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.
(page 6 of 8)
Adam Kissel says that a year after the curriculum reforms were passed in 1998, he was told the changes would be reviewed in 2002. Randel was not inspired to lead such a rally. "I'm not likely to try and bring about some striking change in the direction of the core," he says. Instead, the heart of the core's civilization requirement-Western Civilization-will likely die when the history professor Karl Weintraub and his wife, lecturer Katy O'Brien Weintraub, decide to retire. Students wishing to cover the same ground would have to enroll in both Ancient Mediterranean Civilization and History of European Civilization-in other words, a total of five quarters for what used to take three.
At a protest this past April, students handed out flyers in support of Western Civ, but Sara Butler, the protest group's chair, says there is less student distress this time around. "The student body doesn't care as much about general education anymore," says the junior from New York. "The administration doesn't seem committed to keeping our tradition alive." Saul Bellow, now 87 and living in Boston, wasn't ready to abandon the fight. "By replacing the traditional three-quarter course . . . with narrower and briefer history courses, the university is succumbing to the mindless narrowing and specialization that has characterized other universities for decades," the Nobel laureate told the Chicago Sun-Times, echoing an argument almost identical to the one he voiced when Sonnenschein proposed shrinking the core. Randel, in a response printed in the June issue of the alumni magazine, assured the suspicious, "[T]his change . . . does not mean we have sunk into a pit of utter relativism."
The jewel in Randel's presidential crown will be a $2-billion capital campaign, the biggest in the school's history by some $1.3 billion. When he unveiled the campaign with an afternoon announcement at the Oriental Institute last April, Randel told several hundred trustees, professors, and alumni that his top priorities included securing more generous financial aid packages and building a larger endowment. Later that evening at a lavish kickoff dinner in Bartlett Hall, everyone celebrated over thick slabs of filet mignon. (The event was so tightly scripted that at the dress rehearsal for the dinner, an organizer made sure to remind the student body president, Ben Aderson, to instruct the audience to blow out the candles on the tables, as the flames and paper confetti would create a fire hazard.) By the time the confetti fell, Randel's two years of cross-country fundraising had already raked in $702 million.* * *
Two billion dollars can be spent in many ways. Randel has a vision for a campus arts center with space for performance and scholarship. But a large chunk of the new money will go toward the construction of buildings drawn up on Sonnenschein's watch. "The plans are set," says James Redfield, a classics professor. "I don't think he has another option."
Did you like what you read here? Subscribe to Chicago Magazine »
