John Boyer, as they say around Hyde Park, is UChicago famous.

North of 51st Street, if you were to spot him zipping past on his Schwinn, you might assume he was an eccentric aging hipster, a blur in a white mustache and spindly Ichabod Crane frame, with far-off eyes behind thin eyeglasses and a dark suit too large for his gangly dimensions. But on the University of Chicago campus, where he has been Dean of the College for undergraduates since 1992, he is Mickey Mouse and Mr. Chips in one 6-foot-four-inch package of tweediness, regardless of whether he is wearing tweed. “He’s become a true creature of the University of Chicago,” said John McGreevy, provost at the University of Notre Dame and former dean of that school’s College of Arts and Letters. “I doubt there is anybody alive who functions quite as effectively as a symbol of the University of Chicago as John Boyer does,” said Agnes Callard, associate professor of philosophy at U. of C. “I mean, it’s tough to imagine a universe without a John Boyer.”

Obscure or not, his impact is hard to overstate.

The average dean of an undergraduate college serves about five years. Boyer, who is leaving the post on June 30 to serve as adviser to U. of C. president Paul Alivisatos, has been dean for four decades. He is, in fact, the longest-serving dean in the 133-year history of the Hyde Park institution. He’s been dean for so long because, as he says, if he left the position after 10 years, the College of the University of Chicago would have never climbed out from beneath a growing tangle of train wrecks. Things had gotten ugly.

Boyer, 76, lives on 57th Street, a few blocks from campus.

When he rides to work each day, he moves west toward Woodlawn Avenue, then south to 59th Street, then west again, stopping at Harper Memorial Library, which holds his two offices. As he peddles, he passes Frank Lloyd Wright’s Robie House, as angular and jutting as Darth Vader’s beach house. He passes the Booth School of Business and the spires of Rockefeller Chapel. A historian by training, he sees his daily six-minute commute as a tour of architectural milestones, the offices of 15 Nobel Prize winners for economics, and, in its neo-gothic gravitas, a reminder of the Protestant Reformation.

Every day, same as the last — since he was a graduate student here in the 1960s.

But as immutable as U. of. C. appears, it is not the school it was when he became dean in 1992. Back then — as hard to believe as this may be — the college’s acceptance rate was 77%. Today, it’s 6%. (Callard, who was an undergraduate in the college about the time as Boyer became dean, says she would never have been accepted today.) Back then, the college was losing 13% of its freshman class at the end of its first year. Students were very unhappy, according to the university’s own surveys. As its infamous, unofficial motto reminded: “University of Chicago: The School Where Fun Goes to Die.” Yet at commencement this month, 99% of the class of 2023 graduated. In the 1990s, undergrad enrollment at the college was around 3,500; today it’s 7,000. Some of those stats are mirrored by a national rise in enrollment at highly selective colleges. At least at the University of Chicago, Boyer often gets that credit.

“I found the school rigorous and socially enriching and I think that’s because of Dean Boyer, who proved it’s no longer the place where fun has to die,” said Rodrigo Estrada, who graduated in 2021 on a full-ride Odyssey scholarship and worked at the White House through the Metcalf internship — both of which are programs that Boyer helped create.

“I don’t think it’s too much to say John changed our entire outlook,” said president Alivisatos.

Indeed, Boyer is so popular here, an alumni donation of $130 will buy you a Lego of Boyer on his bicycle. (Boyer himself likes to complain the toy doesn’t move upright nearly as well as he does.) They also sell Boyer scarves and Boyer tote bags; next year, the school plans to open a Jeanne Gang-designed University of Chicago John W. Boyer Center in Paris, as a tribute to Boyer also having revamped the study abroad program.

And so, as you might guess, the months leading to the end of his deanship have been a love fest. Yeah, that is true, Boyer mumbled. Sort of like something out of Soviet Russia.

Last month, on a cool May morning, among the many white tents erected around campus for Alumni Weekend, was a tent dedicated solely to a celebration of John Boyer. Inside, to reflect his also being a leading scholar on the Habsburg Empire and Austrian history, the tent was a sort of coffee house of large copper pots and Viennese pastries, arranged around a chandelier. A video screen recounted Boyer’s achievements. On tables were souvenir white mustaches and stationery asking alumni to write their favorite Boyer memory. The only thing missing from this all-Boyer commemoration was Boyer.

“Is he here?” a staff member asked.

“I don’t see the bike,” another said.

