Chicago: Campus of the Big Ideas
>> The launch of The Chicago Initiative-the University's five-year, $2 billion fund-raising effort-was marked by an April 12 event that focused on Chicago's intellectual initiatives.

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10 symposia offered an opportunity to experience, in President Don M. Randel's words, "the richness and the profound joy of academic life." Crisscrossing disciplines and divisions, some of the campus's best thinkers gathered to consider big issues and big problems. In search of new knowledge and transformative ideas, they demonstrated Chicago's-and the Chicago Initiative's-raison d'être:

1. In the beginning: what do our origins tell us about ourselves?

2. Homo sapiens: are we really rational creatures?

3. Integrating the physical and biological sciences: what lies ahead?

4. Money, services, or laws: how do we improve lives?

5. Clones, genes, and stem cells: can we find the path to the greatest good?

6. How will technology change the way we work and live?

7. Why do we dig up the past?

8. Art for art's sake?

9. In the realm of the senses: how do we understand what we see, hear, feel, smell, and taste?

10. Can we protect civil liberties in wartime?

 

CHICAGO INITIATIVE GOALS

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