Annual Report of the Provost, 1998–99

Fifteen years ago, Provost Robert McC. Adams observed that “change at the University of Chicago for the most part takes place in an incremental fashion.” As a consequence, “even those most closely familiar with the institution probably think of it primarily in terms of the basic continuity of its structure and commitments.” Against that background, Adams cautioned that “myths can develop about ‘golden ages’ of an unevenly remembered past” and that “proximate developments can be over-dramatized as ‘crises’ rather than being seen as natural consequences of long-continuing trends.”

The last few years mark a period of more than usual change at the University, shaped primarily by the need to support long-term academic excellence, renew infrastructure and facilities, and sustain long-term financial strength. During such a period, Adams’s observations are especially apt. But such periods are not uncommon in our University’s history. Over the past century, we often have weathered debates over such issues as governance, structure, curriculum and mission. But once the dust has settled, we have always come together to resume our most fundamental work. As President William Rainey Harper said at the very founding of the University, “the question before us is how to become one in spirit, not necessarily in opinion.” That is always a work in progress.

New Faculty

Part of that work, perhaps the most essential part, is the constant regeneration of our faculty. Each year, we lose approximately 5% of our faculty to retirement, death, denial of tenure or reappointment, or departure to another institution. Each year, we work hard to retain our best against the blandishments of competing institutions and to add new colleagues who will strengthen us for the future. In the 1998–99 academic year, we made 49 new faculty appointments. The most senior of those individuals, those appointed at the rank of full Professor, will play a particularly vital role in helping us remain “one in spirit”:

John Brewer (English), the John and Marion Sullivan University Professor, from the European University Institute, whose scholarship has profoundly reshaped our understanding of eighteenth-century English political, social and cultural history;
John Cacioppo (psychology), the Tiffany and Margaret Blake Distinguished Service Professor, from Ohio State, whose research at the intersection of social psychology and neurophysiology has established the field of “social neuroscience” and effected a paradigm-shift in our knowledge of the relationship of human biology to social behavior;
Mary Ann Case (law), from the University of Virginia, one of the nation’s premier feminist legal scholars, whose research has had particular impact in such areas as feminist jurisprudence, comparative law, and gay and lesbian rights;
James Conant and John Haugeland (philosophy), two distinguished philosophers from the University of Pittsburgh (the nation’s number two philosophy department), whose work focuses on the philosophy of language, with a special concern for questions of ethics and political philosophy (Conant), and on the philosophy of cognitive science (particularly artificial intelligence) and the interpretation of Heidegger (Haugeland);
Donald Harper (art history), from the University of Arizona, whose research on Early Chinese medical literature has yielded stunning new insights into the rich interplay of scientific, religious and occult practices in popular culture;
Michael Hopkins (chemistry), from the University of Pittsburgh, a leading investigator in organometallic spectroscopy and photochemistry whose work focuses on the chemistry of organometallic complexes;
Richard Jordan (chemistry), from the University of Iowa, whose fundamental research on olefin polymerization catalysis has revolutionized the synthesis of commercially important catalysts;
Steven Lalley (statistics), from Purdue University, a theoretical probabilist known internationally for his scholarship on extensions and novel applications of renewal theorems;
Robert LaLonde (Harris School), from Michigan State, an influential labor economist who focuses on major social policy concerns, such as the effects of job training programs on employment and the assimilation of immigrant workers into the U.S. labor market;
Wen-Hsiung Li (ecology and evolution), the George W. Beadle Distinguished Service Professor, from the University of Texas, an international leader in both theoretical and experimental molecular evolution whose current research focuses on the nature of color vision, DNA polymorphism and evolution;
Mark Lilla (social thought), from New York University, a distinguished historian of political theory whose essays on major twentieth-century thinkers have helped to shape contemporary discourse on modernity;
Paul Mendez-Flohr (divinity), from Hebrew University in Jerusalem, a renowned scholar of post-Enlightenment Jewish religious thought, whose writings on Martin Buber and Franz Rosenzweig trace the relation of Jewish theology to European intellectual history;
Nikolai Nadirashvili (mathematics), from the Institute for Information Transmission Problems in Moscow, one of the foremost mathematicians of his generation, whose internationally acclaimed work has resulted in the solution of several of the most baffling and long-standing conjectures in the field of partial differential equations;
Philip Reny (economics), from the University of Pittsburgh, an economic theorist who has made fundamental contributions on mechanism design, sequential equilibrium in game theory, and equilibria in discontinuous games;
George Triantis (law), from the University of Virginia, a leading scholar of law and economics whose insightful research has had a particular impact in the fields of bankruptcy, contract and commercial law.