A half-hour later, the bike arrived. Boyer parked it on the grass alongside the tent — kickstand down and unchained, because who would dare steal the bicycle of Dean Boyer? Soon, a line formed for pictures. Boyer, before the white glare of a ring light, smiled and shook, smiled and shook. One after another. Alumni. Current students. Faculty. Parents of students. Nobody noted the controversies, the memories of faculty revolts, the claims that Boyer, in changing the college, was killing a century of tradition.

As he told me later, “Years ago, if you had said that someday this school would want to name buildings after me, I would have probably asked you: ‘So what planet are you from?’”

A week earlier, as school wound down for the year and finals loomed, Boyer sat in a conference room on 59th Street. Spring lawn mowers roared in the distance. He moved a finger around the open lid of his coffee, listening to Metcalf students and Odyssey scholars relay success after success. About 30% of his students are attending on an Odyssey scholarship. They spoke of internships at the Hague, weeks in New Delhi urging Indians off fossil fuels, eye-popping first times in Europe and, frequently, internships in financial companies. Boyer had been on something of a victory lap tour of programs he created — an “ego tour,” one staffer called it — and even he admitted later these kids “were straight out of central casting.” But that didn’t mean they weren’t sincerely happy. They spoke in corporate lingo and recalled “experiences” they “would carry with them” in their careers.

And these students were impressive.

They also pointed toward a question lingering over liberal arts colleges right now. Was this still a university that believed foremost in “the life of the mind,” as that ideal is mentioned often around here, or was it turning into a factory that prepped students for professional futures and large salaries?

Boyer gets asked this a lot.

The most popular major in the college is economics. After all, this is the legendary home of the Chicago school of economic theory. But among Boyer’s changes at the school has been an active drive for more internships and professional experiences. A popular financial markets program at the college now offers a three-year curriculum of training, internships and recruitment lessons. He noted the philosophical elephant in the room and told the assembled: About 25 years ago, similar universities didn’t offer stuff like this. “Some people told me liberal arts colleges should be buying more library books and not investing in this stuff,” he said. There were chuckles. “So, are we endangering the reputation of this school? Are we crossing some imaginary line about not going out into the world?”

No, the students said, shaking their heads at the thought.

But it is a concern, one wrapped up in a steep decline in interest in liberal arts courses nationwide. Rakesh Khurana has been having this conversation with Boyer since Khurana became dean of Harvard College in 2013. “I think we both have seen standard residential four-year college experience, once embedded in liberal arts, become increasingly niche in higher ed, majors become increasingly professional minded — and also this growth in the student who takes five or six years to finish,” he said. “We talk about the role and the function and we share a skepticism of people who recommend online educations for other people’s children but — of course — not their own. And we come back time and again to: How do you renew liberal arts and sciences in a way that speaks to students, parents and children of immigrants? Because the fact is, despite how much many of believe in the liberal arts, they weren’t growing.”

McGreevy at Notre Dame said, indeed, “Everyone is more professionally oriented these days, but John was early at thinking that way. Because he knew parents were anxious.”

Boyer told me that he didn’t feel “professional development is a danger to anything. In my judgment, this is the best way of protecting the liberal arts degree. They can embody the life of the mind and still help them to prepare for their futures. Some people at this school and others might not like to hear that answer, but it is an answer.”

An answer that, in a way, is about balancing history with a need to stay relevant. To an extent, it’s a self-selecting answer: As Callard said, “There was this image here of nerds and weirdos, and that is just not true anymore, because to get into a school like this now, you need to be really polished and conformist. Yet at the same time, we don’t want to become just another Stanford, some highly competitive preprofessional finishing school.

“So I guess we don’t know what our identity is anymore.”

Boyer’s tenure has provided clues. “We will ultimately be judged on how well our students do after college,” he said. “It’s important to take care of faculty and invest in books, but this is a human capital institution. We will be judged on not only how well people think after they leave, but how successful they are. It’s not a binary. It’s not either/or. If I had to start this again, I would do it again. History is full of people who try to live off their history and end up with mediocrity. I have enormous respect for the ‘life of the mind’ rhetoric — what we call our special mission. But Loyola has a special mission, too. I went there and Jesuits spoke of improving society for the glory of God. Harvard talks about training civic leaders of the future. Every school has a story it tells about itself. OK, but what’s the next sentence?”

