Launching the Chicago Minds campaign
A message from President Paul Alivisatos, AB’81
Minds that Shape the Future
When William Rainey Harper and John D. Rockefeller united to create the University of Chicago, they cemented a partnership between civil society and the academy. Their vision was as inspiring as it was tenacious. Their mission was nothing less than to forge an intellectual environment unlike any other—to endow the devotion to excellence in the pursuit of knowledge. Our founders recruited and cultivated the finest minds–the first Chicago Minds.
Together, they set in motion a virtuous cycle. Each successive generation has taken up this project, breaking new ground in the realm of ideas, and taking care that the promise of new knowledge uncovered by Chicago Minds, will in turn benefit America, our city, and humanity everywhere.
In this great hall this evening we are stepping up as the latest partnership across generations to launch the most ambitious fundraising campaign in the University of Chicago’s history: the Chicago Minds campaign.
What then is a Chicago Mind, and why are such minds worthy of this major campaign?
Chicago Minds are curious, questioning, and engaged with the world. They are rigorous and relentless; well-rounded and yet also deep. They are delightfully nerdy, playful, and ironic; entrepreneurial and innovative; and at times rather self-important.
More than the motif that is reflected all around us this evening, the idea of the Chicago Mind represents something enduring of what it means to be a member of this community. The character of the Chicago Mind is forged by the habits of personal being, intellect, and culture that we celebrate: the journey of self-improvement through the quest for knowledge in community. Across our history, especially during periods of great societal contestation, it is both unifying and grounding. That is why we return to it today. Fundamentally, each individual who has been shaped by this special place, has within themselves and amongst our community engaged in the good struggle to form their own Chicago Mind.
In the coming years, our common cause is to create the conditions so that Chicago Minds will continue to shape the future, and in so doing to fulfill our role in our promise to America that extends across decades and even centuries.
Chicago Minds of the past and present day have a style that is instantly recognizable and admired:
From the Chicago School of Sociology, to the Chicago School of Economics, to the growth of behavioral economics. From the first realization that cancer is associated with genes, to new therapeutics that improve human health and a thriving innovation ecosystem that propels discoveries into clinical care.
From the first accurate measurement of the speed of light, to the design of the Giant Magellan Telescope of the future, to today’s latest study of AI as a form of social intelligence.
From early discoveries of molecular quantum physical chemistry, to the work today to harness quantum systems for new forms of computation and the launch of a quantum economy here in Chicago.
From the development of the epigraphic method and the dictionaries of long lost languages, to the use of game design to further scholarship across disciplines, such as the recent “gaming the gods” course at the Divinity School…
Chicago Minds over and over again surprise, amaze, and reveal.
There is much to celebrate in the past, and much to admire in the present. As we look ahead, our three largest goals in this campaign are very much the same as those of our founders.
First: we seek to foster a community of truth-seeking faculty. Our goal is to support the scholars who are rigorous in their work, open-minded, shrewdly skeptical, demanding, and collaborative across domains of knowledge. Our expectations of them are rightly enormous. They should illuminate, not follow. A key part of the Chicago Minds campaign will be to enable the University to attract and foster that extraordinary level of faculty in the decades ahead.
Already, dozens of you helped us meet the Wallman Society of Fellows challenge, enabling us to establish thirty new endowed faculty chairs. In just eighteen months, we endowed faculty at the fastest rate since the Rockefeller-Harper founding. With your continued support, we will fulfill the new promise of the Mansueto Faculty of Mind and Machine challenge. Every additional supported faculty position bolsters the very underpinnings that power the University now and into the future.
Our second goal is to be purposeful in attracting the finest student minds to the University. Our duty is to awake in them a genuine love of knowledge and enable them with the mindset they will need for great achievements. To help them see that seeking knowledge is part of a life-long journey of understanding oneself, one’s family, and finding one’s way to contribute meaningfully towards a thriving and good society. This can only work if we recruit the very finest minds from across America and the world.
Our calling to educate Chicago Minds compels us to make a UChicago education second to none and affordable to the very best. I hope you are proud of our recent major College affordability announcement, of our commitments to rural and veteran and Odyssey scholars in the College, of the major milestone of endowing the doctoral program and masters’ degrees at Booth, of the Rubenstein Scholars program at Law.
Each one of these shows that we have more to do. At every level of education, each supported student adds to the scaffolding we build together, helping fulfill the dreams of their families and contributing in marvelous ways we can scarcely predict.
Our third goal concerns tending to the physical spaces of the University. This is much more than to raise funds for satisfying technical needs, however real. The founding generation had a vision for how physical structures could promote the flourishing of the mind. They were inspired by the idea that all the fields of knowledge advance best when they are in dialogue with the others. Indeed, they embraced the idea that the tone and style of the neogothic architecture and the complementary landscape of the Quads could evoke strong expectations and aspirations of scholarly excellence.
The evolution of the University’s geography is itself sending a message from our founders to us today. We see this made manifest in the current outlay of the campus. The foundational disciplines are clustered in the quads, with the more professional, society-facing fields placed around at the edges.
The long and ongoing period of forging the outer layers of the campus now must–in the Chicago Minds campaign–be balanced with the demands of this new era. This is to be an era of re-invigoration and re-investment in fundamentals. This era calls for centering the study of what it means to be human and social, even as we expand the scientific and computational lenses of thought. In the months ahead, you will see how our thinking on the Quads is developing. I am quite excited because I see, within reach, a way in which we can honor and renew the quads, while maintaining the historic feel of the architectural and landscape unity.
