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STUDENT COFFEE SHOP WORKERS REFLECT ON YEAR OF LOCKDOWN

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University Aims for Full Return to Campus by Autumn Quarter

By YIWEN LU News Editor President Robert Zimmer and Provost Ka Yee Lee announced that the University is planning to hold the 2021–22 academic year entirely on campus, according to an email sent to the University community on Monday afternoon.

“We intend to invite our full population of students to be in residence, classrooms and labs for the 2021 autumn quarter, if the state of the pandemic and the health of our community allow,” they wrote. All University employees will also return to campus.

In a follow-up email from Dean John

Boyer to students in the College, the reopening will entail a return to full operating capacity for University housing and dining, in-person instruction in “the great majority” of classes and labs, the resumption of study abroad programs in line with international travel guidelines, and a combination of in-person and virtual career advising to ensure flexibility.

Zimmer and Lee wrote that their confidence arises from the UChicago community’s continual adherence to national, state, local, and school-specific COVID-19 safety guidelines as well as the rapid rate of vaccination across the country.

Despite Zimmer and Lee’s optimism,

the email also noted that any in-person reopening is contingent on several conditions, including a high rate of vaccination within the University community, continued adherence to precautionary measures in line with government guidelines, and low rates of infection in Chicago. The overall positivity rate in Chicago has been under five percent since February. The potential rapid spread of new COVID-19 variants could also affect plans to reopen, the email said.

An on-campus vaccine clinic for University employees and students with preexisting conditions opened today, March 29. Eligible University affiliates will receive email invitations for vaccination appointments.

Students without preexisting conditions will be eligible for vaccination in Phase 2 of Chicago’s vaccine rollout, which is scheduled to begin in May. There were 35 new COVID-19 cases among University members last week, according to an email UChicago Forward sent on Friday. Approximately 25 of these cases involved a cluster of students from the Booth School of Business. As of March 24, there were 182 positive cases in the current school year for an overall positivity rate of 0.17 percent.

University administrators wrote that further guidance on autumn quarter plans will be forthcoming.

NLRB Withdraws Proposed Rule Stating Graduate Students Are Not Employees

By NIKHIL JAISWAL Senior News Reporter On March 12, the National Labor Relations Board (NLRB) announced that it would withdraw a proposed rule that would have established that students at the graduate and undergraduate levels who perform services, including teaching or research, for their universities for compensation were not employees.

While graduate students at public universities have been allowed to unionize for years, this has not been the case for those at private universities. The drive for unionization among graduate students at private universities accelerated in 2016 after the NLRB allowed graduate students at Columbia to form a union.

Since then, graduate students across the

country, including Graduate Students United (GSU) at the University of Chicago, have attempted to unionize in order to advocate for better working conditions. In UChicago’s case, GSU has advocated for an end to the student services fee, more flexible program deadlines, and an increased say in the administrative decisions that impact graduate students.

The now-withdrawn rule, which was proposed in 2019, would have severely damaged the unionization efforts of graduate students at private universities, as it would have codified that graduate student workers were not recognized as statutory employees, barring them from federal collective bargaining rights guaranteed by the National Labor Relations Act. “The change of the rule today is show-

GREY CITY: Two unique curricula, two different paths: UChicago and St. John’s College PAGE 7

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CAMELIA MALKAMI

EDITORIAL BOARD: The Editorial Board reflects on its role covering the University and the South Side

SPORTS: UChicago athletes return to in-person competition

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Like our Facebook page at facebook.com/chicagomaroon and follow @chicagomaroon on Instagram and Twitter to get the latest updates on campus news.

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“The government will sometimes support you and sometimes it won’t.”

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ing the winds are in [GSU’s] favor. By August or so, there should be a Democratic majority on the board again and so legally our options are looking better than they have been over the past four years,” said Laura Colaneri, a member of GSU’s communications committee. “As of right now, we’re not relying on any one strategy in

particular, we’re focusing on the needs of our members and trying to do things that will have immediate benefits on campus and aren’t subject to shifting political tides on a Federal level.”

This strategy of caution has defined how GSU has operated, including their 2018 decision to withdraw their case for recognition from the NLRB. At the

time, graduate student organizers across the country feared that the Republican majority on the NLRB, appointed by then-President Donald Trump, would use the case as an opportunity to overturn the Columbia decision of 2016 and declare that graduate students weren’t statutory employees.

“One of our other lessons over the

past few years has been that you can’t put all your eggs in one basket. The government will sometimes support you and sometimes it won’t. And when you know that you’re in the right, in terms of your actions and that you’re trying improve people’s working conditions on campus, you’ve really got to explore all of your options,” Colaneri said.

Campus Through a Camera Lens: UChicago YouTubers Talk About Vlogging, College Life, and Mental Health

By MICHAEL MCCLURE & RYAN OWYANG Senior News Reporters In recent years, before UChicago’s admissions office joined TikTok, prospective students have increasingly turned to online platforms for a look at what life at the University is like. YouTube videos, from casual vlogs of campus dorms to a breakdown of the economics major’s various tracks, have drawn views from among UChicago’s prospective applicants, current students, and graduates.

The Maroon caught up with four student YouTubers who have shared their experiences at UChicago with the online world.

Sissi Zheng (chocopuffeater) In October 2016, Sissi Zheng (A.B. ’20) posted a short video of her flipping through her calculus notebook on her Instagram.

Two months later, she posted her first YouTube video, “Winter Break Haul,” in which she showcased some stationery items she purchased. “In that video I mentioned that I go to UChicago and I got a few [messages] like ‘Oh, you should show us around the school and tell us what it’s like!’” Initially, she didn’t plan on making videos about UChicago, but comments like those made her consider the idea.

Four years later, chocopuffeater has more subscribers than the UChicago Admissions YouTube channel and has become many prospective students’ first glimpse into life at the University. Although Zheng’s intention was not to promote her channel to people interested in UChicago, prospective students nevertheless became a large part of her audience.

“Definitely around second year or third year I [felt] like an unofficial admissions [representative] because a lot of the time, people would come into my DMs [direct messages] and ask me very specific questions, like what courses I took or what books I read or [if I could] post a picture of my syllabus,” Zheng said. “In third year especially, I posted more content about what it’s like, what the classes are like, and what my major was like.”

Besides capturing her and her friends’ daily lives, Zheng also discussed UChicago’s educational philosophy on her channel. “I thought it was important to transmit the type of education offered here and allow people to understand what our aim is.” Even so, the main focus of her videos was her personal experience. “I think people want to watch videos made by actual students and not the admissions office because they want to hear real perspectives of the individuals taking classes.”

Despite an increasing number of views and subscribers, Zheng said that her channel was not about creating eye-catching content.

“What makes you pop on YouTube, besides consistency of uploads, is having fresh content that pops off the page and draws a lot of attention for being flashy,” she said. “Whoever’s interested can watch.… I’m a super oldat-heart person. I’m a homebody, I never go out and party, I don’t do anything extreme.”

Despite being a major part of the University’s online presence, Zheng didn’t intend to shape general attitudes about UChicago. “I don’t want anyone to think my experience encapsulates everyone else’s experience, and I don’t want people who watch it to feel judged for wanting to pursue something I didn’t want to pursue,” she said. Just like

the videos documenting her school journey, career path, and the way she lives, Zheng encouraged her audience to find their own unique path at UChicago and beyond. “I believe that every person’s path is so uniquely theirs.”

Chloe Tan (itschloetan) When Chloe Tan started her YouTube channel three years ago, it didn’t revolve around UChicago. In the winter of 2018, Tan was accepted to the University of Oxford’s philosophy, politics, and economics program, and she began offering advice and answering questions about her application experience on her channel, itschloetan. “It wasn’t that difficult for me to just start filming myself and start putting it on YouTube,” she said.

Soon after she was accepted to UChicago through Early Decision I, Tan discovered that there wasn’t much UChicago–related

content on YouTube, which inspired her to fill the void. “It comes from a place of not wanting other people to go through the uneasiness that we did,” she said.

Tan has covered a broad slice of UChicago life, including study sessions at Regenstein Library, Model United Nations, and the UChicago application essay prompts, but her goal remains to provide an objective presentation of campus life. “I’ve always tried to portray UChicago in more of an informative way,” she said.

With thousands of views per video and over 13,000 subscribers, Tan has earned a formidable following on YouTube. A video of her moving in to Campus North Residential Commons, which she posted in May 2019, has accrued over 100,000 views, a view count she attributes to the paucity of content about UChicago dormitories. “There’s no tour of CONTINUED ON PG. 3

Sissi Zheng (top left), Makayla MacGregor (top right), Donna Tong (bottom left), Chloe Tan (bottom right)

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“It’s short, it’s informative, and it’s relatively quick-paced.”

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North from a student perspective, so I think any dorm tour is already a major clickbait title for college students.”

The length of the move-in video—six minutes and 40 seconds—may also have boosted its popularity. Many YouTubers opt for videos of eight minutes or longer, which allows for more advertisements to be interspersed. “For this video, I didn’t really care [about advertisements]. I just wanted to showcase the dorms. It’s short, it’s informative, and it’s relatively quick-paced,” Tan said.

But bringing college life online has not always been easy for Tan. Last winter, following some personal struggles she endured at UChicago, she posted a video about the mental health challenges of public-facing students like her.

