The "New" UChicago

uchicagoalumna
Mon, 21 May 2012 20:39:56 +0000

Therefore, they are selecting people who are in a state of mind to affirm this mission: to “look busy” or “look happy” until they graduate or until they actually do become successful. And, like HPY, they have the coffers and the influence to get this image seen. Above all, they need themselves to make sure that there are as few genuinely, openly dissatisfied souls at Chicago as possible. Mere intellectual heat doesn’t count because it fades before it has real impact. If Chicago didn’t want to lose its old self, it wouldn’t. People who are benignly focused on the pre-professional OR benignly happy in an intellectual heaven, or both, are what they want, because that’s what people are willing to pay for, like a four-year-long really fun summer camp before real life that also gets you a high-paying job.




Whether or not this is true to current practice at Chicago, this viewpoint certainly resonated to me as true to some extent on some college campuses at some points in time-- see “The Chosen” by Jerome Karabel for a parallel discussion of “character” and some illumination as to why the Jewish/Asian stereotype is “undesirable.”


South is a new dorm still, and if it’s first-year heavy it has a harder time building a Scav strategy and leadership. Snitchcock is very intensely Scav, from O-Week on it’s all the first-years hear about, and their team is highly organized and specialized. I don’t think Scav is a good metric of overall nerdtacularity, though certainly when I was an undergrad my social networks weaved tightly across Scavvies from all teams, so it meant a lot more to me than just a few days of epic.