With this campaign, we are launching together an achievable intergenerational project that matches the ambition and aspiration of the founding era.
Over time, the ethos of our institution–as demonstrated from our approaches to faculty, to students and to our physical spaces–has proved worthy because they are complemented by an even-deeper commitment to the principles of truth seeking.
Our predecessors taught us to always be wary of pressures to stray from principles, and to be skeptical of ourselves. Our predecessors taught us to be relentless in self-examination, pressing ourselves to define how we must act and behave for us to remain a trustworthy community of truth-seeking. From Harper’s 1900 speech on academic freedom, to the Kalven Report on institutional neutrality, the Shils Report on academic standards of excellence, and the articulation of the Chicago Principles through the Stone Report, we have forged the terms of a just and good compact between civil society and this university–and even universities everywhere.
We devote ourselves to the good struggle of practicing these ideals. I am proud of the Chicago Forum for Free Inquiry and Expression that we founded three years ago. It is the first of its kind: where the never-ending challenges to free expression and free inquiry are debated and confronted by students and faculty alike, and where the best practices are refined for how to remain true in the face of pressures that seek to influence from above and those that emerge from below, from within, and from without.
At our university, and through the Forum, we interrogate those forces. Here: our commitment to free expression must–and does–offer a great deal of deference to protest, but, as an institution, we draw the line when crowds infringe on the free expression of others. From above, governments have immense power to impose sanctions to change university behaviors. Yet, here we know: government edict will always be less successful than the governance that arises from the genuine and principled partnership of civil society and a great truth-seeking academic community.
After all, your trust, the trust of civil society, must be earned again and again through the creation of new knowledge and through the realization of the benefits of new knowledge in elevating the well-being of our fellow citizens. This requires freedom of thought and expression. We have protected these values, and we will remain steadfast in carrying them forward.
Every investment by civil society in our faculty, our students, and our built environment is also an investment in those principles. And those investments are backed by these commitments to principle.
While principles and the importance of faculty, students, and our built environment are enduring, the world of ideas is ever changing. Each new generation must meet the academic opportunities and face the intellectual challenges of their moment. We have worked hard across the university to frame with our faculty a set of initiatives that are distinctively UChicago and that will serve to foster collaboration and excellence in the years ahead:
The University that taught all of us how to think needs the investments I have described to meet the opportunities of this new world where machines are now powerful aids to human thought. It is clear that advances in machine learning and artificial intelligence are poised to reshape how many leading thinkers will conduct their research and how students will become learned persons. I believe that it is critical that we stand apart from other universities by redoubling our commitment to center the human experience in the age of AI.
We will empower and challenge the finest minds in the world to learn to think with machines, as well as without them, and to approach these developments with a spirit that is at once ethical, skeptical, and ambitious.
Our approach to the AI revolution extends from the foundations of computer science, math, and statistics, and on to an ambitious plan for how to advance disciplines across the full gamut of questions at the intersection of mind and machine, connecting across the whole of the University. Our approach will help us ensure that an enormous new wave of discovery and improved understanding takes place here on our campus; that our students will be great exemplars of the leading thinkers and citizens in this era; and that we do our part to help societies around the world not just to adapt, but to thrive in this new era.
Our university itself is an example of an institution that contributes to broad and beneficial prosperity. Yet institutions everywhere and throughout history that were created with such a purpose in mind so often falter. Our understanding of the economic and social forces at play is incomplete. In the years ahead, I believe we can achieve much by enabling our faculty and students to build upon our well-established strengths in economics, law, history, sociology and the full gamut of the social sciences to write a new chapter on the understanding of institutions that serve the cause of enhancing liberty and prosperity.
The deep integration of the University with the medical enterprise is also evident in our geography. It is clear that the next 20 years will be an age of extraordinary biological and biomedical discovery, especially when we forge ties with the Physical Sciences and Molecular Engineering. We now have more of the foundational knowledge at the molecular level to allow us to understand living systems in entirely new ways. Advances in AI and machine learning will drive those advances at an ever-greater pace. Our intellectual opportunities in this area are immense, and our parallel strengths in business, economics, social work, public policy, and law make this even more compelling. This must be a period when we focus on lifting our biological discovery and biomedical reach.
As UChicago Medicine is about to launch the largest comprehensive cancer center in the region, we will see that the Chicago Minds campaign will enhance our ability to attract and develop the world’s leading physician scientists to improve healthcare, which will in turn will help us initiate a stronger virtuous cycle of medical discovery, greatly expanded entrepreneurship, and better fostering of a healthy community in the years ahead.
A few years ago, we launched the new Institute for Climate and Sustainable Growth, an interdisciplinary initiative that leverages the University’s strengths and resources to improve society’s understanding of how to address the challenges of climate and energy. With your support, I expect that we will see great things from the Institute in the years to come. For example, we are alone amongst universities in opening a new field of Climate Systems Engineering–others will follow. Future generations will see this as one of the great moves of the University to create new knowledge and benefit Americans and people everywhere.
We begin this campaign tonight with a sense of quiet confidence. This early phase of the campaign has been extraordinary, and it sets the stage for a very successful effort in the years ahead. To those of you who have taken steps to underwrite our vision already: Thank you! Thank you!
Your support and partnership are a powerful testament to the fact that the Chicago Mind is also fierce and generous. Let’s bring more of that fierce generosity to the Chicago Minds campaign.
Let’s build our University of Chicago!