On June 14, the dean of the Division of the Arts & Humanities (AHD) formed and immediately charged five “working groups” with proposing significant reforms on the structure of departments; language instruction; and doctoral, master’s, and undergraduate education. The committees have until August 22 to submit their recommendations to the dean, who will in turn forward them to the provost by August 25. This timetable means that a program of reform intended to change nearly every aspect of academic life will be completed and advanced beyond the division in exactly the interval during which neither departmental nor divisional meetings take place. To achieve this unseemly haste, the process allows neither for consultation with departments nor for comparative and historical study.
Everything about the process, stated rationale, and likely outcomes of this program of reform strikes me as emblematic of the current trajectory of the University of Chicago and, indeed, of higher education as a whole. In what follows, I seek to analyze this development in terms that clarify the stakes, both internally to the University and externally to colleagues in higher education.
I first explore the charges of the committees and the rationale they have been given, both for acting at all and especially for acting quickly. I then analyze the implications of the One Big Beautiful Bill Act (OBBBA) and other federal actions for the University of Chicago. This analysis leads to the question of the incidence of funding changes at the federal level for the budget of the Division of the Arts and Humanities.
The thrust of this analysis is that the University has undertaken extraordinary quantities of leveraged spending in ways that benefit select units, while others, who have achieved high international ranking with little aid from capital spending, have instead suffered from a withdrawal of operational support in order to finance those endeavors. The present moment of reform brings that long trend to a crisis point. To understand the University’s willingness to dismantle its own excellence, I turn to an earlier moment of panicked reform induced by an earlier stage of this prolonged financial crisis, namely the expansion of the College in 2017. This leads to some final reflections on the maintenance of University ideals in an age of instability.