Some interesting stats

Colleges and Universities A-Z University of Chicago ✅
101

The issue is not “greatness” - it’s whether, to generalize on points that Pinker has made, “the ghost of Oliver Barrett IV” still haunting every segment of the pipeline for not-a-few Ivies has created disparities and inequities that don’t exist at UChicago (or exist in more minute amounts).

Pinker has made some pretty scathing points about his employer Harvard, an institution with which he’s very familiar. Here’s a sampling of his observations:

  1. 5 - 10% of the undergrad class is selected on the basis of academic merit.
  2. "Too many" smart people means too many zombies, sheep and one-dimensional dweebs;
  3. New profs are told that Harvard “wants to train the future leaders of the world, not the future academics of the world.”
  4. "Holistic" admissions continues to hide discrimination against certain ethnic groups (Before - it was Jews. Now - it's Asians).
  5. Harvard undergrads skip class NOT because they are lazy but because they crazy-busy with OTHER stuff - "sports, dance, improv comedy, and music, music, music (many students perform in more than one ensemble)".
  6. Graduates get snapped up by consulting firms and equivalent because the Ivy degree is a "certification" of intelligence and discipline. In other words, an Ivy league education is a signal you are smart and capable, not a learning experience in and of itself.

These are astounding indictments when you consider, as Pinker has pointed out, that undergrads are entering an institution that is “single-mindedly and expensively dedicated to the pursuit of knowledge”.

Again - does anyone believe that anyone would characterize UChicago this way?

Some posters - particularly those experienced with the College in the “olden days” - have argued convincingly for the benefits of the College moving away from a “grad-school” feel. But UChicago is NOT what academic rock-star Pinker has described Harvard - and by extension most of the Ivies - to be.

To the point of this thread: How can such an anti-intellectual environment possibly contribute to a student culture in which economic disparities are overlooked and smart and talented kids meet and blend in with different smart and talented kids? Many of those sports and music ensembles sucking up everyone’s time happen to cost a lot of money so are bound to reinforce groupings - and all the requisite camraderie, teamwork, and sense of accomplishment - within similar SES. I have a young relative who is Exhibit A: a top national athlete, she’ll be joining an Ivy this fall to play sports. She’ll be spending a TON of her time on this endeavor and consequently with her teammates, some of whom she undoubtedly already knows. All will have very similar backgrounds and SES status, since there are no athletic scholarships in the Ivy League and all those parents have poured serious money into their children’s athletic development. Will she even have an opportunity to befriend the “smart-and-poor” Jenny Cavilleri types? - first-gen, brilliant kids who undoubtedly also “haunt” the campus? Or will the latter have to make do with debate team,Crimson staff and perhaps hanging out with the other 5% of the class chosen primarily for their brains and who probably DON’T skip class? Not that they won’t make other friends - it’s just that there might be up to 95% of the student body with which they have little-to-nothing in common.

102

BTW, here is the Pinker article - he was answering another writer’s complaint about the Ivy’s. Most here have probably already read this but it’s worth posting nonetheless since he covers points related to this thread:

https://newrepublic.com/article/119321/harvard-ivy-league-should-judge-students-standardized-tests

103
  1. We haven't been discussing anything Pinker wrote in this thread so far. He's got dozens of points, and almost every single one of his points is subject to legitimate dispute. In any event, they have zippo to do with how marriage rates differ between rich and poor students.
  2. Much of what Pinker wrote in that article is, I think, more or less unique to Harvard, and not generalizable to every elite institution other than Chicago (although I would agree that Chicago is the elite institution that least resembles the Harvard Pinker describes).
  3. From the standpoint of University of Chicago values and argument, isn't it fair to ask: If Harvard as an educational institution is as inadequate as Pinker suggests, and by implication the University of Chicago so the opposite, then why haven't the employers and graduate programs of the world who depend on high-octane human capital abandoned Harvard and its ilk in favor of Chicago? What keeps them hiring/admitting Harvard graduates at no worse than (and probably a good deal better than) the rate at which they hire/admit Chicago graduates? Could it be that Harvard is not as inadequate as all that? Or that Chicago's different approach does not clearly produce superior outcomes? If Harvard only admits 5% of its class on academic merit, and then fails to educate anyone further for four years, why don't Chicago alumni just blow Harvard alumni out of the water in the marketplace? After all, the Chicago alumni were more likely to have been chosen for their academic chops, at the point of college admission had objective indicators of academic quality that were comparable to Harvard students, and received what everyone believes to be four years of high-quality, high-intensity higher education. If all that stuff is true, why doesn't it show up in the market?

