Success 101
University of Chicago president Don Randel has won over a tough home crowd—all the while enacting most of his ousted predecessor's controversial agenda. His smooth transition demonstrates the art of persuasion, and it's good news for the school.
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Still, Sonnenschein and Chambers were pleased that they had been able to make their case as to why Chicago could not complacently sit on its past glories. Chambers sent the story around to the university's trustees and Sonnenschein sent an appreciative note to Bronner. "I was impressed by the direction and the balance of your story," the president wrote.
What Sonnenschein and Chambers didn't realize, however, was that the Times article had set off a flood of opposition. Here at last, Sonnenschein's critics said, was proof that the Easterner secretly hoped to wrap the inimitable University of Chicago in a bright Ivy League bow. "The feeling was ‘Thank goodness he's been exposed-let's go get him,'" recalls Bronner.
The percolating opposition to Sonnenschein and his plan looked as if it might boil over. At a derisive "fun-in," 1,400 students ridiculed the new, softer side of Chicago by chanting sixties-style protest songs and performing sketches mocking the new intellectually lite atmosphere-"The Great Books in One Minute" was a favorite.
An alumni group calling itself Concerned Friends of the University of Chicago sprang up, underwritten by Robert Stone, a wealthy alumnus (law '82). Stone hired a Web expert and moved him into the second floor of Stone's three-story Hyde Park house. From there, the expert built a Web site that posted documents about the conflict and allowed students and alumni to voice opinions. At its peak the site captured 10,000 hits a month from places as far away as Africa and Asia. The novelist Saul Bellow (who taught at Chicago from 1962 to 1993) and the Harvard Law professor Mary Ann Glendon (undergraduate '59, law '61, master's in comparative law '63) accused the university of diluting its academic standards. "Making academic decisions on the basis of marketing is itself a crime against the mind," they wrote in a letter that ran in the Chicago Sun-Times.
That June, a group of faculty members-loyal sons and daughters mostly from the humanities and the social sciences-held a panel called "The University in Crisis," which became a forum for bashing Sonnenschein and his plans.
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