Board of Trustees + UChicago Structure, Investment, and Budget

UChicago has no transparency or accountability about its finances. Admin is inaccessible and refuses to engage with students, and decisions about the University are ultimately up to the Board of Trustees, who operate entirely behind closed doors.

The Board of Trustees

UChicago’s Board is a group of corporate leaders and wealthy powerful people, many of whom are connected to arms of racial capitalism like the military industrial complex and the fossil fuel industry, that make the large scale decisions that guide the University as an institution. The Board does not engage directly with students or take student input and is incredibly opaque about what they do and how they do it.

Investments

UChicago has absolutely no transparency in its investments. In 2023, the human rights organization Amnesty International rated a large number of endowments and scored UChicago a 0/40, the lowest possible score and the only institution to receive this score. What we do know is that UChicago has constantly ignored widespread calls for it to divest from the fossil fuel industry, weapons contractors, the genocide in Gaza, and even historically from apartheid South Africa. The Board makes investment decisions with no accountability or ethical guidelines. They lost $1 billion of the endowment in a single year, including losing at least $20 million investing in cryptocurrency like bitcoin. They took $12 million from a coal billionaire who was on the Board and turned out to be running a fraudulent firm and covered up the fallout from it. They have a policy to recuse themselves from Board matters in which they have a conflict of interest, but they clearly do not practice this. Former Board member Kenneth Griffin is the biggest donor to the Republic party, and the current board includes the lawyer representing the Deepwater Horizon oil spill as well as many hedge fund managers who invest heavily in fossil fuels and weapons contractors.

Budget

As you’ll see quickly at UChicago, the University is mismanaging its money and responding with widespread budget cuts across the University. Despite going from need-blind to need-aware in admissions, instituting a staff hiring freeze, and cutting department budgets all over the University, it continues to buy up land on the South Side, maintain a gigantic police force, and build new research centers. UChicago spent over $3 million, more than the entire Humanities research budget, renovating the president’s house. Moreover, it underpays female professors – women earn less than men at every rank at UChicago. The gap is $21,000 at the assistant professor level and more than doubles—to $44,000—at the rank of full professor. The University is a corporation, acting only in the interest of those who already have enough money to hold its positions of power.