Talk:University of Chicago

Past discussions are archived at Archive 1 and Archive 2.

If you attend or have attended the University of Chicago, you can add this template to your userpage: {{User UChicago}} to display this userbox on your userpage:

This user attends or attended the University of Chicago. This will also add you to the category: Wikipedians by alma mater: University of Chicago

List of notable alumni and faculty

I deleted this list from the article. It was totally unreadable, and wasn't presented in an organized way that made sense. I welcome anyone to re-include a list as long as it's presented in a thematic, readable way. (For an example of what would be good, see the Duke University article.) – DroEsperanto^{(talk|contribs)} 18:40, 26 June 2009 (UTC)

To-do list/list of issues

I'm in the process of updating the to-do list. Here are the issues I've encountered so far:

• Eliminate Boosterism: Find and remove elements of boosterism. This is somewhat of a problem in this article, and we should be vigilant in tearing down weasel words, unverified claims, and excessive lists of accomplishments. We should all probably also refresh ourselves on WP:UNIGUIDE. This should also probably include replacing many of the sources that come directly from the University itself with outside sources.
• Article organization: WP:UNIGUIDE gives some rough guidelines on article structure, such as that the history section should come before campus section, etc. I think it would be a good idea to follow them more-or-less.
• Section-level organization: the way some of the sections are structured is confusing. For example, having the sub-sections of the "History" section be labeled "Founding" and "Presidency of Robert Hutchins", which indicate thematic periods, "Science at Chicago" and "Art at Chicago" which aren't chronologically themed, and "1950s-1980s" and "1990s-present", which is a decade-based organization structure, could be a lot more consistent. Similarly, the headings in "Academics" are a little bizarre. Let's try to make sure that all the sub-sections are logically organized; this may require some shuffling.
• Paragraph-level flow: many paragraphs jump from topic to topic, making them pretty difficult to follow. For example, the paragraph on the founding of the school talks about Rockefeller, then switches to mention who donated the land, then where the "modern university" came from, then a random fact about how old students marched for Lincoln, then when the first classes are held. The next paragraph then reiterates some of the stuff about the old university in a similarly disorganized fashion. Let's fix that so that every paragraph has a cohesive topic, and so that within a section each paragraph logically flows into the next.
• Verifiability and details: In the history section, major events should always be accompanied with dates (the first paragraph has only one!), and let's find sources for all claims (e.g., "Contemporary buildings have attempted to complement the style of the original architecture" or "The Yerkes Observatory claims to have been the first to determine the spiral structure of the Milky Way Galaxy and the first to observe carbon in stellar spectra").
• Cruft: Not every building, alum, donation, scholarship, student organization, and tradition need be mentioned. Keep it to what's really really important/memorable for people who are not members of the U Chicago community. If what's left after that is still too much, then maybe we should branch it out into another article.
• Images: I think a few of the images could be removed, or at least placed in more appropriate parts of the article (like the picture of the hospital in the "student activities section." This should be relatively easy to fix.

Okay that's a lot but I think we can do it! Feel free to yell at me if you disagree with some of this, or to add on if you think there's other stuff that needs to be done. (Also I'm going to combine the three organization-related things into one for the to-do list – DroEsperanto^{(talk|contribs)} 22:40, 26 June 2009 (UTC)

I think User:DroEsperanto has been making some excellent contributions to date in terms of bringing this article to a substantially higher level of quality befitting the stature of the institution. Some other issues I would note:

• History should be condensed from ~30 paragraphs to something more digestible. Much of the content actually looks like it could be incorporated into other sections as well (Organization & Administration, Academics, etc.)

Y Done for the most part.

• Creating an "Organization and administration" section to describe the governing board, administration, endowment and fundraising, organization and relationships among various school (though this is also possible in academics), student and faculty governance. Some content in "Associated institutions" section may also be a candidate for merging into here
• Rankings and reputation absolutely needs to be demoted and merged back into academics and summarized substantially. I find that the section is often wholly unnecessary and the rankings of note can be adequately conveyed in the infobox (see University of Michigan which took the lead on this and I emulated at Northwestern University and MIT))
• The university lacks much basic descriptive information such as accreditation, Carnegie classifications, enrollment distributions throughout the various schools, academic calendars, academic honors, tuition and fees, financial aid information, research output, etc. which can readily be found from the Carnegie Foundation, College Navigator, NSF, and Chronicle of Higher education. See links at WP:BOOSTER
• The list of presidents should be exported to a List of Presidents of the University of Chicago and then see also'd.

