“a hell of a job getting it squared around”
196
and larger undergraduate enrollments would surely lead Chicago to the promised land of budgetary probity. Thus, University leaders were forced to launch Phase Two of the Campaign for Chicago in the summer of 1974 — a campaign that should have been started in 1970 but was temporarily sidetracked because of the impact of the 1969 sit-in and the fall in enrollments — lacking a major challenge grant. This new campaign immediately ran into trouble, and, with Edward Levi’s resignation to become attorney general in 1975, it had to be quietly scaled back, with the final results by 1978 painfully below the originally stated goals. The University’s reaction to the convergence of all of these problems was renewed budget cutting, modest reductions in faculty size, and other austerities. The 1970–71 budget had been constructed on the assumption of a no-growth policy in faculty size and a total quadrangles enrollment of 8,300 students, but the actual number of students who showed up was 600 lower. In turn, for the 1971–72 fiscal year, the Deans’ Budget Committee recommended an across-the-board reduction in academic unit budgets of 5 percent, but the final reduction was actually closer to 7 percent.311 In October 1972, Wilson informed the faculty that a serious deficit might still emerge in the 1972–73 budget, and highlighted the need for more attention to a planned downward adjustment of total faculty size, to a level which is congruent with unrestricted funds available and with first-order intellectual standards. Meeting this requirement will be a more difficult exercise than any the University has faced in 311. “1971–72 University Budget,” The University of Chicago Record, October 11, 1971, p. 109.