“I didn’t have to put it on YouTube,” Tan said of the video. “It was only up for a day, but it actually did get more views than a usual video because I [talked] about my stressors at UChicago.”

Much of the video centered around her

feelings of imposter syndrome and the burnout she felt from her academic work. “I felt like I had to ‘do more’ to have a place there,” she said. “I didn’t want to pose it as ‘UChicago is overbearing,’ because it’s not UChicago’s problem, it’s my own.”

Itschloetan is a carefully curated channel: Tan brainstorms video ideas multiple weeks in advance and spends several hours— sometimes days—editing each video. That now-deleted video, however, was a major departure from her norm. “That video was me speaking in my bedroom with zero editing,” she said. “I still haven’t rewatched it…all my stumbles, all my frustrations, all my lack of words, et cetera, it all showed.”

Makayla MacGregor (makaylamacgregor) First-year Makayla MacGregor began uploading videos to YouTube in high school, but after she finished her college applications last year, she found herself with more time to create content. Since coming to UChicago, MacGregor’s videos have included study ses-

sions, college application advice, and footage of move-in day.

“I hope that if prospective students look at my vlogs they’ll be able to…understand what a day in the life of [a UChicago student] looks like,” she said.

But having spent winter quarter at her home in Maine, MacGregor found it difficult to showcase UChicago’s variety of offerings when taking classes online. “It’s definitely a challenge to still produce good content [since] I’m just doing online learning,” she said. “It’s a very limited view of UChicago, I think, but it’s as much as I can show under the circumstances.”

MacGregor’s videos are also dictated in part by the technology she owns. “I usually keep my videos short because I have not yet spent the money on a good camera, so I just use my phone. And I have limited space on my phone, so as soon as I’ve gotten the shot I need, I shut off the camera.”

Donna Tong (donnatong) “Now that chocopuffeater left and Chloe

Tan is taking a gap year, a lot of people are like, ‘There’s a gap [in the content],’” said first-year Donna Tong, a Lab Schools graduate and a new face on UChicago’s YouTube scene. “I never thought of myself as a vlogger,” she said. “Everything I’m doing now is based on instinct. I’m not trying to fill the gap that Chloe Tan left—god knows I couldn’t.”

Even with a smaller audience, Tong still receives messages from prospective students looking for advice. “One of my favorite things in the world is when people DM me on Instagram or comment and ask about life [at the school].” As a result, Tong felt some responsibility for how others connect her to the school. “I wouldn’t say that I represent the…

University, but when people ask me about it, I do feel like I have a responsibility to convince them, to pull them in.”

But neither does Tong try to sell a false version of her experiences. “When I speak positively of the University, it really does come from my heart,” she said. “I’m stressed, but I’m happy. I know I’m doing what’s right for me.”

Alexi McCammond (A.B. ’15) Resigns as Incoming Teen Vogue Editor-in-Chief After Backlash Over Racist Tweets

By YIWEN LU News Editor Political journalist Alexi McCammond (A.B. ’15), who was slated to take over the role of editor-in-chief at Teen Vogue on March 24, resigned from the magazine on Thursday, March 18, over backlash against racist and homophobic comments she made on Twitter during 2011–12.

McCammond announced the decision in a statement posted to Twitter. “My past tweets have overshadowed the work I’ve done to highlight the people and issues that I care about—issues that Teen Vogue has worked tirelessly to share with the world— and so [Teen Vogue publisher] Condé Nast and I have decided to part ways. I should not have tweeted what I did and I have taken full responsibility for that,” she wrote.

The now–27-year-old McCammond made her name while working as a political reporter at Axios. She was known for her coverage of the 2018 midterm election and

Joe Biden’s presidential campaign last year.

In 2019, the National Association of Black Journalists named her the emerging journalist of the year. McCammond would have been the third Black editor-in-chief at Teen Vogue, which has expanded its coverage in recent years to include political and social activism reporting in addition to its fashion and culture coverage.

Just days after Condé Nast announced McCammond’s hiring on March 5, screenshots of the offensive tweets, which included references to stereotypes of Asian people and terms such as “homo” and “gay” in derogatory fashions, resurfaced on social media.

According to The Daily Beast, one of the since-deleted tweets reads, “Now googling how to not wake up with swollen, asian eyes.”

Another says, “Give me a 2/10 on my chem problem, cross out all of my work and don’t explain what i did wrong..thanks a lot stupid asian T.A. you’re great.”

Twitter users first recirculated the

tweets in question in November 2019, after McCammond tweeted about offensive comments basketball player Charles Barkley made to her. McCammond deleted the tweets and apologized, tweeting, “Today I was reminded of some past insensitive tweets, and I am deeply sorry to anyone I offended. I have since deleted those tweets as they do not reflect my views or who I am today.”

In 2011, when she authored the offending tweets, McCammond was a first-year QuestBridge Scholar at the University of Chicago.

McCammond told UChicago News that she came to UChicago aiming to become a doctor. During her time in the College, however, she changed directions and began working in political journalism. She studied sociology and wrote for the undergraduate political publication The Gate.

During the most recent social media backlash, The National Pulse, a right-wing news website, published a photo from 2011 of McCammond in Native American costume

at a Halloween party. A Condé Nast executive said that the company was aware of the racist tweets but not the homophobic tweets or this photo.

The resurfacing of her tweets came amid national attention to hate crimes against the Asian community. On March 8, more than 20 Teen Vogue staff published a statement on Twitter, saying that they wrote a letter to the Condé Nast management condemning the hiring decision. “In a moment of historically high anti-Asian violence and amid the ongoing struggles of the LGBT community, we as the staff of Teen Vogue fully reject those sentiments.”

McCammond apologized for her tweets in an internal note sent to Teen Vogue staff on the same day. “This has been one of the hardest weeks of my life, in large part because of the intense pain I know my words and my announcement have caused so many of you,” the statement reads. “I’ve apologized for my past racist and homophobic tweets CONTINUED ON PG. 4

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“I’ve apologized for my past racist and homophobic tweets... there’s no excuse for perpetuating those awful stereotypes in any way.”

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and will reiterate that there’s no excuse for perpetuating those awful stereotypes in any way.”

Condé Nast initially defended McCammond. In a statement sent to The Daily Beast on March 8, a spokesperson said that “two years ago she took responsibility for her so-

cial media history and apologized.”

On Wednesday, March 17, after six women of Asian descent were killed in shootings at the Atlanta area the previous day, Roger Lynch, Condé Nast’s chief executive officer, sent a memo to staff members, acknowledging the impact of the rising hate crimes on the Asian community. One in 10 employ-

ees at the company identified as Asian, the memo said.

One day later, McCammond announced her decision to leave the new position before her start date. A Teen Vogue statement published after her announcement wrote, “We’ve received many questions regarding Condé Nast’s appointment of Alexi McCam-

mond at Teen Vogue, and more specifically the racist and homophobic tweets she made against the Asian and LGBTQ+ communities when she was a teenager. After many conversations, we no longer see a way forward together and have mutually decided to part ways.”

Four UChicago Professors Help Start Organization to Protect Academic Freedom

By TESS CHANG Deputy News Editor Four UChicago professors are founding members of the Academic Freedom Alliance (AFA), a nonprofit organization dedicated to defending academic freedom in higher education.

The AFA officially launched on March 8, and states that its mission is “protecting the rights of faculty members at colleges and universities to speak, instruct, and publish without fear of sanction or punishment.” It promises to support faculty who feel their academic freedom is in jeopardy, with legal action if necessary. Its members include faculty from colleges and universities nationwide.

In interviews with The Maroon, the four UChicago faculty members said the AFA is a necessary bulwark against increasing impingement on academic freedom, especially in allowing college and university faculty to express unorthodox views.

“There used to be more of a widespread agreement, at least in colleges and universities, that even very, very wrong or offensive speech was just part of what you expected to hear,” said William Baude, a professor of law and Aaron Director Research Scholar at the University of Chicago Law School.

The University has long been known for its commitment to free expression. The 1967 Kalven Report solidified the University’s policy against taking positions on social or political issues. Former president Robert Zimmer made the commitment to free expression central to his administration, for

instance appointing a Committee on Freedom of Expression. In 2014, the committee published the Chicago principles to further articulate the University’s adherence to the ideals of free expression and debate. Since their publication, dozens of colleges nationwide have adopted versions of the Chicago principles.

However, the Chicago principles have been relatively controversial among University professors, with some lamenting the lack of an open forum to discuss the University’s free speech policy. According to reporting by The Daily Princetonian, founding AFA members at Princeton University “proposed the adoption of the Chicago Statement” in the AFA’s early conversations.

Brian Leiter, Karl N. Llewellyn Professor of Jurisprudence at the University of Chicago Law School and director of the Center for Law, Philosophy, and Human Values, joined the AFA because he believes that academic freedom is under threat from forces both outside and inside of universities. In particular, he emphasized how public universities can be more susceptible to external pressure. “Many public universities are now facing efforts by state legislatures to try to restrict the teaching of critical race theory, which is the new boogeyman for the Republican Party,” he said. “As far as I can tell, it has nothing to do with what’s actually called critical race theory, for example in academic law, but we’ll put that aside.”

