This letter was published in The Phoenix‘s Winter 2026 print issue. Read the full issue at uchicagophoenix.com/magazine.

Sir, Soon after my arrival at the University of Chicago in 1998, changes to the undergraduate program had many of the faculty concerned. The Core sequence was modified and pruned back; at the same time, the university was vastly increasing enrollment, broadening admissions accessibility via financial aid improvements, and investing in facilities and housing. And as time went on, the University continued to change in various ways. It developed the Pritzker School of Molecular Engineering, founded several global campuses and centers, and established Computer Science as an undergraduate major. 

Still, UChicago seemed to me to remain the same in two fundamental regards. First, it maintained its longstanding support for thinking outside disciplinary boundaries in research, graduate education, and advanced scholarship, both via new centers and institutes on campus, and of course through the Core sequence itself. The Core remained what Jonathan Fanton, president of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences from 2014 to 2019, had praised in 1989: a recognition of “the inter-relatedness of knowledge… a clear manifestation of the need students and faculty feel to make connections.” 

And refreshingly, the Humanities continued to be granted respect. Indeed, the University has long been regarded as one of the most supportive institutions for the Humanities in American higher education. Half of our presidents have been humanists; the Humanities division has housed many influential thinkers; the institute is a bastion for both rigorous and interdisciplinary study in literature, philosophy, languages, arts. Here as nowhere else it has been understood that the Humanities play a vital part in education, and that the exchange of humanistic thought with other fields of the University brings value to all members of our intellectual community. Not for us what the British scholar C.P. Snow lamented as two separate cultures for science and humanities; not for us the rejection of humanistic knowledge as an appendage to the body of “real knowledge”. 

Recent changes at UChicago now do seem cause for concern, and I worry that our university is at risk of solving a balance-sheet problem by altering core parts of its unique profile. Important initiatives are being born and funded as I write: we have major new strength in climate engineering, data science, medicine. Economics and physics are as strong as ever. But we appear to be pruning back support for the Humanities: graduate admissions for AHD are on hold for 2026-27, and an effort to institutionalize talking across disciplinary boundaries (IFK) begun by four faculty in 2105 was closed in June 2024. 

Are the Humanities less important in the new UChicago, then? I hope not. I’d argue they are more necessary than ever precisely because we’re investing big money in our future on the planet. In a world that’s rapidly being changed by artificial intelligence, environmental crisis, and quantum computing, mightn’t we be interested including an education that focuses on questions of context, interpretation, bias, historicity, meaning, and ethics? And how are we to think about human intelligence today? We’re still stuck with our human brains, after all. 

The generous new endowments are exciting, but I hope we are not creating well-funded new silos rather than supporting an intellectual ecosystem where all of us can exchange ideas with each other, fellow chasers of knowledge that we are. After all, crescat scientia doesn’t mean “let science grow,” it means “let knowledge grow?” And knowledge does so, in part, by talking to knowledge. 

Our bold new initiatives may well form part, eventually, of our intellectual legacy as an institution. The question now is whether UChicago will live up to its other legacies by making quieter, harder decisions: the ones that allow the University to continue to produce a rich variety of humanistic and scientific knowledge, ones that will define out our habits of thought when we call this institution “The University of Chicago.” 

Sincerely, Shadi Bartsch
Helen A. Regenstein Distinguished Service Professor The University of Chicago