Patently false, most would agree that it was in 1919 at the University of Cambridge, and the name “Manhattan project” had nothing to do with Columbia being in Manhattan.
You are making quite a debut here, @EliteCulture331 . I am put in mind of the kid gunslinger who comes to town looking to make his reputation by taking down the grizzled survivor of many battles (sorry, @JBStillflying ).
On one point I must insist: It is I, not JB, who discovered, described and named UChicago Derangement Syndrome. I have missed its presence on this board in recent months and had begun to doubt my thesis, which is that it is universally and eternally with us. Thanks for the confirmation.
On one point Elite is on to something in a ham-handed way: @Cue7 does see in those stats some hopeful signs that the College is moving in the direction he wants to see it move. I said there was a whimsical element in his subject line, but I daresay there is also an aspirational one. A reader of this board would also know that that aspiration is controversial and hence that the subject line is also meant to be provocative. Only the solemnly literal-minded could have taken it literally.
It would be nice if Cue reappeared to clarify his gnomic words. He is not reluctant to do that when a serious fight is on.
@marlowe1 - not quite grizzled yet. But only my stylist knows for sure. UCDS might flare up again later in the year once people get their decisions. Maybe the controversy has lessened becasue everyone’s accepted the new normal. UChicago has gone “mainstream” elite. Bleah.
UChicago students and grads are well aware that the general public thinks that it is city college or a state school. But the people that matter do know.
@marlowe1 captured my intent nicely - the title of the post is clearly whimsical (and, admittedly on my part, a little wistful), but the stats I cited are meant to be serious - they describe a college that is clearly on the up and up athletically.
Chicago is certainly not the Stanford of DIII sports (yet?!), but it’s also (surprisingly) certainly not a doormat of the division. That may surprise people if they walk around the university today - there are a fair number of legit, competitive athletes on campus.
I think that’s a good thing, but as @marlowe1 can note, reasonable minds can differ on this point.
Reposting my comment at UCDS thread:
I have said it so many times that I am almost tired of repeating it: U of C is more than just The College. U of C has been well respected for its Business School, Law School and Graduate Division for ages. In my eyes it is far more important to have graduate schools with significant research done than to just have a high ranking undergrad division. The recent rise in ranking of The College amuses me but it is never source of my pride. For my field of finance and economics, it is the work of Lucas, Sargent, Becker, Fama, Scholes and Thaler, et al. that I really admire. For the constant bickering among undergrad ranking, my emotional reaction is: who the heck cares? You will get an excellent education in the T40 as long as it fits you. It is the research atmosphere at U of C that makes it special but also an acquired taste.
I remember a poster said that U of C was nothing but a Duke in cold climate but lacking Coach K. For me I think Scholes (just randomly pulling a name out of the above list of Nobel Laureates) has a far more impact in the real world than a college basketball coach. The multi-trillion dollar derivative industry traces its root from Scholes 1973 JPE seminal paper. Of course, due credit has to be given to Fisher Black (MIT/Goldman) and Robert Merton(MIT) too. Nonetheless, it is this type of research that makes me proud as an U of C alumnus.
I am not saying U of C is necessarily better than HYPSM. I am just saying the emphasis on research makes the WHOLE university a more unique place. And I am really fed up with people looking from a persecutive of high school students and college students. If you are in Choate, Groton or any HYPSM and you think U of C is beneath you, that is your prerogative. But you bet Goldman, Sullivan And Cromwell, and top Math, Physics, Economics departments know and respect the U of C name.
Note that the suddenly reactivated UCDS thread continues to be buried about five pages back. Have contacted the mods about this. It’s a technical glitch, but the techies are on to trying to fix it.
I’m glad the question of @Cue7 's intent has been aired. I read his post as @marlowe1 did.
@EliteCulture331 : Here in the depths of the UChicago subforum, there are essentially two political parties: those who think it’s a Good Thing if UChicago becomes somewhat more like the Ivy League schools or Stanford, and those who believe that would be a Bad Thing. Cue7 is solidly in the first party; he’s probably the most enthusiastic member of that party. Starting this thread was basically poking a stick in the eye of the UChicago Exceptionalists. It didn’t have anything to do with actually comparing Chicago to Stanford or even Williams.
