020520

FEBRUARY 5, 2020 FIFTH WEEK VOL. 132, ISSUE 14

SPECIAL ISSUE: UNIVERSITY GOVERNANCE Master’s programs balloon and Ph.D. programs shrink as University eyes “ratio between eminence and resources”

Struggles over graduate student unionization have eroded trust in the administration

“Fearful of challenge and discomfort”: After hard questions, administrators cut back dialogue with students

PAGE 7

PAGE 9

PAGE 13

Faculty asked for a public forum to discuss free speech. Zimmer granted a handful of invite-only discussions.

PAGE 14

Like our Facebook page at facebook.com/chicagomaroon and follow @chicagomaroon on Instagram and Twitter to get the latest updates on campus news.

chicagomaroon.com

THE CHICAGO MAROON — FEBRUARY 5, 2020

2

“A FAIT ACCOMPLI”:

How the central administration has consolidated power and deflected dissent at the University of Chicago Cover illustration by Andrew Dietz. Photographs by Jeremy Lindenfeld.

By LEE HARRIS, DEEPTI SAILAPPAN and EMMA DYER Editor-in-Chief, Managing Editor, and News Editor During his 14-year tenure, President Robert Zimmer and his administration have transformed the University of Chicago.

The College has grown from 4,000 to 6,500 students, and has soared in coveted U.S. News rankings—from 15th place nationally the year Zimmer took office to top-six today. Fundraising has almost tripled during his tenure, according to the Financial Times. Zimmer has overseen the opening of new residential complexes, study-abroad programs, and a school of molecular engineering.

A soon-to-open conference center, the

Rubenstein Forum, is expected to save the University $4 million a year—dollars previously spent renting hotel space for conferences in downtown Chicago, the President told faculty. Some say these changes are long overdue: Zimmer has brought economic efficiency worthy of the Chicago School to the notoriously shambolic U of C. In public campaigns, Zimmer has also boosted the University’s traditional values, advertising Chicago’s academic intensity, fostering of free speech, and its faculty-led governance structure.

Good presidents, Zimmer told the Financial Times, find ambitious faculty and “give them a lot of capacity and authority.”

“There is so much distributed authority, but that should not deter you

from being imaginative,” he said.

Faculty see things differently. Many professors say the ‘distributed authority’ that made the school distinctive has eroded during the Zimmer years. In conversations with The Chicago Maroon, and in minutes of the faculty senate, professors express concerns ranging from the proliferation of donor-funded research institutes to the way the president and provost have sought to reshape the humanities and social sciences.

The recent announcement that the University will dramatically shrink the size of UChicago’s Ph.D. programs—long regarded as the heart of Chicago’s scholasticism—drew especially strong backlash. To many, it seemed like the latest example of faculty being the last to know about changes in the University that are

vitally relevant to their work.

Outgoing Provost Daniel Diermeier, too, has had an outsize effect on the University. Intensely interested in the University’s standing compared with peer institutions, the Provost, in meetings with the Council, has stressed the urgency of raising the University’s national profile.

Still, he is optimistic. “In terms of the ratio between eminence and resources,” Diermeier told faculty at one meeting, the University is “punching above its weight.”

This series examines the way an increasingly centralized administration responds to faculty input, shares information, and manages the challenges of governing the increasingly complex modern private university.

THE CHICAGO MAROON — FEBRUARY 5, 2020

3

Professors sound alarm on threats to faculty governance in Ph.D. overhaul

By LEE HARRIS Editor-in-Chief More than 100 professors wrote to University administrators last month expressing “grave concern” about the University’s recent move to shrink the size of doctoral programs without consulting faculty.

The letter, sent to President Robert Zimmer and Provost Daniel Diermeier and obtained by The Maroon, is the latest unified expression by faculty members of a growing concern that they are being denied input in critical decisions that affect their teaching.

Faculty from across multiple disciplines signed the letter, including legal scholar and philosopher Martha Nussbaum, political theorist John McCormick, and historian Dipesh Chakrabarty. The letter was originally penned by Matthew Boyle, a philosopher who came to the University of Chicago four years ago from Harvard University.

The letter calls the central administration’s move, which was announced in October to faculty members along with the rest of the University community in a mass email, “a purely top-down, non-consultative imposition of a comprehensive transformation of the structure and substance of academic life in this university.”

The new model guarantees funding to doctoral students in the Humanities and Social Sciences Divisions, the School of Social Service Administration, and the Divinity School for the duration of their studies.

That’s a win for graduate students, but comes with mandatory cuts to the size of Ph.D. programs.

The new cap sizes haven’t been publicly announced. But the letter—whose signatories include six department chairs—says the Humanities Division will shrink from 585 Ph.D. students to 420 by the 2022–23 academic year.

Though it notes that signatories have “diverse views” about the substance of the new model, the letter describes several detrimental consequences that faculty members expect to flow from the changes.

The University’s cuts to graduate program size will create “a lack of qualified teaching assistants for up to half of the slots we have to fill,” the letter says. To fill that gap, departments might have to turn to less qualified instructors, like master’s students and “late-stage undergraduates.”

This move, the letter says, would “involve

a great reduction in the quality of a UChicago undergraduate education.”

In a sentence that was removed from the final version sent to Diermeier and Zimmer, but which was included in the version signed by faculty members and sent to The Maroon, professors also suggested that the reduction in quality of teaching assistants seemed to indicate administrators don’t have a high opinion of humanities instructors: “It is hard to imagine how this kind of change could be contemplated except on the assumption that no special competence is required to give instruction in a specific Humanities discipline – that really all these disciplines merely present glorified forms of writing instruction, and so can be taught by anyone with a general college education.”

The same low esteem for the humanities is implied by the additional teaching burden that may fall on tenured professors, cramping the ability of the faculty to pursue their own research, the letter says. “Our university would then become, not a broadly excellent research university, but a place where only certain favored disciplines are supported.”

The letter describes a general sense that faculty are being shut out of decision-making in changes that directly affect them.

Although divisional deans knew about the planned changes over the summer, the letter says, they were sworn to secrecy.

“These kinds of methods for introducing a controversial policy are undoubtedly effective, at least in the short term,” the letter says, “but effective though they may be, there remains a question about whether we should want our shared university to function in this way.”

Deans Amanda Woodward, Anne Robertson, David Nirenberg and Deborah Gorman-Smith did not respond to The Maroon’s requests for comment. In an email, a University spokesperson wrote, “the priorities that led to the greatly expanded funding model for PhD education have been a subject of faculty discussion for years, most recently through the provost-appointed Committee on Graduate Education, which consisted of faculty members and students. Additional input was gathered through deans as well as faculty members in the office of the Provost.”

The letter also contests Diermeier’s April statement that the changes emerged out of “a collaborative process that involved both students and faculty.” This is “simply not

true,” the letter says.

The secretive way these changes were introduced is particularly troubling in light of the University’s historical advocacy of collective governance in higher education, the letter says.

In public statements, Zimmer has emphasized the importance of “distributed authority” and “effective channels for faculty input into decisions that shape the academic enterprise.”

The letter suggests that the president has been more commander than consensus-builder, explaining that “the way in which these changes were handed down suggests a sense on the part of the administration that, although particular faculty members may be worth consulting, the faculty as a whole is an unruly and unreliable body that must be approached strategically.”

“We believe this attitude is self-fulfilling: to the extent that the faculty feels it has no real part in the formulation of university policy on core academic matters such as

the structure of graduate education, its responses to such policies will become more oppositional, less informed by a sense of trade-offs, and so on,” it says in the concluding paragraph.

Boyle, the professor who wrote the letter, serves as director of graduate admissions in the philosophy department. He told The Maroon in an interview that the aim of the letter was to open a dialogue between administrators and faculty members about the need for consultation, not to take a stance on the substance of the changes.

He said he found out about the change along with most of the University: in the October email from the provost. “It came very unexpectedly, and as a finished change,” he said.

“I was very surprised that such a major and transformative decision had been made—that it had been made without advance consultation of the faculty as a body, and we all immediately started thinking about the consequences.”

THE CHICAGO MAROON — FEBRUARY 5, 2020

4

“Under-theorized and superficial,” “opportunistic”: Faculty worried Grossman Institute was beholden to wealthy donor

By LEE HARRIS Editor-in-Chief

bounds of faculty jurisdiction over non-degree-granting institutes should look like.

“Intellectually incoherent.” “Quixotic and not helpful.” “Under-theorized and superficial.” “Oriented towards the pursuit of funding.” UChicago professors did not mince words as they sat discussing a newly proposed research institute at faculty senate meetings in 2011.

Members of the Council of the University Senate were troubled by the proposed course of research for the institute, then named the Grossman Institute for Quantitative Biology and Human Behavior.

Some worried it would be beholden to its benefactor, trustee Sanford Grossman, an economist who founded the hedge fund QFS Asset Management. Grossman envisioned an institute that would ground the study of behavioral economics in biology.

At the time, the Council was already on edge.

When the Grossman proposal came before the Council, faculty were still reeling from a bitter dispute over the proposed Milton Friedman Institute for Research in Economics. Some thought the Friedman Institute, proposed in 2008, falsely purported to represent the views of faculty who in fact had misgivings about Friedman’s legacy. The dispute made national headlines. One hundred and eleven faculty members signed a petition describing “the University’s evident fixation on financial assets and its desire to exploit the Friedman brand name for fund-raising purposes.”

Now, a fight was brewing over another research center. The Council was faced with a proposal many found more alarming than the Friedman Institute.

Several professors said the Grossman Institute’s focus on describing complex social behavior using quantitative genetics seemed at best unrealistic and at worst morally offensive, recalling pseudoscientific efforts to map human behavior onto immutable biological characteristics.

In debates over the Grossman Institute, several faculty members’ frustration with their lack of involvement in decision-making came to a head. The debates forced the faculty senate to reckon with what the

Grossman Institute: A chance to recruit star researchers Sanford Grossman (A.B. ’73, A.M. ’74, Ph.D. ’75) is an academic economist who founded a Greenwich-based hedge fund that at its height managed more than $5 billion, according to The Wall Street Journal. The University announced in 2011 that Grossman would fund a research institute that would span the Biological Sciences Division and the Social Sciences Division.

Early that same year, the proposed institute was discussed at meetings of the Council of the University Senate, the body of faculty members elected to deliberate on academic matters.

Conrad Gillam, a geneticist, provided an overview of the proposal, which he described as a trailblazing effort to apply modeling from quantitative biology to human individual, social, and cultural activities.

Researchers would aim to identify genetic correlates for particular behaviors “incorporating biological and neurobiological information, alongside social and environmental data,” Gillam said. He cited “economic decision-making as an example that might bring all of these strands together.”

The ambitious research would be exclusive to the University of Chicago, Gillam said, since “no other peer institutions are approaching these issues in exactly the same way.”

Gillam repeatedly stressed that the Institute would be an opportunity for the University to recruit high-profile talent. A faculty oversight group, he said, had “determined that the study of human behavior was of greatest interest to the star evolutionary genomics researchers.”

A top-down imposition In the subsequent discussion, several Council members raised concerns about the content of the proposal and suggested that it had seemed like a top-down imposition by the central administration, rather than an outgrowth of existing faculty research.

Biophysicist Leslie Kay said she “would like to see the neurosciences grow from an already-established strength, rather than creating a new discipline that may or may not be successful, because there is so much distance in between biology and complex social behavior.” Kay questioned “why this initiative needed to be structured as an Institute, especially in light of earlier years’ debates regarding the Institute for Molecular Engineering.”

