Community at U of C

JHS
Fri, 15 Apr 2011 10:47:19 +0000

First of all, notice that Chicago – like a lot of other elite research universities, including Tufts – has a college that is not a whole lot bigger than many LACs. Chicago has about 5,000 undergraduates; schools like Oberlin, St. Olaf, Smith, Bucknell have 3,000 or more. You probably don’t know everyone in your class at Chicago, but you probably have some meaningful contact with a pretty big percentage of your class.

Both of my kids had strong, tight social groups that developed almost entirely outside of their houses (increasingly irrelevant after the first quarter) and Core classes (never relevant at all, friend-wise, except for choosing some of the later ones in conjunction with friends). In one kid’s case, the friends came partly from ECs and partly from people who showed up at the same parties she did wearing the same kind of clothes, plus one or two (including, in hindsight, her college BFF) from her major, a couple left over from her house, and some she knew going back to childhood (she shared apartments for two years with a boy who had been in her class in 4th grade). In the other kid’s case, the friends are almost entirely EC-related, or Scav-related, or both, plus a few from his major.

Scav is certainly a unique institution that binds lots of students together, although there are also large numbers of students who detest it. The student activities board does lots of the things similar boards do elsewhere, promoting big outdoor concert/parties a couple times a year. There is something called Kuviasungnerk/Kangeiko in the winter that sounds like an interesting acquired taste. (It culminates in an early-morning polar-bear swim in Lake Michigan. In January.) One of my kids never missed the annual Latke-Hamantash Debate, a very Chicagoish sort of institution in which famous and up-and-coming academics present elegant, tongue-in-cheek arguments for the relative superiority of one or the other form of traditional Jewish holiday snacks, from the standpoint of their academic discipline. There’s also something called the Lascivious Ball, which was cancelled for a long time because it apparently lived up to its name too well, and has recently been revived but without quite getting its full mojo back yet.

Houses and dorms have additional traditions, Sunday teas (with academic papers) at Snell-Hitchcock, outdoor movies at Maclean, and, apparently, seeing what everyone else is doing at the South Campus dorm. Particular groups have an impact on the community that extends beyond the group itself – the Ultimate Frisbee Team, which (at least in the past) was responsible for lots of parties, or University Theater (ditto, plus people love following their improv group, Off-Off Campus).

Also, don’t miss the real importance of the Core. It’s not so much that you meet your friends in Core classes, it’s that Core classes make it really easy to talk about substantive things with people you have barely met, because you share a rich pool of common references. At a college whose students pretty much self-select for liking to have intellectual discussions, something that makes it really easy to have intellectual discussions with people you don’t know all that well yet really helps bind people together.