100 out of over 2000 faculty; about a 5% stupid factor for the University as a whole isn’t too bad.
For the University of Chicago, in the past quarter of a century there have been 16 Nobel Prize winners in Economic Sciences, and one in Literature.
The website for the University of Chicago presents a timeline of the “History of the Division of the Humanities.” In the past 25 years four items are listed: (1) a 2002 endowment of $5 million from a 1965 MBA recipient and wife who funded “Fellowships in Humanities”; (2) establishment in 1996 of a “Center for Gender Studies”; (3) a 1991 Pulitzer Prize for Music for Symphony; and (4) founding in 1991 of a humanities institute “to consider the changing notions of a liberal education and… for the critical examination of ideas and free-ranging argument among scholars and the public.” Isn’t that a hoot?
In the last two years, University of Chicago economists have received a Nobel Prize “for laying the foundations of mechanism design theory,” a Presidential Medal Of Freedom for helping to “improve the standard of living for people around the world,” and a Bradley Prize for Outstanding Achievement “for pioneering work in the fields of economics and human behavior.” The Economics Department website in explaining the success of the “Chicago School” boldly states: “The unifying thread in all this is not political or ideological but methodological, the methodological conviction that economics is an incomparably powerful tool for understanding society.” Indeed this powerful tool is being applied to not only business, but to an examination of art, creativity, crime and racial discrimination, and therein lies the seeds of discontent and jealousy.
In the Department of Economics there are 34 faculty plus four emeritus, another 8 visiting faculty and post-doctorate fellows plus 14 associated faculty from the Graduate School of Business or Harris Graduate School of Public Policy Studies for a total of 60. There are 21 Departments in the Division of Humanities. In a single department, English, there are 54 faculty vs 60 for the Department of Economics. Yet the achievements of only one are far reaching and have received worldwide acclaim.
The signatories of the protest letter roughly breakdown according to these departments:
28 History including Art History and History of Religion
16 Anthropology
16 English, Linguistics or Comparative Literature
12 Near Eastern, East or South Asian, Japanese, Turkish or Archaelogy Studies
8 Political Science
8 Sociology, Human Rights, Gender Studies, Humanities or Comparative Human Development
6 Classics, Philosophy, Ethics or Romance Languages
4 Math & Computer Science
2 Music or Visual Art
1 “Distinguished Service Professor” No Department

A breakdown by title reveals:
48 Professors
25 Associate Professors
11 Assistant Professors
3 Lecturers
2 No title listed
1 Visiting Assistant Professor
1 Visiting Professor
11 Emeritus/ Emerita
0 Nobel Prize Winners
0 Pulitzer Prize winners
0 Presidential Medal of Freedom Winners
0 National Humanities Medal Winners

The letter with signatories may be found at :

http://www.naomiklein.org/shock-doctrine/resources/faculty-letter-mfi

Apart from the relative achievements of the Department of Economics and the entire Division of Humanities, I am struck by fact that two visiting professors signed the document. I guess they were needed to get over 100.