Daniel Margoliash, a neuroscientist, said that the proposal “focused on hopes and intentions for neurosciences for the future, and yet neuroscientists had not been involved in shaping it.”

In a recent interview with The Maroon, Margoliash said that early whitepapers for the Grossman Institute that he reviewed at the time were “just silly.” He would not accept such a lightweight proposal from his undergraduate students—nor would they be likely to submit one.

Other faculty described the research whitepapers as attempting to link DNA directly to human behavior, omitting the crucial intermediary of the brain.

Yali Amit, a statistician, said at a meeting in February 2011 that through his academic and administrative work, he had experience spanning biology, statistics, and quantitative analysis. Yet, notwithstanding the talented geneticists at UChicago, he said, it was “still difficult to identify the effect of a small number of genes on a biological trait.”

Amit went on to describe his “discomfort with the notion of connecting genes to an obscure concept such as empathy.”

Moishe Postone, a social theorist who led the development of Core Curriculum offerings in the social sciences, offered further ethical objections to the project.

Postone “noted that in the United States there was a tendency to view social problems in biological terms, in a way that was not as prevalent within other countries.

This often led to the search for scientific solutions rather than addressing social considerations, and he viewed this proposal as another example of that approach.”

Bruce Lincoln, a professor in the Divinity School, spoke in harsher terms. The proposal was “under-theorized and super-

ficial,” he said, and “appeared to be opportunistic and oriented towards the pursuit of funding.” At worst, he said, it was “reminiscent of reductionist attempts to ground understandings of human behavior in the body and in chemistry.”

On the other side of the debate, several Council members were alarmed by the criticisms, which seemed to them like dangerous infringements by some members of the Council on their colleagues’ freedom of research.

“Even though there may be fundamental internal disagreements about the value of certain research initiatives,” sociologist Andrew Abbott said, “other than extreme cases involving illegality, faculty members should be free to pursue the research directions of their choice.”

Some saw arguments about academic freedom as a red herring. Margoliash “offered the view that when a group of researchers collaborate around an initiative and seek a substantial amount of University resources (in the form of significant financial commitments as well as institutional approval), at that point a question arises as to whether or not the Council should become involved.”

Council jurisdiction after Grossman The final outcome of the debate over Grossman was mixed, according to faculty who were initially critical of the proposal.

Neuroscience was added to the name of the institute—it is now the Grossman Institute for Neuroscience, Quantitative Biology and Human Behavior—and research proposals were amended to address some faculty concerns.

“We kicked up quite a fight,” Margoliash said in a recent interview with The Maroon. “It has come to be the neuroscience institute that a great many of us had hoped would develop.”

“On one hand the administration didn’t really budge at all on the formal jurisdiction of the council,” Amit told The Maroon in a recent email. Yet, “ultimately, the Grossman Institute ended up actually being a real Neuroscience Institute and is not significantly involved in Quantitative Biology (e.g. genetics) or Human Behavior.”

CONTINUED ON PG. 5

THE CHICAGO MAROON — FEBRUARY 5, 2020

5

“Intellectually incoherent”: Faculty opposed proposal, but were never allowed a vote CONTINUED FROM PG. 4

The proposal was updated to include a focus on neuroscience, without ever being permitted to go for a vote. But the debate had set off wider disagreement.

At a meeting of the Council in May 2011, following months of discussion, Lincoln said the updated proposal should come before the Council for a formal vote. He cited a passage from the University Statutes which reads: “The competence of the Council shall extend to the Institutes.”

Some colleagues said that a vote was not technically required, but agreed that, given a proliferation of instutes susceptible to undue influence by donors—Grossman, Friedman, and the proposed Confucius Institute, to name a few—the Council ought

to consider voting on new institutes in the future.

In the ensuing debate, administrators said that allowing the Council to vote on non-degree-granting entities would be a slippery slope—and, they said, historical precedent showed that institutes didn’t fall within the Council’s jurisdiction anyway.

Political scientist John Mark Hansen, then dean of the social sciences division, said that the existing governance system, in which the Council did not need to vote when an institute was established, served the University well: “If it ain’t broke, don’t fix it.”

Hansen reflected on the creation of the Center for the Study of Race, Politics and Culture in 1996—widely viewed as a fixture

of campus life, he noted—and warned that there might have been “negative repercussions” if faculty had been required to vote on its creation.

Kenneth Polonsky, the dean of the Biological Sciences Division, expressed outrage that faculty were proposing to veto the Grossman Institute, arguing that “it was fundamentally against the general academic and intellectual interests of the University of Chicago for one group of faculty members to adjudicate the research activities of other highly respected colleagues.”

The threat to academic freedom was so serious, according to Polonsky, that he “conveyed his personal willingness to discuss this matter with the Board of Trustees if it was decided to use this as a test case to

resolve issues of jurisdiction.”

President Robert Zimmer agreed that Grossman should not be a test case.

The Grossman Institute proposal had been brought to the Council for the purpose of “sharing information and receiving feedback,” Zimmer said—not for the purpose of conducting a vote. The debate over the Grossman Institute shouldn’t be the basis, he said, for overturning “60 years of governance.”

But, Zimmer acknowledged that there ought to be further deliberation on the Council’s jurisdiction. He announced that three committees would be charged with determining what role the Council might play in reviewing proposals for future non-degree-granting research centers.

Money is pouring into flashy research institutes.

Faculty worry it undermines their say in governance.

By LEE HARRIS Editor-in-Chief Provost Daniel Diermeier arrived at a faculty meeting at the School of Social Service Administration (SSA) in December 2018 to announce a major restructuring: The SSA would merge with the Urban Education Institute (UEI), which researches education policy and operates a teacher training program and charter school network.

The faculty at SSA were not consulted before Diermeier made that announcement.

And, since the change was announced, they have had little say in how it would be implemented. Following Diermeier’s announcement, some worried the incorporation of the Institute would skew the small School’s research heavily toward education. The SSA, they said, has succeeded by not being dominated by any one discipline.

The way Diermeier responded to faculty concerns at the December 2018 meeting, SSA professor Bill Sites recently told The Maroon, was “implicitly threatening to SSA, or it was condescending.”

“A couple of faculty raised questions, and his response, in so many words, was: ‘That will be worked out later, don’t worry your little head, we’ll take care of every-

thing,’” Sites said.

The merger of UEI and SSA is the latest instance of a long pattern of faculty members being kept out of decision-making over the research centers, institutes, and non-degree-granting units scattered across the University. These entities have proliferated over the last two decades, and some professors say that they are both a symptom and a cause of eroding faculty governance.

Currently, the Council of the University Senate, the body elected to represent faculty, is not permitted to vote on the creation of these entities.

Professor Na’ama Rokem, the spokesperson for the Council’s seven-person Committee, describes the set of issues currently under the faculty’s authority as far too narrow. As spokesperson, Rokem is the highest-ranking member of faculty government.

“If we wanted to pass a vote just saying, ‘As the body representing the University, we feel this is a bad plan’—we couldn’t do that, under the way the Statutes are being implemented now,” Rokem told The Maroon.

By contrast, the faculty at many top universities have considerable discretion to constrain their central administrations and register approval or dissent. At Stanford, the faculty senate—whose agenda and minutes are publicly available—recently voted

to support proposals of Associated Students of Stanford University, a student group. At New York University, the faculty can issue a vote of no confidence in the president, as they did in 2013.

Rokem joined more than 100 colleagues last month in signing a letter to administrators expressing “grave concern” over the manner in which consultative governance has been restricted. She worries the faculty senate is directed away from discussing thorny issues like donor-backed institutes and centers.

“Given that as an institution, our stated ethos is that we believe there should be robust debate,” Rokem told The Maroon, “the fact that it’s very difficult to bring things up for debate in this forum seems to contradict that stated ethos.”

Institutes proliferate over the last two decades The more than 100 institutes and centers at the University span an eclectic mix of entities: modest pots of money earmarked for neglected fields in the humanities; cutting-edge collaborations in the medical school; affiliates of Argonne National Laboratory. These have long been a part of the school’s ecosystem.

Likewise, wealthy donors are nothing

new to a University founded by John D. Rockefeller. But whereas Rockefeller was remote and hands-off—pleased to let the University pursue its own research aims— the past two decades have seen new and aggressive proposals directed at specific ends, faculty critics say.

In addition to the Milton Friedman Institute (now Becker Friedman), the 2010–11 academic year saw the opening of the Institute in Law and Economics (adopted by a donor in 2013, and renamed the Coase-Sandor Institute) and the Fama-Miller Center for Research in Finance, closely followed by the Center for the Economics of Human Development in 2014.

Some institutes are public-facing, inviting businesspeople and experts to campus, forging connections between students and public figures.

The Polsky Center for Entrepreneurship and Innovation, which was bumped up from a program at Booth business school to a freestanding institute in 2016, connects students and faculty with venture capital.

The Center, a notice by the University’s communications department announced, would help “combine and expand entrepreneurial efforts that are separate at most universities.”

CONTINUED ON PG. 6

THE CHICAGO MAROON — FEBRUARY 5, 2020

6

The proliferation of research institutes may “erode the ability of local, self-governing units to set their own intellectual agendas, shifting power within the University toward the center” CONTINUED FROM PG. 5

UChicago’s Institute of Politics (IOP), founded in 2013 by Obama strategist David Axelrod, hosts events with politicians. Since the IOP’s opening, UChicago has become home to numerous other politics-related initiatives: the Project on Political Reform (2014), the Chicago Center on Democracy (2018), and the Center for Effective Government (2019).

Other institutes have names so all-inclusive they sound like the generic description of a university.

The Knowledge Lab explores “how knowledge is made, used, certified and forgotten.” It is part of the Metaknowledge Research Network, a research initiative that studies knowledge. The Center for Practical Wisdom, meanwhile, is geared at understanding “how to gain, reinforce, and apply wisdom.” Housed in the Department of Psychology, this center was founded in 2016 with a grant from the Templeton Foundation, which sponsors findings linking Christianity to science.

The Stevanovich Institute on the Formation of Knowledge, whose director, classicist Shadi Bartsch, is married to University President Robert Zimmer, aims to “understand how factors like history, politics, culture and religion can shape knowledge.”

Special projects like the Institute for Molecular Engineering, recently inaugurated as a school of molecular engineering, have helped the University to poach top talent.

While many centers and institutes are founded with high-profile donations, others are allocated funding by the University.

They are “net consumers of resources,” former provost Thomas Rosenbaum told the Committee of the Council in 2011.

This trend is not confined to the University of Chicago. Many elite research universities increasingly focus on fundraising for interdisciplinary institutes helmed by academic superstars. Research centers can be attractive to faculty because they often bypass the snarl of divisional funding, and posts may come with fewer teaching responsibilities.

Stanley Katz, a Princeton historian of philanthropy and higher education who

previously taught at UChicago, told The Maroon that the tendency to create institutes arose from a perceived need “to make campuses more appealing to the most competitive and productive faculty members.”

The trend is also driven by donors impatient for quick results, Katz said, adding that independent institutes are attractive to philanthropists because research is more easily directed toward pet projects.

Council debates the rise of institutes When Katz sat on the Council in the 1970s with then President Edward Levi, faculty vigorously debated proposed changes, he said. Professors generally felt they had real power to steer the direction of the University.

“You need to compare somebody like President Zimmer with somebody like Edward Levi, who was the president when I was there. Edward was a very different sort of person—he was a very old-fashioned sort of person, somebody for whom intellectual quality was the only thing that mattered,” Katz said. Under Levi, “very often, we came to decisions I didn’t like, didn’t approve of.

