"That's so Chicago"

Colleges & Universities University of Chicago
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<p>I see “learned” as different from “intellectual.” When someone is learned, she simply has a lot of knowledge. When someone is intellectual, she tries to find depth and meaning in things. As such, a ghetto person could definitely be intellectual (I’ve met such people in boarding school). I think what bothers me about UChicago is the thinking that only those who are learned (those who’ve accumulated knowledge that the white, upperclass educational culture considers important) could be intellectual. </p>

<p>I agree that anyone can be intelligent, but not anyone could be intellectual. Like I said, intellectual, to me, is being able to think originally on the spot (unforced), which comes about when one finds and understands depth and meaning in things. Bringing up Plato because he’s relevant and then just saying how he’s relevant is not really intellectual in my opinion because I don’t consider that deep thinking, just an attempt to make a superficial connection… it’s definitely “trying hard” to be intellectual though. Deep thinking, in this case, would be showing deep understanding of Plato (the why and how) not just what his ideas are: “It doesn’t really make sense that Super Mario is like this (explanation)… if Plato is right in saying that life should be like this (explanation).” Alternatively, intellectual could also be “Soulja Boy makes no sense when he says this (explanation) cuz if you think about it this way (explanation), boys and girls in the hood are really like this (explanation).” There’s a difference in the culture of learning even though the thought processes are similar or are on a similar level.</p>

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<p>As with any elite college that costs 50,000 dollars a year before financial aid, our clientele at Chicago is primary wealthy and educationally privileged students. That doesn’t mean that Chicago students think that intellectualism is the domain solely of the wealthy and educationally privileged. I do think that a lot of Chicago students think that Chicago is “above” other schools in intellectualism, but I think that argument has more to do with our core, our self-selecting nature, and the kinds of people who are attracted to this school than the socioeconomic makeup of it.</p>

<p>See: [Civic</a> Knowledge Project | The University of Chicago Division of the Humanities](<a href=“http://civicknowledge.uchicago.edu/]Civic”>http://civicknowledge.uchicago.edu/) for an example of a program based on intellectual interchange between university and community.</p>

<p>(ETA: I consider myself a Chicago “superiorist” to the extent that I’m convinced it’s the best school in the world for me. It’s not the best school in the world for everybody, nor is it “the best school.” But for me in my current situation, it seems like all of the stars have aligned and there’s extremely little I could ask for that Chicago is not providing me. I have a family friend who is considering a lot of elite colleges, and I’m steering her away from Chicago and towards Northwestern).</p>

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I understand but some people on this board have implied that a Western education (the kind dominated by white upper-class culture whether or not the person learning is actually wealthy or educationally privileged) is a prerequisite to intellectualism. In other words, I believe that an elite college could be made up of primarily wealthy students who still think that intellectualism is not limited to those who’ve acquired knowledge dictated by white upper-class culture. I don’t know if this is the case for UChicago. Are students looked down upon if they know nothing about Socrates, Plato, or Aristotle?</p>

<p>Intellectualism exists everywhere, even in populations immersed in ghetto culture (I have no doubt there are intellectuals in non-Westernized cultures as well). Indeed, the top schools have higher concentrations of intellectuals, but UChicago students are simply more explicit about their intellectuality. They might even be biased towards equating intellectualism with acquisition and application of Western knowledge?</p>

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That’s funny since the “That’s so Chicago” with Super Mario happens frequently at Northwestern as well. I dare say it happens at many colleges and not just the elite ones…</p>

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<p>Werner, in my (albeit limited) experience, a lot of people I’ve run into are not into talking about things academic outside (or sometimes even inside) the classroom. I’ve mentioned before that I went to an “elite” high school, where the vast majority of kids are now at various top schools, and my classmates’ curiosity about things academic and non was so painfully low. Maybe the most detailed out of classroom engagement was, “What grade did you get on that test?” </p>

<p>I sincerely hope that my high school classmates are aberrations at the top schools that they attend. I have a feeling they are, as the bulk of them are “bumped” due to money and legacy rather than merit. A poor kid with no knowledge of Western classics who makes connections and puts things together (metaphorically and literally) with what he or she is given is vastly superior, in my mind, to the kids in my high school class, who paid thousands of dollars to make their 750’s turn into 800’s and who paid thousands of dollars more to have a private college counselor amp up their non-achievements. I’m just a little bitter :-P</p>

