Hello,
Forgive me if there were resources on this. I could not find them.
I have often heard that UofC college faced a LOT of problems during the aforementioned era. But I am curious to know the reasons for this.
Thanks, and sorry for my rather bizarre question.
@latichever
Thank you for the link, it was very informative.
However, The article doesn’t give a good explanation of the causes leading to this sit in. It also states that the students were extremely miserable, but does not state a reason other than “alienation”.
It would be helpful if an alum could share his/her personal experience.
It was 1969! There were similar protests at virtually every American campus in that era. Vietnam and the draft were the biggest reasons as well as the demands for “relevance”.
@TomSrOfBoston
Thank you for your answer.
I am an international, so please forgive my lack of info about that era.
It seems that UofC tried to facilitate drafting, which is, in my opinion, absurd. Why would a private university want its students to be drafted? Until just know, I did not know that students are not exempt from mandatory war-time conscription in the US.
So these are the external reasons. Were there any particular internal reasons? and what do you mean by “relevance”?
No, back then college students were exempt from the draft but upon graduating men could be drafted.
This book was published a couple of months ago: http://www.amazon.com/The-University-Chicago-A-History/dp/022624251X
Its author, John Boyer, is a historian who has been Dean of the College at the University of Chicago during the administrations of the last four university presidents – I can’t tell you how unusual that is – and is probably the single person most responsible for the improvement of the College over the past three or four decades. For 20+ years, he has been writing and publishing occasional papers on the history of the University of Chicago, which I assume form the core of his book, and which also served as support and explanation for the direction he and others (including current President Zimmer) thought the university should take. It will have a lot of analysis of the difficulties the College went through in the 50s through 70s, since most of his career as an administrator has been spent reacting to them. (Note: It had little or nothing to do with the 60s protests that pretty much affected every campus. According to Boyer, the problems were rooted in decisions made by iconic President Robert Maynard Hutchinson in the 30s and 40s, as well as the economic decline and racial tensions in Chicago’s South Side in the 60s and 70s.
It used to be that you could find many or all of Boyer’s papers online. It seems to be difficult now; presumably with the publication of the book he has taken care to limit free access to what essentially constitute its chapters.
@JHS
Thank you, though Amazon is not available in my country. I will try to find Boyer’s papers.
- It's published by the University of Chicago Press. I would be awfully surprised if they had no distribution channel in Iran. Some academic library there may already have it.
- Here's an inexpensive idea: E-mail Admissions, tell them what you are interested in (and that you are or intend to be an applicant), and ask if they could send you a reprint or two of Boyer's papers on that period in the history of the College and the University (or maybe e-mail a .pdf). There used to be boxes and boxes of reprints lying around the campus to be sold for a couple of bucks or (more usually) given away. Maybe they'll say they can't, but my bet is that they can, and will.
- Erratum on my post #6: Robert M. Hutchins, not Hutchinson. Brain freeze. Sorry.
@JHS
Thank you for your response.
1- It might be available in some University Libraries, possibly in Tehran, but I was unable to find information about that particular book.
I looked online, and there were very few mentions of UofC in Persian webpages. I also couldn’t find anything about UofC press distribution channels in Iran. Also, almost all the Iranian pages that mentioned UofC were about the Persian Antique crisis, so I think that the University of Chicago is not liked by those Iranians who know about it. (I have never met a person who does know about it. Unlike many Asians, Iranians know next to nothing about US universities.)
2- That is an interesting idea. I will do that right know.
3- No problem, my web search corrected that right off the bat.
Thanks again, JHS.
BTW, in some post, you said that you and the others who graduated during that period are highly ambivalent about your time there. May I ask why? I am quite surprised, since some of UofC’s most iconic alums graduated during the mid 20th century.
I didn’t graduate from the University of Chicago. My children, a niece, a nephew, and several friends did. I know a bunch of people who got JDs, MBAs, and PhDs there, too.
People in my generation or slightly younger (say, people now over 40) who got their undergraduate degrees from Chicago tend to be very proud of the education they got, but to remember their college years as hard and unpleasant. They think the faculty made it unnecessarily difficult, and the administration was basically hostile to undergraduates. There was little or no support for extracurricular activities, or anything that wasn’t coursework, and so Chicago never developed strong, student-run institutions (newspapers, magazines, theater, music). Admissions was focused on intellectual ability to the exclusion of other qualities, and the reputation for being unpleasant made it hard to compete for the best students with other top universities. As a result, there were fewer leaders to build undergraduate activities than at similar colleges, and a larger proportion of students were people who were very smart but socially inept. (Every top college has such students, but Chicago may have had more than its share.) Undergraduates were far outnumbered by graduate students and may sometimes have been treated as afterthoughts, or at best incompetent junior grad students.