But, boy, they were always carefully considered.”

Decades later, the picture is much different.

As institutes proliferated, concerns over faculty jurisdiction over them intensified, coming to a head with disputes over the Friedman and Grossman institutes. Following the controversies, in 2012, it was unclear to many faculty members whether the Council had jurisdiction over these institutes.

Some faculty cited the general interest clause in the University statutes, which grants the Council jurisdiction over “any action of any Ruling Body which substantially affects the general interest of the University,” to argue that research institutes fall under their jurisdiction.

Others described potentially detrimental results if the Council used the general interest clause to enlarge its turf.

Then-Provost Rosenbaum, now the president of the California Institute of Technology, described his concern that if the general interest clause were too loosely interpreted, “the outcome may result in ty-

ing the University up in knots.” Ambitious initiatives aimed at big problems, he said, “would run the risk of being voted down because different groups of faculty were voting against each other.”

Michael Schill, then dean of the Law School, argued that requiring faculty approval for new institutes could discourage donors from giving money. (Schill has since left the Law School to become president of the University of Oregon.)

Citing his experience as a dean at the University of California, Los Angeles, Schill praised faculty governance as a value but stipulated that “shared governance can have costs which need to be weighed against benefits.” Given the increasing amount of academic activity requiring interdisciplinary partnership, “if there was a requirement for Council approval for every non-degree-granting research program that was proposed, this would slow down the process and introduce additional layers of insecurity.”

“In turn,” Schill explained, “this could create uncertainties among potential donors, and lead to a reduction in philanthropic support.”

In response to the debates, Zimmer charged three committees with examining the issue: • The 12 deans.

• The Topel/Markell Committee.

• The Pippin Committee.

It would be up to Zimmer which committee’s recommendations to heed. “It is ultimately my responsibility as President of the University to decide upon the recommendations on this matter, with the advice of the Provost,” he wrote in a January 2012 letter to faculty.

Topel Committee Report The Topel Committee—the committee staffed by members of the Council— achieved some consensus, but remained divided over several key points.

In a memo prior to the final report, Markell, Shissler and Amit argued that in some cases, academic freedom—the same principle usually invoked to restrict the Council’s authority—might in fact demand that the Council intervene in research-related

matters.

One concern brought up during their deliberations, they wrote, “is that the proliferation of research institutes and centers without appointive power... has begun to erode the ability of local, self-governing units—departments—to set their own intellectual agendas, shifting power within the University toward the center, or toward some subsets of faculty at the expense of others.”

Pippin Report The report of the committee chaired by philosophy professor Robert Pippin, which has been cited in more recent disputes over the extent of the Council’s authority, warned against potential harm to academic freedom if the Council is granted too much latitude.

All was well, it explained, with University governance.

“Remarkably few substantive discussions or disagreements about University governance have arisen since the current organization was formed in 1944. This is further evidence that the governance structure and our past practices are functioning well and are not in need of revision...”

The University had changed drastically in recent years, the report acknowledged, but the governance structure remained adequate to the complex modern institution.

“Even during times of an activist administration, one that facilitates the formation of units considerably larger than before, commits more university resources than before, and helps create significantly more research Institutes and Centers than before, the process of faculty vetting has remained, and should remain, the same.”

Indeed, the right of academics to chart the course of their own research, independent of Council review, had become “even more important in an era when sub-disciplines and trans-disciplinary research opportunities have exploded in number and kind.”

None of the reports was ever formally endorsed by the Council.

But the administration now treats the Pippin Report as precedent. Last year, Diermeier cited the Pippin Report as authoriCONTINUED ON PG. 7

THE CHICAGO MAROON — FEBRUARY 5, 2020

7

The SSA-UEI takeover: Faculty played “no role in governing this process” CONTINUED FROM PG. 6

tative in a dispute with faculty, arguing that the issue of graduate student unionization did not fall within their voting authority.

Reception of the reports Historian of religion Christian Wedemeyer said the Pippin Report seemed to be arguing against “imaginary threats.” Those who were advocating “unchecked administrative authority”—like Pippin’s committee—had misrepresented those who wanted to extend the Council’s jurisdiction, he said.

“The credulous reader comes away from this report thinking that the Council is actively seeking to lurk in their offices, look over their shoulders, and micro-manage their research, taking away their ‘academic freedom,’ ” Wedemeyer told the Council.

To Wedemeyer, the “extreme” position was Pippin’s argument that the Council should be prevented from voting to express “unbinding, advisory opinions on vital matters of general interest to the University.”

“Academic freedom does not include the absolute right to set up formal research institutes bearing the name of the Universi-

ty,” Wedemeyer said.

To other faculty, it seemed as though the controversy over research centers and Council jurisdiction had been a proxy debate over Zimmer’s active administration.

Neuroscientist Daniel Margoliash described an “underlying context that he felt was somewhat uncomfortable to discuss.

He pointed out that over the past few years there had been a very active and effective administration in place, led by Messrs.

Zimmer and Rosenbaum, and this level of activity had generated some concern among the faculty, as well as questions regarding the existence of an appropriate mechanism for faculty response and input.”

Muddling through the SSA–UEI merger In response to questions about institutes and centers, Zimmer told the Committee of the Council at a meeting in October 2011 that he thought “issues have arisen because most faculty are not aware of the scope of University operations.”

The solution, Zimmer said, would be more dialogue: “open discussion might improve trust.”

A decade later, faculty members feel that dialogue has not occurred—if anything, some say, it has been cut back.

Following the recent announcement that UEI would be taken over by SSA, faculty scrambled to figure out what the tie-up would mean for the two units.

SSA, founded in 1920, is a degree-granting school; UEI, launched in 2016, manages a number of discrete education-related programs. Some SSA faculty members expressed political objections to the charter schools under UEI’s management; others voiced concerns about whether SSA would be financially on the hook for the success of the program.

“Faculty spent an enormous amount of time trying to map out what could possibly be the financial, the intellectual, the organizational implications of bringing these two units together, and how it might affect us,” Sites told The Maroon. “They were all pretty inconclusive. And the reason they were inconclusive is because, throughout, it was pretty clear that faculty were playing no role in governing this process.”

Administrators were clear on one point,

however: don’t call the move a ‘merger.’

The provost and others “emphasized that SSA would become the academic home of UEI,” Sites said. “We were repeatedly instructed to no longer use the word merger.”

For this story, The Maroon requested to speak with President Zimmer and Provost Diermeier. In response, University spokesperson Jeremy Manier wrote: “Thank you for inquiring about the Urban Education Institute (UEI) and the School of Social Service Administration (SSA). SSA became the academic home for UEI as of July 1, 2019. Although you used the term “merger” in your email, that is not accurate. Moving UEI under the organizational structure of SSA established a stronger connection between SSA and UEI, enabling opportunities to enhance and amplify existing expertise in public education research and policy, and to pursue new opportunities for collaboration in the important areas of poverty reduction, violence prevention, protecting vulnerable children and families, and providing high-quality education.”

Master’s programs balloon and Ph.D. programs shrink as University eyes “ratio between eminence and resources”

By EMMA DYER News Editor In 2011, a committee of faculty members was charged with studying master’s programs in the Humanities and Social Sciences Divisions (MAPH/MAPSS). The Wellbery Report, as it came to be called, was unequivocal in its findings: “in terms of both size and the quality of students, these programs had become a source of considerable and unacceptable strain.”

In response to the rapid growth, the committee unanimously recommended the University shrink the size of these programs.

Nearly a decade later, the University has done the opposite. Since 2015, reports from the Office of the University Registrar show, master’s programs in the Social Sciences Division (SSD) have grown by 146 percent and those in the Humanities Division have

grown by 165 percent.

At the same time, doctoral programs in the two divisions have shrunk, with enrollment declining 12 percent in each—a trend that will continue with the University’s recent announcement that it will cap program sizes. In an internally circulated email among faculty, it was discussed that the administration planned to reduce the number of Ph.D. students to 420 by 2023. The opposite has been true in the Physical Sciences Division (PSD), where doctoral programs have grown by 145 percent.

These changes have occurred despite faculty members’ pushback. Last month, more than 100 professors signed a letter to administrators expressing concerns over the administration’s “top-down” decision to shrink the size of doctoral programs. Details from recently obtained faculty senate meetings and interviews with professors show that faculty members have also long

been resisting the concurrent expansion of master’s programs.

Provost Daniel Diermeier has urged that master’s programs are one way the University can benefit from its improved national standing, and turn its “increased eminence into additional resources.”

But many faculty members argue the master’s programs have been pushed to expand at the expense of their quality.

“The real problem is that we are told that we have to admit a certain number of students,” English professor Elaine Hadley told The Maroon, referring to master’s programs. “We have to admit so many that we are often in a position where we take students who aren’t very well prepared.”

Master’s programs grow, against committee recommendation The Harris School of Public Policy has seen some of the most dramatic growth in

master’s student enrollment—an increase from 330 to 883 students in five years, or a 168 percent increase.

According to Katherine Baicker, the dean of Harris, the school invested heavily in student recruitment efforts to maintain selectivity and facilitate its growth.

Baicker said in January 2019 at a faculty senate meeting that Harris had begun using strategies employed by College Admissions Dean James Nondorf. Baicker said Harris wants “to grow the pipeline, identify those students who would be a good fit for the Harris School’s program, and strategically deploy scholarship resources in order to attract the most desirable candidates and generate the most impact.”

The growth that Harris has experienced wasn’t something the authors of the Wellbery Report could have predicted in 2011.

Authors of the report, charged by CONTINUED ON PG. 8

THE CHICAGO MAROON — FEBRUARY 5, 2020

8

Diermeier: better to offer M.A. programs than embark on “austerity strategy”

CONTINUED FROM PG. 7

then-Provost Thomas Rosenbaum, found that the humanities and social sciences master’s programs “play[ed] an absolutely essential role in the culture and graduate life of the University,” but ultimately had “caused serious stress among the faculty serving those programs,” according to the minutes of a faculty senate meeting in October 2011 discussing the Wellbery Report’s findings.

Beyond the difficulties caused by a growing student to faculty ratio, the committee said, “a consistent leitmotif was the difficulty felt by faculty in reconciling the conflicting pressures forged by an ill-prepared subset of M.A. students with the normal expectations of graduate level programs at the University of Chicago. This kind of tension or frustration has also been replicated on a more individual level in the context of thesis advising.”

Germanic studies professor David Wellbery, chair of the committee that authored the 2011 report, said in a subsequent faculty senate meeting that the committee had found “faculty dissatisfaction with the admissions process [for master’s programs], which [had] led some to adopt a skeptical view of [the program’s] intellectual legitimacy.”

He added that there had been “a tendency for some M.A. students to avoid courses that required special linguistic or other forms of deep preparation, and to gravitate towards offerings that were topically familiar or were more local in nature.”

In response, one faculty member asked whether the committee had considered a separate faculty for teaching master’s students. Wellbery explained that the MAPH/ MAPSS program “was rooted in providing opportunities for student involvement with the University’s faculty, rather than with

Graphs by Emma Dyer

specialized instructors.”

Previous directors of MAPH had recommended that the optimal size for the program would be 75–100 students, Wellbery said. The size is currently 219 students.

Stipulating that “the committee did not consider it their task to solve the financial problem,” Wellbery said the committee acknowledged financial loss would result from shrinking master’s programs in the Humanities and Social Sciences Divisions.

