I have to rise to defend the honor of all those lonesome bookish kids growing up in the landlocked towns of the midwest, west and south. They have their challenges, their formal educations are not of the best, and they are often dismissed and disregarded, but many a brilliant kid has come out of those circumstances. The first American Nobel Prize winner in Physics, Albert A. Michelson of the University of Chicago, came from a raw town in Nevada. The figure of the lonely autodidactic kid coming of age in the hinterlands is a staple of American fiction. Vachel Lindsay, Eugene Debs and Thorstein Veblen came from such places.
No one would contend that an education at the University of Chicago is the norm for these or any other kids - but the idea is not to overlook the nuggets there by failing to even look into the pan. It’s only one place to look and it isn’t in the least inconsistent with looking in the big cities and the suburbs. Chicago is, I believe, announcing that it will look in all those places. The right kind of kid for a Chicago education could come from anywhere. Everyone deserves a crack at it.