The university was baptized in the spirit of the hopeful Enlightenment which the 1893 Columbian Exposition celebrated and which is still evident in the joy of learning that pervades the University of Chicago campus. The hallmark of the University has always been its interdisciplinary nature and its faith in basic research. The various scholarly disciplines have been more solidly integrated at the University of Chicago than they tend to be in most other academic institutions in this country. Contributing perhaps to this cross-fertilization has been the remarkable compactness of the main campus. Innovations that catch the fancy of one discipline or another from time to time are not apt to be fashionable across disciplinary lines, whatever the inclinations of students may happen to be.
Questionable ideology is thereby more likely to be contained.
The intellectual aspirations of the university presupposed, from its founding decades, spiritual and moral underpinnings. Among his accomplishments was the elevation of undergraduate education to a higher status than it had had in what was then, and still is, a university serving primarily graduate and professional students. Much of what was done with the college, as well as with the reorganization of the graduate divisions, during Mr. Hutchins's administration had been set in motion before he came. Among the faculty thus acquired by the university were scientists whose diverse interests, as well as their fundamental sensibleness, encouraged an integration of several disciplines in the physical sciences. An interdisciplinary tendency may still be seen throughout the university.