Violence in Chicago

JHS
Wed, 23 Apr 2008 09:00:49 +0000

The University of Chicago campus, unlike, say, Columbia’s, or even USC, is very open to the surrounding community. Apart from a couple blocks of quads, university buildings are interwoven with non-university buildings across an area of several square miles, and several undergraduate dormitories are “off campus”. Hyde Park and Kenwood, while not anything like the South Bronx, are diverse from both a racial and an economic standpoint. Far from having a “lack of ability to integrate into the immediate surrounding community”, integrating into the immediate surrounding community is a daily necessity for most Chicago students. In addition, they travel all over the city on public transportation, and many recent grads who stay in Chicago wind up living in neighborhoods like Pilsen, which are not in the least hermetically sealed enclaves of privilege.

Each urban university is slightly different. Chicago is nothing like Temple, where you could get a tan from the klieg lights that shine 24 hours a day in the main campus areas, and there are blocks within half a mile of the center of campus that look like something left over from the Bosnian civil war. But it sure ain’t Princeton or Stanford, either. As many have said, it’s safe in the way that urban places can be safe, but it’s not a college where someone who is freaked out by urban settings and urban dangers is going to feel completely comfortable.

One relatively recent grad I know came from a small town in Minnesota. He liked the education at Chicago, but always felt nervous living there, and his idea of a great place to live is represented by Cornell, where he went to graduate school. Now 30, he is just beginning to feel OK about living in a city, but he lives in a luxury high-rise in a rich neighborhood, and reverse-commutes to a job in the near suburbs. Nothing bad ever happened to him in Hyde Park, but all he remembers about it is the (irrational, subjective) fear he felt.

If that sounds like you, you probably should consider other options. If you can deal with it – if you wouldn’t mind going to Yale, or Penn, or USC, for example – then, really, Chicago is just fine.