Of course, at one point Chicago was known as the “Harvard of the Midwest.” Also, the people John D. Rockefeller hired to execute his plan for the university, essentially the entire initial administration and faculty, all came from Yale.
My sense of the “Ivyness” of Chicago has little or nothing to do with hyperselectivity in admissions. It has everything to do with the high quality of the faculty across the broad range of traditional subjects, the first-rate graduate students, the concentration of high-intelligence, hard-working students in a relatively small undergraduate student body, the engagement of senior faculty with teaching undergraduates, the commitment to undergraduate liberal arts education with little or no direct employment training, the pervasive atmosphere of intellectualism, the sense of creating, preserving, defending, and revising a canon of civilized thought that strove for universality, a belief that peer interaction matters and was worth fostering, a certain snootiness towards the unenlightened masses, a relatively high percentage of alumni getting graduate degrees, especially PhDs, links to successful and powerful alumni, recognition of a quality brand within the Establishment, the house system . . . .
Not every Ivy has all those qualities. All of them differ from one another, too; they all had independent existences, in most cases for centuries, before anyone decided to link them together in a sports league. Sure, I think it’s true that Harvard has more kids spending more time on ECs and less on classes than Chicago does. (But they are very talented kids, and some of those ECs are really kickass in quality. The educational value of deep commitment there is greater than you could find with any ECs at Chicago.) I also think it’s true that Harvard faculty, on average, are less engaged with undergraduates. But Harvard is probably one end of the Ivy spectrum on those qualities, and even at Harvard there are large numbers of students who do go to every class, focus on academics, are mentored by faculty, and go on to get PhDs. And at Yale, Princeton, Columbia, Cornell, even Dartmouth, you get a lot more academic focus.
When I was an undergraduate at Yale, long ago, I did not remotely believe that Chicago was “a different sort of place, with a different sort of student body and a different educational philosophy,” any more than I believed that about Cornell, Dartmouth, or Penn. (Actually, a good deal less than I believed that about those schools.) At the time, I didn’t actually know anyone who went to Chicago. I had a sense that undergraduates there were not so happy, but I believed that to be true of several Ivies as well. When, later, I met a bunch of Chicago alumni, they were really well educated and like me in lots of ways.
I knew it as a great university with a world-class faculty. I knew that some of the most interesting faculty I encountered had done their graduate work there. I knew that, like Columbia, it had a classic core curriculum and was stuck on the edge of a ghetto, which made both of them a little scary until I actually saw what they were like. It was on my parents’ and my cousins’ very short list of colleges I was allowed to consider, but they didn’t encourage me in that direction.
When my kids went to Chicago, their intellectual experience there was really close to what my wife and I had enjoyed at Yale. We were thrilled that they had the same overwhelming, mind-opening, intense experience we had had. We thought it was superior to Yale in some respects – the pervasiveness of math-oriented thinking, the almost complete absence of anyone who didn’t take classes seriously. (At Yale there was a small minority like that, but it was really small.) The city of Chicago and its riches. We thought Yale was superior in others – the residential college system worked much better than the house system (which didn’t work at all for either of our kids), we liked that Yale had made us feel connected to the corridors of real power in the world, while Chicago was very ivory towerish, Yale in our day had been free of frats, and Chicago wasn’t. But all of that was nuance. They were much more similar than different.
Between marlowe1’s time and then, lots of things had changed about Chicago to bring it even closer to Yale or other Ivies, including four successive presidencies of former Ivy provosts, Dean Boyer’s efforts to improve undergraduate happiness, lots of nurturing of arts ECs, somewhat more emphasis on sports. It seemed more familiar, too – I knew a lot more people who had gone there, in different generations, plus faculty, administrators, and trustees. If, 50 years ago, I hadn’t really known anyone there, now it was definitely in-network.