Y Done - list article is pretty bare bones, but what would you expect? – DroEsperanto^{(t / c)} 20:15, 16 July 2009 (UTC)

• I've taken to creating a People section to summarize information about the student body (diversity, admissions statistics, etc.), faculty (awards, diversity, descriptive stats, etc.), and alumni. This is by no means grounded policy or consensus, but I welcome other editors' thoughts.

I like the idea, although I find the title "People" to be pretty undescriptive. Perhaps "faculty, alumni, and students" would be more appropriate. – DroEsperanto^{(t / c)} 20:15, 16 July 2009 (UTC)

• The traditions section contains subsections summarizing the presumptively notable activities, but has no over-arching theme or discussion. I would also recommend merging into student life.

I look forward to following the article's development and lending a hand wherever I can. Madcoverboy (talk) 17:07, 16 July 2009 (UTC)

History section

The history section is very long. I believe that it is appropriate to split it off into its own article "History of the University of Chicago", and to leave just a summary of that article in University of Chicago as per WP:SUMMARY. If no major objections arise I'll go ahead and do that.– DroEsperanto^{(t / c)} 02:01, 15 July 2009 (UTC)

I've been working on the summary here. Feel free to work on it with me. I've been introducing some new citations, information, and organization, which may need to be introduced as well into the main history article text once it's created. – DroEsperanto^{(t / c)} 18:52, 15 July 2009 (UTC)

User:Dcoetzee did an absolutely marvelous job at completely rewriting the University of California, Berkeley history from a crufty and disconnected section to an incredibly well-focused section. Can't seem to find the exact diff, but swing by and check it out. Madcoverboy (talk) 17:16, 16 July 2009 (UTC)

Just finished the summary more-or-less, and created new History of the University of Chicago article. Nothing's perfect, but I think it's better than before. Known issues:

• Completeness: don't know if the section really represents a complete, represenative history of the University. I'm no historian.
• Citations: A bunch of claims need citations. I didn't include a bunch of the major ones (I couldn't find anything stating that it was one of the first major universities to accept minorities on a quick google search, for example) in this summary, but they're still in the main article.
• Images: not very many images. I have an image on the campus in 1911 on commons, will put that in later; I'll try to scrounge around to find some other images, as well.

Added some images.

Woohoo! I think I might take a break from the history section for now and work on summarizing other unwieldy parts of the article. Also thanks for the reference, Madcoverboy. – DroEsperanto^{(t / c)} 00:44, 21 July 2009 (UTC)

Excellent sources

• Faculty handbook
• Course catalogues
• Carnegie classifications - just so I don't have to look for it again – DroEsperanto^{(t / c)} 20:35, 16 July 2009 (UTC)
• College Navigator
• Project on Student Debt
• Annual Reports
• NSF
• About organization of collegiate academics
• Trustees website
• Incorporation, bylaws, and statutes
• Report to the Senate Finance Committee
• University Organization Chart
• Facts for journalists - listing of basic facts about the University and campus

Academics section

I'm a little bit stuck about what to do with the academics section. My original idea was to have it organized into four subsections: Undergraduate, graduate, professional schools (medical, business, law, etc.), and associated institutions. Problems associated with this are:

1. There are a LOT of associated institutions. Which ones should be included, and how should they be presented?

• MIT has a lot of associated institutions too. Check it out and let me know what you think. Madcoverboy (talk) 18:37, 24 July 2009 (UTC)

I'm pretty stupid and can't find where in the article they're listed. Care to direct me? Right now though I'm thinking that the Associated institutions heading should be renamed "other educational programs" and only include info about the educational/scholarly programs (like the Council on Advanced Studies and the lab schools) that don't fit into the other categories. Under this plan, information about associated research institutions (Argonne, Fermilab, etc.) would be mentioned in the research section, the libraries allocated to the Campus section (or to a section of their own), and the university press moved somewhere else (not sure yet), since those latter two are only tangentially related to the academics of the school, which I'm defining as teaching and research. Any thoughts?– DroEsperanto^{(t / c)} 23:37, 24 July 2009 (UTC)

1. Where do degree-granting/research committees fall in this? I know virtually nothing about programs like those so I'm looking for input from someone who knows anything more about their nature than I do.

