In the sixties Mandel Hall functioned as the main venue for visiting speakers and performances at the U of C. There were more mundane uses as well: the weekly lectures in Western Civ, Hum and Soc were given there and it was where the entering class was convened and greeted during Orientation Week. It was also where the Aims of Education address was given (the second annual one in 1963). The U of C Orchestra (whose concert master, Leon Botstein, became the boy-wonder President of Bard College as well as the Principal Conductor of the American Symphony Orchestra) performed there, as well as, on one memorable occasion, the Chicago Symphony itself. Readings and lectures were given during my time by such luminaries as W.H. Auden, Yevgeny Yevtushenko, William F. Buckley, Michael Harrington, Erich Fromm, Leslie Fiedler, Hannah Arendt, Shirley Jackson and Eudora Welty. Allen Ginsberg appeared on stage but simply played his tape recorder (containing spontaneous poems composed on the road in Greyhound buses) and then recited the mystical word Om repeatedly (an interesting contrast with Auden, a mumbler, and Yevtushenko, a shouter).
This sort of thing was still going on in Mandel as late as 1995, when Saul Bellow returned to the University of Chicago to deliver a speech on “Literature in a Democracy” attended by a thousand (though the hall is only supposed to seat eight hundred or so): see Leader, “The Life of Saul Bellow”, vol II, p. 554. Bellow began that talk by reminiscing about his own time as a student coming to events in Mandel Hall at the height of the Depression, which sounds a lot like the way the way the place functioned thirty years later, even as to the “reverse-English” he mastered there (referring to playing pool in the adjacent Reynolds Club). Jokes aside, it was a place in which one felt the weight of tradition.
When I was back at the University two years ago Mandel Hall was locked up (as it never used to be), so I didn’t lay eyes on its interior as I had hoped to do. I wonder, does it still function now as it once did? Does it still have an air of faded splendor? Its walls will have heard many brilliant and probably a few stupid things spoken in it in its many years of existence. I hope that tradition continues.