At the Council meeting, professors discussed growing the College as a potential alternative source of funds.

The increased revenue from the College was attractive, they said, since “the impact associated with a small increase in the number of undergraduates would be less onerous than the current situation.”

Lisa Wedeen, a professor of political science, noted that “the issue of teaching burden was impacted by quality considerations as well as quantitative adjustments, and therefore might not be fully addressed through the recommendation involving the size of the College.”

Master’s expansion as an alternative to “austerity strategy” The financial appeal of master’s programs has persisted, comments from administrators in more recent meetings show.

In a December 2018 faculty senate meeting, when presenting an update on the University’s budget, Diermeier suggested master’s programs as a means of using the University’s reputation to draw in more revenue.

“He noted that the University’s endowment was one-fourth the size of Harvard’s, and on a per student basis, it significantly trails that of Princeton and Yale. He commented that this was a challenge that the University has faced for a long time, but the situation had been moving in a much better direction over the past few years. He also observed that in terms of the ratio between eminence and resources, the University was punching above its weight. He spoke of the challenge of translating this increased eminence into additional resources, and suggested several means of accomplishing this, involving master’s degree programs and offerings for non-traditional students, along with other types of opportunities. He added that he would much rather pursue this approach, rather than embarking upon

an austerity strategy.”

Faculty members aren’t all convinced that master’s programs are worth expanding.

Wellberry recently told The Maroon that “the recommendation [in the 2011 Wellberry report] was based on the staffing and other resources at that time.” But, Hadley said in an interview, problems outlined in the report are still present today.

Many faculty members feel “there has been a kind of numbers-driven, accounting-driven decision making practice around class sizes that hasn’t taken into account the intellectual and pedagogical environment,” Hadley said. “It’s the burden of that program having to generate revenue for the Division.”

Doctoral programs that rely on University funding continue to shrink In the October 2011 faculty senate meeting discussing the Wellbery report, Near Eastern languages and civilizations professor Holly Shissler said while “advanced graduate seminars used to contain a preponderance of Ph.D. students,” the composition of her classes had noticeably changed.

She said she noticed “the balance has shifted, due in part to the expansion of the M.A. programs but also because of the shrinkage of Ph.D. cohorts, which has resulted in profound changes to the intellectual agenda of advanced classes.”

While MAPH and MAPSS have expanded rapidly in recent years, Ph.D. programs have shrunk. Since 2015, the SSD and the Humanities Division have seen a 12 percent decrease in doctoral student enrollment, while the SSD’s master’s programs have grown by 146 percent and the Humanities Division’s have grown by 165 percent.

The doctoral programs in the PSD are an exception, where doctoral programs have grown by 145 percent and master’s programs by 178 percent.

Diermeier’s comments at a faculty senate meeting last June revealed his thoughts on the relation between the size of doctoral programs at the division level. Diermeier “felt it was a little misleading to talk about graduate education as a single matter,” and framed graduate education as falling into three distinct categories.

The Biological Sciences Division (BSD) and PSD, comprising the first category, face fewer funding concerns due to the abunCONTINUED ON PG. 9

THE CHICAGO MAROON — FEBRUARY 5, 2020

9

A faculty committee said master’s programs had become “a source of unacceptable strain” CONTINUED FROM PG. 8

dance of external grants and philanthropic donations in their fields, Diermeier said.

The second category contains the mathematics, linguistics, and economics departments, which do not receive external grants, but in which time-to-degree falls within the five- to six-year range.

In the first and second categories, Diermeier said, all or nearly all “obtain jobs that are related to their fields of study, both inside

and outside of academia,” he said.

Diermeier’s third category consists of the humanities, social sciences, and Divinity School. Students in this category have the longest time-to-degree, he said, also noting that the students face fewer job prospects after graduation and their departments have fewer funding opportunities.

Changes to doctoral programs recently announced by Diermeier will contribute to further shrinking. The provost announced

in October that caps would be imposed on doctoral programs in the Humanities and Social Sciences Divisions, the School of Social Service Administration, and the Divinity School.

This decision was announced to faculty at the same time as the general public, deepening the perception among faculty that the administration does not take their input into consideration.

In professors’ internally circulated letter

sent to Diermeier and Zimmer last month, in response to the new caps on doctoral programs, they expressed the intent of the letter was to “simply urge that a final decision about how to meet these challenges ought to have been the product of a real conversation between administrators and faculty.”

“The way in which these changes were decided and imposed strikes us as a betrayal of one of the basic principles by which we should operate.”

Struggles over graduate student unionization undermined faculty trust in the administration—even for professors opposed to a union

By LEE HARRIS Editor-in-Chief To Daniel Diermeier, collective bargaining is “a bad process.”

In meetings with the Council of the University Senate dating back to 2017, the University of Chicago’s outgoing provost has detailed his skepticism towards union negotiations, which he describes as an intractable mechanism leaving no room for nuanced solutions.

Diermeier frequently cites Harvard and Columbia universities, where graduate students recently unionized, as evidence that the collective bargaining process is an impenetrable snarl. At a meeting of the Council last year following a strike organized by Graduate Students United (GSU), Diermeier said that “there has been zero progress on anything that matters at Harvard and Columbia Universities.”

In arguing against graduate student unionization, Diermeier has billed himself as a defender of faculty interests—protecting the autonomy of the advisor-student relationship, and shielding heterogeneous departments against the intrusion of a union.

“A collective bargaining agreement would likely create an environment of standardization without room for differentiation, changing the nature and scope of the relationships of graduate students to their advisors, other faculty, and degree programs,” he wrote in an email to the University last June.

Some faculty agree with Diermeier that a union would interject itself between

professors and graduate students, creating a burdensome layer of bureaucracy. But a growing number of faculty members—including some critics of unionization—complain that the University was too aggressive in campaigns against GSU, and acted hypocritically in refusing to recognize graduate students’ election results after it had urged graduate students to vote.

“I was not happy with the administration’s response. I remain unhappy with it,” philosophy professor Michael Kremer told The Maroon. “That’s true even though I am not a strong supporter of graduate student unionization.”

“There was a website put up by the administration to try to sway people to vote in the way the administration wanted,” Kremer said. “And when the vote did not go the way the administration wanted, then the administration did not recognize the results.”

Yali Amit, a statistics professor, told The Maroon that the administration’s campaign against unionization has damaged his view of University leadership.

“The graduate student unionization, for me, was kind of a breaking point where the discourse became so dishonest that I just don’t trust these people—the administration—anymore,” Amit said. “The fact that nobody among the deans, or the central administration, ever expresses any different opinion around this issue, seems to me to indicate that there’s a very strict policy—you can’t get out of line.”

Recently, other professors have raised questions about their lack of input in the

broader question of unionization. The administration never sought a vote from faculty on GSU. But in a meeting last year, Council members asked whether they should have been given a say in whether the University recognizes the union.

Minutes of the faculty senate obtained

by The Maroon give an unprecedented look at the administration’s thinking about graduate student unionization—and faculty pushback.

Does the University’s response protect faculty?

At a Council meeting in April 2019, Diermeier praised the work of the Committee on Graduate Education, tasked with reviewing the state of graduate education, as “a faculty-led process with significant student input.” By contrast, he said, “if the University

were to recognize the union, that process would stop, and be replaced by the highly regulated and legalistic process of collective bargaining.”

In Diermeier’s telling, part of the problem with the legalism of collective bargaining is that it would prevent faculty voices from being heard.

If the University were to recognize the union, he said at the April meeting, “the existing deliberations that were underway, regarding funding and the organization of graduate student programs, would have to stop, and these would be replaced by a collective bargaining process. At that point, the role of the faculty would end.”

At a meeting two months later, English professor Elaine Hadley argued that the faculty had “already lost control, because CONTINUED ON PG. 10

THE CHICAGO MAROON — FEBRUARY 5, 2020

10

“The vitality of the College is less important to Levi Hall than opposing GSU” CONTINUED FROM PG. 9

they have had virtually no input into conversations regarding whether the University should recognize the union.”

In interviews, professors echoed these concerns, saying they the administration’s unilateral response to graduate student issues did not arise out of discussions with faculty members. This was felt particularly acutely following the Provost’s announcement of a new funding model that will dramatically shrink the size of UChicago’s Ph.D programs, which came as a surprise to many faculty members.

“The administration’s single-minded obsession with GSU has had a more negative effect on the university’s intellectual climate than unionized graduate students could possibly have,” political theorist John McCormick told The Maroon in an email.

“The new graduate student model is the culmination of this. They want to maintain the university’s libertarian brand by preventing unionization even if this undermines, to my mind, a much more important part of our brand: the College. Having graduate students intern in the Core, TA in lecture courses and teach their own classes benefits everyone,” McCormick wrote. “But the vitality of the College is less important to Levi Hall than opposing GSU.” “I think there were problems with transparency and consulting in the way the new system for funding graduate students was rolled out,” philosophy professor Robert Pippin wrote to The Maroon in a recent email.

While “there were both extensive divisional and university wide faculty committee investigations of the problem; all to the good,” Pippin said, “I don’t understand how these latter enterprises came to bear on, if they did, the formulation of the former, final plan.”

Early concerns over polarization At a Council meeting in October 2017, professors anxiously discussed the mood on campus in the wake of the graduate students’ vote to unionize.

The provost opened his comments by saying that “the University is an institution that prides itself on its commitment to graduate education, and yet over 1,100 students had, through this vote, registered their unhappiness and feelings of being disrespected.”

To Diermeier, “regardless of one’s views on the specific issue of graduate student unionization, this was an extremely troubling outcome.”

David Nirenberg, then Executive Vice Provost, described the unionization effort as an “adversarial process” in which “the faculty have been very respectful towards graduate students, and there has been no use of dehumanizing or disrespectful language,” whereas he had not “always felt similarly respected in return.”

Erin Adams, a biochemistry professor, also argued that graduate students’ treatment of administrators had been polarizing, and said she thought “the administration had taken a position that it would naturally take,” while “the faculty had been mostly left out of this process,” and it was “students against the administration.”

All present seemed to agree that the present situation was troubling. Several professors, though, felt it was troubling for reasons different from those cited by the administrators and Adams.

Some faculty at these early meetings complained of what they described as aggressive anti-unionization campaigns by the administration. One professor said she was aware of thirty students who had at first been ambivalent towards unionization, but who had been “so taken aback by the administration’s hardline positions that they had reversed their stances.”

Disavowal of the union vote Faculty took issue not only with the University’s aggressive campaigns against GSU, but also with its move to ignore results of the graduate students’ election.

At the October 2017 meeting, Council members pressed University attorney Ted Stamatakos to describe the path the University would take going forward. Stamatakos outlined a number of legal avenues, including refusal to bargain.

At a meeting the next month, Kremer said he “could not think of something that would be worse than having the University refuse to bargain with a legally certified union.”

Cliff Ando, a classicist, pushed back against others’ suggestions that the election had been a protest vote, observing that “graduate students have been agitating for unionization for over a decade, and that the election turnout had been quite high.”

At a January 2018 meeting, public health professor Harold Pollack said that although he had concerns about unanticipated effects of unionization, he doubted “that the University could oppose the union and command a widespread sense of process legitimacy at this point.”

By the time graduate students went on strike in 2019, many faculty shared concerns about how the administration could retain legitimacy while facing down a union campaign with popular support.

At a special Council meeting following the strike, English professor Kenneth Warren described an email from the administration regarding GSU’s decision to withdraw its petition from the National Labor Relations Board as giving an incomplete picture of the situation. Warren recommended that “the administration admit to its own tactical maneuvering.”