The dorms were antiquated and uncomfortable. Relations between the university and the surrounding community tended to be bad, and were getting worse; the surrounding area was run down and increasingly dangerous. That wasn’t unique to Chicago. It was something that affected many urban universities in the 60s-80s, to a greater or lesser extent, unless they were lucky enough to be in really affluent areas (or they were Harvard or Yale). People tended to think the ideal college was in a small town in the countryside. For example, when I was in high school in the mid-70s, Dartmouth and Cornell, and Amherst and Williams for that matter, were seen as much more desirable than Columbia, Penn, or Brown – basically the opposite of recent fashion.
Where I went to college (Yale), basically 99% of the students loved it all of the time, and felt very committed to supporting the institution. My friends at Chicago thought their academic training was better than mine, but in many cases they never wanted to set foot on the Chicago campus again and felt hostile to the institution. Many told their children not to apply there. (Only one of my Chicago friends had children who even applied to Chicago. Nearly 100% of the children of my Yale friends applied to Yale.)
That situation has really changed over the past couple of decades. Chicago is a very different place for undergraduates, and increasingly the older alumni understand that.
@JHS that was very informative, Thank you for the time you spent.
I am hoping that the office is forthcoming with the papers…
@Soheils, Admissions may not get to you for a few days. Campus was closed today, but should re-open tomorrow.
https://news.uchicago.edu/article/2015/11/30/update-campus-threat
Good luck obtaining the information you seek.
I will push back against some of what is being said about the 60’s-era University of Chicago. I was there both as an undergrad and for one year of grad school. In the College we very much prided ourselves on being unlike the students at the ivies, not to mention the big state universities. We thought of these other schools as frivolous places, where privilege and money created an unreal half-life and where the stupidity of high school just went on indefinitely. The U. of C. was different; it was a serious place, an adult place. The austerity was bracing. Everybody seemed to be trying to figure out what life was all about. Even the proximity of the south side slums was invigorating and served to broaden and deepen and make more serious our academic studies. We imagined ourselves as intellectual and social adventurers, and we liked the hardness and uncompromisingness of our studies. That brought its own form of camaraderie. We called it “boot camp”. Most 18-year-olds would hate this, but that is partly the reason we loved it. We were snobs of a sort, and, like all youngsters, we exaggerated the differences between ourselves and everyone else. Yet the point I’m making is not that we weren’t somewhat silly and pretentious and given to myth-making. I just want to debunk the idea that the University drew students in spite of, not because of, its rebarbativeness and unwillingness to coddle its students. I see nothing inconsistent in our enthusiastically embracing that atmosphere and the fact that so few of our own children seemed later to want to do so. The choice of the U. of C. has always been very idiosyncratic and individually determined. It’s a special taste that can’t be passed on. The ivies with their prestige have an allure that can be passed on. A place like Chicago is - or used to be - a secret, one which shouldn’t be spread about too widely lest it lose its potency. As St. Mark says, the gospel is not intended for the people who can’t understand it.
@marlowe1 's personal testimony and my much looser rumormongering are actually pretty consistent. I was avoiding using the “boot camp” metaphor, because I wasn’t sure @Soheils would understand it, but you hear that all the time from old Chicago alums. I think there is probably a difference between the 60s and the 70s and 80s, when the sense of social purpose described above may have been less common, and there was less interest in engaging in a sort of S/M relationship with your teachers. For lots of the people I know, but not necessarily all of them, it was not a matter of children choosing to forgo a difficult experience that their parents “enthusiastically embraced.” It was the parents telling their children not to apply even though it was the best education in the world.
In any event, for better or worse, I don’t think the following reasonably applies any longer:
That passage eloquently describes an attitude that once characterized the University of Chicago, but which it has more or less systematically abandoned over the past two decades or so. The fact of the matter is that the closely-kept secret college @marlowe1 describes was consistently losing the Darwinian battle of economic survival to the colleges with more allure. And it wasn’t at all hard for Chicago with its superior faculty, beautiful campus, great location, significant endowment, and unique culture of intellectual inquiry and respect to acquire some allure of its own. So . . . it’s still more serious and more academic than its peers, but my kids’ recent college experience in Hyde Park was an awful lot like mine in New Haven, in a good way.
I want to add that the story of any institution as complex as a great university cannot possibly be as simple as I have been telling it. There are lots of nooks and crannies, ups and downs, ins and outs that don’t get captured in anyone’s summary narrative. Anyone who’s interested should read Boyer.
Also: It’s hardly a coincidence that the last four Chicago presidents, covering 37 years, have been hired away from Ivy League posts (at Yale, Princeton, Cornell, and Brown), something that was very much not the case with their four predecessors. The current, very successful president, combines 20+ years as a Chicago faculty member with a stint as the provost at Brown, which turns out to be a great mix of experience. The current, very successful admissions dean is a Whiffenpoof and a member of Skull & Bones.
YAY!: See https://college.uchicago.edu/about/publications for Boyer’s papers through 2012.
@JHS thank you for the articles. I am Downloading them now.
@marlowe1 thank you for recounting you experience. I can honestly say that the picture you paint does appeal to me, at least to some degree.
@JHS What a treasure chest of excellent material!! Thanks for the link!