universitas chicago

An early convocation ceremony at the University of Chicago
[edit] Founding–1910s

The University of Chicago was created and incorporated as a coeducational,[14] secular institution in 1890 by the American Baptist Education Society and a donation from oil magnate and philanthropist John D. Rockefeller on land donated by Marshall Field.[15] It emerged from a Baptist university of the same name that had closed in 1886 due to financial difficulties. William Rainey Harper became the modern University's first president on July 1, 1891, and the first classes were held on October 1, 1892.[16]

The business school was founded in 1898,[17] and the law school was founded in 1902.[18] Harper died in 1906,[19] and was replaced by a series of three presidents whose tenures lasted until 1929.[20] During this period, the Oriental Institute was founded.[21]
[edit] 1920s–1980s

In 1929, the University's fifth president, Robert Maynard Hutchins, took office; the University underwent many changes during his 24-year tenure. Hutchins eliminated varsity football from the University in an attempt to emphasize academics over athletics,[22] instituted the undergraduate college's liberal-arts curriculum known as the Common Core,[23] and organized the University's graduate work into its current[when?] four divisions.[22] In 1933, Hutchins proposed an unsuccessful plan to merge the University of Chicago and Northwestern University into a single university.[24] During his term, the University of Chicago Hospitals (now called the University of Chicago Medical Center) finished construction and enrolled its first medical students,[25] and the Committee on Social Thought was created.
A group of people in suits standing in three rows on the steps in front of a stone building.
The University of Chicago team that worked on the production of the world's first man-made, self-sustaining nuclear reaction, including Enrico Fermi in the front row and Leo Szilard in the second.

Money that had been raised during the 1920s and financial backing from the Rockefeller Foundation helped the school to survive through the Great Depression.[22] During World War II, the University made important contributions to the Manhattan Project.[26] The University was the site of the first isolation of plutonium and of the creation of the first artificial, self-sustained nuclear reaction by Enrico Fermi in 1942.[26][27]

In the early 1950s, student applications declined as a result of increasing crime and poverty in the Hyde Park neighborhood. In response, the University became a major sponsor of a controversial urban renewal project for Hyde Park, which profoundly affected both the neighborhood's architecture and street plan.[28]

The University experienced its share of student unrest during the 1960s, beginning in 1962, when students occupied President George Beadle's office in a protest over the University's off-campus rental policies. In 1969, more than 400 students, angry about the dismissal of a popular professor, Marlene Dixon, occupied the Administration Building for two weeks. After the sit-in ended, when Dixon turned down a one-year reappointment, 42 students were expelled and 81 were suspended,[29] the most severe response to student occupations of any American university during the student movement.[30]

In 1978, Hanna Holborn Gray, then the provost and acting president of Yale University, became President of the University of Chicago, in which capacity she served for 15 years.[31]
View from the Midway Plaisance
[edit] 1990s–2000s

In 1999, then-President Hugo Sonnenschein announced plans to relax the University's famed core curriculum, reducing the number of required courses from 21 to 15. When The New York Times, The Economist, and other major news outlets picked up this story, the University became the focal point of a national debate on education. The changes were ultimately implemented, but the controversy played a role in Sonnenschein's decision to resign in 2000.[32]

In the past decade, the University began a number of multi-million dollar expansion projects. In 2008, the University of Chicago announced plans to establish the Milton Friedman Institute which attracted both support and controversy from faculty members and students.[33][34][35][36][37] The institute will cost around $200 million and occupy the buildings of the Chicago Theological Seminary. During the same year, investor David G. Booth donated $300 million to the University's Booth School of Business, which is the largest gift in the University's history and the largest gift ever to any business school.[38] In 2009, planning or construction on several new buildings, half of which cost $100 million or more, was underway.[39]

A recent[when?] two-billion dollar campaign has brought substantial expansion to the campus, including the unveiling of the Max Palevsky Residential Commons, the South Campus Residence Hall, the Gerald Ratner Athletics Center, a new hospital, and a new science building. Current[when?] construction projects include: the Jules and Gwen Knapp Center for Biomedical Discovery, a ten-story medical research center, as well as further additions to the medical campus of the University of Chicago Medical Center.[40]
[edit] Campus
Many older buildings of the University of Chicago employ Collegiate Gothic architecture like that of the University of Oxford. For example, Chicago's Mitchell Tower (left) was modeled after Oxford's Magdalen Tower (right).
The campus of the University of Chicago.
The campus of the University of Chicago. From the top of Rockefeller Chapel, the Main Quadrangles can be seen on the left (West), the Oriental Institute and the Chicago Theological Seminary can be seen in the center (North), and the Booth School of Business and Laboratory Schools can be seen on the right (East). The panoramic is bounded on both sides by the Midway Plaisance (South).

The main campus of the University of Chicago consists of 211 acres (85.4 ha) in the Chicago neighborhoods of Hyde Park and Woodlawn, seven miles (11 km) south of downtown Chicago. The northern and southern portions of campus are separated by the Midway Plaisance, a large, linear park created for the 1893 World's Columbian Exposition.

The first buildings of the University of Chicago campus, which make up what is now known as the Main Quadrangles, were part of a "master plan" conceived by two University of Chicago trustees and plotted by Chicago architect Henry Ives Cobb.[41] The Main Quadrangles consist of six quadrangles, each surrounded by buildings, bordering one larger quadrangle.[42] The buildings of the Main Quadrangles were designed by Cobb, Shepley, Rutan and Coolidge, Holabird & Roche, and other architectural firms in a mixture of the Victorian Gothic and Collegiate Gothic styles, patterned on the colleges of the University of Oxford.[41] (Mitchell Tower, for example, is modeled after Oxford's Magdalen Tower,[43] and the University Commons, Hutchinson Hall, replicates Christ Church Hall.[44])

After the 1940s, the Gothic style on campus began to give way to self-consciously modern styles.[41] In 1955, Eero Saarinen was contracted to develop a second master plan, which led to the construction of buildings both north and south of the Midway, including the Laird Bell Law Quadrangle (a complex designed by Saarinen);[41] a series of arts buildings;[41] a building designed by Ludwig Mies van der Rohe for the University's School of Social Service Administration;,[41] a building which is to become the home of the Harris School of Public Policy Studies by Edward Durrell Stone, and the Regenstein Library, the largest building on campus, a brutalist structure designed by Walter Netsch of the Chicago firm Skidmore, Owings and Merrill.[45] Another master plan, designed in 1999 and updated in 2004,[46] produced the Gerald Ratner Athletics Center (2003),[46] the Max Palevsky Residential Commons (2001),[41] South Campus Residence Hall and dining commons (2009), a new children's hospital,[47] and other construction, expansions, and restorations.[48] In 2011, the University completed the glass dome-shaped Joe and Rika Mansueto Library, which provides a grand reading room for the University Library and eliminates the need for an off-campus book depository.

The site of Chicago Pile-1 is a National Historic Landmark and is marked by the Henry Moore sculpture Nuclear Energy.[49] Robie House, a Frank Lloyd Wright building acquired by the University in 1963, is also a National Historic Landmark,[50] as is room 405 of the George Herbert Jones Laboratory, where Glenn T. Seaborg and his team were the first to isolate plutonium.[51] Hitchcock Hall, an undergraduate dormitory, is on the National Register of Historic Places.[52]

sumber