In addition, Leiter believes there is increasing pressure from within college and university communities, especially from

college students themselves. “There is increasing pressure coming from those who consider themselves woke. They are very sensitive to what anyone says on matters of race, for example.” He brought up the example of Dorian Abbot, an associate professor in the Department of Geophysical Sciences.

Last year, Abbot drew criticism for expressing his disapproval of the current academic environment at UChicago, including its affirmative action policies in hiring and admissions.

Abbot, who is another a founding member of the AFA, said its founders reached out to him after hearing about this controversy. The experience made him realize the need for an organization like the AFA. Abbot believes that censorship of unpopular opinions can be represented by an iceberg model. To support this, he cited a recent report by Eric Kaufmann, a professor of politics at Birkbeck, University of London, for the Center for the Study of Partisanship and Ideology. Kaufmann’s online surveys found that the majority of threats to academic freedom fell under the categories of “soft authoritarianism,” such as cases of self-censorship or a hostile climate for certain political beliefs. Only 0.03 percent of threats constituted “no-platforming or dismissal incidents,” where the individual in question is removed from the institution.

“A lot of the time, pressure doesn’t take the form of professors getting fired or students being expelled. A lot of the time, the punishments are gentler. Maybe a professor is taken away from some leadership position or the student won’t be given a letter

of recommendation. I just worry that we’re losing sight of something that justifies the whole existence of academia,” Baude said.

Luigi Zingales, Robert C. McCormack Distinguished Service Professor of Entrepreneurship and Finance at the Booth School, explained how the AFA can protect non-tenured professors as well.

“I’m worried that my younger colleagues in particular won’t grow up in an environment in which they can not only say what they think, but most importantly, also do research in what they want to do,” he said.

“Research even against the moral norms of society is important.”

Zingales expressed concern that academics will be afraid to study the negative side effects of vaccines, because any criticism of vaccines might cause people to label them as an anti-vaxxer. “I think academic freedom exists to make sure that we’re not shunned for the research we’re doing,” he said. In 2018, Zingales came under fire for inviting Steve Bannon to speak on campus, reigniting the debate over free speech and academic freedom.

Several professors pointed out that pressure to conform with orthodoxy comes from both liberals and conservatives. “The views of the founding members of the AFA run the political gamut from the so-called political right to the so-called political left, which I think is appropriate and accurate and important,” said Baude. Multiple professors mentioned that criticism of diversity or affirmative action initiatives is automatically denounced by those on the left, while CONTINUED ON PG. 5

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“I just worry that we’re losing sight of something that justifies the whole existence of academia.”

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any critique of Israel is automatically condemned by those on the political right.

All four professors agreed that the free exchange of ideas and the ability to voice dissent are crucial to the fundamental purpose of academia. “The specific function of a university, the reason that it exists, is to produce knowledge for society,” said Abbot. “If

we’re restricting, in any way, the ability of individuals operating within the University to propose ideas and test them, then we’re undercutting the function of a university.”

Baude made a similar argument. “There are two pillars of academic freedom. One is a general belief in free speech. Then there is a separate belief, that even if you think speech in the public sphere should be reg-

ulated more, the whole point of a university is trying to work with controversial ideas through discussion and debate. I’m inclined to believe in both.”

The professors also brought up the University’s exceptionalism in regards to academic freedom. Abbot called UChicago “the gold standard” when it comes to academic freedom on college campuses. “In general,

the University of Chicago is better than other places. But that doesn’t mean it’s immune to problems,” he said.

Baude concurred, “It seems to me Chicago is doing much better on this front than any other university, but Chicago won’t remain special forever if we don’t fight to keep it that way.”

A Year After Coffee Shops Closed Across Campus, Student Café Workers Recall Their Last Days on the Job and What They’ve Lost Since

By RYAN OWYANG Senior News Reporter In March 2020, fourth-year Liam Kim called in the staff of Harper Café to deep-clean and shut down the shop.

Some student workers thought that they were leaving for a few weeks, others for a few months. Now, over a year since a shot of espresso was pulled from the campus machines, *THE MAROON* spoke to four employees of Harper Café about how they adapted to the closure of the shop and corresponding losses of income and community.

Current second-year Omar Shohoud spent almost all of his freshman year in Harper, starting as a barista in the fall of 2020. “I wasn’t planning on it until they posted the application. I thought, ‘This seems really cool!’ and then when I went to the interview, I was even more excited because it seemed like a really chill place,” said Shohoud.

On his first day, he met everyone at the café and spent time with other new hires during training. “I was out of my element a bit, because I had never worked in a restaurant or a café before,” he said. “I was a little bit nervous, but my coworkers were extremely gentle with me, and I could tell they understood how I felt.”

Even as Shohoud finished training and began picking up shifts, he spent much

more time at Harper than he was obligated. “Since I lived in [International House], Harper basically became my life,” he said.

“I would leave I-House in the morning for class and wouldn’t go back until I was ready to sleep. So, I would study at Harper, I would work at Harper, I would eat at Cathey or Harper.”

Recalling closing the shop in March 2020, he said, “I wasn’t that sad. I thought, ‘Oh, goodbye guys but I’ll see you by mid– spring quarter.’” But as University announcements about a fully remote spring and partially reopened fall came out, it became clear that the café would be closed for quite some time.

“It was like losing a whole year with family. People are graduating—we’re not going to see them again. The managers and a lot of the other baristas are gone. That’s one of the saddest parts to me,” Shohoud said. “This year definitely did some damage to the sense of community. I don’t think it will be easy to pick up exactly where we left off.”

Given that there have been no new hires during the 2020–21 year, Harper will see its staff going into 2021 fall with significantly fewer personnel than in a normal year. After the café reopens, staff from the Classes of 2020 and 2021 will have graduated without replacement. “It’s going to be a really big batch of new hires,” said third-year Erica Ramos, a barista at

Harper. “But I think a lot of the people who are staying around really care about having community. Some of the firstyears [now second-years] have been the most committed to making some of these Zoom meetups happen. I think we’ll figure it out.” Through a preferential hiring program set up by the University, Ramos is now a building manager at Reynold’s Club, enforcing masking and social distancing rules.

Kim, the current general manager of Harper Café, joined as a barista in the fall of his first year, just after Orientation

week. For two years, he dedicated around 10 to 11 hours each week to the job.

“I really wanted to meet different people. I thought a coffee shop would be a good way to meet many different parts of the campus community,” said Kim. “Even just the baristas that work at Harper—we’re all very close with each other and some of them I don’t think I would’ve met if I hadn’t worked at that coffee shop.”

Kim fondly recounted forming relationships with customers who dropped by the café at the same time each day and CONTINUED ON PG. 6

The employees of Harper Café at their closing party last March. COURTESY OF JULIA LIU

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“It was like losing a whole year with family.”

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the sense of routine it provided.

“Even when I was a manager and didn’t work shifts, Harper was like a second home to [those of us who worked there] at UChicago,” said Kim. “You could always find someone whom you knew.”

In his third year, he became financial manager. Last spring, when campus was shut down due to the pandemic, it fell to Kim and the staff of Harper Café to close

down.

One of the people on-shift when *THE MAROON* first broke news that spring quarter 2020 would be completely online was third-year Julia Liu, a barista. “We didn’t want to believe it, since it wasn’t from an official source,” said Liu. But, by the next morning when the University made the official announcement, it became clear that the shop would need to stop operating. “I wasn’t in management,

This year Harper Café has been converted into a study space. ANGELINA TORRE

but I’d bet it was really chaotic for Liam. I just got an email saying we have to close up.”

“We called in everyone who was available to finish out shifts, notify people we were closing in two hours, and, over a few hours, deep-cleaned the shop because we didn’t know when we would be back,” said Kim. Liu is currently in China, where she has been since the beginning of the summer.

Though Liu is sure that she’ll be back as a barista in fall 2021, for now, Harper still seems far away. “Now I can’t remember much of what happened last year. It was so long ago and it feels like a complete other universe.”

At that time, an extended closure seemed far-fetched to Kim; when one of his friends suggested that fall quarter might be remote, he laughed.

“We were working under the assumption that the very latest we would come back would be fall quarter,” he said. “We also had to say goodbye to our seniors very rapidly because we didn’t know when we were going to see them again. It was a rushed, bittersweet moment.”

As financial manager, Kim was in charge of calculating how much the staff of Harper might have been paid, had the

café remained open. The University then paid the laid-off staff a percentage of that projected value.

Kim had applied to be general manager because of what the community there had meant to him. “There is a strong sense of friendship among Harper employees,” Kim said. Even now, he keeps in regular contact with former employees who have graduated. “I was very grateful to the Harper community when I first came to college—Harper was one of the first things I joined,” said Kim. “When I decided to apply to [general manager], I wanted to give back. I think Harper has a very special bond between the baristas. My goal was to maintain that.” Kim had applied for the job before the pandemic reached the University. His job interview was conducted days before the closure of the shop. Suddenly, he found himself manager of a shop that served no coffee.

But the pandemic has made this sense of community difficult to maintain. “We haven’t been able to come together as a community for almost a year now. It’s been difficult to have large group gatherings online,” he said. “We’ve had game nights and casual chats, but it’s been very difficult. Online engagement is not something people are very fond of these days.”