John Boyer grew up in Roseland, alongside Pullman. His parents were “lifelong blue collar centrist Democrats who hated a lot of Democrats, but would never ever vote Republican.” His mother was a secretary at a nearby steel mill; his father drove a truck and worked as an electrician and repairman. John graduated high school in 1964 just as area steel factories went into decline. Most of his friends had planned to work in those mills. But as a child, Boyer devoured encyclopedias his mother bought at supermarkets for 50 cents a volume. He was always headed to college, but having graduated from a Catholic high school (Mendel Catholic Prep, which closed in 1988) he had a choice of DePaul or Loyola. Looking outside Chicago “was not a part of our mental world.”

He studied history at Loyola and met his future wife there, Barbara Boyer, a Chicago teacher and novelist. He planned to continue and do his masters at Columbia University in New York, but in the spring of 1968, Columbia was being occupied by Vietnam protesters. To receive a college deferment and avoid being sent to Vietnam, he went with his backup school: The University of Chicago. He didn’t know that much about it: “It wasn’t quite hostile to working-class South Siders, but it did resemble another world.”

As the largest landowner in Hyde Park (which is still true), it resembled a city-state within Chicago, albeit one that, as Boyer learned later, “didn’t really start thinking of itself as an intellectual hothouse until the 1930s and ‘40s, with (president) Robert Hutchins.” When the school was founded, social mobility had been a primary goal. But with Hutchins, who famously pulled the school out of the Big Ten Conference and killed its football program, “the ‘life of the mind’ rhetoric, which had always had substance, became a major branding strategy — an extremely successful one.” But by the 1960s, that translated into a university that resembled more of a Ph.D. factory than a traditional college experience. The average U. of C. student, he said, “was probably a 29-year-old graduate student.” Even today, of its 17,000 students, more than half are graduate students.

Boyer, then and now, was a hybrid: He was an intellectual who recognized college as a tool for social mobility. He joined the history faculty in 1975. Ralph Austen, a professor emeritus in the department who occasionally taught with Boyer, recalls: “John was a very good teacher and extremely solid member (of the history department), but he also arrived here from Loyola! And was from the South Side! None of which is typical of the background here. It made some of the older, senior faculty suspicious. They assumed he wasn’t, you know, cultured enough for this place. Later, some faculty said he was dumbing down everything. I guess you could say John had to prove himself. So he did — no problem.”

Boyer’s office on the sixth floor of Harper overlooks the Midway Plaisance and Woodlawn. The best way to reach it is to have a key that opens an elevator to the sixth floor (which is why he keeps another office of the second floor). The windows in the office are curled stone, marked by knife-like medieval ornament. On his desk are photos of his nine grandchildren held proudly by his three children. On a meeting table in a corner are two busts, one of Austrian emperor Franz Joseph, one of Napoleon, the latter a tourist tchotchke. He turns it over to reveal an orange price tag ($14) still stuck to the bottom.

The office was willed to him, more or less, by its previous tenant, Edward Levi, a Chicago native who had been President Gerald Ford’s attorney general then returned here to run the law school. We’re surrounded by walls of books, floor to ceiling, several by Boyer himself — on the history of radicalism in 19th-century Vienna, the history of the Austrian empire, the history of the University of Chicago. He’s explaining to me that this is where he comes to write “huge books no one but my wife and three others read” when Chris Skrable, executive director of the Chicago Studies program, comes in and sits down.

“Nonsense!” he says to Boyer. “I read your Chicago book!’

Boyer waits for more.

“But OK, not the Austria book,” Skrable adds.

Boyer cuts to the chase. He wants to know how the Chicago Studies program is going; he helped launch it a decade ago. Once a semester, Boyer leads a bike tour of the South Side to get cloistered students into the city. The Chicago Studies program is more; what began as civic engagements only tangental to the curriculum, now offers dozens of courses. “Do you think this an easy sell these days?” Boyer asks Skrable.

Registration for these classes, Skrable says, is “disproportionate” to what class sizes can handle. A class on the history of Black Chicago, for instance: “You can’t get near it.” Skrable tells Boyer he would like to study if there is a connection between students who take these classes and choose to stay in Chicago.

The office door opens.

“Emily!” Skrable says.

“Sorry I’m late. I was in the downstairs office!” says Emily Lynn Osborn, deputy dean of the Office of Research and Teaching Innovations. She takes a seat. Skrable tells her they were discussing how engaging with the city itself might become part of the curriculum, how “organizing on 63rd Street or chasing an internship downtown” has the potential to challenge a student’s assumptions. Osborn nods: “You do want a kind of nimbleness, right? We can talk professional development versus liberal arts all day, but the best way, broadly, is to make (students) nimble. I mean, we do not know what the world will be.”