Certainly, to date, Harvard’s post-war approach has been far more successful for Harvard than Chicago’s has been for Chicago. Harvard has, at least, one of the world’s strongest higher education brands; Chicago’s is quite good, but not quite in the same league. Harvard has become the wealthiest private nonprofit in the history of the world, besides the Catholic Church, based largely on giving by its alumni; Chicago has an elite-level endowment that is a fraction of Harvard’s, and it constantly struggles to keep up with the Ivy Joneses. Chicago is forced to rely on non-alumni for a surprising percentage of major gifts.

Where is the objective evidence for the superiority of Chicago’s approach? Or, put differently, where is the objective evidence that Chicago and Harvard have approaches as different as many of us believe?

104

@JHS - you seem to think - based on your point #3, that Pinker’s thoughts might have more than “zippo” to do with the original point of this thread. But no matter. I connected the dots to some extent in my last paragraph of post #100. Do you agree or disagree with what I said? I’ll summarize: when as much as 95% of the undergraduate class is selected on factors other than academic merit, there might be a lot more cliquishness among them and SES is going to be a big factor in that. Why that specifically means that the highest SES marries more than the lowest was answered by the NYT article: the latter is still left out of the cliques.

Now, to answer your point #3: First of all, Harvard is NOT “inadequate” nor does Pinker suggest it is. Harvard, to be precise, is an academic powerhouse that rightly surpasses UChicago. It has more money, more top libraries and more academic rock-stars than does UChicago. The latter competes in most departments and surpasses in some, but in general when you are ranked the #1 research institution in the world there’s no room for improvement. Pinker is lamenting the strong dichotomy between the undergrad. program and the rest of the university. Clearly there’s an inconsistency and one that - to continue to beat that horse - isn’t really mentioned as existing at UChicago. In fact, quite the opposite as the College as been accused of RESEMBLING - not deviating from - a top grad program.

Second, there’s a very simple set of answers as to why Harvard College graduates could expect - at least up to most recently - a higher overall permanent income than a UChicago grad. Pinker himself got the answer when he asked a related question and my post #100 touches on this: A) they train “leaders”, not “academics”; B) The Ivy “Stamp” is a signal of a prestige good, not an indication of superior academic training or experience; C) The Ivies have a long history of influence and “panache” in top industry, finance, govt, etc. including scores of alums who help recruit those smart young go-getters fresh from the Ivy League; D) your keister is covered if you hire one, similar to how no one used to get fired for buying IBM. UChicago had nowhere near this reputation or cache among the (regenerating) power elite. It took in nerdy types using academic merit as a primary criteria and educated them in the liberal manner approved by Pinker in his article. The outcome is great, but it isn’t quite the same as taking in the talented and beautiful who - 4 years later - will still be talented and beautiful.

Lastly, no one thinks that Ivy League kids are “rich and stupid” (sorry for the continued reference to Oliver Barrett who, by the way, wasn’t the latter). Pinker certainly doesn’t as he pointed out a study showing how academic standards have risen for these schools over the decades. My young relative is very bright - as is her parent (who is also an alum of that school). But she hyper-specialized in athletics, not the physics lab, because she’s much better at the former than the latter. She’s a great example of what these moneyed academic powerhouses are doing a bit differently from Uchicago - at least historically. And that’s running an experiment with the undergraduate program. They recruit “the best” - but “the best” doesn’t necessarily mean “the best academically”. That’s hardly news. As my dear sibling said upon his first visit home from an Ivy League: “if you are the best break dancer out there, you can get in.” Again, do we know anyone who would say that about UChicago?

105

@JHS - btw, I don’t disagree with your point #2 - there ARE differences among the very elite:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9w-DuepzjxI

106

@JHS - upthread, you said that it’s possible Chicago students are less wealthy now than they were in 2002-2006. Why on earth would that be the case? When looking at the Ivy Plus cohort for roughly that time period, the median family income for a Chicago student was about $135k. Compare that with a median of about $200k for Yale, Brown, etc.

Zoom forward ten years, why would that median dip any lower for Chicago? If anything, with ED, even more focus on prep schools, higher rankings, and an eye toward the bottom line, shouldn’t wealth have increased on campus?

Put another way, wouldn’t there be more inequity present today - e.g. more students from the top 1% (or so), and more students from the bottom 20% (or so), but LESS in between? The students most squeezed here are the ones that come from the middle class. Chicago is actively targeting low SES kids, but probably, through its various policies, coveting high SES kids too.