Daily Tutoring Can Double or Triple Math Student Learning, UChicago Study Suggests

By RACHEL WAN Deputy News Editor Daily tutoring can double or triple the amount of math that high school students learn each year according to research out of UChicago’s Education Lab. The recently published study titled “Not Too Late: Improving Academic Outcomes Among Adolescents” measured the impact of providing daily 45–to=50 minute instruction to ninth and 10th graders who are currently enrolled in some of Chicago’s most economically disadvantaged schools.

The findings come as schools grapple with the challenges of online learning during the COVID-19 pandemic, including significant learning loss among stu-

dents and the acceleration of preexisting educational disparities between school districts and socioeconomic status.

The study focused on tutoring students in math, as failing core math classes is a major driver of dropout in Chicago. In Chicago, 80 percent of students who drop out of high school cite course failures as the reason, with Algebra 1 being the most frequently failed high school course. In fact, educational research suggests that many American high school students are three or more years behind grade level in math, a pressing challenge that has been exacerbated by the pandemic.

By providing personalized instruction in accordance with the school curriculum, students were able to complement school

lessons with intensive mentorship and help. The study shows that this intensive tutoring doubled or tripled the amount of math students learned in a year.

The study also suggests that the positive trends from intensive tutoring are substantial and long-term. Two years after receiving tutoring, students continued to see persistent gains in math test scores and GPA. Intensive math tutoring was also found to have spillover effects across subjects, as student grades increased in both math and non-math courses.

The study’s results contravene claims by some in the research community that it is too difficult or costly to substantially improve the academic skills of children who are behind once they reach high

school. The paper suggests that previous educational research has perhaps relied on “wrong interventions, failing to account for challenges like the increased variability in academic needs during adolescence, or heightened difficulty of classroom management.” The study estimated the cost of this tutoring to a below-average rate of $3,500 to $4,300 per participant per year.

The implications of this study are particularly relevant in the context of COVID-19. With positive trends predicted to persist for at least two years, the results suggest that intensive tutoring could reduce the achievement gaps that have been exacerbated by the pandemic.

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A Tale of Two Curricula: General Education at St. John’s College and the University of Chicago A small liberal arts college in Maryland shows a vision of what the University of Chicago might have been.

By BRANDON SHIN Grey City Reporter

At the center of Maryland’s historic capital, Annapolis, lies St. John’s College. Described by The New York Times as “the most contrarian college in America,” St. John’s has attracted attention for its moves against the grain of the higher education scene of today. Notably, St. John’s has used donor dollars to lower tuition costs and for a long time held out against reporting data to the controversial—and increasingly influential—college rankings by U.S. News and World Report. As both the price of the education and the size of the endowment at the University of Chicago soar, and as its admissions rates decline, it may come as a surprise that, following a reorganization in 1937, St. John’s was once called “the college where the ideals of this University [UChicago] come closest to being realized in actual practice” by The Maroon (then The Daily Maroon). In fact, the general education curriculum at St. John’s has its roots firmly planted in the Great Books movement cultivated at UChicago in the 1930s, and the ethos of its curriculum, unlike at UChicago, remains largely unchanged to this day.

The New Plan According to John Boyer’s A Twentieth-Century Cosmos: The New Plan and the Origins of General Education at Chicago, the beginnings of UChicago’s history of general education can be traced back to the New Plan of the 1930s. Often misattributed to former University pres-

ident Robert Maynard Hutchins, it was Dean of the College Chauncey Boucher who, frustrated with the University’s heavy bent towards graduate education, formulated the University’s first core curriculum in the late 1920s.

Boucher sought to revolutionize undergraduate education through the creation of a cohesive general education curriculum that would take advantage of the University’s impressive roster of research faculty. He created four different year-long, interdisciplinary, and interdepartmental survey courses in the natural sciences, the biological sciences, the humanities, and the social sciences. Constructed in a lecture-discussion format, these courses relied on the collaboration of a number of the University’s senior faculty and, particularly in the sciences, intended to demonstrate to students the interdependence of disciplines across various fields of study.

The New Plan was constructed—both in its structure and in its content—to emphasize students’ individuality. Notably, the social science course made use of an array of primary sources and sought to place the burden of deriving social principles on the students themselves. On a structural level, the New Plan maintained its focus on individuality through its means of assessment. Attendance at lectures was optional, and instructors had no control over students’ grades. Instead, students were encouraged to work through the curriculum at their own pace. When the material was mastered, students were given grades through five different six-hour general education

competency exams overseen by an independent Office of the Examiner.

President Hutchins and The Great Books Hutchins, though initially an ally of Boucher when he was appointed president in 1929, eventually became one of the greatest challengers of the New Plan. Hutchins’s push against the New Plan started in 1930 after he became acquainted with Mortimer Adler, an instructor at Columbia University who would go on to become one of the leaders of the Great Books movement.

According to a 2009 dissertation by William Scott Rule, S eventy Years of Changing Great Books at St. John’s College, which details the history of Great Books at St. John’s and beyond, Adler himself first encountered the idea of a Great Books education at Columbia University as a student in John Erskine’s General Honors course, a course which Adler would eventually go on to help teach. The seminar-discussion course would go on to form the mold for Columbia’s core curriculum and lay the foundation for how a Great Books education might be implemented. Erskine saw the defining characteristic of a great book to be its timelessness.

“The Great Books are those which are capable of reinterpretations, which surprise us by remaining true even when our point of view changes,” Erskine wrote in his 1928 book, The Delight of Great Books. “If a book no longer reflects our life, it will cease to be generally read, no matter what its importance for antiquar-

ian purposes.”

Hutchins had taken a liking to Adler when the two met several years before.

So when Hutchins became president in 1929, he used his position of power to entice the aspiring philosopher to Chicago three years later with a philosophy professorship, a position Adler had failed to land at Columbia. Having admitted, according to Rule, to not giving much thought about what education should be prior to accepting the presidency, Hutchins was quickly converted by Adler into a staunch proponent of the Great Books. Soon enough, Hutchins resolved to replace the New Plan with a Great Books curriculum.

Hutchins constructed a curriculum committee and tasked Adler with formulating four lists of great books to replace the curricula in the four existing divisions of the New Plan. However, the lists were met with intense opposition from the faculty on the committee, and Hutchins’s first attempt at a Great Books curriculum ultimately failed.

Hutchins didn’t give up on his vision, however. In 1936, he brought in several influential outside figures, including Scott Buchanan and Stringfellow Barr of the University of Virginia, and he gained a powerful ally in Dean of the Humanities Division Richard McKeon. Still, the proposal managed to inflame faculty.

“The faculty really had a great deal of anxiety about what Hutchins and Adler were trying to do in the late 1930s. Part of it was personality-driven. A lot of faculty just didn’t like Hutchins, thought he was CONTINUED ON PG. 8

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“At St. John’s, there are no departments. There are no ranks among the faculty. We’re all just tutors.”

CONTINUED FROM PG. 7

very autocratic and telling them what to do. And it’s a long tradition around here.

The faculty have the right to organize the curriculum the way they want,” Boyer, dean of the College and historian of the University, told The Maroon.

Ironically, though, it was disagreements within the committee of Great Books supporters that ultimately defeated Hutchins’s second attempt. The committee simply could not agree on what books to read or how to read them, and the idea of an all-encompassing Great Books education at Chicago was put aside.

A Vision Realized: Great Books at St. John’s College Though the Committee on the Liberal Arts failed to produce a Great Books curriculum at UChicago, according to Rule’s thesis, it did not fail to produce a Great Books curriculum altogether.

More than 700 miles away in Annapolis, Maryland, a struggling St. John’s College, lacking a president and official accreditation, had heard about the committee and contacted Hutchins hoping to receive his assistance. While the opportunity to implement a Great Books program at a smaller institution intrigued the committee, Hutchins himself was uninterested in leaving his position at a large, prestigious institution like UChicago to fill the role. Realizing this, Barr and Buchanan agreed to leave the committee for St. John’s and take on the roles of president and dean, respectively.

Both experienced academic administrators, Barr and Buchanan implemented a completely new curriculum and administrative structure at St. John’s.

“The New Program implemented in 1937 redefined the college in such a way that it, aside from the physical buildings, established a new institution,” Rule wrote.

The pair instituted a Great Books curriculum that was completely compulsory and spanned all four years of undergraduate education. Most of the existing faculty, who experienced difficulty with the curricular transition, chose to leave and were replaced by new faculty mem-

bers. Instructors of this new curriculum adopted the singular title of “tutor”; the terms “professor” or “teacher” were avoided because pedagogical responsibilities were to be attributed exclusively to the authors of Great Books.

Joseph Macfarland (Ph.D. ’96), dean of academic affairs at St. John’s, described this environment, which has endured into the present, in an interview with The Maroon. “At St. John’s, there are no departments. There are no ranks among the faculty. We’re all just tutors.

We don’t have postdocs. And it’s a very egalitarian culture in which everyone shares as part of a single community.”

The restructuring of St. John’s was a phenomenon of great interest to the University of Chicago community. In 1937, Hutchins was added to the Board of Visitors and Governors at St. John’s, and in 1939, Barr and Buchanan, alongside two members of St. John’s new faculty, drafted a four-part series in The Daily Maroon. The introduction to the series reads: “The educational ideas being tried out at St. John’s are of obvious interest to the University community, both for their relation to education in general, and for their relation to education in particular, to Hutchins’s educational proposals.