Echoing arguments made over the previous two years, several faculty members argued that central administrators had misled graduate students by refusing to bargain with them in 2017, following the vote.

Anton Ford, a philosophy professor, recalled that administrators urged graduate students to vote in the 2017 election. To Ford, this had been “a significant process of public deliberation on this campus that had been endorsed by the administration as being legitimate,” and was subsequently ignored when students voted for a union.

“He then referenced an email from then-Executive Vice Provost David Nirenberg that had concluded with an urging for all eligible voters to vote, and had conveyed that “your voice truly matters’. He recalled that two days later, the graduate students overwhelmingly voiced their opinion. However, this was not treated as if it was an element of the decision-making process. Rather, it was regarded as a poll. He found this to be quite appalling, and he did not believe that this should be shunted aside.”

Ford suggested that the University could have responded differently, pointing to Harvard University, which agreed voluntarily in 2018 to collectively bargain with its graduate student union. Columbia University agreed to commence bargaining with its union later that year. In response, “Mr. Diermeier observed that there has been zero progress on anything that matters at Harvard and Columbia Universities.

He offered examples of the types of the is-

sues [sic] that are front and center at those institutions, including Title IX, the use of third-party arbiters, and sanctuary campus status, and stated that these have nothing to do with improvements to graduate student life. He did not view those institutions as serving as suitable role models for what the University is seeking to accomplish.”

English professor Zachary Samalin attempted to redirect the Provost to Ford’s comments.

“Mr. Samalin noted that Mr. Diermeier’s response was not relevant to the substance of Mr. Ford’s remarks, which had been about the disavowal of a valid process that the University itself had solicited.

Mr. Diermeier replied that the University had previously made its position quite clear, in presentations to the Council and in writing, that it was contesting the legality of the election.”

Later in that discussion, Kremer described the negative consequences of continued failure to recognize the union. “His sense was that from the graduate students’ point of view, they had been lied to.”

Other professors worried that administrators had dealt lasting damage to relationships between graduate students and their advisors. The unilateral handling of the issue had soured faculty-administrative relations as well, they say, needlessly alienating professors who had been broadly sympathetic to the administration’s goals.

Citing Ford’s comments on the issue of the legitimacy, sociologist Elisabeth Clemens asked about the administration’s “alternative theory of the legitimacy of a non-union response,” noting that “what has transpired so far may have been tone-deaf to optics.”

Gabriel Lear, a professor in the philosophy department, seconded Clemens’s point, critiquing “the administration’s claim that students would be part of the decision-making process, which had not happened.”

“While [Lear’s] own view was that unionization was a bad idea, she agreed that it was problematic that this claim had been made.”

A solution to dubious “process legitimacy” – poll the faculty?

One solution, some said, would be a vote to ‘poll’ the faculty.

Neuroscientist Daniel Margoliash, who CONTINUED ON PG. 11

THE CHICAGO MAROON — FEBRUARY 5, 2020

11

“What has transpired so far has been tone-deaf to optics” CONTINUED FROM PG. 10

told The Maroon he believes unionization is a bad idea, felt faculty members should nonetheless be able to make their views known in the question of whether the University recognizes GSU. Margoliash last year suggested to the faculty senate that faculty should be polled on their support for unionization. This would be “a brave step to take,” he told the Council, since it is “unknown as to how the results would turn out.”

Lear also “raised the possibility of polling the faculty, to find out whether they wish to think of their students as workers.”

Christian Wedemeyer, a historian of religion, argued that a faculty vote is not only desirable but required. He cited debates in 2012 over the legislative authority of the Council, during which the deans had concluded:

“... a fair reading of the Statutes indicates that the Council’s legislative powers involve the educational work of the University – specifically those matters that relate to the teaching activities or functions of the University and which either (1) affect more than one Ruling Body or (2) which substantially affect the general interest of the University.”

Wedemeyer “then highlighted Mr. Diermeier’s earlier statement that the graduate student unionization question was an educational matter, i.e. one relating to teaching.”

Based on the administration’s own interpretation of the University Statutes, “it seemed very clear,” Wedemeyer said, that “the final arbiter of whether the union should be recognized was the Council of the University Senate.”

Diermeier directed Wedemeyer to the report of a committee chaired by philos-

New Provost Says Graduate Funding Model May Have “Unintentional Consequences”

By LEE HARRIS Editor-in-Chief At an event Thursday, new provost Ka Yee Lee briefly discussed the funding model for graduate students announced last year by her predecessor, Daniel Diermeier.

In response to a question from The Maroon, Lee said that the policy had been implemented quickly in response to the findings of the report of the Committee on Graduate Education. “If you read that report, some of the issues that was revealed in that whole study shows that one out of six students, graduate students, report food insecurity, and so that’s a very serious issue,” she said.

“And so, whether it is a perfect—so there’s consultation, in terms of this, right? But you’re racing time in order to put something in place to help avoid this continue to happen, or, you know—if you put a policy in place, it still takes time for, to effect change, right?

And I think, you know, it was the desire to push out the policy earlier to help alleviate

some of the situation. When you try to help change one thing, there might be other sort of unintentional consequences.”

Lee also briefly discussed the decision to shrink the size of Ph.D programs in the Humanities and Social Sciences Divisions, and two other schools. She said that she had not been involved, but that there were resource considerations at stake.

“One extrapolation of it is that, if you move from a five-year funding model, to an n-years, where n is maybe close to eight, right, and the resources stay the same... that is resource-limited, right?”

Referring to a letter recently signed by professors expressing concerns about the University’s overhaul of doctoral programs, she said: “This will be an ongoing dialogue.”

Lee, who officially stepped into her new role on February 1, said at the Thursday gathering that she had already looked at the issue. She added that the implementation of the new model is an ongoing process. “It’s not easy to drop something off and then it works from day zero.”

ophy professor Robert Pippin, produced around the same time as the deans’ report Wedemeyer cited, which had argued for a narrow interpretation of the Council’s authority.

Questions of governance were “a separate conversation” from the issue of unionization, Diermeier said. He suggested that this discussion take place in the future, with Zimmer present.

Pippin, in a recent email to The Maroon, wrote that he thinks the question of graduate student funding is not the exclusive purview of the central administration.

“Financial aid to graduate students is a matter that concerns the resources of the university, its level of indebtedness, commitments already made to future capital projects and fund-raising probabilities.

This would seem to make the issue primarily an administrative one,” Pippin wrote.

“But how graduate students are funded, by how much and for how long, has profound consequences for the educational mission of any graduate program,” Pippin went on. “So this is an issue that should be the subject of extensive collaboration between the ‘financial’ and the ‘educational’ representatives.”

Current members of the faculty senate who would like to see more consultation on the union question aren’t holding their breath.

“We don’t have the right to advise the administration on matters of real importance to the structure of the university,” Anton Ford told The Maroon in a recent interview. “It’s a bit absurd. It appears that the primary function of this body is to provide democratic cover for the administration to do whatever it wants.”

THE CHICAGO MAROON — FEBRUARY 5, 2020

12

Why can’t the faculty senate send minutes to the Board of Trustees?

By LEE HARRIS Editor-in-Chief At a meeting in November 2011, the spokesperson of the faculty senate made an explosive proposal. Michael LaBarbera, a biologist who was then serving in the role— making him the highest-ranking member of faculty government—moved to make the minutes of the Council available to the Board of Trustees.

In response to LaBarbera’s motion, University President Robert Zimmer said that, unlike boards at many other institutions, the University of Chicago’s Board of Trustees “deliberately does not get involved in academic issues,” and LaBarbera’s motion would “be an invitation for the Board to involve itself in academic matters,” Zimmer said.

The conversation that followed sheds light on the relationship between the faculty senate, the President, and the Board.

In the ensuing discussion, members of the Committee of the Council of the University Senate—the seven-member group that meets more regularly with the president to discuss issues of University governance— de-

bated “whether sharing the minutes would tempt the Board to meddle in academic matters.”

According to the minutes of that meeting, “It was suggested that the motion represented an effort to circumvent the President and the Provost on controversial issues when what was needed was a better plan to resolve disagreements.”

Following the November meeting, LaBarbera sent a message to the Chairman of the Board of Trustees, later minutes show, in which he “asked whether the Board was interested in receiving copies of Council Minutes.”

The communication was apparently distressing to Zimmer and other Committee members.

At a meeting of the Council a few weeks later, LaBarbera read aloud the following statement: “Over the Thanksgiving holidays, I wrote to the Chairman of the Board of Trustees in order to clarify a question that had arisen in your Committee’s discussion of the proposal to share the Council’s minutes with the Board. I also sent copies of this letter

to President Zimmer, Provost Rosenbaum, and the other members of your Committee.

In the letter I tried to make it clear that I was writing as Spokesman, not for your Committee, and wished only to clarify a narrow question that could be settled only by input from a member of the Board.

I apparently failed miserably. President Zimmer and a number of members of your Committee expressed their distress at this communication and what they perceived as an implicit claim of endorsement by your Committee. I expressed my abject apologies to all present for my lack of insight into how this letter might be perceived; I freely admit to political naiveté.

In an attempt to cover my blunder, members of your Committee will draft a memo to President Zimmer (which I hope to be allowed to sign); he in turn will transmit this clarifying missive to the Chairman of the Board of Trustees.”

In response to LaBarbera’s apology, faculty members raised a number of questions.

One professor asked “why the discussion of whether or not to transmit Council Minutes to the Board of Trustees had been as

contentious as it seemed to be.”

Economist John Huizinga responded that “if Council Minutes were to be forwarded to the Board, this would be viewed as an invitation for the Trustees to insert their opinions into issues that are currently being addressed strictly at the faculty level.”

The Committee had discussed the issue, he said, and decided that “if the Board was invited to become more involved in the University’s academic affairs, this might result in unintended consequences.”

Addressing faculty questions, Zimmer offered further details about the relationship between the Board and the faculty senate.

Zimmer “explained that the University had a rather particular stance about the relationship between the Board of Trustees and academic affairs. He further clarified that the Board had assiduously stayed out of the University’s academic affairs, as distinct from the practice at many other institutions.”

In response to a request for comment, Michael LaBarbera wrote in an email to The Maroon: “I retired four years ago and happily left all issues of campus politics behind me. I’d like to leave it that way.”

THE CHICAGO MAROON — FEBRUARY 5, 2020

13

“Fearful of challenge and discomfort”: Top administrators cut back dialogue with students

By LEE HARRIS Editor-in-Chief Student Government (SG) president Jahne Brown and her slate prepared for weeks for a rare meeting with President Robert Zimmer in November.

The hour-long meeting began with a half-hour conversation between Zimmer and Deputy Provost Bala Srinivasan on the importance of emerging fields in data science and engineering. SG’s leadership had prepared for a meeting on political issues like campus sustainability, mental health, and sexual misconduct. When it was their turn to speak, Brown said, Zimmer listened attentively but spoke very little.

“The one thing he asked about—and seemed really, genuinely interested in—was when we said there’s so little trust of the offices and admin,” Brown, a fourth-year student, told The Maroon. “We suggested doing one quarterly office hours, like a lot of other universities, or maybe just coming to sit in on a house meeting.’”

Zimmer did not make any promises as they talked, and Brown was surprised he would not even make a general commitment to more dialogue, she said. As the meeting came to a close, she asked whether Zimmer would do anything going forward, based on their conversation.

“He literally said, verbatim, ‘I’m not going to do anything.’”