What do you think the median family income looks like today? Do you really think it’s dipped below the $135k mark from years ago? My guess is that the median has gone up (probably closer to Yale’s level - maybe $180-190k?), and that there is MORE inequity now - more people coming from HIGH and LOW SES backgrounds, and fewer in the middle.

(And there are more who hail from the top 1% now than before. The #3 USNWR rank alone should bring more wealthy students in.)

107

The discussion has somewhat veered off iinto fields we have often debated on this board - whether the Chicago model of old is sustainable, whether it attracted the right kind of kids and whether it delivered those kids sufficiently numerously into the arms of wealth. The inevitable invidious comparison to Harvard (both College and grad school) has again surfaced, with Chicago found wanting when placed in the balance with Harvard in all its power and wealth. It’s an interesting debate, but tangential to my interest in starting this thread. Let’s admit the supremacy of Harvard and be done with it. Let 's admit (though I do this more grudgingly) that Chicago did need to go somewhat more mainstream for sustainability reasons. The single point I ask the proponents of the Harvard undergrad model to acknowledge is that Chicago did - and I believe still does - a better job of creating a cohesive student body based on the general commitment of all the social quintiles to the pursuit of knowledge without Pinkerian trappings and distractions. It remains hard for me to believe, despite the testimony of @JHS , that the poor bookish kid at Yale or Harvard or Priceton will generally be as fulfilled or happy as the same kid at Chicago. Does anyone here other than JHS dissent from that proposition, whatever you think the statistics above are saying?

108

I’m not certain I said exactly that, but it seems like a low hurdle to cross. “Fulfilled” and “happy” are not words one often hears associated with the undergraduate experience of students of any income level at the University of Chicago of our collective youth. It’s quite possible that in generations past the “bookish poor” could have been miserable at Yale or Harvard or Princeton and still equaled or surpassed their Chicago equivalents in terms of fulfillment and happiness. I thought @marlowe1 was touting Chicago’s relative equality between rich and poor, not its absolute superiority for the poor. But now I understand that he was focusing not so much on the similarity of young marriage rates for rich and poor students as on the high young marriage rate for poor Chicago students relative to other, similar institutions.

Hmm. Maybe. In any event, I was talking about the Yale of the past, which will not exactly be the Yale of the present. As for the Yale of the past, however, the relatively less affluent people who were most bothered by all the wealth and privilege on display were not at all the “bookish” poor. The bookish poor were happy as clams amidst the stacks of books, freely conversing with the bookish rich about topics of mutual interest. It was the non-bookish poor – people who wanted to be activists, those consumed by ambition – who were more likely to feel alienated and frustrated. I suspect whatever Yale is like today, that won’t have changed much. Bookish anybodies are not know for being socially exclusive, or for caring whether they were invited to parties they didn’t rant to attend.

Speaking of Pinker and his “ghost of Oliver Barrett IV” that apparently still haunts Harvard, I’m not exactly clear on how, what about the ghost of Jennifer Cavilleri? Does anyone think she was unfulfilled and unhappy at Radcliffe, even in the bad old days? Didn’t Harvard turn out to be a pretty good deal for her (apart from dying young of the sort of Victorian illness that makes one more beautiful with each fading breath)?

109

^^If one connects the dots between marriage rates and happiness, then the NYT Marriage Gap data suggest that the poor at UChicago were happier and more fulfilled than the poor at HYP, and the opposite for the rich. That would hardly be a shocker if the school selects primarily on Brains then beats the hell out of everyone with the curriculum. It would also suggest that poor and rich alike are either more bookish, or more gluttons for punishment.

At the risk of going off on yet another tangent, @JHS’s post opens up an interesting thought experiment: does money make you more happy? Studies on this question in the past have said that the answer, beyond a basic, “needs-satisfying” level, is “No”. So not sure we can even use income and marriage data to measure “happiness and fulfillment” as much as we can use it just to understand the type of student who attends each of these places and, perhaps from that, what the admissions criteria happen to be.

A more relevant (to this thread) study would be what a thorough exploration of the NYT College Mobility data reveals for UChicago vs. the other top elites. This is far more recent than the other data set as well.

https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/projects/college-mobility/university-of-chicago

UChicago is #12 - out of 12 - top elite schools in terms of median family income. They are also #12 - out of 12 - in terms of percentage in highest quintile. They are #2 - out of 12 - in terms of lowest quintile (surpassed by MIT). If one computes the % in the middle-income cohorts - so quintiles #2 - #4 - they are, unsurprisingly, the most “middle class” among the bunch - by several points.