For this reason, several members of the college’s overworked staff have written articles explaining their school to The Daily Maroon readers.”

At the heart of this new curriculum was the seminar, where students were to discuss the Great Books under the supervision of two or more tutors. These seminars were discussions structured for intellectual play and rigorous argument and were meant to challenge students and tutors alike.

“Each seminar has at least two instructors to lead it, from different ‘fields.’ We wouldn’t trust one professor alone with such a group. He might start telling jokes, or indoctrinating, or bludgeoning young persons over the head with specialists’ terminology, or any one of a dozen of the things professors commonly do when they lead a student discussion without being chaperoned by a colleague,” Barr wrote in The Daily Maroon. “A good seminar is likely

to make a monkey of somebody, either a student or an instructor, by pushing him into a position he can’t get out of without backing out. It is good for students to be made monkeys of, and instructors too.”

These seminars were then supplemented by lectures and, for the sciences and mathematics, tutorials and labs.

Even the sciences, however, were to be taught via Great Books rather than textbooks. George Comenetz, one of the original tutors at St. John’s, described how this approach allows students to better understand the development of science and to critically examine authority in the field.

“A unique advantage of the great books is that they make great errors. Galileo deserves especial credit in this condition. The effect on a student’s attitude towards authority can only be a healthy one,” Comenetz wrote in The Daily Maroon. “There is at least a fair chance that a study of science in its development will be better for these students in training their minds and in showing them its place in knowledge as a whole, than the more efficient study of the sciences as they stand today.”

The College: Hutchins Gets His Revolution As debate over the curricula heightened, two of Hutchins’s main opponents—Boucher and economist Harry Gideonse—left the University. Boucher resigned over frustrations with attacks on the New Plan, and Gideonse was ousted by Hutchins, who refused to grant him a tenured position despite the continued recommendation of the Department of Economics. With his main opponents out of the way, Hutchins had paved a clearer path for the kind of sweeping reform he sought to achieve in his role as president.

This trend culminated in Hutchins dismantling the College in 1942 under the New Plan, in which most of the faculty, like today, also maintained departmental positions. Instead, Hutchins recruited a new faculty—larger than three of the four divisions—appointed solely to the College and pushed dual-appointed faculty out of the College and into their respective departments. He tasked the

new College faculty with the creation of a full-time, mandatory curriculum that would span four years instead of two, as in the New Plan. Instead of entering college at grade 13, this curriculum was to span grades 11 to 14 and would culminate in the awarding of a bachelor of arts degree, now controlled by the College instead of the individual departments.

With departments out of the picture, this new program did away with majors altogether.

“The idea was to have early admission. The high schools are doing a terrible job,” Boyer said. “Let’s get the kids, smart students, take them out of the clutches of these mediocre high schools, bring them to a great university, and put them through a rigorous program of four years of general education training. Then they could go on to medical school...the whole idea of specialization should come when you want to get your master’s or Ph.D.” Hutchins waged war on the faculty divisions, and he ultimately came out on top. Though he had abandoned the idea of a Great Books curriculum in its purest sense, as a board member of St. John’s who was closely following the success of the Great Books over in Annapolis, he certainly had the Great Books in mind as he fleshed out his reforms. His new curriculum, much like that of St. John’s, was structured around small seminar-style classes, and he enjoyed the fierce loyalty of the newly appointed faculty body in the College.

According to Boyer, this loyalty extended to the student body.

“As a younger person back in the 1980s, I would meet some of these alums and they were passionately, passionately in favor of this concept. I mean, they thought this was the world’s best way of organizing knowledge. To use the kind of colloquial [phrase], they had drunk the Kool-Aid.” While Hutchins was, by many accounts, an adept academic visionary, he did not share this same aptitude for fiscal management and fundraising.

Hutchins’s fiscal ineptitude, coupled with the great cost of the large College faculty required for the small class sizes CONTINUED ON PG. 9

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“What the College began to do is to allow variants…as a way of responding to the desire for more diversity and more plurality of approaches among the faculty.”

Left to right: Robert Maynard Hutchins, Stringfellow Barr, and Scott Buchanan. COURTESY OF BRANDON SHIN CONTINUED FROM PG. 8

of the new curriculum, led to large budget deficits and stagnating endowment growth that ultimately forced Hutchins to leave his position in 1951.

“The board was holding him accountable for getting us into this very dire financial mess,” Boyer said. “After what was a long time for a president of a university, Hutchins decided to leave.”

A Post-Hutchins College and the Core of Today Following Hutchins’s resignation, Lawrence Kimpton, a professor of philosophy, was appointed to replace Hutchins.

Kimpton quickly rolled back many of Hutchins’s reforms: He reintroduced majors into the College, took away much of the College’s curricular autonomy by allowing departmental faculty to teach

undergraduates, and restructured the college to include grades 13 to 16 rather than 11 to 14.

“Kimpton was a very shrewd guy,” Boyer said. “He had a Ph.D. in philosophy. He was kind of a humanities guy.

But he took one look at this and he said, ‘Look, this is not sustainable. I can’t run a college with, you know, all these [departmental] faculty, many of whom actually want to teach.’”

The College faculty, he said, needed to make room for more specialized coursework.

“It was very painful for the College faculty who were hired to teach these three or four years of humanities.

They’re told shrink it down to one year,” Boyer said. “Okay, how do you shrink a three-year [course] down to one year?”

Kimpton ushered in an era of curricu-

lar disarray that lacked the unified vision of the Hutchins plan, as responsibility for general education was fragmented among the departments. In 1964, the College was restructured into five collegiate divisions (biological sciences, humanities, physical sciences, social sciences, and new collegiate), and in 1966, a compromise that sought to restore curricular unity allowed each of these new divisions to create their own versions of their Core components, with less stringent requirements.

“Over time, faculty would begin to come forward and say, ‘Okay, I like general education or I like social sciences, but I don’t like Sosc 2. I want to have a different course.’ And so what the College began to do is to allow variants,” Boyer said. “That began in the ’60s and ’70s, really, as a way of responding to the desire

for more diversity and more plurality of approaches among the faculty.”

The next attempt at significant curricular reform occurred in 1982, under the leadership of Dean of the College Donald Levine. Levine sought to address the curricular disarray that characterized the post-Hutchins era up until this point, recentralizing control over undergraduate education. Under Levine’s plan, which went into effect in 1985, Core classes were to occupy 21 of the 42 classes required for the baccalaureate degree.

While many Core options remained, Levine did reestablish a common curricular platform for all students.

While more organized than the curricular chaos of the ’60s and ’70s, Levine’s curriculum faced several challenges.

First, the large size of the curriculum CONTINUED ON PG. 10

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“Looking back on it, [the curriculum negotiations] were fun...

But it was like negotiating a nuclear arms control treaty with all of these different interests.”

CONTINUED FROM PG. 9

forced many students to push their Core classes into the third and fourth years of their undergraduate studies, which went contrary to a previous conception of Core classes as initiatory prerequisite courses.

By their third and fourth years, students have “already been inducted into other educational cults…. They’ve already learned the throes of economic or of race theory,” said Harper-Schmidt Fellow and Self, Culture, and Society Core sequence instructor Sean Dowdy, an alum of the University’s M.A. Program in the Social Sciences who received his Ph.D. from the Department of Anthropology. “And so they’re coming in with those lenses and sort of saying, ‘Okay, we’re going to rip Durkheim apart, we’re going to rip Marx apart,’ without having that shared early experience together of initiation.”

Second, the decentralized curriculum caused the feeling of loyalty among College faculty, now largely co-appointed to a department, to decrease. While these courses were previously under the control of faculty appointed solely to the College, departmentally appointed faculty wanted no part in classes over which they had no intellectual control.

University president Hugo Sonnenschein’s administration, during Boyer’s tenure, ushered in a new wave of curricular reforms in the mid-to-late 1990s.

A series of intense debates began about how to address difficulties surrounding Levine’s reforms.

“Looking back on it, [the curriculum negotiations] were fun. I would never want to do it again. But it was like negotiating a nuclear arms control treaty with all of these different interests,” Boyer said. “So you try to talk through it and six months later we arrive at, I think, a reasonable compromise.… That’s what Hutchins did not have a lot of patience for. I’m not saying that my approach is better than his, except that I got the curriculum through and it’s still here. And I didn’t get kicked out like Hutchins.”

The agreement that was reached in 1997 and ultimately implemented in 1998 was a Core much the same as exists today. The overall course load shifted from

21 to 18 courses, occupying one-third of undergraduate study. The structure was similar to that of Boucher’s New Plan. Year-long sequences in the biological sciences, humanities, civilizational studies, and the physical sciences were replaced by two-quarter “doublets” with the intent of allowing a greater level of experimentation within the Core and the development of new Core options.

Departments were not allowed to occupy this space with increased major requirements, granting students another third of their planned coursework to experiment with electives or to add another major.

While the Sonnenschein-era reforms did address many of the issues of the 1985 plan, it was, and still is, not without controversy. Many members of the University community, including Dowdy, continue to critique the reforms as an attempt to make a “Chicago lite” experience that is more marketable to the general public and thus more profitable.