“Besides, once ChatGPT moves in here …” Skrable says.

Boyer, with a smile, adds: “I’m on the sixth floor. The elevator doesn’t always work.”

Chicago Studies, as Skrable described later, is a fine example of Boyer thriving for years despite making big, sometimes sweeping decisions. “He didn’t see a department like this as public relations or want it subverted for those goals. He never told me that, but I think he wanted it firmly part of the college to protect it.” Among the university’s earliest missions was engaging with the city to learn. Skrable’s department is now in the midst of a long project on urban renewal “and who it crushed. I doubt our Office of Civic Engagement is thrilled, but then, thanks to John, I don’t answer to them.

“Some disagree with John about everything, but then when you have been John Boyer for this long, you can make executive decisions without a whole lot of input from others.”

As Boyer explains: Soon after becoming dean in 1992, he was attending a conference and speaking with an older dean of another college who said what became a kind of personal mantra. “He told me, ‘My best advice is do your job, don’t try to save your job.’”

That came in handy during the first years of his tenure.

The then-university president asked for a revamping of The Core, a good name for what others call “the guts of Hyde Park,” the foundation of every U. of C. undergraduate education. Created in 1931, The Core was requirements — broadly, classical subjects like civilization, math, languages — that, by the 1980s, became more than half what a student needed to graduate. Boyer proposed shrinking The Core to two years and filling the remaining two years with electives, professional development, dual majors, study abroad. What sounds like a plan already fairly common at many other universities became a five-year fight between Boyer and faculty who loudly declared he was destroying a century of Hyde Park tradition.

“Basically, I felt (The Core) was too much and could be made smaller and leave room for other studies, too,” he recalls. “We were telling ourselves stories about our virtues that simply were not true. Some people cherished that world. It had been successful. But 13% of freshman were dropping out. You have parents moving kids into dorms and then moving them out months later. You had unhappy kids. Some thought they wanted a ‘place of the mind’ only to find out, when they arrived, that excluded a social life.”

The Core is now about two years of classic courses. In 1992, the college was receiving less than 6,000 applicants a year. Today, the pool of possible freshmen is about 38,000.

“We would be in a precarious state if The Core remained the way it was,” said Eric Slauter, deputy dean of humanities at the college. “We’d be drifting away from general ed toward a focus on majors. Now English and economics may be the most popular dual major. What happened in the 1990s really created a sustained place for liberal arts. I think that’s because John decided to strip away our pieties and myths.”

Twenty years ago, before the university opened a $51 million athletic center, Boyer was in San Diego at an alumni lunch. “This woman stops me: ‘I heard you’re building an athletic center. Does that mean you’re getting rid of The Core?’ To build an athletic center was now a signal of dumbing things down. I said, ‘I think we can swim in the morning and study Heidegger in the afternoon.’ She was only somewhat relieved.”

At the end of the Ego Tour, Boyer met with students from the study abroad program. They filled the room and left their backpacks in a tidy row against a wall and regaled him with stories from Spain, Greece, Italy, of going on scholarship, of cultural differences and of playing the designated American in a group. Study abroad programs, nationwide, have boomed, but at U. of C., studying abroad hadn’t been big until relatively recently. As Boyer tells it, the attitude was: If a student made it to Hyde Park, why ever leave?

Their world was here.

Partly because of Boyer’s advocacy, partly because of trends in higher education, that parochialism vanished. More than 60% of the student body now does some overseas study; in 1992, less than 50 students total took part. The program has since expanded into Marrakech, Cairo, Dakar. Boyer took its success as one more thing to cross off his to-do list.

He began an actual list 30 years ago, just after becoming dean. I asked if there was anything left for him to cross off. He couldn’t think of anything. The next dean — Melina Hale, a vice provost and professor in the Department of Organismal Biology and Anatomy — will develop a plan of action soon, he said. “Ask admissions what three questions they get from parents, and one of them is always ‘Is it safe?’ The issue of security within the city will be inevitable for her.”

As for Boyer, he will be less visible around campus. As an adviser to the university president, he will be surrounded daily by the school that he changed — a school that will change again, and again. “I hope some things I did don’t get undone,” he said, then shrugs. Because, as any historian will tell you, that’s history.

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