At this year’s Opening Convocation, Dean Hale reflected on the history of college education in the United States and the Civilizations Core. An edited and shortened excerpt is below.

2026, the 250th anniversary of the United States, is a particular moment for reflection and appreciation for our freedoms, our history, and our aspirations. Throughout its history, college education in the United States has been nested in the national civic project, and that responsibility continues to be critical today. International voices and cultures have always been critical additions to this work and are its link to the ever-growing importance of our global citizenship. The Civilizations curriculum in our Core took shape with recognition of the importance of understanding other civilizations and, with that knowledge, more fully understanding our own.

In the country’s early history, particularly in the 1700s and early 1800s, a landscape of liberal arts colleges tied to religious denominations prepared students for liberal professions, and specifically for the clergy. In the later 1800s, with the Morrill Act and support of land grant universities, the US increased access to college and a broadening of education for disciplines particularly needed by society.

Our University of Chicago was founded in 1890, first and foremost as a research university. It flavored our own special college experience as one with classical grounding but also one injected from the start with the excitement of new knowledge and deep engagement in emerging fields. True to its research ethos, as the college within a research university, it insisted upon intellectual rigor and the exhilaration of new ideas, to our benefit. That closeness to discovery has stuck as well, hand in glove with free expression: We must test our perspectives and be discerning in the answers to our questions, paraphrasing our university motto, to let knowledge grow and enrich human life.

In the rush of new ideas in the late 1800s and early 1900s, the civic nature of higher education was not lost; the University maintained that steadfastness of purpose. In the College, civics and the study of human civilizations took shape in the curriculum.

The University’s third President, Ernest DeWitt Burton, argued the following in his 1924 Convocation address: “To achieve its purpose the education of our youth must be vastly more than a process of impartation and acquisition of knowledge. It can hardly be said too often that the college must concern itself with the development of personalities who to knowledge have added something called culture, and to culture high ideals and strong character. The task of making for this Republic citizens who will maintain its best traditions and meet its new responsibilities is a vast and serious one.”

And in years that followed, the horrors and terrible losses of World War II and the Holocaust reinforced our seriousness of purpose and appreciation for our freedoms. In the United States, veterans returning from the war with the benefits of the GI Bill came to colleges across the country, most as first-generation college students; notably, at that time nearly 50 percent of college students in the US were veterans. Our college veterans brought, and still bring, a maturity—a sophistication—of civic understanding through service. And, for many, experience with other cultures abroad.

Evolving from UChicago’s 1940s war-related Army Specialized Training School and Civil Affairs Training School, our Civilizations Core emerged from the cross-disciplinary innovations of the 1950s as a set of area-based courses, eventually joining and complementing the existing requirements. In the words of its proposers, the study of civilizations would “not only familiarize a student with a civilized tradition other than his own, and thus permit him to glimpse the world and his own civilization as others see them, but might also enable him to understand better his own cultural heritage by comparing it with another.”

The study of Civilizations in the Core cemented a long-standing idea about education and citizenship: that learning essential for a Republic must not only look internally but also be receptive to the world and strengthened by its exchange with other parts of the globe. The Civilizations curriculum, to President Burton’s charge, provided depth of understanding for acting wisely, with character, for one’s own country and with a scope of action that includes all humanity.

The Core curriculum, including Civilizations, continues to evolve and grow. The Civilizations Core today gives students a wide range of options to encounter a tradition “not their own,” from the study of ancient empires and texts to the historical study of human rights, and each one asks students to enter sympathetically into the experiences, ideas, and time-bound development of peoples with perspectives they will not recognize.