As for the top 1%, UChicago is near the bottom but has more super-wealthy than MIT. Harvard, Princeton, and Yale (three that have been mentioned on this thread) are, in turn, have moderately to significantly more super-wealthy than UChicago. Yale actually surpasses Princeton here. Dartmouth and Brown win the prize with approximately 20% of their families in the 1%.

UChicago is also ranked #12 in terms of median income by age 34, and the chance that a poor student has to become a rich adult (defined as likelihood of moving from last quintile as a student to the first quintile as an adult). Harvard and Yale are right behind the middle of the pack, and Princeton is near the top.

Now for marriage rates (by 2014): UChicago is #12 out of 12 in terms of rates of marriage - among the lowest in the nation.

However, for overall “mobility” - defined to be the likelihood of moving up two or more quintiles - it’s #3 (behind MIT and Cornell). Interestingly, Harvard is #7, Yale #10, and Princeton dead last at #12.

Not sure how much of this measures happiness or fulfillment. But it does seem to be a more recent confirmation of that theorized cultural influence that a school might bestow on a student and thus level the playing field a bit - or perhaps they just are pretty good at selecting kids who are open to that influence in the first place. In sum, it seems that a critical mass at UChicago eschew making loads of money and are far too busy working to get married. Are they working so hard because they just aren’t making enough money otherwise? Or do they just like to work? Perhaps the answer would unlock that “happiness” question earlier - although I suspect that what makes UChicago students happy might be a tad different those at all these other schools. The student body, when you look at these numbers, just seem different. Finally, but not unrelatedly - the very poor don’t become the very rich but they do land comfortably in the middle class - which is pretty much where a whole lot of kids who attend UChicago in the first place actually come from.

110

@JHS - Cavalleri had no friends. Barrett did, of course, and they included other rich Harvard guys but also scholarship kids, including Tommy Lee Jones (seriously). Anyway, are you suggesting that, if you are poor, then as long as you marry someone whose family had donated a building to the school, you’ll be happy? Because, remember, his parents cut them off. They lived in poverty for about 3 years, then she died. Not sure her piddly pre-school teaching job was “Radcliffe-worthy” either. However, I suspect that she was in general a happier person than Ollie - he seemed so emo. And her choices were her own.

111

I have sympathy with marlowe1’s concern over the fate of “poor bookish kids” at Harvard. I am heartened by his point that the poor and rich at Chicago are “essentially undifferentiated in a measure regarded as a proxy for social well being.” It rings true. I grew up in a near-South Side working class suburb of Chicago. UChicago was 4 years of continuous intellectual growth and exploration for me and put me on a very good trajectory for life.

When the subject of kids from modest backgrounds feeling out of place at Harvard comes up, I think of an individual who was the brother of a high school friend of mine who was my partner on debate team. He is also the brother-in-law of another high school friend. A faculty member from Harvard who wrote about this case has speculated about whether his time at Harvard may have contributed to his terrible life course. I have long wondered whether feeling out of place at Harvard could have had anything to do with his tragedy. Of course, I am referring to Theodore Kaczynski.

112

^^Wow.

Perhaps Pinker’s colleague had the same thought. From his article:

‘At an orientation session for new faculty, we were told that Harvard “wants to train the future leaders of the world, not the future academics of the world,” and that “We want to read about our student in Newsweek 20 years hence” (prompting the woman next to me to mutter, “Like the Unabomber”).’

113

Thanks, @JBStillFlying . That set of NYT tables is great stuff. Unfortunately, it cuts off just at the point that Nondorf enters the picture, so its relevance to the University of Chicago of today is somewhat unclear. That flat line showing percentage of bottom-income-quintile students should have perked up noticeably starting with kids born in 1991, thanks to the Odyssey Scholarships. Or at least I’d like to believe that was the case.

As for marriage rate: I am going to go out on a limb and say that for people who are under no compulsion to marry, marriage is both, on the whole, a signifier and a producer of happiness.

Re Jennifer Cavilleri: She seemed to enjoy her life plenty. She had a great relationship with her father, and she was certainly not waiting around for a rich guy to show up, much less hunting for one or getting upset that she and the rich kids weren’t hanging out together. She loved her college, loved her education, loved her life. She was going to get to go to Paris to study with Nadia Boulanger, or something like that. Pretty cool. She had agency. She had a sharp wit to deflate preppies, mainly male preppies, but I don’t remember her whining about how terrible it was to be a poor kid at Radcliffe. It certainly wasn’t her helplessness or any forlorn quality that attracted Ollie Barrett to her.