“Questions of pedagogy and questions of the philosophy of education were subordinated to economic motives,” said Dowdy. “The Sonnenschein administration and the suits that he brought in wanted to rethink not just the College, but the University as a whole, its infrastructure, its bureaucracies, on the basis of how to be profitable, with the endowment being the real bottom line.… To me, that’s disingenuous.”

The Future of General Education With more than 100 years of core curricula under its belt, the issue of what a general education should be and what it should look like remains a contentious issue at the University. General education at UChicago has been a tumultuous journey. However, UChicago remains among the select few institutions that, among a higher education scene that has been pushed more and more into specialization, has managed to maintain a firm commitment to general education as a worthwhile endeavor.

St. John’s College remains not a relic of what was at UChicago but an example of what could have been; while St. John’s maintains a rich educational tradition with roots grounded in UChicago’s edu-

cational philosophy, UChicago has never truly had a Great Books curriculum itself. St. John’s appears, then, as one of the few remaining torchbearers of an all-encompassing general education. While the list of the hundreds Great Books on offer at St. John’s has changed over the years (for example, Macfarland highlighted that W. E. B. DuBois now plays a more prominent role in the curriculum), Rule notes that a majority of the authors on the list—including Aristotle, Dante, Hegel, and Shakespeare—have remained since day one.

One of the main criticisms of the St. John’s Great Books curriculum, which Dowdy voiced, is that it is elitist and eurocentric, representing solely the Western tradition.

“The very term ‘Great Books’ is elitist. Yes, the very term ‘canon’ is elitist because what those words do, those signs, is they automatically make you think that there is going to be a drawing line between what counts as great [or] not great or what counts as canonical or not canonical,” Dowdy said. “That being said, I hold a slightly more nuanced view on this, in that I think there are some texts that are fundamental.… There’s this idea of cultural picturability. Freud has been read in Egypt, in India and China and far-flung parts of Siberia. That we should pretend as if Freud is just a white man is a problem. Freud opened up a possibility in thinking about human subjectivity that has been consumed the world over, that has not been colonially imposed but intentionally, deliberately read.”

Macfarland does not agree with this assessment of the Great Books. While he acknowledged that the Great Books are a Western tradition, he stressed that the curriculum’s scope is limited by its fouryear window.

“At St. John’s, I think there’s a very strong notion that it should be for anyone, for everyone to read the books which have played a foundational role in developing the culture and the thought which we’ve inherited,” he said. “The West doesn’t have a monopoly on great thought, but the authors that are in our tradition talk to one another.… So the further you go afield, the more likely you are to bring

something in as a kind of token—which I think doesn’t do either the tradition or the word justice, or it doesn’t have the same lines of communication with the series of voices that you’re bringing together.” For a Great Books education that veers off the beaten path of the Western tradition, Macfarland points to the eastern classics M.A. program at St. John’s.

St. John’s, too, has had to adapt. While the structure of the curriculum remains largely the same, it occupies a much different role in an era where U.S. academia has begun to reject the West’s supposed monopoly on “great” thought. According to Macfarland, it’s clear that St. John’s no longer sees the Great Books curriculum as general in the truest sense, but rather as one kind of specialization or version of what a general education can be.

“I think we’ve lost a little bit of that evangelical spirit, the notion that somehow the good news of St. John’s ought to be spread, has to be spread everywhere,” Macfarland said.

This illuminates for Boyer one of the biggest problems in formulating a general education: It can never be truly general or all-encompassing. “I’ve always been a little bit skeptical about being too prescriptive about what general education is beyond that it be a general introduction to knowledge and [that] there be small groups, there be a lot of writing, and there be a lot of conversation in the classroom,” Boyer said.

As for Dowdy, in his Self, Culture, and Society sequence, authors as varied as the anarchist anthropologist David Graeber and the Arab philosopher and social scientist Ibn Khaldun have been added alongside the likes of Adam Smith and Karl Marx.

“General education should always be experimental. It should never be done right,” said Dowdy. “There’s one thing that I think should not be debated, and that’s [that] a general education, in a true liberal arts sense of the term, is necessary.… It was necessary then in the creation of this university, and it’s necessary now. Not because it’s the University’s brand, but because it works. It generates people like Bernie Sanders. And I’m willing to put money on that.”

THE CHICAGO MAROON — MARCH 31, 2021

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THE EDITORIAL BOARD

How The University of Chicago Can Better Serve the South Side Over the past four months, THE MAROON Editorial Board deliberated how the University of Chicago can improve its relationship with the South Side. This series, the product of interviews with various community members, activists, and University associates, lays out our recommendations.

By EDITORIAL BOARD The Maroon has a particular mandate, narrower than most other media organizations: We cover the University of Chicago and the decisions it makes. But the University of Chicago is one of the most consequential institutions in the city, and certainly on the South Side. It is the area’s second largest employer, a major real estate player, a self-con-

tained law enforcement agency, and a massive economic and cultural engine with the power to shape huge swaths of the city and the lives of people who live there. It is impossible to ignore the role that race plays in the University’s interactions with the South Side. At The Maroon, this relationship, and its implications for racial equity, frequently takes center stage in our coverage—whether it’s news about the

Matthew Lee, Co-Editor-in-Chief Ruby Rorty, Co-Editor-in-Chief Adyant Kanakamedala, Managing Editor Suha Chang, Chief Production Officer Charlie Blampied, Chief Financial Officer The MAROON Editorial Board consists of the editors-in-chief and editors of THE MAROON.

NEWS

Peyton Jefferson, editor Pranathi Posa, editor Yiwen Lu, editor Kate Mabus, editor GREY CITY

Alex Dalton, editor Avi Waldman, editor Laura Gersony, editor VIEWPOINTS

Gage Gramlick, head editor Elizabeth Winkler, associate editor Kelly Hui, associate editor ARTS

Gabi Garcia, editor Veronica Chang, editor Wahid Al Mamun, editor SPORTS

Alison Gill, editor Thomas Gordon, editor Ali Sheehy, editor COPY

Rachel Davies-Van Voorhis, copy chief James Hu, copy chief Cynthia Huang, copy chief Gabby Meyers, copy chief Charlotte Susser, copy chief

DESIGN

Matthew Chang, head of production BUSINESS

Graham Frazier, director of strategy Astrid Weinberg, director of marketing Michael Cheng, director of marketing RJ Czajkowski, director of development Dylan Zhang, director of operations WEB

Firat Ciftci, lead developer Kate Hu, developer Joshua Bowen, developer Perene Wang, developer Editor-in-Chief: Editor@ChicagoMaroon.com Newsroom Phone: (312) 918-8023 Business Phone: (408) 806-8381 For advertising inquiries, please contact Ads@ChicagoMaroon.com or (408) 806-8381.

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Obama Center’s plans to break ground after a protracted fight with the Community Benefits Coalition or a sit-in by #CareNotCops to pressure administrators to abolish the University of Chicago Police Department (UCPD).

This editorial series aims to delve deeper into the University’s relationship to the South Side and to begin setting a new course for how we approach this relationship in our pages.

“Community members’ opinions” and “community engagement” are inescapable phrases in this coverage. Yet in the pages of The Maroon—from the opinion pages to news and features—Southsiders’ stories appear sporadically, and usually in service of making a point.

Some of this makes sense. The Maroon is, after all, written by University of Chicago affiliates, and the University community is our primary audience. But when the Maroon Editorial Board was composing our editorial about the abolition of the University of Chicago Police Department, the paucity of up-to-date, varied accounts and experiences of Southsiders with UCPD, or with any other part of the University, was painfully obvious.

So The Maroon Editorial Board—16 staffers from across the paper, from reporters to editors—set out to change this. We considered whether this was appropriate for the editorial board to address. After much deliberation, we decided, yes, it was.

Most editorials rest on previously

covered news topics, but the journalistic tradition also includes reported opinion pieces, the tack we’ve taken with this series.

When the board makes endorsements during election seasons, we wouldn’t dream of doing so without hearing from the candidates on the ballot. This case is similar. We didn’t want to make sweeping recommendations about how the University could improve its relationship to local non-affiliates without hearing from that population, the people who (if our suggestions were taken seriously) would be the most affected by the changes.

We met with more than a dozen residents, activists, University officials, and employees in putting together this series.

What results is not the opinion of any one of these interview subjects. We asked them about their memories of interacting with the University, how the institution had shaped their worlds beyond campus, what they thought the institution did well and what they thought would make the University a better partner with the South Side. Our subjects’ answers varied as widely as their affiliations and backgrounds.

We have tried to look at their collected experiences and think, as people operating from within the institution, about how those experiences suggested ways to improve the University as an institution that enriches human life, on the ground as well as in an intellectual capacity. We’ve divided the series into four install-

ments. The first suggests how the University can be meaningfully more accessible to those not enrolled here. The second examines the University’s reach beyond the quadrangles, from real estate to community partnerships to the University of Chicago Charter Schools. The third recommends that the University establish a Reparative Justice Center to better partner with the South Side of Chicago as an educational institution and financial anchor.

And “Shaping the Conversation” presents the question that anchors every editorial board debate: What is the history and the current role of a student newspaper covering these problems, and what should our mission be going forward?

