Leo Vernor
As a humanities and social sciences student in the College, I have closely followed professor Clifford Ando’s public inquiry into our University’s precarious and increasingly harmful financial position.
In an early assessment, Ando estimated that about half of all undergraduate tuition—the mainspring of the University’s discretionary budget—simply went to servicing, not even paying down, about $6 billion in principal owed on major capital expansion projects. His most recent assessment, published in The Maroon, suggests that “the tuition of approximately 6,350 undergraduates, around 85 percent of the student body, is needed merely to service the University’s debt.”
University trustees have taken on that debt not to expand the historical divisions of the University or, indeed, restore the historical divisions’ failing infrastructure. Instead, the University has gobbled up the Marine Biological Laboratory; built towering high-rise dormitories; and increasingly pursued capital-intensive corporate partnerships like Hyde Park Labs. Its new investments generally prize expansion, located largely in pre-professional initiatives and student amenities, not incremental improvements on existing programs.
Undergraduates pay for this very particular kind of expansion, Ando argues. The question then is: do we want it?
Former College dean John Boyer would like us to think that, yes, two decades of debt-financed University expansion lie in the interest of University undergraduates. Or at the very least, the University’s undergraduate experience has significantly improved during the period of expansion.
In a response to Ando published late last year in The Maroon, Boyer recounts the major gains made by the College over the last two decades. These include a larger freshman class, higher freshman retention rate, higher admissions yield rate, and an applicant pool with increased “size and academic strength.” Lest these statistical gains appear impersonal, Boyer notes that the growth of the undergraduate population has made possible “a flourishing profile of student-life and cocurricular programs.” Major improvements in student life include increased “student career preparation,” “major new resources in residential life,” and a “greater agency” to take classes across the University’s professional schools.
I recap Boyer’s argument with such great detail because it is a thorough and coherent account of what the University has accomplished over the past two decades. The University has settled in squarely with its “peer institutions.” But this argument obscures the fact that the University of Chicago does not simply have peer institutions; it chooses them. The decision of University trustees to issue an ever-increasing supply of bonds was fundamentally a choice designed to put the University on a par with, say, Harvard and Yale.
In his most recent review of the University’s financial position, Ando suggests that University trustees ought to have recognized, at some point, that the University of Chicago is not Harvard or Yale. The University has not had and does not have the same capital resources at its disposal as its self-appointed peers, as Boyer himself points out in his defense of the University’s aggressive borrowing policies. Now, facing the rising costs of debt, the University has turned to what Ando calls “socializing the costs of their own risk-taking.” That is, tightening budgets across all University departments, not just those that have benefited from expansion. As Ando points out, we are now stuck in the position of “less well-resourced” universities like those that made national headlines last year for budget cuts to the humanities.
It seems clear that our position as an “undercapitalized” university should have demanded some financial responsibility—or at least foresight—on the part of the trustees. Now, as hundreds of millions of dollars in principal approach their refinancing dates, the University risks resembling a financial bubble: the inflated value we have boasted for the past decade will collapse, and we will have traded a serious intellectual reputation for a rapacious and short-sighted one. And in the most selfish terms, we undergraduates will have paid our tuition money for a fiercely devalued diploma.
But it is important to consider aspects of the College experience beyond reputation and big-picture financial crisis. Whether or not that crisis comes, the desire to place the University of Chicago among a certain cadre of other elite Universities impacts our daily life.
I am not unique among University of Chicago students to come from a family that takes tremendous pride in the College’s unyielding character and sense of tradition. I grew up in the shadow of nine technicolor volumes of Readings in Western Civilization (edited by no one other than Boyer himself). When I applied, I had the sense that despite its rising reputation, the University of Chicago still clung to a longstanding intellectual culture and a measure of self-selectivity that once distinguished the school from its “peers.”
What Boyer’s argument makes clear is that intellectual culture and self-selectivity are, at best, vestigial organs in the College. His case for the strength of the College is founded on our increasingly competitive admissions, not our self-selectivity. His case for flourishing student life is rooted in the rise of pre-professional opportunities long eschewed by a school that prized academics above all else. Our admissions process and student life have assimilated to those of the Ivy Leagues. As we have grown into our peer group, we have grown out of what set us apart.
I do not mean to suggest that the collapse of a certain kind of education in the College has proceeded separate from the reinvention of University finances. The opposite is true. The aims of undergraduate education have not simply changed; undergraduate education itself has been instrumentalized, transformed into a weapon in the University’s fight for growth and status. New dormitories and pre-professional programs demand massive outlays of cash just as they draw in the students who provide that cash. As Boyer notes, the growing undergraduate population “contribute[s] powerfully to the financial stability of the University.” What Boyer calls an increasing “instructional staff” is an army of adjunct workers called in to bear the brunt of teaching as funding to the classical divisions remains stagnant.
We, undergraduates, are the engine of meaningless expansion, of growth pursued for its own sake. As a consequence, our experience is rapidly losing meaning. But even with the looming threat of economic crisis, the University administration has room to change course. The simplest reallocations of funds, a handful of new hires, a shift in the objects of future investment; all can keep the College distinct. The school we build for ourselves is a choice.
Noah Glasgow is a third-year in the College and a Head Arts Editor at The Maroon.