Short answers, pulled from the story.
The current University of Chicago was incorporated in 1890 by the American Baptist Education Society, using $600,000 from Standard Oil co-founder John D. Rockefeller and land donated by Marshall Field. An earlier institution of the same name had been founded in 1857 and closed in 1886 after decades of financial hardship.
As of 2025, the University of Chicago has 101 affiliated Nobel laureates across all six prize categories. Of those, 31 were awarded in Economics, 30 in Physics, 19 in Chemistry, 13 in Physiology or Medicine, 3 in Literature, and 1 in Peace.
In 1942, physicist Enrico Fermi engineered the world's first self-sustaining nuclear chain reaction beneath the viewing stands of Stagg Field, the university's football stadium, as part of the Manhattan Project. The site, known as Chicago Pile-1, is now a National Historic Landmark marked by a Henry Moore sculpture called Nuclear Energy.
Since the 1999-2000 school year, the University of Chicago's core curriculum requires undergraduates to complete 15 courses across seven subjects and demonstrate proficiency in a foreign language. The core traces its origins to the "New Plan" introduced by President Robert Maynard Hutchins and dean Chauncey Boucher in 1931.
Hanna Holborn Gray became president of the University of Chicago in 1978, making her the first woman in the United States appointed to a full-term presidency of a major research university. She modernized financial systems, expanded the undergraduate college, and oversaw the implementation of a unified 21-course core curriculum across all collegiate divisions in 1985.
The Kalven Report is a two-page statement issued by a University of Chicago faculty committee in 1967 declaring that a university must sustain an environment of free inquiry and remain independent from political pressures. It has since been cited in university debates over divestment and inspired the Chicago Principles on free speech, which a number of other universities have adopted.