Applications to University of Chicago Skyrocket

At least not as it was back in the 1980s, when it had Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia and Richard Posner, cultural critic Allan Bloom, writers Saul Bellow and Richard Strand, and the Chicago boys in the econ department. Oh, and Leon Kass in philosophy, who ended up in the Bush administration.

The law school is no longer conservative. Scalia recently ripped Chicago for losing its niche as THE conservative law school. In fact, some would say Harvard Law is more liberal. Chicago economics is no longer as influential as it was 20 years ago. Chicago literature is liberal, like most other lit departments.

Chicago stopped being a conservative school a decade ago.

But remember, a conservative in academia is a libertarian. To many political conservatives in the US, that's the same as being a communist.

Winston of CA 6:21PM January 15, 2010

Didn't go to Chicago (went to Northwestern), but whoever posted that it was not a politically balanced school is just obviously misinformed.

Yes, the faculty within the liberal arts/humanities disciplines tend to be one-sided, politically, but U of C is well known for Milton Friedman! U of C just experienced a bit of a flap over a new Milton Friedman center over there, to honor the free market economist's legacy, and many of the humanities professors went berserk in protest.

The (more conservative) "Chicago School" of economics is very well known among scholars, so it's absurd to argue that it's not a school where one can get a well-balanced education.

Having attended classes with students at NU, who had also attended The University of Chicago (many students are going back to study something different, so second degrees are not at all uncommon), the word was that it was, indeed, a place with an eclectic mix of ideas.

That's why so many favored Obama, because it was well known that he had worked in an intellectually diverse academic institution, where he taught constitutional law.

So, again, just have to comment that it is very unfair to categorize that institution as politically one-sided. Indeed, it is quite the opposite.

Angie Koutrotsios of IL 4:27PM January 15, 2010

Look at the faculty's credentials and you will be dismayed if you value the principles of our Founding Fathers.

Obama's assocaition with the school should be enough to make thinking students shy away. The Kool Aid drinkers will flock there and come out with liberal, elitist brains incapable of independent thought, but rather glib parroters of the indecent psychobabble of the Progressives who are ruining this country.

Fed Up of IN 1:52PM January 15, 2010