This editorial series is a statement of values as well as a set of recommendations. Our suggestions are inevitably informed by the opinions of the people who sit on the board and who reflect the makeup of our staff overall. We write as young people informed by the paths each of us took to the University and The Maroon, by the failings and horrors of the world we are preparing to enter upon graduation, and where we see potential for positive change.

As students, we have benefited a great deal from the intellectual and extracurricular offerings of the University. Our hope that the University can be an engine for good in the life of the South Side as it has been in our lives grounds these editorials.

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To Be a Better Neighbor on the South Side, UChicago Must Begin on Its Own Campus UChicago must make its physical spaces more accessible and open its academic and professional resources to the South Side.

By EDITORIAL BOARD Jalen Kobayashi, a leader of the youth activist group GoodKids MadCity and a Black Indigenous person, grew up on the South Side with a childhood aspiration to attend UChicago. Like many UChicago students, Kobayashi identified themself to the editorial board as a nerd, and UChicago’s rigor and the research opportunities were enticing to them. That all changed for Kobayashi as they grew to see the needs of their community in sharp contrast with the immense wealth of UChicago, resources the University was unwilling to share with its neighbors.

They struggled to understand “how you could have this cornucopia, you could have this fountain and this abundance of love and resources—and money, and money, and money—and then go home to nothing?” Eventually, they came to feel that attending UChicago would be a betrayal of their friends and neighbors who were suffering; they opted to attend Vanderbilt University instead.

Kobayashi’s feeling isn’t new.

Kenneth Newman, a white man, and Jennifer Smith, a Black woman, both grew up in Hyde Park in the ’60s and ’70s—but they recounted two very different experiences of the University.

Newman recounted how UChicago nurtured his love for sports, provided athletic facilities for him and his friends, and offered him part-time jobs refereeing. Meanwhile, Smith recounted how, when she visited the Regenstein Library as a Chicago Public Schools (CPS) student for an Honors English project, she was treated like an

outsider. “It was like I was trying to steal something, like a good Tom Cruise movie. You know, I just expected sirens to go off,” Smith said.

“They wouldn’t even let me see the books.” Kobayashi had a similar experience at a public Logan Center event they attended on the topic of mass incarceration, where they recalled feeling ostracized and out of place. As Smith said, UChicago always felt to her like a “secluded fortress.”

Throughout our conversa-

or even, in the case of one Black UChicago student who in 2010 was arrested in Regenstein Library, approaching them for causing a “disturbance.” We cannot expect Southsiders of color to feel comfortable using University services when UCPD—an institution dedicated to forcibly maintaining the exclusivity of campus—makes visitors feel unwelcome based on their race or economic background.

But ridding the University of its private police force is not enough.

now uses “campus cards,” which can only be obtained by request of a UChicago staff member who deems that the individual has a “business need.” UChicago could easily extend access to its 11 million volumes to fellow Southsiders who wish to use them. By doing so, the University would both offer a valuable resource to its neighbors and signal that they are welcome on campus.

The University should also make its wealth of career advance-

UChicago must open itself up to the South Side, not only in terms of its physical spaces, but its academic and professional resources too, so that a felt sense of belonging can begin to take shape. tions with Southsiders, a common theme came up with nearly every interviewee of color: a felt sense of exclusion from campus. In order to welcome and embrace the next generation of Southsiders like DeVaughn and Kobayashi, UChicago must make its physical spaces accessible and its resources available to Southsiders.

The first step necessary for this “secluded fortress” to lower its defenses is to abolish the UCPD. As we argued this summer, UCPD has been a constant perpetrator of racial injustice on the South Side.

Countless people of color have recounted UCPD trailing them across the quad, asking them to justify their presence on campus,

UChicago must open itself up to the South Side, not only in terms of its physical spaces, but its academic and professional resources too, so that a felt sense of belonging can begin to take shape.

One way in which UChicago could make its “cornucopia” of resources more accessible to other Southsiders is opening up access to the UChicago library system, which can and should serve as an academic resource for the Hyde Park and Woodlawn neighborhoods, whose public schools have historically been underfunded by the City. In recent years, UChicago has done away with their library cards, which DeVaughn fondly recalled utilizing. The library system

ment and professional development resources available to Hyde Park and Woodlawn residents.

This Martin Luther King Day, the Office of Career Advancement expanded its services to South Side residents and local elementary school students to offer free resume reviews, lessons, and speaker events. Why limit this work to one day of charity?

The infrastructure for the University to subsidize CPS students to attend programs such as its high school Summer Sessions and for it to more broadly play a part in encouraging and equipping teenagers to pursue higher education already exists. UChicago could also expand its adult education initiatives, such

as the Graham School of Continuing Liberal and Professional Studies, to support Southsiders in obtaining master’s degrees and professional certificates. To implement these changes and expand existing outreach efforts would demonstrate to the next generation of Southsiders that UChicago is an institution where they are welcomed and where they belong.

Promising displays of effective community outreach are already in effect at the UChicago Medical Center. UChicago Medicine (UCM) has tried to address the disproportionate impact of the pandemic on Black and brown Chicagoans by prioritizing vaccinating patients from 15 South Side ZIP codes. “We continue to believe this is an important equity issue because the South Side has been disproportionately impacted by the pandemic and it is also a region where fewer residents have been vaccinated,” UCM Incident Commander Krista Currell and Chief Medical Officer Stephen Weber wrote in an update to UCM and Biological Sciences Division faculty and staff. This plan embodies a spirit of justice, repair of harm, and neighborly goodwill that the rest of the University’s services should aspire to.

Making campus resources more accessible is just one small part of the University’s effort to be a better member of the South Side; much of its work to right past wrongs must take place off campus, as subsequent editorials will describe. But opening campus and its resources is a necessary first step to establish an open, equal partnership between UChicago and its neighbors.

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It’s Time for UChicago To Rethink Its Development Strategy The University’s self-interested development strategy has long displaced low-income Southsiders. It must take direct action to support affordable housing in the area and create an institutional framework to ensure that its development decisions are guided by community input.

By EDITORIAL BOARD In an interview with The Maroon Editorial Board, representatives from the Office of Civic Engagement (OCE) said that the University “is not in the housing business.” But UChicago’s history suggests otherwise. Since its founding over a century ago, the University’s legacy on the South Side has been characterized by deliberate interventions in the housing market that resulted in gentrification and concerted efforts to displace low-income residents. The University has a responsibility to repair the harm its development continues to do in Hyde Park and Woodlawn: It must take direct action to support affordable housing in the area and create an institutional framework to ensure that its development decisions are guided by community input, not just self-interest.

Throughout its history, UChicago has shaped the surrounding neighborhoods in its own image of whiteness and intellectualism, deliberately pushing out Black residents and gentrifying the South Side. In the 1930s and 1940s, the University spent hundreds of thousands of dollars in court defending racially restrictive covenants that prohibited Black residents from living in and around Hyde Park, including in University-owned properties.

After the United States Supreme Court declared racially restrictive covenants unconstitutional in 1948, the University spearheaded the “Urban Renewal” of Hyde Park by creating the South East Chicago Commission, whose express purpose was to rid Hyde

Park of the “blight” of poverty.

During this period, the University invoked eminent domain to tear down poor residents’ homes in what many have argued was an attempt to preserve a certain proportion of high-income white residents in a racially transitioning Woodlawn neighborhood. As the income distribution on the South Side makes clear, these concerted efforts to push poverty out of Hyde Park have had a lasting effect: The neighborhood remains inaccessible for many low-income Southsiders.

Some residents who spoke with The Maroon’s Editorial Board have had positive experiences of Hyde Park’s development over the past few decades.

Anne and Aaron Collard, a white couple that grew up in Hyde Park during the 1980s, said that the arrival of larger businesses like Target has made certain goods and services more accessible.

But others lamented the evolution of the neighborhood, both economic and cultural. Jennifer Smith, a Black woman who grew up in Hyde Park and returned to the neighborhood as an adult, recounted how the area, particularly East 53rd Street, bears little resemblance to what it was in her youth. “53rd just doesn’t look like 53rd anymore.… It was much more economically diverse and economically integrated,” she said. “You’d hear like Creedence Clearwater Revival [and] Crosby, Stills & Nash…people like these.

Hyde Park had such a vibe. Now, it is so austere.”

In the intervening decades, UChicago’s leadership has disavowed its past development practices. At a University-host-

ed conference in 2004 about the legacy of urban renewal, former University president Don Michael Randel stressed the importance of affordable housing and said that “terrible mistakes were made” in UChicago’s development history. But the University has continued to place its self-interest above the stated needs of its neighbors. UChicago violated community agreements about its boundaries in 2016, when it announced plans for a charter school on East 63rd Street despite a decades-long agreement with the Woodlawn community not to expand south of 61st.

More recently, the impending construction of the Obama Presidential Center (OPC), which the University sponsors, threatens to price thousands of residents out of neighborhoods in which they’ve lived for decades. The OPC has been marketed as an “economic engine for the South Side,” but only those stable enough to weather its arrival will reap its benefits. OCE may say that UChicago is not in the housing business, but for better or for worse, it is.