Faculty Achievements

Faculty Awards and Honors:

Every year, members of our faculty receive national and international awards that honor their achievements as scholars. Here are just a few examples from the 1998–99 year:

Janet Rowley (medicine) received the National Medal of Science, the nation’s highest scientific honor, for her work revolutionizing cancer research, diagnosis and treatment; Mark Strand (social thought) received the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry for his volume Blizzard of One; Leo Kadanoff (physics) received the Grande Medaille d’Or from the Academie des Sciences de l’Institut de France; Lars Peter Hansen (economics) was elected to the National Academy of Sciences; Amy Dru Stanley (history) received the 1999 Frederick Jackson Turner Prize, the 1999 Morris D. Forkosch Award, and the 1999 Avery Craven Prize (an extraordinary “triple”) for her first book, From Bondage to Contract; Charles Rosen (music) received the prestigious Truman Capote award for literary criticism; and Anthony Yu (divinity) was elected to the Academia Sinica, the most eminent scholarly society of China.
Seven members of the faculty (more than any other university in the nation) received Guggenheim Fellowships—Neil Harris (history), Robert Hooper (art history), David Jablonski (geophysical sciences), Ketan Mulmuley (computer science), Robert Nelson (art history), Bruce Winstein (physics) and Wu Hung (art history).
Five faculty members were elected Fellows of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences—Bruce Cummings (history), Martha McClintock (psychology), Thomas Pavel (romance languages and literatures), Craig Thompson (molecular genetics and cell biology) and Wen-Hsiung Li (ecology and evolution). (In the last several years, the University of Chicago ranks second among the leading private research universities in the number of faculty members elected to the AAAS.)
Four members of the faculty received Alfred P. Sloan research fellowships—Steven Levitt (economics), Benson Farb (mathematics), Matthias Schwarz (mathematics), and Shankar Venkataramani (mathematics).

Faculty publications:

Each year, our faculty publish scores of new books that add importantly to our knowledge and understanding. Here are just a few examples to illustrate the remarkable breadth of our faculty’s contributions to scholarship:

Ralph Austen, Middlemen of the Cameroon Rivers
Catherine Brekus, Female Preaching in America
Dan Brudney, Marx’s Attempt to Leave Philosophy
Pastora Cafferty, Hispanics in the United States
Michael Camille, The Making of Medieval England
Jean and John Comaroff, The Political Imagination in Africa
Wendy Doniger, Gender and Myth in Ancient Greece and India
Sheila Fitzpatrick, Everyday Stalinism
Neil Harris, Building Lives: Constructing Rites and Passages
Richard Hellie, The Economy and Material Culture of Russia
Tamar Herzog, Ritos de control, Précticas de Negociación
Friedrich Katz, The Life and Times of Pancho Villa
R. Kipp Martin, Large Scale Linear and Integer Optimization
W.J.T. Mitchell, The Last Dinosaur Book
Casey Mulligan, Parental Priorities and Economic Inequality
Tetsuo Najita, Tokugawa Political Writings
Peter Novick, The Holocaust in American Life
Sam Peltzman, Political Participation and Government Regulation
Ingrid Rowland, The Culture of the High Renaissance
Sangram Sisodia, Alzheimer’s Disease
Michael Stein, Interpolation of Spatial Data
Josef Stern, Maimonides and Nahmanides
Cass Sunstein, The Cost of Rights
Lisa Wedeen, Politics, Rhetoric and Symbols in Contemporary Syria

