Welcome Class of 2009
Ted O’Neil
Dean of Admissions
The University of Chicago</p>
<p>Welcome, Class of 2009, and transfers – Classes of 2008 and 2007, - finally, welcome - and welcome to your parents, and other supporters and to all of you.</p>
<p>Where have you been? It’s already September 17th your friends have been at school for a month. We hear that you were home staying out late, sleeping into the afternoon, and being ornery around the house pretending to study for the calculus placement exam, hanging around your old high schools, checking out the new threads in the mirror, waiting until the last minute to pack, not reading The Iliad as you promised yourself you would before you got to the Athens of Illinois. We hear that people back home wonder why, if you were so smart, you didn’t go to college. Bad enough that they thought you were going to a city college (at least the Chicagoans could get away with letting people think they were going to UIC.)</p>
<p>Well, you are here now, that’s the important thing – the leaves are turning, the divisional playoffs are about to start, with or without the White Sox (but with or without, thank heaven it’s without, the Cubs), the Bears have already lost their first game, the kids are deciding who they will be for Halloween, the mayor has mountains of salt ready to de-ice the streets, and now you finally come to college.</p>
<p>We hope, just because you imagined that when you arrived you would catch a whiff of the corpse of fun, that you didn’t delay your departure. Maybe you thought you got the wrong letter! Or, that we changed our decision – we found out that you didn’t study for your calculus placement exam, or read The Iliad, or memorize French idioms, or, that we really paid attention to your spring semester C- in AP Chemistry – that instead you went to the beach, de-tassled corn, or drank a root beer – things no University of Chicago student is supposed to do. But – we don’t make mistakes, and, stare decisus –the decision stands (for the next day or so, the Latin phase newscasters will take the most pleasure in saying), stare decisus, unless you really think those old judges didn’t know what they were doing – stare decisus – “you’re stuck” is the English translation.</p>
<p>We know you – we didn’t ask you about big jars of mustard for nothing, we know you belong in this slightly odd, at least by the standards of these odd times, community of people who actually cannot wait to get to learning; who cannot wait another minute to meet new friends who can’t wait to learn and change the world; who laugh at the notion that fun dies if you think too hard, or that one single integrated person couldn’t be happy and serious at the same time; who can both believe that truth is worth seeking and see through the baloney that so many people, including, or especially, powerful people, take to be true; who can discriminate and make beautiful things while recognizing an ugly painting or building or policy or war when they see one – we have been eagerly awaiting your arrival, just as you, if you are a true Chicago class, have been waiting impatiently for school to begin.</p>
<p>Every year I tell the entering class that they are the best ever – why not? Who knows? – and, if it is a case of “who knows?”, why not claim that each new class is the best? It could be true your grades were better than ever, your scores were better than ever, you did a lot for your communities, you knew what to do with giant jars of mustard or what to do if stranded on Mars with a Teleclone machine – you resisted the nearly overwhelming push to be ruled by the ratings, to do the popular thing, to seek “fun” (and you should have no trouble imagining the smirking little sarcastic quotation marks around that “fun”) to avoid that “dangerous” neighborhood of real, vital, diverse urban life, politics and art, and you came here, albeit, late, and we love you for it, and promise to do whatever we can to help you make lives rich, thoughtful and satisfying.</p>
<p>Soon you may see the just-released movie Proof, based on the Pulitzer Prize-winning play written by recent College alum David Auburn. In it you will see this very chapel, and scenes of this campus and neighborhood, and neurotic students and mad professors, all things with which you will come to be familiar. And Jake Gyllenhaal as a math professor who plays in a rock band, and Gwyneth Paltrow as a mathematician as brilliant as Matt Damon – people the like of which you will never see again. The father and brilliant old math professor, played by Anthony Hopkins, an English speaking version of someone you might meet in Math 151, says: “I love Chicago in September. Perfect skies. Sailboats on the water. Cubs losing. Warm, the sun still hot with the occasional blast of Artic wind to keep you on your toes remind you of winter. Students coming back, bookstores full, everybody busy —Yeah, I like it. I like watching the students. Wondering what they’re going to buy, what they’re gonna read. What kind of ideas they’ll come up with when they settle down and get to work” Tony and I say “welcome”.</p>
<p>Speaking of the movies: When admissions people get together after-hours they all tell this one story – everyone has his or her own way of telling it, a simple story that has made the rounds for years and years. The old timers tell it, and the new ones tell it. Usually it isn’t for the public, but since your arrival is so belated, maybe you deserve to hear a rendition.</p>
