Personally, far from hating the University of Chicago, I greatly admire it. I’ve said often on these boards that I think it’s one of the top universities in the country, and I believe it’s made immeasurable contributions in many areas over the last hundred years.
What I find less appealing (echoing @JHS) are some folks on CC’s UChicago board who argue ad nauseam about what a unique citadel of free thinking UChicago is, the most consistently intellectual of all the universities, certainly deserving of at least its equal-third US News ranking, because of course it’s much better than equal-third snowflake haven Yale, leaving aside numbers 5-8 (Columbia, MIT, Stanford and Penn).
You don’t generally see that sort of thing on the boards of the peer schools. Have a look at the Harvard, Yale, Princeton, Stanford and MIT boards. With the exception of one Stanford partisan (who happens also to be a vocal UChicago partisan), there’s a negligible amount of posturing of this kind by people who have actual connections to these schools.
My second issue is that, based on posts and reactions to them, more than a few on the forum (including, apparently, some UChicago fans) share my view that the abovementioned US News ranking was obtained by an unseemly pattern of gaming US News’ ultimately arbitrary ranking system by going where other schools in UChicago’s peer group won’t go.
All of which to say, in response to @marlowe1’s questions, what I think annoys people (on here, anyway) is the combination of statements about UChicago’s purportedly unique intellectual climate and aggressive admissions gamesmanship (which includes moves that manifestly dilute whatever uniqueness UChicago has).
Sure, one person’s gamesmanship is another’s hardball competition, but, to put it bluntly, it seems obvious to some of us that the combination of mass mailings, reliance on EDI and ED II and now test-optional admissions and playing games with fees - a combination seen nowhere else among UChicago’s peer group - is all about puffing up applications and yield, not identifying some unquantifiable population of kids presumed to be seeking that UChicago je ne sais quoi.