The University of Chicago: A History

An expanded narrative of the rich, unique history of the University of Chicago.

One of the most influential institutions of higher learning in the world, the University of Chicago has a powerful and distinct identity, and its name is synonymous with intellectual rigor. With nearly 170,000 alumni living and working in more than one hundred and fifty countries, its impact is far-reaching and long-lasting.

With The University of Chicago: A History, John W. Boyer, Dean of the College from 1992 to 2023, thoroughly engages with the history and the lived politics of the university. Boyer presents a history of a complex academic community, focusing on the nature of its academic culture and curricula, the experience of its students, its engagement with Chicago’s civic community, and the resources and conditions that have enabled the university to sustain itself through decades of change. He has mined the archives, exploring the school’s complex and sometimes controversial past to set myth and hearsay apart from fact.

Boyer’s extensive research shows that the University of Chicago’s identity is profoundly interwoven with its history, and that history is unique in the annals of American higher education. After a little-known false start in the mid-nineteenth century, it achieved remarkable early successes, yet in the 1950s it faced a collapse of undergraduate enrollment, which proved fiscally debilitating for decades. Throughout, the university retained its fierce commitment to a distinctive, intense academic culture marked by intellectual merit and free debate, allowing it to rise to international acclaim. Today it maintains a strong obligation to serve the larger community through its connections to alumni, to the city of Chicago, and increasingly to its global community. Boyer’s tale is filled with larger-than-life characters--John D. Rockefeller, Robert Maynard Hutchins, and many other famous figures among them--and episodes that reveal the establishment and rise of today’s institution.

Newly updated, this edition extends through the presidency of Robert Zimmer, whose long tenure was marked by significant developments and controversies over subjects as varied as free speech, medical inequity, and community relations.

John W. Boyer is Senior Adviser to the President and the Martin A. Ryerson Distinguished Service Professor in History at the University of Chicago. A specialist in the history of the Habsburg Empire, he has written four books on Austrian history, including, most recently, Austria 1867-1955.