• I know the degree-granting committees are particularly unique to Chicago and certainly merit mention. However, I too know nothing about them. I see no reason to treat them any differently than any other department that grants degrees. Madcoverboy (talk) 18:37, 24 July 2009 (UTC)

1. Where would information about the importance of the economics/sociology departments belong? It's more related to research than to graduate teaching and programs. Perhaps there should be a research section.

• I'd say the "Chicago school" information can be placed under the research heading. Madcoverboy (talk) 18:37, 24 July 2009 (UTC)

1. ?!?GEHDSf

So in short, any suggestions? – DroEsperanto^{(t / c)} 15:50, 24 July 2009 (UTC)

Sociology Department Claim- It seems that the University can claim the first independent sociology department, but the Kansas University had an established "Department of History and Sociology" in 1891. Any thoughts on how to clarify this distinction in the article would be helpful.-Etennis3 (talk) 17:05, 17 August 2009 (UTC)

That's a good question. How does your source describe it? — DroEsperanto (talk) 17:09, 17 August 2009 (UTC)

Prestigious Ranking

The article on the University of Oxford states that "it consistently ranked in the world's top ten universities". The article on Princeton states Princeton is "near the top" on ranking lists. The article on Harvard states it "consistently ranked at or near the top of colleges and university rankings". I've checked numerous ranking lists and the Univeristy of Chicago also consistently ranked in the top ten on each list of worldwide academic institutions, however it doesn't state this in the article as it does in the other institutions articles. Even the current president of the United States has taught there, however that's not the most important factor. It seems that if the University of Chicago consistently ranks in the top ten global institutions and that's not acknowledged in the article as it is in other top ten worldwide colleges, then that is a discredit and insult to the staff and students related with the univeristy who have, and always have, kept it at a prestigious status; the top ten in the world no less. Most people think of Harvard, Yale, Oxford, or Princeton on this prestigious list but the Univerisity of Chicago ranks right up there with them. Several independent rankings also seem to agree. —Preceding unsigned comment added by 66.192.176.30 (talk) 21:31, 11 August 2009 (UTC)

While it's true that other articles do it, that doesn't necessarily make it right, and in this case I think those other articles are wrong. The lead paragraph is generally supposed to be a summary of the information in the rest of the article; since the mention of rankings is limited to an infobox in the academics section, it would be inappropriate to give it a full sentence's mention in the lead. Second, there's an inherent problem with having statements such as "many rankings place University X in the top ten"; it's prone to cherry-picking the best rankings while ignoring lower ones (making this a neutral point of view problem), and constitutes synthesis in that the editor takes a few examples of top-ten rankings and uses that to advance the position that "many rankings place UC in the top ten". Furthermore, saying that "such and such organizations think UC is great" isn't particularly descriptive of what UC is like, which is the goal of Wikipedia; it's better to report the reasons why people tend to think it's great (e.g., major role in sociology, law, and economics, numerous Nobel Prize winners, site of the first self-sustained nuclear reaction, university press, etc.; see WP:MOS#Avoid unnecessary vagueness). An essay that discusses this is WP:Avoid academic boosterism; check it out. — DroEsperanto (talk) 22:33, 11 August 2009 (UTC)

DroEsperanto's response already conveys much of my sentiments, but I would also emphasize that What about X is not a wholly convincing argument. These articles you mentioned are simply wrong and should be amended to strip out this boosterism. Moreover, I find specific and relatively indisputable claims such as the UChicago has been affiliated with more Nobel Laureates than any other American university to be wholly more convincing of its quality than appeals to a single magazine's particular methodology for distilling a variety of statistics into a single easily-digested and highly-chaotic number. Rest assured, if a reader wants to find out how "good" a university is, they need only go to the university website which will surely provide the cherry-picked rankings to assuage their remorse or justify their envy. This rankings and selectivity fetishism, however, lies far outside of Wikipedia's core mission to provide free, neutral, and reliable encyclopedic information. See WP:PEACOCK, WP:WEASEL, and WP:AVOID for other examples that crop up in non-university contexts. As such, we must always assert facts, not opinions. Please identify what part of Oxford, Harvard, or Chicago's entries in Britannica make note of their quality as measured by magazine rankings. Madcoverboy (talk) 22:58, 11 August 2009 (UTC)

