<p>Oy, do we have to drag out the agendas again?</p>
<p>Agreed, counting down. Looks like someone might have gotten new fishing lures and assorted bait for christmas. ;)</p>
<p>I agree with posts 499 and 500.</p>
<p>The subject of the thread is a Chicago prompt, which then evolved – not unexpectedly – to other Chicago prompts, and – also not unexpectedly – to a discussion of Chicago’s admissions process and/or its selection criteria, and through that, its public image.</p>
<p>This University is no more sacred than any other U and is open to criticism in all the areas discussed, as well as, obviously, to praise. </p>
<p>My own D – whom her high school teachers described as the essential intellectual – was turned off by the essay prompts during her admission year. She found them alternately irrelevant to her own purposes in the pursuit of knowledge & exploration of ideas, and embarrassingly pretentious in a forced kind of way. Same (for her) with the designation “Uncommon.” Her application year was the Mustard Jar year. There were also other universities, such as Penn, whose applications at the time were also involved/long, but which she chose to spend time with and whose process she respected more.</p>
<p>Call her the weird one, I don’t care. Hundreds of students have obviously enjoyed the essay prompts. (marcellad I love your free-choice example; I’m sure she would have liked that, as would she have a couple of the other choices discussed on this thread.) Or maybe, as marite suggests, my D was particularly turned-off by the sophomoric mini-essays which preceded the prompts. She thought that, in those preambles, the students were posing, and she didn’t want to be among such a group. </p>
<p>Ultimately-- and this does return us to the original thread subject – adults need to be in charge & take responsibility – whether that’s how much they turn over the essay prompts to students, whether that’s developing a marketing strategy and being responsible for the consequences, whether that’s publishing a submitted essay. </p>
<p>JHS criticized the Maroon editorials for being “namby-pamby,” but I disagree. I think there’s a legitimate disconnect being criticized. What a great thing to want to graduate students not just superficially acquainted with fields other than their majors, but to drink deeply of those fields and become more thoroughly literate (& fluent) in them. I can see why students would be disappointed, if their beliefs going in fell short of curriculum choices later offered. I have a different concern – that is, how realistic is it, in four years (given the already very heavy major requirements, which like other curriculum there, is indeed thorough) to graduate such deeply and broadly educated students. The math doesn’t add up, to me. (That’s a sidebar, but it could be an additional reason for some students feeling disenchanted with a gap between promise and delivery.)</p>
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<p>I don’t see that anyone has said that there is anything wrong with finding the preambles superficial or pretentious or posing. That’s completely understandable to feel that way.<br>
There’s a difference, though, between
“I, applicant A / parent A, personally found the essay prompts pretentious and posing,” and
“UChicago shouldn’t use those essay prompts.”</p>
<p>I rather suspect that Chicago <em>wants</em> x% of the people who read the prompts to find them pretentious and posing, so they can gleefully self-select out and claim they are only for the cognoscenti Who Get It. If that’s what they want to do, if they’re willing to make the sacrifice of broad appeal, then I don’t see what there is to object to.</p>
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<p>Realizing a school is not the right place for your kid(s) and not being interested in a subject are not the same thing. The topic of application processes and essays and how a major university is viewed, especially one that is in your city or that you might have attended, is interesting to many of us. And the twisting of words continues…</p>
<p>I don’t think my son spent too much time getting wrapped around the axle about the prompts. He liked the school, he liked the coach and the prompts were part of the application he had to complete to get into the place. It just didn’t keep him (or me) awake at night. </p>
<p>I don’t know why there isn’t the same sort of snarky “debate” over other colleges. There IS some over Penn, because (gasp) USNWR had the audacity to rank it higher than many think it deserved. There is some over Cornell because, God forbid, part of it is a state school. And then we have the southern schools which we all know have no academic merit but are populated by rich frat boys and bigots. So- I guess Chicago isn’t the only school that causes an internet stand-off!</p>