Student Government’s dialogue with the central administration hasn’t always been so terse. But recently, the students elected to serve as intermediaries between administrators and the student body have been shut out from substantive dialogue with administrators, recent interviews with members of the past six years of SG executive slates show.

The central administration has also policed their communications with the larger student body—weakening student government’s ability to serve students effectively, multiple recent presidents told The Maroon.

“That whole exchange was just so frustrating. It’s really our only time to talk about all these things,” Brown said. “It just seemed so dismissive.”

“These values of open discourse...testing your ideas in public—it wasn’t happening.”

The previous provost Eric Isaacs, who served from 2014 to 2016, held an open forum twice a year at SG assemblies—until a contentious meeting in May 2016 made administrators more wary of public events with the provost.

Tyler Kissinger (A.B. ’16) was SG president for two consecutive years, from 2014 to 2016, and presided over the meeting that made the Office of the Provost sour on attending future events.

Kissinger told The Maroon in a recent interview that members of Teamsters Local 743, a union including clerical and maintenance workers on campus, arrived to the meeting and questioned the provost about the health-care plan on their new dining contract.

Other students pressed Isaacs for answers to questions on issues like a South Side trauma center and campus sexual assault.

After the meeting, Dean of Students Michele Rasmussen emailed Kissinger, requesting to meet and discuss “how SG leadership engages with administrators.”

After a public meeting with Provost Eric Isaacs, Dean of Students Michele Rasmussen emailed SG President Tyler Kissinger, requesting to discuss “how SG leadership engages with administrators.”

In a Facebook post at the time, Kissinger said that in the meeting with Rasmussen, he was told “that she was ‘disappointed’ in me for not ‘controlling’ an SG meeting in which the Provost came to speak with members of the student body…. Apparently, I should have stepped in and made students ‘move on.’”

“I was told that my lack of intervention this time, as well as ‘tactics’ of students at this meeting (such as requesting a yes or no answer to basic questions and reading questions that ‘had clearly been prepared in advance’) were inconsistent with this UChicago’s method of free inquiry,” Kissinger went on.

The consequences of this, Kissinger said in the post, affected SG’s ability to help students voice their thoughts to the administration: “The clear threat is that students, via their Student Government, will no longer have access to University administrators.”

Soon after the incident, Isaacs was succeeded as provost by Daniel Diermeier, who put a stop to the SG open forum.

Brown, the current president, said she asked Rasmussen why that meeting—one of students’ only points of contact with the provost—had ended.

“She said people were really aggressive, and that’s why we don’t do them anymore,” Brown told The Maroon.

Recalling the incident recently, Kissinger told The Maroon, “All of these values that the University of Chicago markets itself as embodying were in no way lived out by the people in positions of power, running the University.”

“These values of open discourse, critical inquiry, rigorous debate, testing your ideas in public—it wasn’t happening.”

Kissinger’s successor, Eric Holmberg (A.B. ’18), echoed Kissinger’s sentiments in a 2016 statement to The Maroon. “Of anyone else on campus, the administration is far more fearful of challenge and discomfort than any student I know,” Holmberg said, in response to a letter the College dean of students sent to incoming first-years condemning trigger warnings and intellectual safe spaces.

“It’s ironic that during my time at the University of Chicago,” Holmberg said, “administrators have continuously sought to create a comfortable space for themselves free of challenge by avoiding engagement with student leaders.”

Since Kissinger’s term, the University has stopped making its president available for quarterly meetings with SG. Zimmer now meets with the student body president once at the beginning of his or her term, and once at the end.

A public forum with Zimmer Chase Harrison (A.B. ’18), vice president of SG from 2017 to 2018, made it a personal mission to secure a public forum with Zimmer for undergraduates during his time in student government.

Harrison said that an interview with Zimmer in The Wall Street Journal, in which the president commented that it would be acceptable for white nationalist Richard Spencer to come to campus, prompted him to request a public meeting.

Harrison authored a resolution, which was passed by College Council, asking for a forum with Zimmer in February 2017.

It took until 2018 for the forum to take place. “I just kept bothering Michele and she was able to secure him,” Harrison said.

“It got postponed many times,” he said, but Rasmussen finally confirmed a time.

At the time, it was the first public event with undergraduates Zimmer had held in five years—a fact SG highlighted in their advertisement of the event.

Outside the talk, graduate students protested over unionization. They also expressed frustration that the event had been marked as undergraduate-only.

“It’s like everyone is eager to meet with Zimmer because he’s so evasive,” Harrison said.

Harrison told The Maroon that after the event, he drafted an opinion piece about Zimmer’s refusal to answer some questions at the forum. But in the end, he said, “I decided to pull it from The Maroon because I worried it would anger him and ensure another event never occurred.”

“He was talking about building a supercomputer. I’m like, I’m trying to put some free tampons in the library.”

Recent leaders of Student Government say that the rare meetings with the University president were highly choreographed, and the president avoided substantive dialogue.

Fourth-year Sat Gupta, the president of SG in the 2018–19 academic year, told The Maroon that at the first meeting he ever attended with Zimmer, he was thrilled to be given an audience with the president.

“As a first-year, you feel kind of like, ‘Wow, I’m being led into Levi Hall,’” Gupta said. “I’m all dressed in a suit, and I have a notebook, taking notes, really just trying to be an active participant in the meeting.”

“But what I quickly realized was that this wasn’t so much a meeting as a lecture.”

The administration set the agenda, and scheduled most of the meeting for a discussion of issues that had little bearing on Gupta’s work, he said. Zimmer spent much of the meeting talking about the relationship of the University’s technology development to geopolitics.

CONTINUED ON PG. 14

THE CHICAGO MAROON — FEBRUARY 5, 2020

14

A former V.P. of student government retracted an op-ed criticizing Zimmer: “I worried it would anger him and ensure another event never occurred” CONTINUED FROM PG. 13

“He was talking about building a supercomputer,” Gupta said. “I’m like, I’m trying to put some free tampons in the library.”

“After that meeting, I never brought a notebook again to a Zimmer meeting.”

Like Gupta, Kissinger joined SG his first year of college, and was part of meetings with Zimmer throughout his college career, beginning spring quarter of his first year.

“He would always pass the buck on whatever question—try to defer to someone else in the room,” Kissinger said.

At the time, he wanted the University to acknowledge that it was the only institution in the local area capable of opening a Level 1 trauma center.

“What was most frustrating about it was we wouldn’t even get him engaged in a discussion about the merits of that idea—it would just be non-sequiturs, like, ‘We view

health care access as the most important issue on the South Side of Chicago.’”

Brown and her slate recalled similar experiences in their November meeting with Zimmer.

Student communications policed Beyond private conversations in Levi Hall, administrators have also attempted to exert control over the communication SG has with the student body.

Brown’s Student Government administration planned to send an email to the entire student body—a listhost to which they don’t have direct access, but which they have traditionally been permitted to use by sending communications to administrators for review.

The first email that the newly elected Student Government slate wanted to send out sat for eight weeks before reaching stu-

dents’ inboxes.

Brown said her slate stayed up late on the first day of fall quarter to finish the email, which they wanted to use to welcome students back and introduce applications for SG positions that would be due in two weeks.

But administrators said they wanted to vet the email, and weeks went by, during which the application deadline passed.

On Monday of fifth week, they received an email asking them to include language that would refer to the Halloween safety email and remind students to sign up for safety alerts.

“It is frustrating that administrators expect us to just sort of be a mouthpiece for them, but when we’re critical, they make it very difficult for us to get out any sort of message,” Brown said.

“At this point, we’re going to have to change the email anyways, because the

deadline for all our positions are closed,” Brown added, “but we’re afraid to rewrite the email because then the process has to start from the very beginning.”

The email continued to be delayed, she said. “This happens every week until seventh week.”

Then, at a meeting seventh week they learned that what had caused the email’s delay: the mention that SG wanted to work with student groups to start a free food pantry for students.

The Office of the Provost was looking into setting up a food pantry, they were told.

“So basically, because it’s their thing—which we didn’t even know about—we couldn’t say it,” Brown said.

The slate then conceded, taking out the mention of the pantry. Brown eventually wrote a brand new email, she said, after having “completely watered it down.”

Faculty asked Zimmer for an open forum to discuss UChicago’s free speech policy. Here’s what they got instead.

By DEEPTI SAILAPPAN Managing Editor In the spring of 2018, as the University’s famed “Chicago Principles” on free speech were gaining traction nationwide, a group of University of Chicago faculty members asked President Robert Zimmer for a public forum on campus to debate the Principles.

“It is our belief in the importance of freedom of expression and freedom of inquiry that leads us to call for addressing these issues in a public venue,” they wrote, in a letter to the editor about the invitation published later in The Maroon.

The president never granted the request.

Instead, he offered the professors a few private, invite-only discussions at locations including the Neubauer Collegium and the Quadrangle Club.

One of those faculty members, English professor Kenneth Warren, had also helped write the Chicago Principles as a member of the Committee on Free Expression. In a recent interview with The Maroon, War-

ren described Zimmer’s move as part of the administration’s “unwillingness to meet with faculty and students in open, ongoing discussions...in some sense, to assess whether or not the document is doing what it was supposed to do.”

The incident, new details of which have come to light through recent interviews with faculty members, highlights professors’ struggle with communicating with an administration they feel has stonewalled them.

This is, faculty say, a contradiction of the very doctrine the Principles enshrine: “the University’s solemn responsibility to promote...lively and fearless freedom of debate and deliberation.”

The Chicago Principles and the University’s free speech brand “Concerns about civility and mutual respect can never be used as a justification for closing off discussion of ideas,” reads the Chicago Principles, the statement issued in 2014 as a crystallization of UChicago’s ideals regarding free speech.

The original document was titled, simply, the “Report of the Committee on Free Expression”—the seven professors tasked by President Robert Zimmer with drafting it.

The report gained the “Chicago Principles” moniker as it was exported nationwide.

According to the nonprofit Foundation for Individual Rights in Education (FIRE), eighty-two American universities have since adopted or endorsed variants of the Principles.

Free speech has become, in many ways, a cornerstone of UChicago’s public persona—as much a part of the school’s hallowed history as neoclassical economics or the first nuclear chain reaction. Outlets from The Washington Post to The Economist have covered the Principles.

The topic shot up in national prominence during the summer of 2016, after Jay Ellison, Dean of Students in the College, sent incoming first-year students a made-for-the-headlines letter denouncing trigger warnings and safe spaces.

A year later, New York Times columnist

Bret Stephens (A.B. ‘95) dubbed Zimmer “America’s Best University President” because of his stance on free speech. Since the Principles’ publication, Zimmer has toured campuses from Ohio to Colorado to tout them.

The desire for a public forum Mathematics professor Denis Hirschfeldt was one of the six professors who sent the original invitation to Zimmer.

“Given the role that Bob Zimmer has had in advocating a very particular view—and... given that this is not uniformly embraced by members of the community, including in the faculty, we think that there should be a discussion of this,” Hirschfeldt told The Maroon.

“One of the reasons we wanted this...is because absent a discussion, there’s a feeling on the part of a lot of people that a lot of what’s happening with President Zimmer’s advocacy is publicity.”

The professors envisioned a forum that CONTINUED ON PG. 15

THE CHICAGO MAROON — FEBRUARY 5, 2020

15

“They have worked very hard to limit the scope of what kind of discussion we can have on campus regarding those principles,” an author of the Chicago Principles said.