114

I’m fairly certain the “poor bookish kids” at Harvard neither want nor need anyone’s concern.

Years ago I was one of those “poor bookish kids,” the first in my family to attend college and a Pell Grant recipient. I hesitantly turned down Chicago, my top choice, for financial reasons (this was in the days before Chicago improved its aid with the Odyssey program) and attended a college ranked a lowly #9 in the NYT social mobility ranking. I had a great time in college - double majored in the sciences and humanities, studied abroad in multiple countries, wrote a senior thesis I presented at a conference, and was involved in student groups ranging from LGBT activism to marching band. Virtually all of my classes had fewer than 15 students, and with few exceptions professors were genuinely invested in student learning and development. I was accepted to all of the PhD programs I applied, Chicago included. Not everyone at my alma mater had the same positive experience, but I have no regrets, and I never felt disadvantaged or out of place due to my family’s income.

Chicago is a great school, and it has done a very good job of marketing itself so that more people now know that, but it does not have a monopoly on the Life of the Mind, nor are students there nearly as different from those of other top private universities as is often supposed.

115

@JHS - we gotta get the data where we can. No doubt the NYT will update both sets of data (marriage gap and social mobility) as time marches on. Thinking that Nondorf didn’t quite change the entire character of the College beginning in 2009. At least the Post-Nondorf kids we know seem to be about the same fit as the Pre-Nondorf kids. Time will tell.

@warblersrule you have a particularly relevant perspective! Clearly you are not one of those low SES who might have felt excluded and left out of the social scene at the Ivies. Apologize if you posted this already on this thread but what is your accounting for the marriage gap at these schools - or lack thereof at UChicago? Do you agree with the NYT conclusions that it signals a lack of integration with the important social circles?

116

To comment first on the overall marriage rates, neither I nor many of my friends are represented in this data since same-sex marriage across the US has been legal for less than three years. At universities with high percentages of queer students - about 20% of Yale students identify as LGB, questioning, or asexual - this will have an impact on marriage rates, however small. Looking at another type of diversity, longitudinal studies have found that marriage rates are significantly higher among white men and women than black men and women; note that Howard’s overall marriage rate is rather low at 25%. Career goals play a role too; a student still stuck in a PhD program in his 30s is less likely to be married than someone who finished law school in his mid-20s.

To address your question more directly, I think participation in Greek life has a lot to do with relative marriage rates between low and high income students, as the article discusses using Princeton as an example. Fraternities and sororities have disproportionate percentages of white and wealthy students, many of them legacies. At my undergrad, students in frats and sororities were more likely to get married directly or soon after college, which I suspect is a trend you’ll find most places.

That is not to say that students in Greek life and independents never mingle, though, or to say that you’ll necessarily feel left out if you don’t join a Greek organization. I never had the slightest desire to join a frat, but I lived downstairs from one and became rather good friends with guys in that frat and others. Students in Greek life participate in many other activities - from theatre to religious groups to intramural sports to debate - and interact with a wide range of students both inside and outside of the classroom.

It undoubtedly helped a lot that all events on campus were free for students, and the cost of living in the surrounding town was so low that even low income students could afford to go out for dinner or drinks with friends.

117

@JHS - couldn’t agree more about your characterization of Cavilleri! The contrast to her husband was very interesting. She was the one who clearly loved appreciated the opportunities that this elite education afforded them both. However, she was also taking grad school courses so her exposure to other scholars might have been more frequent (or her major which was music, might have attracted a more serious student). Ollie was checking out the book the night before the test.

118

Very interesting and illuminating posts here. It is pretty clearly the case that Chicago was once and probably still is a place where (a) there was a much higher proportion of what I have been calling “the bookish poor”, and (b) the bookishness of all SES classes was much more pronounced in the culture of the place. There’s a connection between these two apparently distinct assertions. Because bookishness ruled and was the master-spirit of all, the poor and the rich had little to differentiate them. Why is it surprising that the poor liked that about the place and flourished there?

