another international team, led by Keith Moffat (Biochemistry & Molecular Biology), achieved a major advance in understanding how myogloblin binds and stores oxygen in muscle tissues, an achievement that has potentially dramatic implications for improved drug design;
David Jablonski (Geophysics) effectively debunked a hundred-year-old proposition widely accepted among paleontologists that as organisms evolve they tend to get bigger;
A team of archaeologists led by Professor Aslihan Yener (Near Eastern Languages & Civilizations and the Oriental Institute) and Research Associate Tony Wilkinson made exciting new discoveries about the origins of tin mining some 5,000 years ago in the Amuq Valley of eastern Turkey;
In a recent evaluation of the nation’s 7,000 hospitals conducted by the National Opinion Research Center, the University of Chicago Hospitals were ranked among the best in the nation. Three of the Hospitals’ programs ranked in the top ten in the nation (endocrinology, cancer, and gastroenterology), and seven others ranked in the top twenty. Not only did the University of Chicago Hospitals have by far the highest overall evaluation in the state, but the Hospitals earned the highest ranking in the state in more than half of all programs evaluated.

Students

We have wonderful students. Our College students this year won two Marshall Scholarships, one Churchill Scholarship, six National Science Foundation Fellowships, three Fulbright Fellowships, three Goldwater Scholarships, a Truman Scholarship, and five Mellon Fellowships in the Humanities. Five of our graduate students received Newcombe doctoral-dissertation fellowships, the most from any school in the nation. Eight students from the Harris Graduate School of Public Policy Studies were invited to serve as Presidential Management Interns, and five 1997 graduates of the Law School have been selected to serve as law clerks to justices of the United States Supreme Court.

This was also a noteworthy year for the University’s intercollegiate athletic teams. The men’s basketball team won the UAA championship and advanced to the sweet sixteen of the NCAA Division III tournament; both the men’s and women’s soccer teams advanced to the final four of the NCAA national tournament, and the coaches of the men’s and women’s teams were both selected NCAA Division III Coach of the Year; four of our students were named All-American; three were named UAA Player of the Year; and Mark Mosier was named Academic All-American in baseball and was drafted by the San Francisco Giants.

We have continued to make progress in our efforts to enrich the day-to-day lives of our students. The University’s downtown express bus service, which was established last year to make the city more accessible to students, had an average ridership of more than 1,000 per week; a completely restructured dining program was implemented for students last year, enabling them for the first time to use “flex dollars” in all of the University’s dining facilities; this fall will mark the completion of the Reynolds Club/Hutchinson Commons renovation project, which has reestablished this magnificent facility as a central meeting place for students to eat, study, listen to music and poetry, attend student theater, and participate in a wide variety of student events and organizations; the University’s new Community Service Center, which is charged with supporting student volunteerism, has created a range of new programs, including Summer Links, a ten-week summer internship providing students with the opportunity to work in community-based organizations, public schools, and non-profit agencies throughout Chicago; and last year’s revitalization of the Career and Placement Services office has had dramatic effects: the number of students and alumni participating in on-campus recruiting increased by 133 percent; new internships for College students have been established at the White House, the offices of both senators from Illinois, the Mayor’s Office, the Smithsonian, the National Gallery, the Museum of Contemporary Art, Goldman Sachs, the Joffrey Ballet, and Time magazine; and CAPS has initiated an ambitious new counseling and placement program for graduate students considering non-academic careers.

University Finances

Much of the research that we undertake at the University requires external funding. In 1996–97, our faculty received 1,450 grants and awards totaling more than $203 million. Although this is slightly less than last year’s record of $207 million, it represents an 11 percent increase over 1994–95 and a 24 percent increase over 1993–94. Among the more noteworthy of these awards was $3.4 million from the National Cancer Institute for cancer and leukemia research; $3 million from the Annenberg Foundation to support a longitudinal evaluation of the Chicago Public Schools; $2.3 million from the Australian government to support research in structural biology and materials chemistry; $1.9 million from the National Institute of Diabetes to support diabetes research; $1.7 million from NASA to support the use of high-performance computing to solve “grand challenge” scientific problems; and more than $900,000 from the Pew Foundation for research relating to the role of religion in American public life. In addition, although this more accurately belongs in next year’s report, I am delighted to report that on July 30 the Department of Energy announced an extraordinary five-year $20-million grant to the University of Chicago to establish a Center on Thermonuclear Flashes, which will partner with Argonne National Laboratory to use the most advanced supercomputers to study the physics of cosmic explosions.

The University also had a strong year in development. In 1996–97, the University received a record $128.7 million in gifts. This represents an increase of 30 percent over the last two years. The University received fourteen commitments of $1 million or more, including a stunning $10-million gift from Life Trustee William Graham (S.B.’32, J.D.’36) and his wife, Catherine. In their honor, the University renamed the Center for Continuing Studies the William B. and Catherine V. Graham School of General Studies. Spurred by a challenge grant established by Trustee Eric Gleacher (M.B.A.’67), the GSB Annual Fund grew by 27 percent last year; gifts for capital purposes (endowment and facilities) throughout the University increased by 56 percent; and College Reunion attendance set a new record of more than 1,200 participants.

Planning for the Future

As I noted at the outset of this report, 1996–97 was a year of transition. In 1997–98, we will continue to build for excellence. Next year we will see the completion of the College curriculum review and the first significant steps of new Vice-President and Associate Dean Michael Behnke to enlarge and deepen the applicant pool for the College; we will see the completion of both the Oriental Institute expansion and the renovation of Hutchinson Commons; we will see continued progress on the construction of the Law School’s new Kane Center for Clinical Legal Studies and the renovation and expansion of Allee Laboratory; we will see important new faculty recruitments in biopsychology for Allee Lab and in the physical and biological sciences for the new BSD/PSD Institute; we will see continued programmatic growth in the Center for International Studies, the Center for Gender Studies, the Film Studies Center, and the Center for the Study of Race, Politics and Culture; we will consider proposals for innovative new programs in the Graham School of General Studies, for a new BSD department of Family Medicine, for new graduate programs in the PSD, the Harris School, and the GSB (which is considering a new international program in Singapore); we will move forward with the campus master plan; we will consider faculty committee reports on such issues as academic fraud, the academic calendar, intellectual property, and the future of research and teaching in the field of education; and we will see continued improvements in information technology, library acquisitions and services, faculty salaries, student life, and administrative processes.

A commentator on higher education recently observed that “academe remains rich in dreams … and collective memory. The campus utopia is always [sometime or] somewhere else.”¹ The University of Chicago has an especially rich collective memory, and rightly so. But we are confident that, through these and other initiatives, our brightest days are yet to come.

With much appreciation for all you do on behalf of the University, and with warm best wishes for a challenging and satisfying academic year
Geoffrey R. Stone
Harry Kalven, Jr., Distinguished Service Professor in the Law School and the College, and Provost of the University

¹ Anne Mathews, Bright College Years 181 (Simon & Schuster, 1997)

The University of Chicago

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