UChicago 2017-2018 Admission's Statistic Hints

marlowe1
Sat, 03 Feb 2018 23:59:22 +0000

As with so many of the rants on this board against the Chicago admissions system, this one imagines a one-size-fits-all level of conformity among the group of elite colleges always vulgarly called “the big boys”. The Bard would not have approved of that level of systemization. He broke the rules, for which the theory-ridden 18th century critics punished him. Take your inspiration, dear @LoveTheBard , from the Bard and not from his detractors.

Every school ought to design the system that works best for it, given its history, objectives and the maintenance of its identity. If that system is going to be organic and healthy, it will not be fixed and unchanging, and it will not be the same system as that of other schools. Chicago’s many experiments with almost every aspect of its educational philosophy and practice over many years make it a very special instance of this more general truth. Is it so surprising that Chicago would design a similarly experimental and perhaps idiosyncratic admissions system? Chicago has always done things like that, and it has always upset the established schools. In the 1950’s the President of Harvard, in vetoing an entirely merit-based system of admissions, needed to give only one reason for doing that: “It would make us like the University of Chicago.” So it has gone throughout Chicago’s history.

I vividly recall Charles Gray, one of the most thoughtful of my profs at Chicago, expounding the contrarian views of the great English historian, Sir Lewis Namier. Sir Lewis told us that to understand an institution we need to examine in fine detail its thick texture and identify its special genius. The life of great institutions is not in slogans or in abstract panaceas, such as “one man, one vote” or “every elite school should go SCEA.” The people who urge the latter on this board generally do not value or else outright deny the special qualities of the University of Chicago. They have no interest in its history and no desire to perpetuate whatever is unique in it. For them the College ought to go into the hopper with all other elite colleges, there to fight it out for dominance, as if we were dealing here with lobsters in a cage. Or, more aptly for the present discussion, as if the choosing of a school, one of the more important things any young person does, was simply a matter of entering a lottery and taking the best on offer at the end of the day. If you believe the top schools are all more or less the same, then that’s logical. I don’t believe that. Sir Lewis Namier would not have believed it. Nor should anyone believe that the act of choosing is oppressive for the chooser. It is actually what makes us free, and that’s a good lesson to learn at the age of 18.