<p>Kid comes into an admissions office, says I’ve got an act for you admissions guy says, “What kind of act?” and the kid says, “A family act.” “Okay, how does it go?” Kid says, “High school junior spends $4,000 on a Princeton Review class and SAT scores go up 120 points, now he figures he doesn’t have to go to #10-15 on the U.S. News list but can get into 1-10, so the mother takes a second job to pay off the Princeton Review and buys the Platinum Package from an independent college counselor for $30,000 so Junior can be advised about when to help his fellow man and how best to package the experience, and when to take power naps, father, meanwhile, talks to the accountant, finds out that even a home equity loan won’t bring enough cash to get the kid into the right summer program to help repair castles in Carcassonne as a community service project, without which Junior won’t get into college 1-10, to say nothing of having the money to send the boy to Tibet to practice spinning prayer wheels as proof of his spirituality and concern for diversity and international harmony, and besides there is the tuition for sophomore daughter’s harp camp in Maine, so he decides to sell the car, which means mom and dad have to use the Metra to get the younger brother to his 2:00 a.m. hockey practice, which he’ll need if he wants to use the athletic hook to get into an Ivy or at least a “Little Three,” a trip which takes one parent away from Junior’s homework – the family has a pact that at least one parent will write at least one draft of each required paper due in the senior year and the first draft of the college essays - and Junior has carefully chosen the “most challenging” senior coursework – AP Stats as his math, AP Psych as his science, “The History of the Vietnam War” as the social science, “The Literature of the Vietnam War” as the English elective, and “Reading a Balance Sheet” as preparation for his college internship, which he means to be the culmination of his liberal arts education. Parents are working so many extra hours and otherwise spending so much time on the Metra train on the way to hockey practice that sister is ignored and stops practicing the harp, thereby settling for a future without a prestigious college education, hence, perdition, has herself heavily tattooed, drops out of the Key Club, joins a heavy metal harp band, and spits venomously whenever Junior pulls out his SAT word-list and adds another entry to his on-line collection of homonyms. Metra goes on strike, little brother can’t get to hockey practice, is kicked off the team, begins to think of a future at the community college or emigration to Germany where he can join an apprentice program for tool and die makers, and mom and dad begin to feel strains in the marriage, but vow to stay together to see Junior through the second administration of the SAT IIs, because they know that with support, and coaching, he will be able to get an 800 on the writing exam unless he is tempted to be either original or imaginative, which would result in a lower score, and his having to settle for, heaven forbid, a state university which means no job at Goldman, Sachs, so why bother to go to college at all? Father finds that he begins to day-dream of the time when he carried Junior’s egg on his toes beneath a flap of his own skin during the long Antarctic winter, and vows that the boy will never go to college in a windy and frigid Midwestern city where, if the egg drops, cracks will reveal the icicles which had been his not-yet fledgling son, and in his identification with the precarious, fragile frosty egg decides that we will only apply to Duke, Emory, UVA, and, of course, Dartmouth if we can get in, damn the cold, they are rated 7th in U.S. News. All the while, mother swims under the ice eating enough chum to regurgitate meals for her newly hatched chick to make him strong enough for cross country practice, which should look pretty god on the application despite the fact that his little webbed feet limit his speed, and he finds that flopping on his belly to slide along the ice doesn’t really improve his time, not at all in Raleigh, Atlanta or Charlottsville. Family meets and decides to prune away younger brother and sister to help foster the blossom that they wish Junior actually had turned out to be, they sell the home and move to Kazahkstan, hoping that geographical diversity might work the trick at any, please, just any, top 10 college or university, and they are last seen deciding to which school they will apply Early Decision.”</p>
<p>The admissions guy looks at him and says, “Wow! that’s quite an act – what do you call it?”</p>
<p>The Meritocrats.</p>
<p>Well, that’s enough fun for this lifetime.</p>
<p>For the second time in four years we begin the academic year following a national tragedy. In 2001, despite the national sense of shock and loss, every first-year showed up for the beginning of the school year determined to carry on with life and to learn how to put the world back together. This year we have watched some combination of nature being nature, and human nature being human nature, bring the destruction of a vital and irreplaceable part of our country. </p>
<p>Some of you are New Orleanians, and as far as I know, you have all made it up here to begin the important task of educating yourselves, even if you lost your houses and every other material thing you owned. Some of you, with more to come next week, have left your home colleges and universities to join us temporarily while Tulane and Dillard and Xavier and the University of New Orleans rebuild. Welcome to Chicago, everyone, a city that has been a refuge, not at every moment in our past a kind refuge, but a place people have come in order to escape floods, (remember the Mississippi flood of 1927?) poverty, and racism. So many new Chicagoans have over the years come here from New Orleans, and especially the Mississippi Delta, right up those famous county highways and the Illinois Central railroad. King Oliver and Louis Armstrong and Big Bill Broonzy and Muddy Waters and Buddy Guy and a whole lot of just normal, hard-working people travelled up the Mississippi to this city, and have transplanted their culture and watched it grow with a particular Chicago flair. If New Orleans is the birthplace of jazz and the Delta the birthplace of the blues, Chicago is the place where those most important American art forms came into full flower. The south has made its mark here, and Chicago has made its mark on hundreds of thousands of Louisianans, Mississippians, Alabamians, Arkansans and Tennesseeans. You can be sure that a lot of the people you will meet in Chicago have family down in the flooded regions, and for that reason as well as for the simple fact that we feel for people who suffer no matter what, or where, you new and old Chicagoans have a special connection to the recent disaster.</p>
<p>I am very proud to present your class, the best ever, to a person who, in his tenure here, has most clearly understood the strength and cultural richness of even our most impoverished neighbors in the city, and has done the most to bring the University of Chicago and the great south-side together, and that is the President of the University, Don Randel.