President Paul Alivisatos announced the launch of a University-wide fundraising campaign, branded “Chicago Minds,” in an email to students and staff on Friday morning.
The new campaign is intended “to both bolster our institution’s foundation and provide the scaffolding for its future by focusing on raising support for our faculty, students, and infrastructure,” Alivisatos wrote.
Chicago Minds includes eight campaign initiatives, according to its website: campus infrastructure, faculty excellence, global community, student support, computing and AI, climate and energy, health and medicine, and thriving cities and institutions; the University will focus on “major interdisciplinary initiatives” across the latter four.
Funds raised will go toward projects ranging from the modernization of buildings on the quad, support for new buildings like the IonQ Center for Engineering and Science and AbbVie Foundation Cancer Pavilion, more endowed professorships and “faculty recruitment and retention funds,” and increased financial aid for students.
The University held a private launch event for the campaign on Wednesday, a University spokesperson told the Maroon.
“In the coming years, our common cause is to create the conditions so that Chicago Minds will continue to shape the future, and in so doing to fulfill our role in our promise to America that extends across decades and even centuries,” Alivisatos said at the event.
He also noted in his remarks that the University had successfully completed the $75 million Wallman Society of Fellows contribution-matching challenge, which created 30 new endowed professorships, and that the University had “endowed faculty at the fastest rate since the Rockefeller-Harper founding” over the last year and a half.
The public launch of the campaign comes after several previously announced contributions in recent months—including Board of Trustees Chair David Rubenstein’s (J.D. ’73) $50 million donation in March to modernize Ida Noyes Hall and University trustees Joseph (A.B. ’78, M.B.A. ’80) and Rika Mansueto’s (A.B. ’91) $50 million gift last month to support AI research. Rubenstein and Rika Mansueto will co-chair the Chicago Minds Campaign Cabinet, which includes 14 more alumni, mostly other trustees.
The University also is coming off a “record-breaking” fundraising year, having raised just over $1 billion in fiscal year 2025, and is aiming to raise another billion dollars this fiscal year, administrators said at a budget town hall this month.
Provost Katherine Baicker hinted at the new campaign’s initiatives at the town hall, saying the University has focused on fundraising for “faculty through endowed chairs and research funds, its students through scholarships, its core infrastructure to make sure that our quads and our core buildings… match the eminence of the faculty and students within them and are suited to purpose.”
Baicker also said that administrators aim to expand the College to 9,000 students, and that increasing enrollment would be dependent on “grow[ing] the underlying resources that are necessary” for a strong College experience, citing both capital investments, like expanded classroom and dorm capacity, and hiring additional faculty and staff.
The campaign also supports the expanded free tuition initiative the University announced last week, under which undergraduate households earning less than $250,000 annually will qualify for free tuition beginning in the 2027–28 academic year.
Matthew G. Andersson, '96, Booth MBA / May 23, 2026 at 4:18 pm
What the University president is disclosing is that he’s short of working capital for fundamental university operational categories, and passively letting unmanaged costs claim free cash, while intending to actually escalate them (faculty inflation). Until University costs are cut in half, including all labor categories; tuition pricing lowered at least 50 percent; debt restructured, and degree programs doubled in efficiency (time to degree accelerated), then capital raised on top of such unaddressed cost and efficiency distortions risks being capital converted to subsidy, and not a capital investment per se. It is ultimately consumed in overhead waste. Indeed, UChicago tuition is mostly used to service debt. The real ratio of university cost-to-benefit is otherwise similar to government, and exceeds 100:1. Moreover, any pragmatic donor or investor, always invests in a management team, and partitions and controls donations so they are not subject to university fungibility; this issue has resulted in numerous and growing contentions with higher education. This current University team does not otherwise appear to demonstrate a track record, capability or willingness to first face and actively manage costs, and instead apparently seeking to plug a waterfall, and under low-probability assumptions of stable macroeconomics. This doesn’t appear to be a serious team, or at least, not serious about management. Conflicts of interest are a significant part of the problem. Readers may appreciate the efficiency work of Yale’s legendary EVP of operations which is referenced in Tribune Publishing/Hartford Courant, “Yale can regain trust by gaining control of its costs,” 3 May, and “Regaining Trust Will Come at a Cost,” addressing Yale, Chicago, and Wesleyan, 7 May, NAS.
Milkman / May 23, 2026 at 11:33 am
Very apt name. I hope “Chicago Minds” serves as a reminder to Alivisatos that the University of Chicago does not train students for specific jobs; it trains first-rate minds. Training students for whatever is in the news cycle has a way of making them obsolete before they even graduate.
“In the coming years, our common cause is to create the conditions so that Chicago Minds will continue to shape the future, and in so doing to fulfill our role in our promise to America that extends across decades and even centuries,” Alivisatos said at the event.
Very apt too. The University of Chicago does not follow trends. It sets them. Walter Pitts invented neural networks 70 years before AlexNet, before a single electronic computer even existed. People who set their research agenda according to what’s in the news cycle have no place here.