Other Research Achievements

Not all of our faculty’s research is embodied in books. For example:

A team of Fermilab researchers, headed by Bruce Winstein (physics), found a new measure of the charge-particle violation that provides critical insight into the unbalanced decay of subatomic matter and antimatter. This discovery suggests that without this imbalance the Big Bang would have created equal amounts of matter and antimatter, which would have annihilated each other and thus left nothing but light in the universe.
A model developed by David Archer (geophysical sciences) that tracks the movement of carbon dioxide from the ocean surface to the deepest sea floor has added immediacy to the concern that the industrialized world’s growing carbon-dioxide emissions will destroy the ocean’s coral reefs by the middle of the next century.
James Mastrianni (neurology) identified a new disease, fatal sporadic insomnia, a prion disease with critically important scientific, economic and public health effects.
Michael Foote and (the late) J. John Sepkoski (geophysical sciences) demonstrated that mammals evolved 65 million year ago, rather than 130 million years ago, as previously hypothesized on the basis of molecular genetic data.
The Sloan Digital Sky Survey, of which the University of Chicago is a lead partner, discovered the highest redshift (and thus the most distant and oldest) quasars ever found.
Paul Sereno (organismal biology and anatomy) excavated a new predatory dinosaur in the Sahara Desert in Niger. A new genus and species that lived 100 million years ago, the dinosaur had a skull like that of a crocodile and a length of 36 feet.
NASA launched aboard the Space Shuttle Columbia the Chandra X-ray Observatory, named after the late University of Chicago astrophysicist and Nobel Laureate Subrahmayan Chandrasekhar. The Chandra X-ray observatory will enable scientists to obtain unprecedented X-ray images of exploding stars, black holes and other exotic environments to help them understand the structure and evolution of the universe. Chandra is the world’s third Great Observatory, and follows the Hubble Space Telescope and the Compton Gamma-ray Observatory in being named for a University of Chicago scientist.

New Research Institutes, Centers and Educational Initiatives

Each year, the University establishes new research and educational programs, centers and initiatives. In recent years, these have included, for example, the interdivisional (BSD/PSD) Institute for Biophysical Dynamics; programs in human genetics, cinema and media studies, gender studies, Jewish studies and human rights; the Center for School Improvement; and the GSB’s programs in Barcelona and Singapore. Among the new initiatives in 1998–99 were the following:

Computation Institute: The University of Chicago and Argonne National Laboratory jointly established the Computation Institute to bring the most advanced tools of computer science to bear on fields ranging from the physical and biological sciences to the social sciences, the arts and the humanities. Of special interest to the Institute is research requiring computational simulation, modeling or massive data analysis. The Institute’s co-directors are Ridgway Scott (computer science) and Rick Stevens (director of mathematics and computer science at Argonne).
Center on Teaching and Learning: This center, which was proposed by the Council on Teaching, will provide training programs in teaching for advanced graduate students, coordinate orientation programs for new members of the faculty, offer training to faculty who are interested in using new information technologies in their teaching, support with competitive grants the development of new undergraduate and graduate courses, and explore ways in which the University can work with secondary school leaders to design pilot programs to improve the transition between secondary and post-secondary education.
Center for Human Potential and Public Policy: With the support of an extraordinary $5 million contribution by Irving and Joan Harris, the Harris School established this interdisciplinary center in 1998–99 to help bridge the gap between basic research and public policies concerning the development of human potential in children. The center will engage in training, research, and the dissemination of information focused on approaches to enhancing the intelligence, skills, motivation and moral character of young children.
Cultural Policy Studies: Building upon the University’s path-breaking 1999 conference on “The Arts and Humanities in Public Life,” a faculty steering committee has been established to enable the University to take a lead role in fostering the emergence of cultural policy studies as a new academic field. This program, which involves faculty members from throughout the University, will focus on collaborative research and curricular development addressing such issues as how to define the public’s stake in the arts and humanities, how to understand the complex interaction of government agencies, private foundations and individual philanthropy that support cultural activity in a democratic society, and how best to integrate the arts and humanities into the fabric of community life.
UNext.com: The University joined with Stanford, Columbia, the London School of Economics and Carnegie-Mellon in a consortium designed to offer non-credit courses over the Internet to a world-wide audience of potential students. The initial programs designed by the University will be developed by the GSB (finance and marketing) and the Little Red Schoolhouse (writing).