<p>**</p>

<p>My intent was to explain the whole of my Chicago experience in an anecdote, and I understand how that experience could be transferable to situations in other colleges. I’m not trying to say that Chicago has exclusive rights to academic purity and goodness, truth, and beauty. What I have noticed about my experience here (and maybe I would have noticed it at another school, if I attended it), is how non-academic conversations easily transition into academic ones and back again. It’s a phenomena corranged has also experienced, so for once I know I’m not the only one. It’s also not something I’m used to from high school. It doesn’t happen all the time. If I were a Northwestern student championing Northwestern or a Dartmouth student championing Dartmouth, I probably would have said something similar. I’m just trying to paint a picture of the college I attend and feel I know pretty well. I feel like there are a lot of misperceptions surrounding Chicago (“Where fun comes to die”; also see explanation below) so I do what I can to try to amend it to what I feel is closer to actuality.</p>

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<p>I don’t know a whole lot about either of those three, and most students come into the Core with maybe only the slightest inkling of what’s going on before cracking the books open. Maybe some did some reading on their own or in high school-- it’s not long until the class catches up. (Personally, I’ve only read Aristotle, and I read him in Core-- Nichomachean Ethics was not my idea of a good time, although reading Augustine and Dante was awesome after it).</p>

<p>We’re a smart school, maybe at times a smartass school, but I wouldn’t say we’re about making people feel stupid for their lack of access or time to invest into books or pointing out the ones they haven’t read against the ones that they have. I remember being a little overwhelmed in my first week or two here because I realized that a lot of my housemates knew multiple foreign languages and seemed to know every poet on the face of the earth. I only know one foreign language (Spanish) and I don’t know a lot of poetry, but I didn’t feel inadequate because of it. I just knew I was in an environment where talking about these things wasn’t interpreted as one-upmanship but rather as simple and honest inquiry. So one time my friends decided to start playing the car game Geography, only they were using names of ancient cities and countries. I knew few, if any, and didn’t participate that much. So what?</p>

<p>The two people I know who played the intellectual supremacy card pretty aggressively both had significant personal/emotional issues and neither attend the school any more. (They were both disliked intensely) .</p>

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<p>Addendum (I know it’s ranting season because I’m procrastinating on writing up an annotated bibliography, so I apologize to all who are reading my drivel):</p>

<p>Every school has issues with its image that it has to overcome, and Chicago isn’t alone in that regard. I don’t particularly care if you (the prospie) apply here or if you (the college student lurker) like the school, but guess I wish you knew more about why you don’t like it or why it doesn’t attract you. If nothing else, tell yourself that there’s this annoying poster who feels like she has to have the last word on everything and every internet thread, takes everything too seriously, acts self-righteousy about her amaaaaazing relationship with the U of C and introduces select anecdotes to legitimize nearly unsupportable statements.</p>

<p>What I’ve found here is something wildly different from what I expected I’d find, and I think clarifying some of the misperceptions I had is one of the reasons I post so much. I think that like you, sanjen, I thought Chicago would be some kind of intellectual supremacist hellhole. What have I found instead? I’ve found kids having fun, (* say whaaaaaaaaat?!*), a certain kind of easygoingness in the realms of dress, competition and grades, a collection of students who are all amazed that they too, wound up here even after being flared away time and time again because this place might just might be right.</p>

<p>By the way, I’m still convinced my admission was a fluke, and I pondered this heavily as I was wandering around the third floor of the stacks of the Reg today, trying to pull out books relevant to my research paper. I came to the conclusion that it’s the university’s fault for admitting me, and in the meantime I’m going to ransack them for all they are worth.</p>

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<p>This is quite an interesting exchange.</p>

<p>I love the whole Intellectual vs. Smart/Intelligent as I truly believe they are two completely different things.</p>

<p>One thing that troubles me is that people seem to typify and stereotype all Chicago students. To say everyone is a regurgitate-Marx-elitists who enjoys remembering passages from Wikipedia is a little extreme, and quite frankly not true. I have to side with Unalove here. Sure she might bleed Maroon and be a little biased towards U of C, but that doesnt mean her analysis is tragically flawed. She obviously has interacted with all different types of people, and to say they are all pretentious and insincere is sort of sad quite frankly.</p>

<p>At any school you are going to find those type of people, so they do exist at U of C too. But I have seen the types of people that go on to U of C and HYPS from my school. And quite frankly the ones who end up at U of C were more sincere and passionate than anyone else. Obviously that is just my experiences, but atleast I have something tangible to support it</p>

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<p>First of all, this thread discussion is so totally “That’s so Chicago”.</p>

<p>So much of this sounds like conversations my deferred daughter has with friends. It’s funny, I keep telling my daughter to take it easy her last semester of high school and do just enough to get a decent grade…but she loves doing her assignments too much. She turned what should have been a three-paragraph critique into a five-page analysis of a short poem by Yeats. Seems a bit Chicago-esque to me!</p>