CONTINUED FROM PG. 14

would see Zimmer onstage in conversation with a slate of faculty members who hold diverse opinions on free speech. They asked administrators if Zimmer would be available sometime over the next two quarters, or over the full year.

The administration responded with a no.

What Zimmer wanted, Hirschfeldt said, was instead a series of “closed conversations with groups of faculty” who would be handpicked by top administrators to attend.

All six professors were invited, as were several other faculty members drawn from across the University. The invitees received an email from Zimmer’s secretary, Susan Huie, giving a date, time, and location.

As Hirschfeldt tells it, when he realized the conversation would replace—not precede—an open debate, he opted not to attend.

He sent a note to Huie saying so.

“If these conversations are a preliminary to having a public [conversation], something where you were going to figure out what the parameters should be, then that’s great, then I’d come,” Hirschfeldt told The Maroon.

“The problem is that this was instead of [the public event].”

Hirschfeldt’s email received no response.

Since then, no on-campus public conversation about the Chicago Principles’ implementation has materialized.

The closest approximation to one would be a student forum in International House in April 2018. After Student Government’s request for a public conversation with Zimmer—made with support from the six professors—administrators consented to a moderated public event for students to ask questions about free speech.

But the event was far from the open forum with faculty and student voices that the professors had envisioned. Zimmer took questions alongside Dean of the College John Boyer, who discussed free expression in relation to the philosophy of liberal education undergirding the University’s Core Curriculum. The event was moderated by Institute of Politics Director David Axelrod, whereas the six professors had pressed for the inclusion of “faculty who have divergent views on what constitutes real freedom of speech on university and college campuses.”

The rare public appearance by Zimmer,

open only to College students, drew large numbers of graduate student protesters. Inside the event, students clamored to bring up other concerns—most notably the shooting of a student, just two days earlier, by a UCPD officer.

Discussion behind closed doors Meanwhile, faculty were attending the series of one-hour events the administration had scheduled.

English professor Elaine Hadley—another of the professors who had, with Warren, invited Zimmer to discuss free speech—was invited to a session held at the Quadrangle Club, a social club for University faculty and affiliates.

Much of the initial lecture at the faculty discussions, by Zimmer and University Provost Daniel Diermeier, focused on the national context for the Chicago Principles, not their implementation on campus.

One example, discussed at length, was the 2017 student protest at Middlebury College that shut down a lecture by conservative author Charles Murray—best known for The Bell Curve, the controversial 1994 book that linked race to IQ. Several of the invitees were unsure what the event was, let alone why they’d been selected.

“It was clear, from some of the remarks of people in the room, that many of them weren’t quite sure why they had been anointed,” Warren said.

Hadley said, “A few seemed to know little to nothing about the Free Speech policy—the purpose of the discussion.”

The professors were drawn from across a variety of divisions and schools. Some were glad for the opportunity, like philosophy professor Gabriel Lear. “I’m interested in free speech issues and have thought about them in the context of my interest in Plato’s and Aristotle’s theories of civic virtue, but I rather doubt the President and Provost knew about that,” Lear told The Maroon.

She added that the discussions offered the chance to speak with “colleagues from parts of the University I don’t normally interact with about a topic I think is quite important.”

Some points of contention did surface. At the event they attended, Warren and Had-

ley brought up the question of unionization, which the professors had cited in their April 2018 public letter about the proposed forum.

“I said something like, ‘for me, free speech also encompasses the right of students to vote to unionize, and once the vote is overwhelmingly yes, the university should recognize an election they sanctioned,’” Hadley told The Maroon. “And [Zimmer] said, ‘I don’t think that’s about free speech.’

And he said it very forcefully.”

Warren said he was interested in discussing the risks of the University’s “growing dependence” on wealthy donors—“whether that represented, in some sense, a potential threat to freedom of expression.” Diermeier’s response was that it didn’t.

“It had, in his view, not been the case that the experience of the university with respect to donors trying to determine what happens with the money that they put forward on campus was an issue,” Warren said.

UChicago’s free speech brand has itself become a lure for major donors.

Citadel founder Ken Griffin, for example, cited the University’s shunning of safe spaces and trigger warnings as one motivation for his $125 million gift to the economics department in November 2017.

The Chicago Principles as the facilitator of broader conversation The broader question at the heart of the open-forum proposal, faculty say, is what role the Chicago Principles themselves should play in discourse on higher education.

To what extent is the document specific to UChicago, and furthermore, how should it be used in setting University policies?

Warren described in stark terms the administration’s response to the Principles, which he helped to write. Especially as the statement “has increased in visibility nationally, it’s been used in ways that I think are inimical to the values it wants to promote,” he said.

Furthermore, the document was “promulgated with the presumption that it was actually going to support the values expressed within it,” Warren added. “And that expectation requires ongoing evaluation and discussion…. Are students feeling that they have a clearer sense of what values they are expected to uphold? Do those values work

in practice? That seems to me to require ongoing discussion and review. And that’s not what we’ve seen here on campus.”

To Warren, this has in part stemmed from FIRE’s instant latching on to the document. That endorsement—followed by a flood of support from other institutions— has lent it a sort of legitimacy he’s not sure it warrants.

“The call from FIRE for other institutions to adopt the document has given it more of a status of a kind of loyalty oath than a support for freedom of expression,” he said.

Apart from Zimmer, perhaps the University’s major figurehead of free speech is Law School professor Geoffrey Stone, who has authored several books on the First Amendment and who led the drafting of the Chicago Principles as the committee’s chair.

Stone said that he has been “amused and delighted,” if initially surprised, by the document’s national fame. He also doesn’t feel the University’s marketing of free speech poses a threat to varied opinions about the topic on campus.

“Nothing stands in the way of students or faculty who want to talk about these issues,” he said. “That’s completely okay, that’s at the very heart of what the Principles are about.”

He noted that he was completely unfamiliar with the professors’ public forum proposal and the closed faculty discussions, though he described the six professors who made the invite—apart from Warren, whom he knows well—as “leftwingers” with a restrictive view of what constitutes free speech.

“I don’t think this administration, at this university, would be reluctant at all [to hold a public forum],” Stone said.

Stone added, however, that in planning a public debate, “I don’t think they’d get very far, frankly…. My sense is that the substantial majority of faculty members endorse [the Chicago Principles].”

“If it feels I’m dancing around the word ‘hypocrisy,’ it’s only because I think that the upper administration feels that its commitment to freedom of expression is genuine,” Warren said.

“I think they take that seriously. But in practice, they have worked very hard to limit the scope of what kind of discussion we can have on campus regarding those principles.”

the chicago maroon — February 05, 2020

16

VIEWPOINTS The Chicago Principles Are For Disciplining Dissent—Not Protecting Speech By matt andersson Philosophy becomes relevant because the world—riven as it is with hypocrisy and concealment— desperately needs a hermeneutics of suspicion to unmask it. ­—Brian Leiter, Karl N. Llewellyn Professor of Jurisprudence, Director of the Center for Law, Philosophy, and Human Values, in The Future for Philosophy (2004): 78.

In re, “Faculty asked Zimmer for an open forum to discuss UChicago’s free speech policy.

Here’s what they got instead,” UChicago faculty, and The Maroon, may be misunderstanding the “Chicago Principles.”

They are not about supporting free speech; rather, they are an attempt to suppress criticism that

threatens to disrupt the administration’s corporate regularity, and the inclinations thereby of individual, corporate, and government financial contributors.

When you actually “unpack” the Principles and Statute 21, it consists of a series of escalating punishments, ranging from permanent student file letters that impact future employability to the cancellation of scholarships, academic probation, expulsion, or open-ended threats, directed at doing “whatever is necessary to protect our vital interests.” The Chicago Principles are not an enlightened body of rules that promote the First Amendment; they are an effective ex ante warrant served on students and faculty to dampen sustained confrontation toward any number of controver-

The Maroon Editorial Board consists of the editors-in-chief and editors of The Maroon.

NEWS

GREY CITY

Alex Dalton, editor Caroline Kubzansky, editor Avi Waldman editor

DESIGN

Jessica Xia, head of production Suha Chang, head designer Michelle Liu, design associate

By JOHN MARK HANSEN

BUSINESS

I oversee the Master of Arts programs in the Social Sciences Division (SSD), and was Dean of the Division in 2011. The Maroon’s article about the University’s master’s programs and the years since the Wellbery Report did not report significant developments in the social sciences and its M.A. programs; this has left an incomplete, and I fear, misleading impression of the programs and their students. I would like to add to the information your readers have about us.

Michael Vetter, chief financial officer Brian Dong, director of strategy Gianni LaVecchia and Kelsey Yang, directors of marketing Victor Doddy, director of development Jennifer Phu, director of operations ONLINE

VIEWPOINTS

Firat Ciftci, software engineer

ARTS

Editor-in-Chief: Editor@ChicagoMaroon.com Newsroom Phone: (312) 918-8023 Business Phone: (408) 806-8381

Zahra Nasser, editor Meera Santhanam, editor Zoe Bean, editor Perri Wilson, editor SPORTS

Alison Gill, editor Thomas Gordon, editor Brinda Rao, editor COPY

Mohammed Bashier, copy chief James Hu, copy chief Cynthia Huang, copy chief Jason Lin, copy chief Olivia Shao, copy chief Kuba Sokolowski, copy chief

For advertising inquiries, please contact Ads@ChicagoMaroon.com or (408) 806-8381.

Circulation: 2,500.

ders were directed specifically at universities and colleges, one order involving conservative speech accommodation, the other asserting Title VI protection of the Civil Rights Act to broader ethno-religious groups on campus. Both threaten the withholding of federal funding if such executive orders are found to be in violation by any member of the university sector.

By their federal funding conditions, they reinterpret decades-old U.S. case law concerning constitutional free speech, and other rights, on public university campuses, especially in Dickey v. Alabama (Dickey v. Alabama State Board of Education, 273 F. Supp. 613 M.D. Ala. 1967), whose constitutional law judgment was determined by “tax-supported colleges or universities.” It does not say “tax-financed” but rather broader federal funding receipts that characterize all higher education institutional capital structures. UChicago is tax exempt (tax

subsidized) and is also federally compensated for the administration of Fermi and Argonne Labs, both federal Department of Energy and Department of Defense research installations, among many other sources of taxpayer finance including tuition receipts from federal subsidized or guaranteed loans.

This makes the dissonance between UChicago’s Principles, purporting to ratify free speech, and its threat of discipline enforcement in Statute 21 of the UChicago Trustees Restated Articles of Incorporation, specifically against it (under the University’s private interpretation of free speech), into a constitutional law infirmity, and Zimmer’s barricading against open discussion, more understandable.

Matthew G. Andersson is an alumnus of The University of Chicago Booth School of Business, Class of 1996.

As Master’s Programs in the Social Sciences Have Grown, So Have Resources

Lee Harris, Editor-in-Chief Elaine Chen, Deputy Editor-in-Chief Deepti Sailappan, Managing Editor Peng-Peng Liu, Chief Production Officer

Tony Brooks, editor Miles Burton, editor Emma Dyer, editor Caroline Kubzansky, editor Matthew Lee, editor Oren Oppenheim, editor Justin Smith, editor

sial speakers, some who may be aligned financially, politically, or commercially with the University.

It is little wonder that the Administration resists meeting in open public faculty forums to discuss it (They also declined to participate in a 2017 public television debate on Chicago’s WTTW, with myself and FIRE legal expert Ari Cohn, on “The State of Free Speech on College Campuses.”).

This has several fascinating ramifications. One concerns Zimmer’s unsupportable assertions concerning Constitutional law.