Additional Highlights of the 1998–99 Academic Year

Enhancing Graduate Programs:

Noting that “graduate education is central to the mission and identity of the University of Chicago,” President Sonnenschein last winter committed an additional $1 million per year, the equivalent of the income on more than $20 million of endowment, to support graduate education in the Humanities and Social Sciences. These funds will be used to increase the stipends of graduate student lecturers, increase the fellowships offered to new Ph.D. students, and increase support to Ph.D. students already in residence at the University.

Enhancing the Trustee Fellowship Program:

In 1998–99, the University committed significant additional resources to this program, which supports underrepresented minority Ph.D. students in the Humanities and Social Sciences and in the Divinity School. As a result of this additional commitment, the number of incoming minority Ph.D. students in these areas of the University increased by more than 25% over the prior year.

College admissions:

The College in 1998–99 saw a 44% increase in early action applicants, a 25% increase in applicants, an admit rate of only 47.5% (compared to more than 70% only a few years ago), and an entering class this fall in which 35% of our new students were early action candidates (compared to 27% the year before), 55% were in the top 5% of their high school class (compared to 41% the year before), and the average SAT score is 1380 (compared to 1347 the year before). These figures reflect the highest number of early action applicants, the highest number of total applicants, the lowest admit rate, the highest percentage of new students who were early action candidates, the highest percentage of students in the top 5% of their high school class, and the highest average SAT score in the history of the College.

Student Honors:

Nineteen University of Chicago graduate students received Fulbright-Hays doctoral dissertation research fellowships, more than any other university in the nation. Indeed, University of Chicago students won more than 25% of the fellowships awarded nationally. College students also had a remarkable year, winning three Rhodes Scholarships (more per capita than any other university in the nation), one Truman Scholarship and one Churchill Scholarship.

Development, Alumni Relations and Federal Funding:

Fund-raising progress (new gifts and pledges) increased by 7.6% in 1998–99, achieving a record $150.6 million. The University received 33 commitments of $1 million or more. Annual funds increased by 9.0% and corporate giving grew by 26%. Over the past five years, the University’s fund-raising progress has increased by an average of 9% annually, compared to an average annual increase of 5% among such institutions as Harvard, Princeton, Yale, Stanford, Columbia, Cornell, Penn and Northwestern. To help achieve these results, 48 faculty members volunteered their time in 1998–99 to lead more than 70 alumni programs across the nation involving more than 4,200 alumni. Federal grants to the University (which are not included in “fund-raising progress”) increased by 6% in 1998–99, to reach a new high of $169 million. Grants and awards to the Biological Sciences Division increased by almost 10%.

Research Grants:

Illustrative of the many government and foundation grants the University received in 1998–99 were a $17.6 million grant from the Hughes Foundation to the BSD to help fund construction of the new Interdivisional Research Laboratory; a $7.2 million grant from the National Science Foundation to support the University’s Materials Research Science and Engineering Center; a $3 million grant from the National Science Foundation to support the vertical integration of research and education in the mathematical sciences; a $2 million grant from the W.M. Keck Foundaton to support the University’s new interdivisional Institute for Biophysical Dynamics; a $1 million Centennial Fellowship to John Carlstrom (astronomy and astrophysics) from the James S. McDonnell Foundation to support research into the early universe; a grant of almost $900,000 from the National Endowment for the Humanities to support the University’s History of Religions Library Collection; an award of more than $600,000 from the MacArthur Foundation to support the Center for International Studies’ new program in Human Rights; and a $527,000 award from the NIH to Amanda Woodward (psychology) to study goal-directed actions in pre-verbal infants.