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<p>I too was enjoying the conversation on the thread, and I’ve been thinking about sanjenferrer’s comments quite a bit in the last few days. I tutor underprivileged kids from Chicago’s South Side and from time to time, when they’re not bouncing off the walls or getting in each other’s faces, some of them do some really smart AND really intellectual things. They absorb. They think. Some of them fess up to even liking it. If a third grader from Englewood can impress me, I’m sure a Northwestern kid can too! :-P</p>

<p>When conversations like these come up, I often think about me and the reason I chose this school and my brother and the reason he chose his school. We make a great comparison, because throughout high school, we had nearly identical grades and scores and had similar extracurricular involvement. As smart as he is, though and as smart as his friends in high school were (one is now a Rhodes scholar and the other is a Marshall scholar), he made it clear that he did NOT want to be in an academic/nerd environment, but he DID want to be around smart kids. He found a school that fit his needs pretty well.</p>

<p>I, on the other hand, felt like I could benefit from a self-consciously academic community, based on who my friends in high school were (largely the outcast crowd and the intellectual crowd) and what kinds of people I wanted to meet more of. I should point out too (as giantredlobster pointed out) that I have a real spectrum of friends and acquaintances here. I don’t think any one “personality” dominates this school, but what tends to be the biggest uniter is that these kids like to learn and are in a community where learning has such an emphasis.</p>

<p>I also meant to add that there is a difference between “intellectual” and “academic.” I think of “intellectual” as somebody who pursues knowledge on their own time and is well acquainted with music, art, sciences, literature, movies, etc. I have friends who are particularly adept at say, comparing Kafka to Bruce Springsteen, but they are not quite as devoted to schoolwork as I was. Chicago would not be the right place for them, but they’ve found places for themselves at schools like Oberlin, NYU, Sarah Lawrence, Wesleyan, and Carleton. Some of them decided to make their undergraduate education pre-professional and are studying business, journalism, and education at other schools that are not known to be “intellectual.”</p>

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<p>What I thought was Chicago-esque about her turning the 3-paragraph assignment into a 5-page analysis was that she was doing it for the sheer joy of it, not because it would make any difference in her grade or because she’s into schoolwork. The analysis she did of the poem by Yeats was so interesting and examined the piece not only as a literary work, but from a historical and political perspective. To me, she made it into much more of an intellectual exercise than the academic one that was required of her…that’s what struck me as “so Chicago”.</p>

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<p>I agree with pretty much everything sanjenferrer has said. Especially about name dropping not equaling intellectualism. If you know the philosophies of 20 different Ancient Greeks, that makes you learned and well-read, which in my opinion does not imply pure intellectualism. Obviously, it’s difficult to say what constitutes “original thought” as opposed to the regurgitated thoughts of dead intellectuals or connections between them. But when I think about the few people I consider intellectuals, I’m pretty sure they’re acquainted with Marx, Aristotle, Kant, and Plato, but I don’t hear them name-drop … pretty much ever. </p>

<p>I don’t know what it is, but something about name dropping, and making lots of references to movies like Hitchhiker’s Guide or Monty Python… stuff like that really gets on my nerves. Yes, it does seem sorta pretentious. Unalove, from reading your posts, I get the feeling that you’re not that kind of person. But I know kids who do that kind of thing, and they’re (as HS seniors) all very attracted to UChicago - which isn’t a bad thing, but is one of the reasons I never applied there.</p>

<p>I would never say this sort of UC student is an “affected intellectual.” I don’t think most people name drop or make ‘intellectual’ references to moves/books/philosophies in order to appear learned. I think these people really just are speaking their mind. However, I also think that something about doing this makes people who are “in the know” feel like they share a special bond that “normal kids” wouldn’t understand, and so the Monty Python and the Kant. Nevertheless, I find it annoying, sort of like - why can’t we just talk normally, without cross referencing the ideas of others?</p>

<p>This isn’t really a rant against UC, because I think all of the tech-y schools have lots of kids like this, although it might be especially prominent at UC and a small number of other schools. It just happens that this thread is on the UC board. This has just always gotten on my nerves. It’s the one aspect of “dork culture” that really irks me.</p>

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<p>2forcollege-- that sounds exactly like something I would do! I actually do similar things for assignments from time to time in making them harder for myself than I absolutely have to if I know I’m going to get something out of it.</p>