Is it boosterism?... Maybe, hard to say. A lot of these ranking lists are very respected, so if these institutions are consistently place in the top ten worldwide by several independent studies and rankings there must be some truth to that. But here is an important point: Do we say it's okay to state Yale, Harvard, and Oxford rank among the top ten worldwide, or are consistently ranked among the top world colleges, and not state that about the University of Chicago, when it too consistently ranks in the top ten? On one of the lists it even came ahead of Princeton and Oxford. Why do we suddenly draw the line with the University of Chicago? Most people think of the aforementioned schools as the top tier schools; they may not know UC ranks right up there with them, but UC's article should state this only if the other school's articles are allowed to re-enforce the top ten ranking. Again, why draw the line at UC? And yes, acknowledging higher rankings for any school may mean lower rankings are not being looked at, but these schools really do not have lower rankings on any respected ranking list of the thousands upon thousands of colleges and universities worldwide. So this issue could go either way. The other schools articles should not have the top ten worldwide ranking mentioned if the UC article isn't allowed to mention it. But if we are allowing this to stay in other articles, UC's article should have it as well. And since many people may not be aware UC ranks in the top ten worldwide, this is the article it really should appear in. —Preceding unsigned comment added by 66.192.176.30 (talk) 00:02, 12 August 2009 (UTC)

I see no mention of rankings in the leads for Yale or Princeton and have removed the most egregious example from Oxford and DroEsperanto has removed it from Harvard. Madcoverboy (talk) 03:50, 12 August 2009 (UTC)

Images

I just found this user on Flickr who has released a wealth of excellent UChicago campus images under CC-SA. I'm beginning to upload some of them to Commons, and any help uploading/identifying buildings would be extremely helpful. For buildings with more than one image, I plan on creating subcategories within the University of Chicago campus category, and placing everything else within that parent category. Thought you guys might be interested. Thanks — DroEsperanto (talk) 17:21, 1 September 2009 (UTC)

Those look fantastic. Restoring the "Gallery" section in the article and including some of these would be great if we could get around to that. -- mcshadypl ^TC 04:11, 8 September 2009 (UTC)

I've already started messing around with that idea in my sandbox, if you want to take a look. — DroEsperanto (talk) 07:21, 8 September 2009 (UTC)

Done. — DroEsperanto (talk) 23:55, 10 September 2009 (UTC)

University of Chicago GA Reassessment

This discussion is transcluded from Talk:University of Chicago/GA1. The edit link for this section can be used to add comments to the reassessment.

This article has been reviewed as part of Wikipedia:WikiProject Good articles/Project quality task force in an effort to ensure all listed Good articles continue to meet the Good article criteria. In reviewing the article, I have found there are some issues that may need to be addressed, listed below. I will check back in seven days. If these issues are addressed, the article will remain listed as a Good article. Otherwise, it may be delisted (such a decision may be challenged through WP:GAR). If improved after it has been delisted, it may be nominated at WP:GAN. Feel free to drop a message on my talk page if you have any questions, and many thanks for all the hard work that has gone into this article thus far.

• There are at least three dead links.[3]

Y Done Re-sourced everything that came from a dead link or removed it if I couldn't find another source that said the same thing. — DroEsperanto (talk) 20:49, 8 September 2009 (UTC)

Lead

• The lead claims that the University is noted for "several movements in anthropology", but anthropology is not mentioned in the article. This has been tagged as needing a citation since August, but if these movements are indeed significant I'd have expected to see them discussed in the article.

Y Done - I had my doubts about the statement, but thought that it was possible that it was indeed significant, so I just tagged it instead of removing it before. Now it's gone, and I've rephrased that section of the lead as well. — DroEsperanto (talk) 20:12, 8 September 2009 (UTC)

Founding–1910s

• There is a request for citation tag that needs to be dealt with.

Y Done Removed it; couldn't find a source for it, and it seemed mostly like admissionsy folklore anyway. — DroEsperanto (talk) 21:58, 8 September 2009 (UTC)

• What's the source for the second paragraph?

Y Done Sourced all the facts in there. — DroEsperanto (talk) 21:58, 8 September 2009 (UTC)

Campus

• There is a request for citation at the end of the first paragraph and the last paragraph is also uncited.

Y Done— DroEsperanto (talk) 22:22, 8 September 2009 (UTC)

Associated academic institutions

• There are two requests for citation in this section.

Y Done. Took care of those.— DroEsperanto (talk) 03:32, 10 September 2009 (UTC)

--Malleus Fatuorum 11:50, 8 September 2009 (UTC)

• Thanks for dealing with all of these issues DroEsperanto. --Malleus Fatuorum 11:12, 15 September 2009 (UTC)

The above discussion is preserved as an archive. Please do not modify it. Subsequent comments should be made in a new section.