<p>Regarding mummom’s “why are you here” comment to pizzagirl, I still haven’t figured out why mummom is here, or why she’s so obsessed with the University of Chicago.</p>
<p>I think some people take advantage of any opportunity to try to tear Chicago down for having the temerity to be generally considered (and to consider itself, since its inception in the 1890’s as a Midwestern Ivy League-type school, very self-consciously so) the academic equal of all or most of the Ivy League schools. And people seem eager to do this in a way that they would never tear down Ivy League schools themselves.</p>
<p>Not that I really care that much about people’s motivations, of course. Because that kind of obsession with vilifying a school just makes the person doing so appear to be extremely strange.</p>
<p>Regarding Chicago’s essay prompts, the one my son chose (it was the final year of the Uncommon Application, the fall of 2007) was the “What do pictures want? Describe a picture and explore what it wants” prompt. Including an image of the picture you were describing was not permitted. He chose a Madonna album cover, and the following is an excerpt of what he wrote. This isn’t his usual style, which has become much more spare and straightforward the older he gets (he used to write prose pretty much the same way he wrote poetry), but it’s how he still writes sometimes when he gets carried away a little bit! I thought it could have used editing, but he refused. I guess it worked out OK, though! The main thing was – this is unquestionably my son’s voice, not anyone else’s.</p>
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[QUOTE]
The name Madonna has come to be used mostly for visual representations of the mother of Christ - she may be the most painted and sculpted woman in history. Madonna and Child, the Coronation of the Virgin, the Virgin and Child with St. Anne, the Pieta. The Black Madonna of Czestochowa, Our Lady of Perpetual Help, Our Lady of Sorrows, Our Lady of Peace.</p>
<p>In the American “Age of Irony” starting in 1980, when revolutionary changes became commonplace (and accepted by more of the population), the name Madonna became a name for two. It was bestowed upon a mortal woman in Michigan in 1958, who made herself electronically divine through images - like the process bestowed upon the Virgin Mary, but self-conscious, ravenously calculated. Perhaps, Ms. Ciccone’s given name inspired her.</p>
<p>Madonna’s mercurial rise to power in autumn 1984, at the peak of the dizzying excesses and paradoxes of the Reagan Era, came as the result of an interconnected iconography of slogans frozen into images, mannerisms frozen into images, dance routines and four-minute pop songs (“Like a virgin for the very first time!”) frozen into images. Yet there is one image that exemplifies them all, a definitive version of the new Madonna, whose images supplanted her physical reality and made her superhuman. It is the cover of the 23-million selling Like a Virgin album. </p>
<p>It depicts Madonna in the wedding dress in which she audaciously writhed and roiled onstage during the MTV Music Video Awards. The gown is swept in motion, fanning out around her waist like a calcified cauldron of froth, its frontispiece of ruffled tulle, strewn with white rose petals, floating (snaking) diagonally at the transfixed viewer. It appears to rapidly revolve around her, like the ring of stardust our solar system’s Venus never possessed, caught in a snapshot during a space storm. It levitates in suspended motion by studio magic, her upper body nestled in folds of billowing cloth. Beneath the tulle, innumerable petticoats of organdy flail into the cup-shape of a peony with the snap of her bouncing hip; the snap propels luxuriant bolts of silken garment into the air behind her, levitating like the houses uprooted by a tornado. The sonorous gown partially shades her sly hands, gently but fiercely clasping a BOY TOY belt buckle about her diagonally-cocked pelvis. The gloves, of flower-patterned translucent lace, fasten at the middle of her upper arm and terminate at the knuckle. The eyes are drawn first to the hands, and then to the come-hither eyes that are the metronome of her bold slink. Her jewelry is that of a saint who was born a food court ragamuffin - cheap plastic baubles around her wrists, the mother-of-pearl and clinking cross pendants on her left ear, her rhinestone choker and the bodice’s zipper emblazoned with a rhinestone crucifix. The whole of the image is hard - the substances are luridly brilliant, mass-produced, harsh, and mysteriously sensuous.</p>