<p>amb3r-- I’m glad I don’t strike you as pretentious and name-droppy, and from my volume of posts in this section of the CC universe, I guess I’m the universal “go-to” on all things U of C, but I am only one person here and answer questions the way I see them, not necessarily on behalf of the student body as a whole. (Though I try my best to encorporate both). One of the problems of CC is that though you may be familiar with my posts and the way I write, you don’t really know me. So I think it behooves me to explain that a good chunk of my good friends here are of the Monty Python and Kant variety (not to mention spouting phrases in foreign languages!), as that sort of zaniness really attracts me, even though I don’t usually embody it. That said, not all of my friends are zany in that particular way, and I don’t think that most Chicagoans are zany in that particular way, though I do think that they, like me, are open to it and amused by it.</p>

<p>I’d also like to take a second to stand up for those of us who are sometimes misunderstood in the way we address things that important to us. Most of the people who do say uberdork things are NOT trying to emphasize their superiority, they’re just saying what comes naturally and talking about what excites them. If somebody is trying to make sure you know that you’re not as smart as they are, they will let you know. Otherwise, I think you have to give people the benefit of the doubt and understand that words like “epistolary” and “patois” might come out of their mouth, but if you ask them what it means they’ll make profuse apologies and give a definition of the word. Even though wikipedia reading is rampant here, I don’t think that people are celebrated for their stores of internet-acquired useless information or approach information competitively. (Unless they are on quizbowl, in which case that’s the whole point).</p>

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<p>I don’t feel like Monty Python or Hitchhiker’s Guide are pretentious at all. I mean, my friends and I watched Monty Python together, so when we do reference them, everyone knows what we’re talking about and can conjure up the scene and be amused. And many of my friends are “normal kids.” I don’t see how Monty Python really excludes anyone… I can kind of understand where you’re coming from when you talk about referencing great works and things… but if you’re going to say that dropping reference to movies like Monty Python as pretentious then one might as well say that dropping reference to anything is pretentious… celebrities? History? Where would our conversations BE without references to SOMETHING?..</p>

<p>I’m sorry. I feel like this post is very poorly written/expressed, and slightly incoherent. And full of loopholes. Opposition, poke away. =]</p>

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<p>Hmm… I think I’ll ease my way into the conversation here.</p>

<p>I’ve noticed a lot of discussion about intellectuals and the “name-dropping” that they do. Most people seem to disapprove of it, perhaps even resent it a bit.</p>

<p>A few of my friends are like that too. Sometimes, they’d reference people that I’ve never heard of or haven’t a clue about their philosophies and accomplishments. </p>

<p>But I never got the feeling that this “name-dropping” was meant to be excluding me out, or to create a feeling of superiority for them.</p>

<p>Instead, I realized that “name-dropping” was almost a way of inclusion, as if to say: yes, I accept you as a kindred spirit.</p>

<p>See, all groups of people have their own language. </p>

<p>For instance, doctors probably make obscure med jokes amongst themselves, politicians might have their own form of communication, and musicians have yet another method. But the point is that within their respective groups, there is a unique language that the group shares and that encompasses most of their experiences.</p>

<p>Those that I consider intellectuals are, without a doubt, intelligent. But more often than not, due to their intellectual curiosity, they are well read and do know the philosophy of Kant. This is the world that they’re in, the group that they’re a part of. And thus, the language that they speak reflects the focus of the group. </p>

<p>And so, when I’m having a great conversation with an intellectual friend, and she happens to name-drop someone I don’t know, I know that it isn’t for any ignoble motive or anything. It’s as if they’ve included me into their world, at least for a little while and have eased into the language of the intellectual. </p>

<p>All I do is smile, and ask them to explain further.</p>

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<p>Well put, Ketty.</p>

<p>While students do often discuss things that are academic (or relate non-academic things to academic things), I don’t think they often extend outside of the realm of accepted vernacular. I think Ketty and la montagne point out that when you have a set of common experiences with friends, you have a basis on which to place comments.</p>

<p>For Chicago kids, that basis is core, and so when somebody makes a Durkheim reference, everybody who took Self for sosc (a lot of people) get it. It doesn’t become an “I know Durkheim and you don’t, muhahahahaha.”</p>

<p>As I mentioned before, my less academic but more cultured friends pull in things left and right-- they seem to see every movie, every play, every art exhibit-- and I see how that knowledge display becomes exhausting after a while, but I think the same thing about friends who talk about how much alcohol they drink and how many friends they spend time with. I feel like everybody has the right to be a little self-centered every once in a while and get by without complaint, but it’s the kids who don’t get beyond that who can become irksome.</p>

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<p>Good heavens. Among my kids’ friends, Monty Python and Hitchhiker’s Guide aren’t pretentious; those are the coin of the realm for teenage geeks. Come to my house after a sleepover and listen to the early risers walking among the motionless, snoring sleeping bags and calling out, “Bring out your dead!”</p>