Also: The Yale Bowl holds 70,000 people. The entire undergraduate student body at Yale is about 5,000, although they are in the process of taking it up to around 6,000, and there are another 6,000 or so graduate or professional students. If every Yale undergraduate and graduate student (yeah, right) came to a football game and brought a date who was not a student at Yale, the Yale Bowl would still be empty.
I don’t have up-to-the-minute information, but in the past, at least, there was lots of enthusiasm for Yale football among Yale undergraduates – about the same level of enthusiasm you would have found at Stanford. Which was fairly amazing given how fundamentally inferior Yale football was compared with Stanford.
From the UChicago College official tweet:
https://news.uchicago.edu/story/first-years-find-inspiration-uchicago
Out of the five students profiled here, two of them are athletes. I wonder whether The College is trying to send a message that The College is no longer solely a nerd haven. Intellectual athletes are warmly welcomed too.
These five are way less nerdy than last year’s crew. I’m very worried about the place now.
@JBStillFlying Why? These five are just 5 out of 1814(?). And these are marketing material. Everyone knows about “where fun comes to die”. To change or modify the narrative, The College has to showcase people with more multi-facet talent.
Nah - in the Nondorf era, athletes have gotten more front-page UChicago website press in the past 4 years than maybe the 15 years preceding that, combined.
See here: https://www.uchicago.edu/features/20120924_incoming_students/
and here: https://www.uchicago.edu/features/swimmer_chases_olympic_dreams/
Make no mistake, Chicago pushed the story about naomy grand’pierre (the olympian) HARD. One could easily ask, why would an academically-centered school market an Olympian more than any Rhodes Scholar or Fulbright recipient?
For better or worse, Chicago is pushing athletics more, for sure.
(Interestingly, the two basketball stars featured in the first link are now both investment bankers. If that doesn’t sound like an ivy league-like path - from the hard court to wall street - I don’t know what is!)
@85bears46 - totally agree that there is still a good representation from Nerdville at UChicago but I do worry that the culture will change as more athletes/future I-bankers show up on campus. Not sure UChicago is interested in a bait 'n switch as much as it is killing off “Where Fun Comes to Die”.
@JHS : Yalies can still muster enthusiasm for the Harvard game - see here: https://yaledailynews.com/blog/2018/10/26/yalies-cue-for-hours-hoping-for-tickets-to-the-game/. I think it’s more for the social aspect than anything else, though. A typical game at the Bowl that isn’t against Harvard (or Princeton, if it’s the last home game of the year and the team’s in title contention), might have 10,000 spectators, in a stadium built to house many times that number. Sad!
@JHS - Stanford’s stadium holds about 50,000, and they usually get around 40,000 fans in for a game. BUT their school size is similar to Yale’s (around 16k students, total). How the heck do they fill their stadium for games? Who is attending?
@Cue7 - Area alums and probably fly-ins from LA and elsewhere. It might be like ND - the regional airport in South Bend is packed with private jets on game day.
@JHS 's description of the politics of the Chicago board, together with the trends in the constitution of the student body noted by Cue and others, set me to thinking: Is the administration’s aspiration here to achieve a complete make-over of the culture and traditions of the College (call this “full Princetonization”) or to effect some level of change short of this? No doubt there are top-secret memoranda on the matter not to be revealed until some future history of the University takes the subject up where Boyer left off. However, nobody on this board ever declines to speculate merely because the facts aren’t in as yet. In that spirit…
My belief is that the aspiration is not so radical as that. It is more like an injection of “quantitative easing” of the historical rigor of a Chicago education, meant to cure some of the ills arising therefrom without thereby making Chicago merely into another HYSP. Until almost yesterday Chicago’s undergraduates came from the least wealthy backgrounds of all those attending elite schools. They tended to raise themselves to higher levels but not to the very highest ones, becoming academics or professionals but not tycoons. There is evidence that they valued their educations and were happy at Chicago, but they didn’t acquire anything like the wealth of the grads of other elite schools. There were also at Chicago in those not distant days a fairly large contingent of the more wealthy, but these kids tended to be dissatisfied, having arrived after rejection from prestige schools and being disappointed in Chicago for not having prestige or sports or a social culture like that of their preferred schools. They also didn’t have the same influence or prominence on campus. They emerged as graduates feeling conflicted about the place at best and hating it at worst. Some of them went on to make good money, but they were not big contributors and they didn’t send their kids to the school.
