Read editor in chief Shubh Malde’s letter from the editor, introducing The Phoenix‘s Winter 2026 print issue. Read the full issue at uchicagophoenix.com/magazine.

Let me take you back to the blustery winter of your senior year of high school. Picture your face as you turn from one “Why us?” essay to another: the look of despair and exasperation at the prospect of paying glutinous lip service to a defunct RSO, the existence of which you have known for all of five forlorn minutes. Now comes UChicago. With that, the realization that you will need to make yourself seem stranger than you already are (after all, you made it here). Next, you discover your newfound identity as a lifelong bastion of academic freedom and as an aspiring contributor to the proliferation of knowledge. Perhaps, too, you find an appreciation for your estranged immigrant great-aunt and her peerless influence on your sense of self.

There is, of course, a serious point to be made. I ought only whisper his name in these parts, but a good Chicago economist will be familiar with Keynes’s famous beauty contest, in which judges receive rewards not for picking their personal favorites, but for successfully anticipating which models will be most favored by the rest of the panel. When applying to college, we are often not trying to be the best versions of ourselves, but rather what we perceive as the ideal candidate of a faceless admissions board. Once upon a time at UChicago, that might’ve meant an affinity for the theoretical over the vocational; for Machiavelli, not McKinsey. But those priorities are not so hard-set today. For better or worse, as one Resident Head told The Phoenix’s Cora Miller (22), “the new UChicago student is more ‘normal.’”

We can surely decry these changes, and not without merit. The University is shuffling its own priorities: class sizes are getting bigger (Wang, 20), the Core is flailing behind the rapid development of AI (Stein, 26), and its aspiration toward openness is at risk of self-sabotaging (Davis, 4).

However, the honest critic will see the demands of reality, too. In these pages, Calvin Swedene (6) reports that by 2031, 85 percent of well-paying jobs will require a college degree—up from less than thirty percent in 1967. This, together with surging tuition fees (Sharma, 10), means that to many in all parts, and to all in some parts, college is now primarily a means to an end. As Bob Dylan once said, “The times they are a-changin’.”

We should be careful, of course, not to make the mistake of oversimplifying our characterization of the past after the owl of Minerva has spread her wings; however, we should treat the present with equal dexterity. Today’s Hyde Park is different at every level: we come from a wider range of backgrounds than ever before, and many more of us are arriving here from different colleges (Beaudreau, 16) and different countries. Nevertheless, it can often feel that you are competing with half your class in a game of human lottery for the same internships, study abroad placements (Fischer and Yingling, 28), and futures. We must be careful: though we may now come in a great deal more shapes, sizes, colors, and persuasions, visual diversity—quite aside from its own merits—is a poor proxy for intellectual vibrancy.

Our resistance to these changes, then, should not be based on a nostalgic longing for a bygone era. We can confront the predicaments of the modern university while staying true to our scholastic roots. In the day of AI, automation, and job market dysfunction, there can surely be few more valuable skills than critical thinking, creativity, adaptability, and intellectual courage. And though it may sound trite, few places are better placed to nurture those characteristics than the University of Chicago. We need not force ourselves into a false dichotomy between pre-professionalism and the Life of the Mind. We can at once revel in Ovid and tussle with Kant; climb our roofs (Brunner, 8) and read our eccentric magazines (Megibow-Taylor, 12); and still beat the herd. In fact, there may be few better ways to do so. 

So, take the good with the bad, the bliss with the blunder; thank your lucky stars once in a while and go on an adventure. At UChicago, we are a weird, wacky, and weathered family, but we are a family nonetheless.   

Shubh Malde