Its main campus is in the Hyde Park neighborhood on Chicago's South Side, near the shore of Lake Michigan about 7 miles (11 km) from the Loop.

It closed in 1886 after years of financial struggle and a final annus horribilis in which the campus was badly damaged by fire and the school was foreclosed on by its creditors.

Other early benefactors included businessmen Charles L. Hutchinson (trustee, treasurer and donor of Hutchinson Commons), Martin A. Ryerson (president of the board of trustees and donor of the Ryerson Physical Laboratory) Adolphus Clay Bartlett and Leon Mandel, who funded the construction of the gymnasium and assembly hall, and George C. Walker of the Walker Museum, a relative of Cobb who encouraged his inaugural donation for facilities.

[44] Harper was an accomplished scholar (Semiticist) and a member of the Baptist clergy who believed that a great university should maintain the study of faith as a central focus.

In response, the university became a major sponsor of a controversial urban renewal project for Hyde Park, which profoundly affected both the neighborhood's architecture and street plan.

[69] In 1999, then-President Hugo Sonnenschein announced plans to relax the university's famed core curriculum, reducing the number of required courses from 21 to 15.

When The New York Times, The Economist, and other major news outlets picked up this story, the university became the focal point of a national debate on education.

In 2008, the University of Chicago announced plans to establish the Milton Friedman Institute, which attracted both support and controversy from faculty members and students.

The northern and southern portions of campus are separated by the Midway Plaisance, a large, linear park created for the 1893 World's Columbian Exposition.

[citation needed] The site of Chicago Pile-1 is a National Historic Landmark and is marked by the Henry Moore sculpture Nuclear Energy.

The university's Booth School of Business maintains campuses in Hong Kong, London, and the downtown Streeterville neighborhood of Chicago.

The Joe and Rika Mansueto Library, built in 2011, houses a large study space and an automated book storage and retrieval system.

[185] In physics, the university was the site of the Chicago Pile-1 (the first controlled, self-sustaining human-made nuclear chain reaction, part of the Manhattan Project), of Robert Millikan's oil-drop experiment that calculated the charge of the electron,[186] and of the development of radiocarbon dating by Willard F. Libby in 1947.

[194] Admissions to the University of Chicago has become highly selective over the past two decades, reflecting changes in the application process, school popularity, and marketing strategy.

[205] In 1969, Chicago reinstated football as a Division III team, resuming playing its home games at the new Stagg Field.

[212] Notable extracurricular groups include the University of Chicago College Bowl Team, which has won 118 tournaments and 15 national championships, leading both categories internationally.

[221] Every January, the university holds a week-long winter festival, Kuviasungnerk/Kangeiko (Kuvia), which includes early morning exercise routines and fitness workshops.

[7] While the university's first president, William Rainey Harper stressed the importance of perennial theory over practicality in his institution's curriculum, this has not stopped the alumni of Chicago from being among the wealthiest in the world.

[226] Notable alumni in the field of law, government and politics include Supreme Court justice John Paul Stevens; the lord chief justice of England and Wales Lord Thomas of Cwmgiedd; President of the Supreme Court of Israel Shimon Agranat; Attorney General and federal judge Robert Bork; attorneys general Ramsey Clark, John Ashcroft and Edward Levi; Prime Minister of Canada William Lyon Mackenzie King; 33rd prime minister of New Zealand Geoffrey Palmer; 11th prime minister of Poland Marek Belka; former Taiwan Vice President Lien Chan; Governor of the Bank of Japan Masaaki Shirakawa; David Axelrod, advisor to presidents Barack Obama and Bill Clinton; the founder of modern community organizing Saul Alinsky; Prohibition agent Eliot Ness; former Chicago mayor Lori Lightfoot; the first female African-American senator Carol Moseley Braun; United States senator from Vermont and Democratic presidential candidate in 2016 and 2020 Bernie Sanders; former World Bank president Paul Wolfowitz; Chinese jurist Mei Ju-ao and Amien Rais, professor and former chairman of the People's Consultative Assembly of the Republic of Indonesia.

[227] In journalism, notable alumni include New York Times columnist and commentator on PBS News Hour David Brooks, Washington Post columnist David Broder, Washington Post publisher Katharine Graham, reporter and commentator Virginia Graham, investigative journalist and political writer Seymour Hersh, The Progressive columnist Milton Mayer, four-time Pulitzer Prize winning journalist Rick Atkinson, baseball statistician Sarah Langs, statistical analyst and FiveThirtyEight founder and creator Nate Silver, and ABC News correspondent Rebecca Jarvis.

[226] In the arts and entertainment, minimalist composer Philip Glass, dancer, choreographer and leader in the field of dance anthropology Katherine Dunham, Bungie founder and developer of the Halo video game series Alex Seropian, Serial host Sarah Koenig, actor Ed Asner, actress Anna Chlumsky, Pulitzer Prize for Criticism winning film critic and the subject of the 2014 documentary film Life Itself Roger Ebert, director, writer, and comedian Mike Nichols, film director and screenwriter Philip Kaufman, and photographer and writer Carl Van Vechten, photographer and writer, are graduates.