Campus Master Plan:

The final campus master plan document, which addresses such issues as the Gerald Ratner Athletics Center, the Interdivisional Research Laboratory, the new undergraduate residence halls, the Midway (including the permanent skating rink and warming house), the new GSB facility, the parking structure, and the planned Arts Center, is (or soon will be) available on the University’s webpage at www.uchicago.edu/masterplan/.

During 1998–99, the University retained internationally renowned architects Ricardo Legorreta (for the residence halls), Cesar Pelli (for the Ratner Center and the parking structure) and Harry Ellenzweig (for the Interdivisional Research Laboratory). An international competition is currently underway to select an architect for the GSB building.

The University has already broken ground on the new Press building (at 60th and Dorchester) and the Lab School’s new Kovler Gymnasium, and will soon begin construction of the skating rink and warming house (on the Midway) and the parking structure (on 55th between Ellis and Greenwood). Schematic designs were approved by the Board of Trustees in July for the residence halls (around Regenstein Library), and similar designs for the Ratner Athletics Center (on the west side of Ellis between 55th and 56th) will be presented to the Board this fall. Ground-breaking on these projects is scheduled for 2000.

Other Items of Note:

Phase I of the Regenstein Library reconfiguration project, which adds capacity for more than 1 million additional volumes, is almost complete.
The newly refurbished Egyptian Gallery of the Oriental Institute opened this spring after a three-year renovation that included the addition of a completely new wing to the museum. Four additional galleries will open over the next several years.
The Smart Museum is in the midst of a substantial renovation and will reopen this fall with reconfigured exhibition galleries, a new education study area and a refurbished lobby.
The University’s Court Theater had its most successful year ever, receiving an unprecedented 16 Jefferson nominations and 6 Jefferson Awards, more than any other theater in Chicago.
The University of Chicago Hospitals were ranked # 13 in the nation, and the best in Illinois in 7 of the 15 specialties evaluated (cancer, endocrinology, gastroenterology, geriatrics, gynecology, neurology and neurosurgery, and pulmonary).
In its annual review of new full-time junior-level faculty appointments in four-year colleges and universities, Lingua Franca reported in 1998–99 that in 14 of 21 fields studied the University of Chicago placed more of its Ph.D. graduates in such positions than Columbia, Harvard, Princeton, Stanford or Yale.
The University of Chicago ranked among the top private research universities in the nation in “information technology,” behind Penn and Princeton, but ahead of Stanford, Columbia, Cornell, Yale and Harvard. Currently under construction is a 118 seat computer cluster that will open in the spring of 2000 in Crerar Library.
The Council of the University Senate adopted a new Intellectual Property Policy dealing for the first time with the particularly vexing issues posed by new information technologies. This policy, which was promulgated by a faculty committee chaired by Douglas Baird (law), has already become a national model and is the core of the proposed new AAU policy on these issues.

Changes Over Time

As Provost Adams observed in his 1984 report, “Change and Continuity,” with which I began this annual report, “taking a longer look at the University … can serve as a source of insight into our unwritten modes of operation and perhaps into some of the structural features of the institution itself.” That report identified several troubling trends. It is useful to look back, 15 years later, to see how those trends have developed.