Traditions

I noticed that the list of college traditions has been reinstated. I didn't want to revert right away without discussing, but my reason for removing them originally was because I wasn't able to find any non-UChicago sources that wrote about them, and the threshold for inclusion of school traditions is notability. If you can find sources then of course I think these traditions should be included (I admit I wish the section weren't so sparse) but I think that unless sourcing can be found they should stay removed, or at least on the talk page. I'd like to hear your thoughts on this. — DroEsperanto (talk) 23:28, 9 December 2009 (UTC)

Technology Transfer and Intellectual Property

I have been asked by the Director of Communications in the Office of the Vice President for Research and for National Laboratories to add a section about Technology Transfer and Intellectual Property to this page. I added it yesterday, and it was deleted today. I'm going to try and add it again today. The majority of this information refers to content containted on the web site http://tech.uchicago.edu/, which is the official site of the Office of Technology Transfer and Intellectual Property. Lynn1144 (talk) 16:13, 23 December 2009 (UTC)

Significant portions of that material were copied directly from that website so I deleted the section as a blatant copyright violation. Please rewrite the material so it's not a direct copy. I also recommend making it much shorter as it was very long compared to its relative importance in this article. --ElKevbo (talk) 19:25, 23 December 2009 (UTC)

In addition to availing yourself of Wikipedia's guidelines on conflict of interest, look to analogous sections such as those at MIT, Northwestern, and Michigan for a sense of what is appropriate balance and coverage. Madcoverboy (talk) 21:06, 23 December 2009 (UTC)

Thank you for the comments. I have sent them to the Dir. of Communications to help her revise what she sent to me to post. Lynn1144 (talk) 02:13, 24 December 2009 (UTC)

Neo-liberal economics and Neo-conservatism...

Maybe there should be a section on the central role the University of Chicago played in the development of Neo-liberal economics and Neo-conservatism. These twin ideologies seem very relevant to the affairs of today: the Iraq War and the late-2000s Financial Crisis. What do my fellow editors think? Soupysoap (talk) 02:30, 1 March 2010 (UTC)

It seems very hard to incorporate this in any way that would be not be advocacy, much less violating neutrality or reliablity. The article already acknowledges notable faculty members and alumni in government positions who advocated or endorsed neo-X policies, but it would be a stretch to argue that UChicago as an organization advocated or endorsed these policies or the effects of these policies can be attributed to the university. I am opposed to introducing political red meat into university articles. Madcoverboy (talk) 04:39, 1 March 2010 (UTC)

Rankings under the Academics page

Just to clarify it was not boosterism. I do not, have not, and will not ever attend University of Chicago. The Rankings table, supposedly 'adequate' is incorrect. What it refers to as 'Times Higher Education' utterly neglects the fact that those rankings were published under the partnership THE-QS (QS standing for Quacquarelli Symonds). This partnership has ended and in 2010 QS and THE are publishing separate rankings. Either the table needs to be amended (and, in any case, updated for 2010) or a rankings title under the Academics section be introduced, which would make it much easier to clarify the separate systems etc. ArthurGD (talk) 15:12, 10 September 2010 (UTC)

The table has been updated to reflect citations to the QS_W (QS World) 2010 rankings and the THES_W (THES world) 2009 rankings. The QS_W and THES_W fields simply need to be populated. Madcoverboy (talk) 15:43, 10 September 2010 (UTC)

Regenstein library

There is an error in this section: "once its expansion is completed in 2010". There will be no expansion - but another library building - [Library]. Please correct. --92.76.106.253 (talk) 17:16, 23 September 2011 (UTC)

Redirected from Bradbury House

I just spent some time searching for Bradbury House, being redirected to this article, which doesn't mention it at all. Eventually I searched through the article on Blade Runner to find that I meant to search Bradbury Building, not house.

Anyway, I might not be the only one to make this error and it took me quite a while to realize what I'm doing wrong. Is it possible to add a "Did you mean Bradbury Building?" link to the top of the article in the case that you come here redirected from Bradbury house? Since Bradbury House (whatever it is) isn't even mentioned in the article, I'd say that somebody searching for it probably meant Bradbury Building.King Klear (talk) 13:19, 30 December 2011 (UTC)