Supporting the Humanities

Universities aspire to establish a permanent home within our culture for intellectual inquiry, creative expression, and free debate. Achieving this goal requires securing a stable financial foundation and above all endowing our core enterprise-the professorships and fellowships that allow us to attract and sustain the best teachers and the best students.

Because universities are built for durability, they are also inherently institutionally conservative. Yet the best universities are not merely durable but also adaptable, able to identify important new areas of research and to develop programs that respond to pressing intellectual and cultural needs. In addition to endowment for core enterprises, universities also therefore need what might be called venture capital to support more risky undertakings and enterprises.

The Development office of the Division of the Humanities works with alumni and friends of the University to develop gifts that support the Division's top priorities: graduate aid, faculty support, programs that foster intellectual innovation, and the planned Center for the Creative and Performing Arts. Our aspirations are high and focused on the needs of today as well of the distant future; we seek the resources that make it possible for us to realize them.

Find out more about supporting the Division of the Humanities and the University of Chicago through the Chicago Initiative.