I am hardly suggesting that this is the only measure of what might count as success for an undergraduate institution. By all means, let Harvard by Harvard, Yale Yale, and so on, places where bookishness has a place of honor - sometimes and with some groups. Why is there such anxiety around the issue of Chicago’s having been an especially good place for poor kids? Not merely anxiety but denial, this in the face of the experience of many on the board (some of whom liked that experience, others who did not) and now these sets of confirmational statistics as to marriage rates and the data summarized by @JBStillFlying as to general SES make-up of the student body and outcomes for it after graduation. Chicago is an outlier. Stop fighting it, @JHS ! Or else pin your hopes on the prognostications of @Cue7 , that this bad old dream of a homogeneous Chicago culture based on seriousness about studies above all else has come to an end with the advent of Nondorf and all the rest of it.

I am not suggesting that this class of students about which I am so tender would become whiners and misfits if they found themselves at Harvard. I merely say that Chicago would be their special paradise considering (a) and (b) above without becoming any more granular than that. Why would it be otherwise? Sure, a kid like that would find like-minded friends, both rich and poor, at almost any other institution. But why not go where the hunting grounds are so much richer? Apart from the greater likelihood of finding there one’s own small group of kindred spirits or even one’s single such spirit, one will be in a place where almost everyone is somewhat of a kindred spirit. Therein lies happiness. That’s Human Nature 101, and Chicago with all its eccentricities has not repealed human nature.

Incidentally, the misery sometimes associated with the Chicago of yore was, I believe, highly tendentious and exaggerated. In part it is merely a description in hostile terms of this culture of serious study, especially as working-class kids brought their working-class values to that study but also as the higher SES kids sought a place for being serious outside the mainstream of consumerism and shallowness that characterized and characterizes much of American life. Now, if you happen to be a kid, usually a higher SES kid, who hasn’t drunk that particular Kool-Aid, you are made unhappy by it and you never tire of telling of how it was such a strange hell-hole of a place. These kids always make the most noise and are most listened to, not only by the administrators of the day but by historians trying to describe the place years later. I ought to write my own memoir and set everyone straight!

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@marlowe1 I’m exactly with @warblersrule . I get tired of the sort of Chicago exceptionalism and tendentiousness that isn’t content with Chicago merely being one of the great universities of the planet, and recognized as such by anyone who matters (i.e., me and people I know). Why denigrate and even demonize Chicago’s somewhat more popular peers? As if their success and popularity somehow diminished the University of Chicago. It doesn’t. The University of Chicago is an absolutely terrific institution with a special, somewhat unique culture that I love. It just doesn’t own the patent on Life of the Mind or Intellect. Big deal.

None of the people my own age I know who went to Chicago as undergraduates would have qualified as poor or rich, bookish or not. My window into the gap between Chicago of the 70s and Chicago of the Oughts comes from a sibling pair of cousins who went there in the mid-late 90s. They, too, were far from poor, and just about as far from rich. They grew up in a small college town in the upper Midwest. Their parents were an English professor and a nurse. The older one was a socially awkward, sardonic physics major (and later math PhD) who did a lot of running and rock climbing. In other words, a Chicago stereotype. His younger sister was conventionally pretty and outgoing, and vacillated between wanting a career in politics or one in country music. (She tried both, and had more success in politics.) Both loved their educations at Chicago and pretty much hated every other thing about it. Their advice to my kids – never followed – was to join a fraternity or sorority as soon as possible in order to have some people to talk to, because otherwise it was just cold, and lonely, and mean.

Neither was married by age 34. The brother never even had a serious girlfriend until his 30s. He had to get rich before women would take it upon themselves to do all the work in the relationship, because he was never going to do any of it. The sister was involved with her husband by that time, and may even have already adopted his young child already (the mother had died when her baby was 6 mo, old), but she refused to get married until same-sex marriage became legal in her state.

120

In these discussions someone is always saying about Chicago that “it doesn’t own the patent on the Life of the Mind” - as if that was anything any of us Chicago Exceptionalists were actually asserting. To say it once again: Undergraduate student life at Chicago was once (and I think to a considerable degree still is) more focussed on serious study than is that of its peers. You could put it unkindly and say that its student culture is one-dimensional. Chicago critics have no reluctance in putting it that way and in pointing out all the things lacking in Chicago student life - sports, social life, extracurriculars - fun, let’s say. If it lacks all those things, something else must be filling the void. Is it so hard to admit that that thing could be, horrors, life of the mind? Somehow it gets people very huffy to think there could be a school out there staking a claim to such a thing. Yet those same people will turn on a dime and propound a caricatured version of Chicago students as dweebs, nerds or grinds. Somehow it’s a school that drives its critics (JHS is hardly one of them) to cognitive dissonance. One of the things I like about it.