Going back to my two questions as OP, I believe the first one has been fairly conclusively answered: there is agreement that Chicago arouses more negativity than do its peers. As to why this is the case - my second question - it sounds like there is something approaching agreement that it is because it has all these idiosyncratic (at least among its peers) marketing and admissions policies AND continues to claim that it is uniquely devoted to the life of the mind, etc. Do I have that right?
I agree that something like that is what’s getting up the noses of non-Chicago people. I have no desire to argue them out of their derangement (or call it irritation in the cases of JHS and DeepBlue). The phenomenon itself is, however, interesting. I wonder whether, if Chicago ceased to claim that its educational experience was any different from that of the peer schools, people associated with those schools would welcome the marketing, the ED, the free speech, the test-optional and the rest of the package. I highly doubt it. The revulsion against these things is part of a piece with Chicago’s continuing emphasis on its distinctly intellectual brand of education.
We are dealing here with the Brideshead Revisited Syndrome. You go to Harvard, you’re a smart kid, you may even (though that’s a big “may”) be really intellectually ambitious and curious - but the culture of the place requires that you hide all that under a veneer of aristocratic sprezzatura. Don’t show you’re working too hard, don’t show the effort, don’t really get too obsessed with trying to figure out the meaning of things. Breaking a sweat about stuff like that is, well, that’s for the likes of the drudges at the University of Chicago.
We know that breaking a sweat about exactly these things was for at least the latter half of the 20th century the experience of a Chicago education. That must have been so at least as late as the late 90’s, if the testimony of our friend, Cue7, is to be believed. He didn’t like it all that much, but he would hardly deny that it was very different from what he later experienced at, I believe, Penn. We know the culture has changed in the last 20 years. The detractors make these changes Exhibit A to their thesis that the intellectual pretensions of the place are a thing of yesteryear (but then they didn’t like what Chicago was in yesteryear either). My thesis is that (a) the changes, though not all to my taste, were essentially necessary, and (b) they have not vitiated in any essential way the underlying culture of intellectual aspiration at the University of Chicago. Its offence is to claim both (a) and (b), but if both are true, neither should be denied. Therefore, let the mockers mock.