Espionage at I-House

marlowe1
Thu, 31 Oct 2019 21:07:19 +0000

Well, this tale is an old one but a good one, from the thirties…

The University was suspected in those days of harboring un-American types. In an effort to dig up dirt on the sex lives of radical students and professors the blessedly extinct Chicago Herald Examiner, a Hearst paper, engaged the services of a young woman to move in to I-House and conduct undercover researches. Apparently she found nothing worth reporting (some things don’t change). In an attempt to satisfy her employer she stepped up the level of her provocations. Such un-UChicago activities led to her detection and confession. She was dubbed “Little Beverley” by the Maroon. A spectacular backfiring of the intentions of the paper ensued: “the sinister comedy she participated in aroused campus opinion against the Hearst press and all it stood for” (McNeill, “Hutchins’ University”, p. 63). Downtown sleaze could not touch the University.

McNeill, who was himself a student in the College of those days, describes the more serious political debate of the times as being being between the Thomists and the Marxists. Now doesn’t that sound ur-Chicago? As he says, “No other campus came close to such a mix.” Though many campuses had their Marxists, then and now, “only at Chicago did Marxists have to compete with a rival Thomist sect, whose argumentative skill was equal or superior to anything Marx had to offer” (p. 61).

Little Beverley would never have been detected if she had confined her provocations to making arguments for the existence of God.