One concern of the 1984 report was the gradual “graying” of the faculty, as reflected particularly in the “declining numbers of young scholars for whom places can be found on our faculty.” This trend has continued. In 1973, 29% of the faculty was 35 or younger; by 1983, this had declined to 19%; today, only 17% of the faculty are 35 or younger. Similarly, the median age of the faculty has steadily increased from 43 in 1973, to 45 in 1983, to 46 today. Similar trends are evident in the percentage of faculty with tenure (gradually increasing) and the percentage of faculty at the rank of Assistant Professor (gradually decreasing). As Provost Adams observed in 1984, this development, which affects all major research universities, is “damaging, not only to the vigorous, state-of-the-art research and instructional programs that are immediately affected, but also, more generally, to the intergenerational continuity toward which any great educational institution must work.”
Another concern of the 1984 report was a serious decline in the number of graduate students in the Divisions, due largely to cuts in federal support (though also affected by the then-relatively bleak job market for new Ph.D.s). There has been a modest reversal of this trend: the number of new graduate students matriculating in the Divisions in 1973, 1983 and 1999 was 1087, 632 and 783, respectively; and the total number of Ph.D.s awarded in each of these years by the Divisions was 411, 304 and 335.
A related concern of the 1984 report was the then-precipitous decline in the number of applicants for graduate programs in the Divisions. This trend has been reversed: the number of applicants for graduate programs in the Divisions in 1973, 1983 and 1999 was 5,025, 3,267 and 5,880, respectively.
The 1984 report also expressed concern about a slippage in selectivity in admission to graduate programs. This trend has largely been reversed: the percentage of applicants admitted to graduate programs in the Divisions in 1973, 1983 and 1999 was 56%, 71% and 46%, which shows great progress since the 1984 report; yield (the percentage of admitted applicants who decide to enroll) in each of these three years was 38%, 27% and 34%, which shows considerable progress since 1984, but still leaves us slightly below the 1973 level. Returning to at least the 1973 yield by continuing to strengthen our fellowships and improving our overall attractiveness to top candidates should be a clearly defined goal for the next few years.
The 1984 report was quite concerned that from 1973 to 1981 faculty salaries in the “Arts and Sciences” had declined by approximately 20% in real (inflation-adjusted) dollars. Under Presidents Gray and Sonnenschein, the University has made a concerted effort to strengthen faculty salaries. As a consequence, we have not only regained in real terms all the ground we lost in the 1970s, but “Arts and Sciences” salaries are now 20% higher in real terms than they were in 1973. It is useful also to consider our position comparatively. Among the nation’s leading private research universities, in 1990 the University ranked 7th in Assistant Professor salaries and 9th in Professor salaries. Today, the University ranks 4th in Assistant Professor salaries and 7th in Professor salaries, with the trend definitely in the right direction.

Conclusion

The University of Chicago is well poised for the future. With another excellent recruiting year, our faculty remains strong by any measure of scholarly achievement; building upon our distinctive traditions, we have in recent years established a broad range of exciting and innovative interdisciplinary programs; our entering College class this fall should be our best in fifty years; our graduate programs are robust and have been substantially strengthened by the infusion of new resources, an effort that should remain a high priority in the future; we continue to place our Ph.D. graduates as well as any university in the nation; our neighborhood is safer and more attractive than it has been at any time in the past half-century; the University has broken all fundraising records in recent years and now raises annually more than 50% more than it did only five years ago; after several years of large operating deficits, we have had three consecutive years of balanced budgets; and we are about to embark upon the most ambitious and exciting building campaign since the founding of the University.

Of course, there are challenges ahead. We are in the midst of a year of leadership transition; we must adapt to the revised College curriculum; we must strengthen still further our support of graduate programs; we must pay attention to the continuing “graying” of our faculty; we must face potentially substantial changes in health care that may pose serious issues for both the University of Chicago Hospitals and the BSD; we must cope with the dislocations and disruptions that inevitably accompany a massive building program; we must manage a succession of planned operating deficits over the next decade as our new facilities come online; we must adjust to a gradually larger College over the next decade as we grow out of those deficits and again achieve financial equilibrium; and we must undertake in the next few years the most ambitious Capital Campaign in the history of the University of Chicago.

These are challenges we can and should face with confidence. This is a remarkable and resilient University. As Provost Adams emphasized, it helps to take the long-view. This is not as fragile an institution as we sometimes fear. To flourish over time, the University has often adapted to meet new challenges, and it will continue to do so in the future. Clark Kerr once observed that universities are among the few institutions of western society that have survived essentially intact from medieval times. This is a tribute, not only to our resilience and our capacity to respond to changing circumstances, but also to the fundamental importance of institutions like the University of Chicago to the transmission of knowledge and the advancement of civilization.

With warm best wishes for a productive 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

The University of Chicago

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