University of Chicago

The University of Chicago is one of the foremost universities in the world academically, albeit one of the youngest in that august company. In spite of its relatively recent founding, the school has been associated with some of the world’s most important scientific achievements, above all, the first controlled, self-sustaining, nuclear chain reaction (atomic fission), which was achieved in late 1942 by a team led by the legendary Italian physicist, Enrico Fermi, in a laboratory beneath a football field on the Chicago campus.

In another first, in 1952 then-graduate student Stanley Miller, with the assistance of his adviser, the distinguished University of Chicago chemist Harold Urey, demonstrated that organic molecules such as amino acids can be artificially produced in vitro from only inorganic precursor compounds. It is also worth noting that James D. Watson, the co-discover with Francis Crick of the double-helix structure of the DNA molecule at the University of Cambridge—also in 1952—completed his undergraduate education at Chicago.

However, Chicago is famed for far more than its contributions to science. For example, in 1896 renowned philosopher John Dewey founded the “Lab School” on the university’s campus to put his liberal pedagogical principles into practice. For better or for worse, the Chicago Lab School has had an incalculable impact on the course of educational philosophy in America.

In 1952, former University of Chicago President Robert Maynard Hutchins and philosophy professor Mortimer J. Adler teamed up to found the Great Books of the Western World publishing project and accompanying curriculum—one of the most important ancestors of the Great Books programs that are increasing in popularity today throughout the US.

Of the approximately 90 Nobel Prize recipients connected to the University of Chicago, no fewer than 29 have been recognized for their work in economics, including such distinguished names as:

• Friedrich Hayek
• Paul Samuelson
• Kenneth Arrow
• Herbert Simon
• Milton Friedman
• James M. Buchanan
• George Stigler
• Robert Lucas
• Ronald Coase
• Gary Becker
• Eugene Fama

Friedman’s free-market views, in particular, have been identified with the university—so much so that he and his close associates (Stigler, Lucas, Coase, Becker, Fama, among others) have come to be known collectively as the “Chicago School” of economics.

The American novelist and Nobelist Saul Bellow was a professor at Chicago, as well as a longtime member of the university’s prestigious Committee on Social Thought.

Of the many other distinguished scholars associated with the Committee on Social Thought, we may mention Hans Jonas, Hannah Arendt, Mircea Eliade, Allan Bloom, and Leon Kass.

In addition, the highly influential political philosopher, Leo Strauss, held the Robert Maynard Hutchins Distinguished Service Professorship at Chicago for 20 years.

Other distinguished Chicago-related individuals include:

• Astrophysicist, Edwin Hubble
• Physicists, Luis Walter Alvarez & Carl Sagan
• Statistician, Nate Silver
• Novelists, Kurt Vonnegut & Philip Roth
• Philosopher, Richard Rorty
• Essayist, novelist, and culture critic, Susan Sontag
• Historian, Carter G. Woodson
• Anthropologist, Clifford Geertz
• Economist, Thomas Sowell
• Author, radio broadcaster, and oral history pioneer, Studs Terkel
• Actor, Ed Asner
• Actor and film director, Mike Nichols
• Film critic, Roger Ebert
• Dancer and choreographer, Katherine Dunham
• Washington Post publisher, Katharine Graham
• 2020 Democratic Party presidential nomination candidates, Amy Klobuchar & Bernie Sanders