I was going to comment at length on the subject at hand, but once I got to the University of Chicago website and saw that the “average” cost of attending the university was $52,450 (for one year !!), I began to lose interest.

http://collegeaid.uchicago.edu/cost.shtml ,

I was further discouraged by the emphasis placed on “diversity” as a concern of the institution. One of its webpages informs us that the university offers “Workshops, seminars, classes, and brown-bag lunches on working in an increasingly diverse world. Topics include appreciating differences related to race, culture, age, gender, sexual orientation, and ethnicity.”

http://www.uchicago.edu/diversity/workplace.shtml

Such substandard English. It’s always been a “diverse world”. In fact, in many ways the modern world is much less diverse than it used to be. The tendency, especially during that last 50 years, has been towards homogenization rather than diversification of societies, so it is not “an increasingly diverse world” at all.

Further, “Gender”, as has by now often been pointed out, is a grammatical category most often associated with classes of nouns, not with biological considerations such as the male/female dichotomy of most animals.

And what is meant by “sexual orientation”? If what they mean is “sexual DISorientation”, which is what I think they allude to, they should just come out and say so. (Although why THAT should be a subject of university public discourse, brown-bag and all, is beyond me).

Finally, I noticed that U of Chicago is also the home of Martha Nussbaum

http://divinity.uchicago.edu/faculty/nussbaum.shtml

and that Bernardine Dorhn – she of Weathermen fame – is a graduate of the university and of its Law School.

That was too much for me. I shut off the computer and retired.