<p>The bodice is fishnet, a material in which the stockings of temptresses are classically netted; it is low-cut, and the two straps do not cling to her shoulders tightly, instead bouncing above them, repelled from her almost maternal form by the incarnate life of the garment. Flesh is de-emphasized, its shade and suppleness at best the equal of the silk and organdy and tulle and lace and hairspray-encased, tousled mane. It is the face, angled downwards to contrast with the upwards-pointing chest and the outwards and upwards reaching propulsion of the gown, carved into a marble bust by the camera, that makes this the most powerful image of the “Age of Irony”: the beacon for its arrival, its impassioned advocate that takes passion with a grain of salt, and the ultimate representative of its thesis. This thesis is that all words are but images waiting to happen, and that the manipulation of their personalities creates substance in art, both popular and fine. It is defined by the conflict between the expected and the unexpected that has become the American cultural status quo since Madonna burst onto the scene, heralding its arrival. . . .</p>
<p>And how is this defining image of 1984, which took not communism but capitalism to new extremes in a knee-jerk reaction to a grimly prophetic Englishman, ironic? It is ironic because it is shot in the sumptuous style of the glamor shots of glamor queens in the interwar heyday of the Hollywood studio system, the sensuous duotone cathedrals of chiaroscuro that the faces of Norma Shearer and Joan Crawford and Marlene Dietrich expanded to fill like revelations of a secret; and yet, Madonna does not wear Givenchy nor Chanel nor Dior but a ragtag medley of ripped and re-sewn lace and tacky costume jewelry that derives as much from punk as from haute couture. Her clothing is only aesthetically pleasing by the skill of the photographer and by the illusions stewing in the brain of the transfixed viewer; her body is functional, not another note in the melody of garment and wearer like it was for the glamour queens of yore.</p>
<p>Madonna is not superlatively gorgeous, does not ascribe to the standards that glorified Grace Kelly and Marilyn Monroe. She is a diminutive, relatively ordinary-looking young woman born of the malls of suburban Detroit. When you remove the veil of irony from her face, it does not suggest either “man eater” or “empress.” It is ironic because it is an empowered, salacious woman, not a vixen, nor a harlot, nor a matron (though she may be pieces of all of these.)</p>
<p>She owns her sexuality with a tenacity demonstrated by her grip on the BOY TOY buckle; and yet she is placed in a white wedding dress, a Victorian symbol of the feminine ideal of virginity and submission. She will not personify either side of the “Madonna-Whore” equation of female sexuality, though she will tease both through the shroud of imagery.</p>
<p>But do not make the mistake that the image is a wry joke, a series of one-liners on femininity meant simply to push the buttons of the viewer - nothing more than a pop culture reduction of a joke personified in punk clothing or in a Gaddis novel or in feminist circles (as Camille Paglia would have it.) The genuinely seductive, magnetic potency of her face creates a double irony, defying and calling irrelevant the myriad concealing ironies that dwell on its surface. Within the lattice of ironic commentary are two eyes drowned in eyeliner, two barely-closed, thickly painted lips that have no rival for earnestness, for effortless expression, for tenderness, for ferocity, since the days of photography dawned.</p>
<p>Beneath the fa</p>
<p>Not to mention WashU. Why people don’t just say “I don’t care to apply to WashU” and move on, I don’t get. Instead, it attracts a huge number of detractors, from people who wouldn’t even know where to find Missouri on a map without help.</p>
<p>There are 2 particular schools that rub me the wrong way and are off limits to my kids, but I don’t lurk around their forums or start threads on Why They Suck So Bad.</p>
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<p>Now *that’s * a controversy. Strip away all the various costumes and makeup, and I think Madonna is quite an attractive woman!</p>
<p>I view their sending out that sample essay as somewhat counter-productive to their alleged goal of student self-selection. If you want intellectual out-of-the-box thinkers, why would you want to illustrate for them how to write a creative UofCh essay? Now how do you then separate the students who would have done something like that on their own (supposedly a true UofCh type) from the ones who wouldn’t have thought of it but worked really hard to be bold, daring, and quirky as a consequence? </p>