[226] In science, alumni include astronomers Carl Sagan, a prominent contributor to the scientific research of extraterrestrial life, and Edwin Hubble, known for "Hubble's law", NASA astronaut John M. Grunsfeld, geneticist James Watson, best known as one of the co-discoverers of the structure of DNA, vaccinologist Maurice Hilleman, whose vaccines save nearly 8 million lives each year, experimental physicist Luis Alvarez, popular environmentalist David Suzuki, astronomer J. Allen Hynek, nuclear physicist and researcher Stanton T. Friedman, balloonist Jeannette Piccard, biologists Ernest Everett Just and Lynn Margulis, computer scientist Richard Hamming, the creator of the Hamming Code, lithium-ion battery developer John B. Goodenough, mathematician and Fields Medal recipient Paul Joseph Cohen, geochemist Clair Cameron Patterson, who developed the uranium–lead dating method into lead–lead dating, geologist and geophysicist M. King Hubbert, known for the Hubbert curve and Hubbert peak theory, the main components of peak oil, and "Queen of Carbon" Mildred Dresselhaus.

[226] In economics, notable Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences winners Milton Friedman (a major advisor to Republican U.S. president Ronald Reagan, Conservative British prime minister Margaret Thatcher and Chilean military dictator Augusto Pinochet), George Stigler (Nobel laureate and proponent of regulatory capture theory) Herbert A. Simon (responsible for the modern interpretation of the concept of organizational decision-making) Paul Samuelson (the first American to win the Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences) and Eugene Fama (known for his work on portfolio theory, asset pricing and stock market behavior) are all graduates.

[226] Other prominent alumni include anthropologists David Graeber and Donald Johanson, who is best known for discovering the fossil of a female hominid australopithecine known as "Lucy" in the Afar Triangle region, psychologist John B. Watson, American psychologist who established the psychological school of behaviorism, communication theorist Harold Innis, political theorist Anne Norton, chess grandmaster Samuel Reshevsky, and conservative international relations scholar and White House coordinator of security planning for the National Security Council Samuel P.

[224] Additionally, the John Bates Clark Medal, which is rewarded annually to the best economist under the age of 40, has also been awarded to 4 current members of the university faculty.

A. Michelson, elementary charge calculator Robert A. Millikan, discoverer of the Compton Effect Arthur H. Compton, the creator of the first nuclear reactor Enrico Fermi, "the father of the hydrogen bomb" Edward Teller, "one of the most brilliant and productive experimental physicists of the twentieth century" Luis Walter Alvarez, Murray Gell-Mann who introduced the quark, second female Nobel laureate Maria Goeppert-Mayer, the youngest American winner of the Nobel Prize Tsung-Dao Lee, and astrophysicist Subrahmanyan Chandrasekhar.

[229] In law, people that have served on the faculty include former U.S. president Barack Obama, the most cited legal scholar of the 20th century Richard Posner, Supreme Court justices Elena Kagan, Antonin Scalia, and John Paul Stevens, and Nobel laureate in economics Ronald Coase.

Other distinguished scholars who have served on the faculty include Karl Llewellyn, Edward Levi, Cass Sunstein, and legal historian Stanley Nider Katz.

Past faculty have also included astronomer Gerard Kuiper, biochemist and National Women's Hall of Fame member Florence B. Seibert, biologist Susan Lindquist, Nobel Prize winning chemists Glenn T. Seaborg (the developer of the actinide concept), Henry Taube, and Yuan T. Lee, egyptologist James Henry Breasted, mathematician Alberto Calderón, Friedrich Hayek (one of the leading figures of the Austrian School of Economics and Nobel prize winner), meteorologist Ted Fujita, linguistic anthropologist Michael Silverstein, Nobel Prize winning novelist Saul Bellow, American politics scholar Herbert Storing, political philosopher and author Allan Bloom, conservative political philosopher and historian Richard M. Weaver, cancer researchers Charles Brenton Huggins and Janet Rowley, one of the most important figures in the early development of the discipline of linguistics Edward Sapir, the founder of McKinsey & Co. James O. McKinsey, and Nobel Prize-winning physicist James Cronin.

[229] Current faculty include the philosophers Jean-Luc Marion, James F. Conant, Robert Pippin, and Kyoto Prize winner Martha Nussbaum; political scientists John Mearsheimer and Robert Pape; anthropologist Marshall Sahlins; historians Dipesh Chakrabarty, David Nirenberg, and Kenneth Pomeranz; paleontologists Neil Shubin and Paul Sereno; evolutionary biologist Jerry Coyne; Nobel Prize-winning economists Eugene Fama, James Heckman, Lars Peter Hansen, Roger Myerson, Richard Thaler, and Douglas Diamond; Freakonomics author and noted economist Steven Levitt; Voltage Effect author and noted economist John List; former governor of India's central bank Raghuram Rajan; and former chairman of President Barack Obama's Council of Economic Advisers Austan Goolsbee.