Getting ready to get stoned online for saying this:) The more Harvard like UChicago becomes the better it is for its future, its finances and its students. The academic temple ascetic mentality simply does not work anymore.
@Chrchill Uh oh. You just triggered the entire community
I am dedicated to the vibrancy of the free market of ideas!
Someone on a boat likes to fool tourists.
I thought the 2nd City moniker had to do with Chicago being 2nd in population to New York. The name stuck even though Chicago has been passed by LA in terms of population. In any event, it makes for a snappy name for a comedy group.
@kaukauna That is what "second city`’ refers to. Second to NYC.
It s a great livable city with fabulous culture, music restaurants and genuinely friendly people. The city has. Areal character and personality. Winter sucks – but clearly progressively getting warner. However, people dress for shits. No fashionista is safe.
For those parents who are impatient with all this talk about “life of the mind” in light of the realities facing their kids on graduation I commend the 2002 “Aims of Education” talk by Andrew Abbott, a sociologist:
https://aims.uchicago.edu/node/79.
Abbott tells the entering class that merely by being one of the relatively few (40,000 or so) who have gotten into an elite college (as against the total of 1.8 million going to all colleges that year) they’ve hit the home run ball - that almost everyone in that class, regardless of field of study, will end up with earnings greater that 80 percent of the population 20 years out. His survey of 1975 U. of C. graduates twenty years out showed that their incomes were five times the national average and put them in the 93rd percentile, so I guess he was allowing for some margin of error for that present class of 2006, notwithstanding that it excelled the class of 1975 in all the usual measures (as the class of 2021 must surely excel the class of 2006, I would interject). Interestingly there was only a weak correlation within the Class of 1975 between g.p.a. and future earnings, so that it appeared not to matter very much how hard you worked at your studies. Even more surprisingly, what you studied didn’t matter very much: there was only a weak correlation between future earnings and major. Yes, one’s ultimate occupation is the biggest variable, but “at the University of Chicago there is really no strong relation between what you study and your occupation in later life.” This observation is supported by statistics that flood into his talk at this point and on the basis of which he concludes that except for professors in the natural sciences “there is absolutely no career ruled out for any undergraduate major at the University of Chicago.” He then goes on to demolish a shibboleth of a different sort - that the famous U. of C. rigorousness is all about acquiring cognitive and writing skills that make for future success. Guess what - unsupported by statistics! What is left then? --Education is a good thing for its own sake, it makes us fuller people, more able to understand and participate in the world, inculcates in us “the habit of looking for new meanings, of seeking out new connections, of investing experience with complexity or extension that makes it richer or longer.” The inspiration is saved for the end, and it proves to be, coming after all those demolitions, surprisingly inspiring and traditional. And, more importantly, true. The search for “meaning” is the thing itself and not just a future aim of education. However, it should be reassuring to many a parent to know that it doesn’t come at the expense of the usual measures of worldly success.
@marlowe1 thanks for the link…to be so lucky to have such an eloquent introduction to the college experience; I am happy and envious for my son’s future life as a student there. I would love to have listened (rather than just read) the oration, as well.
And the good news is that since then, UChicago has risen to much loftier heights, thereby making the prospects of current students materially brighter.
I can tell a nice UChicago story about Andrew Abbott. My son and future daughter-in-law both took a seminar with him in fall quarter their fourth year. There were about 10 people in the seminar. It went really well, everyone loved it . . . and Abbott (who is a pretty famous, senior professor) offered to continue meeting weekly with the group for another quarter, giving them assignments and leading discussions through the winter quarter. It wasn’t a course, they weren’t writing papers or getting grades, but I think only one student “dropped out” of the completely voluntary seminar continuation. Abbott got nothing out of it other than the chance to teach some students with whom he already had a relationship a little more. I thought that was very cool, and something it’s hard to imagine happening at other elite universities.
@JHS How great is that ? In contradiction to my experience at Harvard, where you were lucky if a professor agreed to make an appointment with you with less than three weeks notice.
In “contradistinction” …
@marlowe1 Thanks for the official link to the PDF. I’ve only had the UChicago magazine link.
Wow, my experience (and my husband’s, for that matter) was that Harvard faculty were very accessible when we were undergrads. I’m delighted that, years later, our kid is having a similar experience at Chicago.
And, now that I think about it, Princeton faculty were very accessible too. I agree that the Abbott story is a great one and goes way beyond the call of duty, but probably speaks more to the individual than to the institution. And/or it’s not surprising that at elite universities generally you find some faculty who love to talk shop with eager students who share their interests.
In 1980’s I took Western Civ with Prof. Karl Weintraub (another famous professor) as a 4th year. I graduated but stayed in HP for other reasons. A good friend of mine arranged for the two of us to do an off the books reading course with him (on Jacob Burckhardt), meeting weekly. I wasn’t even a registered student at the UC at the time but that was completely irrelevant. My friend is now the President of a well known college and I went off to medical school.
So perhaps this sort of thing happened not uncommonly?
My Abbott story speaks both to the individual and to the institution. The University of Chicago faculty has never particularly considered it their responsibility to get their students into medical school, or law school, or investment banking jobs, but they do consider it their responsibility to help students go as deeply as they can into their academic fields. The students Chicago attracts tend to take the faculty up on that, and the social system of the College validates students wanting to learn more.
To some extent that’s true of every university, and I have plenty of stories about what the faculty at mine did to help me, for no reason other than I was a student who wanted to learn and was willing to work. But I think it’s more mainstream at Chicago, less extraordinary and more part of everyday life.
Professor Weintraub was famous for that sort of thing. In the sixties he regularly conducted an extracurricular seminar one evening a week on one of his favorite subjects - the humanist tradition of historiography. The readings included Burckhardt, Herder, Ranke, Huizinga and others. He was not a light-hearted man, and these seminars, which usually included about 20 or so of us eager beavers, could be somewhat frightening, as he moved from person to person in relentless Socratic questioning. Not to have read the materials and not to have thought about them was a sin that would be found out under that scrutiny. Yet we all felt the intoxication of together closing in on the truth and thinking things no one had ever before thought - an illusion, but a pardonable one. He was childless and had suffered deprivations in the war; he was said to have been in hiding from the Nazis in the Netherlands. Perhaps that background had something to do with his melancholy demeanor and tender ponderousness in the classroom. One felt that he genuinely liked young people but that something else very important was at stake in his interactions with them - perhaps civilization itself, considered as a value requiring our allegiance both as scholars and human beings. I always felt that he exemplified the very quality that he himself found in the great humanists - force of character. R.I.P.
Thanks Marlow1, not your ordinary CC post.
We are now way off the original topic of this thread, but I hope at least students and parents can get an idea what is/was special about Chicago that people think is worth preserving even if it doesn’t produce the lowest possible acceptance rate.