<p>On the Stanford supplement there was a question “What historical moment or event do you wish you could have witnessed?” D told me she wrote about something that could have happened but didn’t. I’m confident she wasn’t the first ever to do that, though it was a slight out-of-the-box twist on what they would ordinarily get as a response. But the minute Stanford publishes a response like that as a sample, they’d lose out on the value of that question.</p>
<p>epiphany – As it happens, I like the Penn application, too. But one way or another Penn and Chicago generally attract different sets of students, and people who are happy at one may not be happy at the other. I think it’s a fair comment that someone who is allergic to sophomoric poseurs maybe ought to avoid the University of Chicago. But, sadly, I think that students whose interests are not primarily pre-professional can feel marginalized and lonely at Penn, and yearn for a little more sophomoric b.s. as opposed to “Is this on the exam?”.</p>
<p>I thought the Maroon editorial series was namby-pamby because it went “Rigor, rigor, rigor; theory, theory, theory” – sort of the call of the Chicago-bird – while doing little to address the causes of its dissatisfaction. For instance, it criticized the Hum sequence my daughter took, while using the one my son took as one of the models of what the Core should be. Now, my daughter’s course was not very successful in her eyes, but the problems did not relate to what the editorial criticized, and the editorial somehow failed to recognize that (a) the reading lists for the two sequences have about a 70% overlap, and (b) the criticized sequence has a much stronger foundation in current thinking about the relationship of literature to other disciplines than the favored one, and is much more interdisciplinary in its approach. The “good” sequence has essentially remained unchanged since the 30s, and reflects a conservative point of view one would associate with William Bennett and Allan Bloom – although I do not think every section is taught that way, and there is no question that the course works. The “bad” sequence actually attempts to examine the relationship of social science methods to literary texts and, if it had been done well, could have been a heck of a foundational course. In this, as in other areas, the Maroon writers failed to take account of the reasons why the faculty may have wanted to explore other approaches to core subjects beyond the tried and true ones.</p>
<p>In discussing languages, the editorial series wimped out and concluded that a year of study wasn’t enough but was good enough. Its hard-hitting recommendation was to up the waiver requirement from 3 on the AP to 4. Namby-pamby enough for you?</p>
<p>In discussing science, the series complained that the courses weren’t tough enough, without explaining how to make them tough enough, broad enough, and deep enough in the time allotted. It focused on one particularly silly-sounding option, which as far as I know is not generally popular for precisely the reasons the editorial gives. It questions the appropriateness of one of the physical science courses my daughter took, Global Warming. I heard a 90-minute presentation of the course by the professor to a group of parents, most of whom (including me) were floored by how great it was. It was better than anything I could have imagined from the description, and clearly reflected 15 years of ongoing work by the instructor. (This was one of the cases where my daughter complained of professorial over-enthusiasm.)</p>
<p>In the arts, the editorial complained about what appears to be a “creative” option, without acknowledging a fundamental issue: No one makes hard-core bio majors take watered-down Core bio, and there are seven different math courses a first-year can place into. But hard-core arts and humanities students have to take the same arts and humanities courses that the bio and econ majors take, and much of the time THAT feels like going back to high school for them. I would venture to guess that no one who takes a creative-work path to the core arts requirement is the sort of person who leaves the University of Chicago without far more sophisticated grounding in the arts than the Core could dream of providing.</p>
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<p>I didn’t see it as “here’s an illustration of what to do and how to do it.” I saw it as “here’s a little light humor to lighten the mood given that everyone’s so stressed. Cute essay, read it, smile, ha ha.” Sort of the equivalent of sending around a funny YouTube video. Meant to be a cute chuckle, not an instruction manual.</p>