This was the situation that the policies of recent years have sought to ease in the ways often described on this board - expanding the student body, enhancing mainstream student culture, recruiting more mainstream (and richer) kids. No doubt there is debate in the inner sanctums of the administration and board of directors as to how far to take this process. My fond hope is, as with quantitative easing in the economy, the goal is to correct the ur-state of things without thereby repealing it. Perhaps for a time it is necessary to flog the developing ivy-leaguish amenities and culture of the school in order to overcome “fun goes to die” and get a few more genuinely committed rich kids and aspiring plutocrats to make it their choice in the first place and to make their experience a good one when here. Some modest level of recruitment of athletes fits that objective.
Can a line be drawn - and is the administration interested in drawing any such line - between the injection of these elements in some degree and “full Princetonization”? The jury is out on that question, and JHS is certainly right in saying that some of us long for the line to be drawn closer to the bone and some much further out or not at all . It would be interesting if there are stats that would indicate where Chicago is presently drawing the line or where it ultimately intends to draw the line. How many investment bankers per capita does it now produce or is it looking to produce? How many athletes does it wish to recruit? How many kids of wealth?
Perhaps it is not entirely a question of drawing lines. In our more somber era could Chicago’s legendary seriousness and rigor have an appeal in its own right - not just to any athletes and rich kids but to the ones who long for a traditional Chicago-style education? And not all of whom are destined to become investment bankers? And will there not always be children of the working class, the moderately poor and the very poor at Chicago? If Chicago lost all that, some of us would cease to love it.
Agree totally with @marlowe1 on #39
While sharing @JBStillFlying #35 concern, I can imagine a conversation in the Board of Trustee ten to fifteen years ago: “Let’s make The College less nerdy and more practical so that we have a higher profile and better future donors but essentially still preserving the university central creed and tradition.”
I am repeating what @marlowe1 is saying in #39 succinct post. It is obvious to everyone that the Class of 2022 is vastly different from Class of 2002, which was likely quite different from Class of 1982 or Class of 1962. But while there are some degrees of Princetonization to achieve that imaginary conversation in Board of Trustee, we steadfastly hope that the essential intellectual school spirit will stay true at The College.
Not an alum, but I live near Stanford and attend an occasional football game. First, there are a lot of alums in the area. Second, the student body, including a large number of athletes from other sports, really support all sports teams. As an example, you’ll see football players attend men’s and women’s soccer games. Third, opponents like Cal, Oregon, USC and Notre Dame bring large crowds to Stanford stadium. Fourth, the weather is nice.
Perhaps the planning and gradual transition to a more athletic presence is part of the effort to make UChicago available to a wider range of scholar, similar to what they are doing with the Empower Initiative for the low SES applicants. It’s possible to be a brilliant student who also excels at sports. One of the two athletes featured in the link is pursuing badmiton which seems very harmless. Neither seems likely to bump UChicago up to Stanford’s level of athletic prowess. However, it appears that three of these kids want to major in economics! That’s WAY too lopsided (realizing that they are hand-picked for promotion, of course). Hopefully there is a theoretician or two among them. UChicago Bus. has sent scores of smart I-bankers to Wall Street because the university’s strength in finance and economics is definitely “D1” caliber. But too many in one major isn’t a good thing.
By the way, perhaps those afflicted with UCDS can serve as a type of metric. As long as these types continue to pop into the UChicago threads declaring that we will NEVER be like Harvard, Stanford or Princeton, not in academics, not in athletics, not in nothin’, we are safe from any sort of “Princetonization” damaging the school’s intellectual spirit.