He is quoted in The Maroon: “I keep telling people who congratulate me on defending the First Amendment that it’s not about the First Amendment.... As a private University we are not subject to the First Amendment.”

By taking such a position, he is clinging to an outdated legal interpretation that discriminates against students and faculty: The recent White House executive or-

© 2020 The Chicago Maroon Ida Noyes Hall / 1212 East 59th Street Chicago, IL 60637

The SSD master’s programs have grown since 2011, to be sure, but so has the SSD faculty and the faculty’s participation in the programs. The SSD faculty has grown by 20 percent. The Kenneth C. Griffin Department of Economics, which had never before participated in the Masters of Arts Program in the Social Sciences (MAPSS), launched MAPSS-Econ in 2016.

Excited about the promises of computational approaches, SSD faculty members proposed a new master’s to the division, and the M.A. program in computational social science began in 2016. More

recently, other faculty members have started “concentrations” in MAPSS in quantitative methods and social analysis, education and society, and gender and sexuality studies, with more to come.

The division has accommodated much of the growth of the M.A. programs by bringing more faculty into them—and providing students with more offerings.

The social sciences division has also attracted a larger and deeper pool of applicants to the M.A. programs. The largest program, MAPSS, is growing increascontinued on pg. 17

the chicago maroon — February 05, 2020

17

“The SSD master’s programs have grown since 2011, to be sure, but so has the SSD faculty” continued from pg. 16

ingly more selective in its admissions. The average GRE scores for students in MAPSS have been rising for two decades. They are never far off from the average scores for Ph.D. students. The grades earned by SSD master’s students in SSD courses have also risen steadily. Selecting winners of our best thesis awards is always an exciting but difficult task. Every

year, among our Center on International Relations (CIR) and MAPSS students, are a number who earn an M.A. along with an B.A. in the College.

The M.A. students are a capable bunch doing impressive things.

The majority of our graduates take their talents into a wide range of rewarding careers outside of the academy, in government, nonprofits, research organizations, busi-

ness, education, journalism, and more. Those who decide to go on to doctoral studies do very, very well. Last year, MAPSS helped 111 students win funded offers for Ph.D. studies, 30 of them in programs at the University of Chicago. The SSD faculty can be proud of the M.A. students and the role we play in the development of their talents.

The M.A. programs have been

integral to the Division’s mission since its earliest days. (In fact, the CIR program slightly predates the SSD) In the years ahead, I expect the M.A. programs to help the Division and its faculty in the pursuit of an even greater range of goals.

For example, SSD already invests substantial amounts of money in merit-based financial aid for M.A. students. We are working now to find the resources to offer more

need-based aid, so that the Division can provide the opportunity of a University of Chicago education to a still more diverse and inclusive population of able and eager students.

John Mark Hansen is the Charles L. Hutchinson Distinguished Service Professor of Political Science and the College.

As New Grant Program Is Introduced, the University Fails to Credit the Emergency Fund

By JAHNE brown In 2017, the Emergency Fund met for the first time in a Reg room with a group of no more than six students. Every week for the next year, we set out to create a revolutionary organization, one with no blueprint At the time, the University’s most popular source of emergency funding at the Center for College Student Success (CCSS) offered only emergency loans, and the decision to provide funding was entirely arbitrary. The other major source of funding through the Center for Identity and Inclusion (CII) had no website and was largely presumed inactive.

We wanted to be different.

First and foremost, we wanted to fund every kind of student emergency on campus, and we wanted the funding to be presented as grants and not as loans. Second, we wanted to create a transparent system of applying for funding, instead of it depending on an individual’s discretion. Most importantly, we wanted to create a fund with the explicit goal of funding “political” emergencies, like DACA renewals and abortions.

The process was not easy. For over a year, while creating the application and writing the bylaws,

we faced criticism and significant obstacles from every direction.

Some administrators we met with believed there was not sufficient demand for the Emergency Fund. Others argued that no one would want to apply for a fund run by students. Still others believed that the CCSS’s loan program did enough to provide financial assistance. Eventually, we were begrudgingly given permission by the school to start our fund, with the understanding that we would not receive any institutional support or help.

We worked for months to raise every dollar we could. In 2018, we officially opened the fund and quickly realized that we were filling an important gap. As chair and founder of the Emergency Fund, I worked around the clock to keep raising money so that we wouldn’t have to turn anyone down. In a matter of a year, the Emergency Fund became the premier funding organization on campus.

Suddenly, the largely apathetic and dismissive University administration seemed to understand how important emergency grants are. In the summer of 2018, I was shocked to find out that the CII’s emergency fund had ended its inconvenient hiatus; several thousands of dollars of funding

now existed under the name the Student Emergency Fund. It was so similar to the organization we worked tirelessly to create that multiple students reached out asking if this Student Emergency Fund was the Emergency Fund.

Then, on January 30, 2020, we heard from the Office of the Bursar that the University of Chicago now “provides student access to emergency assistance funds.”

Amazingly, there is a new website for emergency assistance programs, and an online application for emergency assistance, providing grants in addition to loans!

Sound familiar?

After years of pouring our own labor, time, and money into filling a gap created by the University, the University of Chicago has caught up to what the Emergency Fund has been doing for years. They’ve co-opted our revolutionary model, with no recognition or even a thanks to the students who did their job for years.

This is how things are done at the University of Chicago. Students of color fight for changes for years. We’re called crazy, entitled, or unrealistic. Then, years later, the University co-opts what they were against for so long. Anyone familiar with the University’s relationship to activism can notice

this disgraceful pattern.

With the University’s immense wealth and institutional power, it probably won’t be long before the Emergency Fund ceases to exist. How long will it be before everyone forgets that the Emergency Fund, and the students behind it, were here at all?

The Emergency Fund’s memory and work can exist for much longer, but this will require fundamental changes to the University’s relationship with activism on campus.

Most importantly, the University should work with students to archive and honor the legacy of student activism and efforts on campus. Memorials honoring successful and transformative student activism should be on public display just as readily as paintings memorializing past University presidents are. CARE Executive Slate actually proposed enacting a public plaque memorial honoring student activists to members of the administration earlier in the year. This is just one way the University could honor student work.

Second, the school should award and honor successful student activists and student organizations in a public ceremony.

The school already offers student awards. An easy but important

change would be to create a new award or set of awards specifically for student activists who have been indispensable in influencing University actions. The Emergency Fund, UChicago United, UChicago Student Action, and Student Government’s new Health and Wellness Committee are just a few organizations that deserve public recognition and celebration from all members of the University.

Third, the University should financially and institutionally support students and organizations who successfully lobby the University to make changes. In the Emergency Fund’s case, the University should provide money to the Emergency Fund and create a partnership with the organization so that it can remain viable.

The University can and should be innovative when responding to student needs, but should do so without trampling on the important work that has been done by students. The best parts of this University are the creations of students. The least the University can do is honor that work and pay credit where it’s due.

Jahne Brown is a fourth-year in the College and the president of Student Government.

the chicago maroon — February 05, 2020

18

For the Future of University Governance, Aim for the Board of Trustees

By JOHN ARNOLD With its recent articles, The Maroon has done an excellent job of demonstrating that the various recent controversies on campus are fundamentally about the fact that the authority in the University is not, in the end, accountable to the people who constitute it. These circumstances need to change.

I propose that students and faculty unite to pursue guaranteed representation on the Board of Trustees.

Legally speaking, the Board is the highest power within the University; it appoints, and can dismiss, the president, but itself has no legal obligation to anyone. Currently, the Board is entirely self-perpetuating: Almost all of its members are donors from the world of business. It is important to have business experience on a board, but, here as elsewhere, a variety of perspectives leads to a better understanding of problems and solutions. The Board lacks this variety and therefore can easily view all problems as business problems that need business solutions.

And since all authority f lows down from the Board, this influences all aspects of University administration.

As an alternative, the Board could have a certain number of seats reserved for members elected by the student body, the faculty, and non-faculty staff. Indeed, the Board currently has student representatives to the Board, but these representatives are not themselves on the Board, and hence have no formal power. This needn’t be the case; there are many universities where fully empowered and enfranchised student and faculty representatives sit on their board, and the bylaws of the UChicago Board could be easily amended to allow for such representation.

As an undergraduate, I served as

a student-trustee for Shimer College (itself historically related to the University of Chicago), which also had faculty-trustees. In this role, donor-trustees would tell me—and I saw myself—that my fellow student-trustees and I constructively contributed to discussions in a way that could not have been captured by polls, reports, or town halls. And I saw faculty-trustees playing even more of a helpful role, demonstrating care and attention to all sorts of dynamics on campus that deserved to inform board decision-making. Because of this experience, I have a firm belief that having student- and faculty-trustees is not only more just for the community, but also leads to better governance.

Pursuing this course of action would be an occasion for solidarity between undergraduates, graduate students, and faculty. The University of Chicago is nothing without the people who make it up, and it’s time for all of us to unite—undergraduates, graduate students, faculty, staff—together demanding that we legally own the community we constitute.

The best of music & theater for only $20 Sign up for $20 student ticket alerts EMAIL TEXT

Sign up at lyricopera.org/next Text NEXTTIX to 51555

John Arnold is a first-year master’s student in The Divinity School.

Madama Butterfly Feb 6 - Mar 8 lyricopera.org 312.827.5600 Photo: Lynn Lane/Houston Grand Opera

NEXT is supported by Lead Sponsor The Grainger Foundation and cosponsors Mr. and Mrs. Paul F. Anderson, Dr. and Mrs. Arthur J. Atkinson, Jr., The Brinson Foundation, The Ferguson-Yntema Family Charitable Trust, and Elaine S. Frank Fund.

the chicago maroon — February 05, 2020

19

OF

THE

ALLURE

MATTER

659 WRIGHTWOOD

Gu Dexin, Untitled (detail), 1989, Melted and adjoined plastic. Musée d’art contemporain de Lyon.

Installation view, Los Angeles County Museum of Art, 2019–20. Photo © Museum Associates/LACMA.

THE ALLURE OF MATTER Material Art from China

Opening Reception: Saturday, February 8, 3–7 pm Co-presented by the Smart Museum of Art and Wrightwood 659

theallureofmatter.org

the chicago maroon — February 05, 2020

20

Lessons from Sonnenschein: Don’t Alert Faculty to Your Plans By marshall sahlins Robert Zimmer, who was a deputy provost during the ill-fated Hugo Sonnenschein regime—the first in the modern era to draw widespread faculty criticism—always believed that Sonnenschein’s problem was that he told the faculty in advance what he was going to do.

Zimmer has made sure that would not happen during his tenure. Instead, the

faculty has been presented with a series of major academic changes in the form of faits accomplis. The long-term effect has been a radical reduction in faculty governance by means of clandestine administrative action, coupled with public propaganda about the University as a bastion of academic freedom.

Your series has documented many of the deleterious changes in the structure and educational values of the University.

What they amount to is the decimation of graduate study and research in favor of a swollen undergraduate cohort as well as terminal masters students in the humanities and social sciences that far outnumber bona fide Ph.D. students—all fundamentally motivated by money, including the false coin of academic glory doled out by the US News and World Report.

The Zimmer regime has completed the process begun in Hugo Sonnenschein’s

tenure—and continued by a succession of Alter-Hugos—of dismantling the University of Chicago as a graduate research institution of distinction and worldwide reputation. Instead we have degenerated into a good university.

Marshall Sahlins is the Charles F. Grey Distinguished Service Professor of Anthropology Emeritus.