<p>As critical thinkers, we come to cc to learn, to discuss, and now to debate the attractiveness of a pop star. I am with DonnaLs son. I always thought Madonna was not all that good looking, especially when she had the mole under her nose (sidebar: for anyone who cares, rumor has it Sarah Jessica Parker had hers removed, Cindy Crawford has not). She is in phenomenal shape and I only wished I was in half as good shape at that age, but as for facial features, I agree with DonnaLs son.</p>
<p>Back to the topic of the essay, if U of C has a tradition of asking current students for essay prompts for upcoming applications, thats fine by me. If the ideas are unusual, well, that isnt surprising, especially if they are coming from the creative minds of college students. I would imagine that students at many colleges could come up with some wild essay prompts.</p>
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<p>Since we’re sidebarring, let it be known for the record that Cindy Crawford lived in the dorm next to mine for her semester or so at NU before leaving for more lucrative pastures!</p>
<p>See… no need for that silly piece of sheepskin…</p>
<p>Of course, my son adores Madonna, gorgeous or otherwise. Like many gay men, he’s always loved strong women. (When he was 7, he was obsessed with Elvira!) When he was growing up, Madonna was one of his role models for learning how to be a strong, independent, and assertive adult, in a way that no famous straight man, reflecting all the heterosexual standards of what “masculinity” means, could ever be. But that’s a topic for another place and time.</p>
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<p>Or how about a different radical connection, How about, These essay prompts are controversial enough that they might – or have – turned off intellectually inclined students who may go to a competitor, but who might actually contribute a great deal to this campus?</p>
<p>JHS:
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<p>How would you, or any parent on this thread, know “what kind of a student” is or is not attracted to chicago, Penn, or any other institution? How would you dare to presume that chicago attracts intellectuals, whereas Penn attracts “pre-professional” types who are concerned about “the exam”? Talk about narrow-minded prejudices! Who ARE some of you parents who think they know invisble applicants and their respective intellectual depth? </p>
<p>I find it interesting that those of you who criticize others for offering personal opinions (or their S’s, D’s) feel completely free to offer their own. And without basis.</p>
<p>Wow.</p>
<p>I really like DonnaL’s son’s essay. It isn’t tremendously original – I think every substantive point in it was thoroughly explored in print before he was born – but it sure as heck shows that he has a strong aesthetic sensibility and the vocabulary and writing ability to communicate what he sees, and that’s a lot. And it also has the subtle virtue of presenting a kid who could really benefit from getting even better, more precise vocabulary and theoretical armature for addressing the things that excite him, which would make me want to let him into my university.</p>
<p>It’s hardly a secret that Penn’s undergraduate student body has the reputation – whether accurately or not, I have no idea – of being heavily pre-professional, more so than a lot of other Ivy League schools. And it’s hardly presumptuous to refer to it.</p>
<p>Thanks, JHS. I’m sure you’re right about the non-originality of his ideas, but I’m equally sure that he came up with them on his own (influenced, I imagine, by whatever he’s read about Madonna over the last 10 years or so!). And I find it very interesting that what he enjoys most so far about the art history courses he’s taken is that he’s learning a great deal about art theory for the first time, giving him more of a framework for analyzing and discussing the art he’s been so enthusiastic about for so long.</p>
<p>"It’s hardly a secret that Penn’s undergraduate student body has the reputation – whether accurately or not, I have no idea – of being heavily pre-professional, more so than a lot of other Ivy League schools. "</p>
<p>Very true in part because of the excellent Wharton Business School.</p>
<p>Interestingly, Cornell also has preprofessional programs such as its hotel management program, engineering school and School of Industrial and Labor Relations, but somehow doesn’t get put into the preprofessional box that many put Penn into.</p>