Espionage at I-House

marlowe1
Sun, 03 Nov 2019 10:49:57 +0000

We are getting quite a lot of mileage here out of the “Little Beverley” episode, but isn’t it a UChicago specialty to tease out and query the manifold implications of all situations and events high and low? In that spirit I feel Little Beverley has more to give us…

In the College of Hutchins’ days the culture was shaped not only by everyone (aside from Beverley) being smart and intellectually ambitious but by a common curriculum focussed on major texts and big ideas. These factors fostered a communal spirit of intense talk: “[Students] commonly talked about what they were reading at meals and in other spare time during the day - and late, late into the night” (p. 141). Is that how it is in today’s College, I wonder?

Here is McNeill one last time, describing this culture of interrogation and disputation as he himself experienced it: “No one could come away from two or three years of such talk without achieving a superior level of verbal agility and acquiring an aptitude for taking on big questions and encountering unfamiliar data (or at least assertions) with complete aplomb. Chicago’s students came to bear a common mark, which still survives. Even now, after more than forty years, veterans of the blizzard of words that the Hutchins College provoked among its faculty and students can often recognize one another by the assurance with which they are ready to discourse on almost anything and everything” (p. 141).

Some of that might sound a bit familiar to us old hands on the UChicago cc board. Indeed, it may be part of the explanation for why we seem to drive others on this board slightly nuts. The world tends to divide between those with a penchant for argument (truly understood, as dialectical discourse) and those who know it only as mere assertion and invective and therefore avoid or stigmatize it. A proper experience of the culture of the University of Chicago will infect you forever with a taste for it.