As we’ve argued elsewhere in this series, the ultimate solution to this disconnect between University development decisions and community needs would be to create a Reparative Justice Center funded by the University and governed by local community groups. But in the meantime, the University should take direct measures to counteract the harm done by its long history of displacement.

First, it should sponsor existing community groups that are working to provide and maintain

affordable housing developments in Woodlawn, such as Preservation of Affordable Housing Chicago and Woodlawn East Community and Neighbors. This would directly help the low-income neighbors who are most vulnerable to displacement and who have been most affected by the gentrification UChicago has caused.

Alternatively, as representatives from Southside Together Organizing for Power suggested in an interview with The Maroon Editorial Board, the University could create a community trust fund for affordable housing and community development. The University passed up an opportunity to do this during the negotiations over the Community Benefits Agreement (CBA) for the OPC in 2019, declining to engage with activists who proposed this measure. Doing so now would signal a concerted effort to place community-building power back in the hands of Southsiders and would ensure that the University does not profit off of a housing crisis it played a part in creating.

UChicago should also reform its existing housing programs to make them more accessible to its own staff members and to Southsiders unaffiliated with the University. It should expand its loan program to set aside a certain number of residential units for its staff members, professors, and graduate students, while leaving the remaining units purchasable to community members unaffiliated with the University, beyond what is required by law under Chicago’s Affordable Requirements Ordinance. It should also make its existing Employer-Assisted Housing Program more

accessible to lower-paid contract employees; as past research has shown, it could accomplish this by doing away with the location requirement and providing additional support to non-white employees seeking homeownership.

Derek Douglas, vice president for civic engagement and external affairs at UChicago’s OCE, told The Maroon Editorial Board that he has already engaged in conversations with individual affordable housing developers on the South Side.

While this is commendable as an individual effort, only a comprehensive University policy would be of the scale necessary to right historical wrongs.

The University is not the only force on the South Side responsible for gentrification.

Other institutions such as the Obama Foundation and property owners, like Mac and TLC Management, have contributed as well. The City’s leadership has perpetuated these issues by its lack of decisive action to pass a CBA. Despite a federal eviction moratorium in the face of the pandemic-induced economic instability, South Side property management companies have continued to evict tenants. But while the University is not alone in contributing to housing insecurity, it has no less of a responsibility to do its part to combat it; the growing housing insecurity across the South Side in the wake of these evictions makes the University’s indifference even more problematic.

The University has made promising steps to better support its South Side neighbors.

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UChicago should also reform its existing housing programs to make them more accessible to its own staff members and to Southsiders unaffiliated with the University.

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The Polsky Center for Entrepreneurship and Innovation’s Small Business Growth Program is

an admirable initiative to foster growth on the South Side. But by pricing out those who make up its surrounding community—be they

business owners, activists, or simply longtime residents of Hyde Park and its surrounding community areas—the University is displacing the

very people its OCE has been trying to help. By supporting affordable housing in its own neighborhoods, UChicago can make an effort to

counteract the harm of its long legacy of displacement and take a concrete step toward regaining the trust of its neighbors.

To Repair Historic Harm, the University Must Endow Southsiders With Capital and Control The University should fund a Center for Reparative Justice and incorporate a Community Board into the Office of Civic Engagement to direct their initiatives on the South Side.

By EDITORIAL BOARD UChicago takes pride in the efforts of its civic engagement department to give back to the surrounding community, programs like the Neighborhood Schools Program or UChicago Local initiative. However, if the University really wants to build a partnership with the South Side community, it needs to give locals a say in how those resources are distributed. Setting up a community board attached to the Office of Civic Engagement (OCE) and establishing a Reparative Justice Center—both endowed with autonomous leadership, true authority, and adequate funding—are two necessary steps to ensuring that’s the case.

Since its founding, the University of Chicago has worked against the interests of its Black neighbors in order to enrich itself by privileging the interests of its white community members, “revitalizing” and reorganizing the South Side. The history of our primarily white institution deliberately separating itself from the South Side, whether that be through isolationist campus

architecture or destruction of Black neighborhoods under the guise of “urban renewal” projects and the South East Chicago Commission, is a legacy which undergirds the relationship between campus and the South Side community today. It is UChicago’s responsibility to acknowledge this legacy and actively work to dismantle it by redistributing power to the locals, particularly those Black Southsiders whom they have so long sought to silence and displace.

The appointment of Derek Douglas, a former South Side organizer, to vice president for civic engagement and external affairs was a step in the right direction towards letting those familiar with the needs and demands of local residents guide the University’s engagement with such issues. The next step is creating a lasting, institutional body that positions our neighbors front and center in the decision-making process, ensuring their needs are heard and accurately met so that a true partnership can begin being built between the University and the South Side.

Deborah DeVaughn, a Chicago Public Schools teacher,

has spent most of her life on the South Side, but despite growing up less than two miles south of the Midway, she said the University has always felt distant to her.

She never saw many avenues into the University community, and when she did, they were one-off events that didn’t go far for her in forming a relationship. Still, DeVaughn expressed practical optimism for the idea of a partnership between the University and the surrounding South Side neighborhoods; she listed off the top of her head a number of ideas for programs and initiatives, most with her students in mind, that the University could provide to support its neighboring communities.

However, DeVaughn had clear criteria needed to achieve such a relationship: regular and substantive engagement through the incorporation of Southsiders into the University’s everyday functioning. “If you don’t have that exposure, you don’t have a relationship and you don’t help grow people who would want to get to know and be a part of the University.”

Currently, OCE has a working group composed of around 50

community stakeholders from the nine South Side neighborhoods the University interacts with, but for their voices to truly be honored they need to be given real bargaining power. A community board with the ability to help shape OCE programs at every step, composed of local activists, organizers, and enthusiastic Southsiders like DeVaughn, could go a long way toward making these programs more effective at meeting the needs of the people they are intended to serve.

However, in order to truly start to repair the damage done by more than a century of resource deprivation, redlining, and the University’s original ties to slavery that the historians from the Reparations at UChicago Working Group (RAUC) have identified, OCE will not be enough. As RAUC argued in an interview with The Maroon Editorial Board, reparations require the University to honestly acknowledge its historic role in perpetuating structural racism on the South Side, and to relinquish control over how the money it must invest in reparative work is used.

A Reparative Justice Center,

funded by the University and governed by a coalition of community organizations, offers the opportunity to leverage UChicago’s wealth to make a material difference in the lives of the people it has historically harmed.

Discussions of reparations on college campuses often point to the example of Georgetown, which established a policy in 2016 to give admissions preference to the descendants of enslaved people sold by the school’s founders, and whose students established a reparations fund in 2019 to benefit those descendants. UChicago has yet to fulfill this very basic step of recognizing its racist foundations and meaningfully contending with them, as Georgetown has done.

The first step towards this would be meeting the demands of the More Than Diversity campaign and creating a department for Critical Race and Ethnic Studies. Such a department would enable faculty and students to interrogate the University’s own history and partner with a Reparative Justice Center to explore ways to move toward a more equitable future. But UChiCONTINUED ON PG. 15

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“UChicago has yet to fulfill this very basic step of recognizing its racist foundations and meaningfully contending with them, as Georgetown has done.”

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cago also has the chance to go beyond the examples of its peer institutions, and set a new standard for universities reckoning with their violent pasts.

“As far as I know, it’s always been a top-down [process], how can the University provide leadership and do certain things it wants to do, maybe consulting and kind of asking permission,” said RAUC member Guy Emerson Mount. “But I think that the

model that we would like to see happen and that communities would like to see happen is that the community is kind of in control of not just the truth telling process, but the reparative process, with the assumption being that communities know what communities need.”

In an interview with The Maroon Editorial Board, Douglas mentioned a survey that showed the more interaction community members had with the Uni-

versity, the more positive their perception was. If it is OCE’s goal to improve the University’s relationship with the South Side, then they must begin to bring community stakeholders into the fold. In recent years, OCE has worked to support its neighbors by funding the initiatives the University decides it should offer to the South Side. But under such a method, the University will never meet community members and activists where

their needs are, or allow them to take the lead in determining how to repair the damage the University has done to their communities. Meanwhile, these groups will continue to speak over one another, maintaining an age-old divide. Only once Southsiders have a leading role in the University can we begin to see activists and administrators speaking the same language.

Transforming the University’s community outreach

through a two-pronged approach of a Community Board, which directs and approves OCE initiatives, and a Center for Reparative Justice, whereby the University financially supports the needs of Southsiders, would not only begin a partnership to heal the historic rift between the South Side and UChicago, but also lay the foundation from which to meaningfully approach the University’s historic harms and their present-day consequences.

Shaping the Conversation: THE MAROON’S Role in Reporting on Race, Equity, and Opportunity on the South Side To overhaul our reporting standards on racial equity, we have established a Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion board as a starting point.

By EDITORIAL BOARD The Maroon Editorial Board took on the research and interviews for this series knowing that the series would be incomplete without a consideration of what The Maroon’s role is as an organization embedded in the South Side of Chicago. The Maroon finds itself situated between worlds in many respects.

We seek to inform a student body as well as a neighborhood, two audiences with vastly different experiences and trajectories.

Our reporting has not always demonstrated a diversity of perspectives among South Side residents, and this demonstrates a past failure to adequately fulfill The Maroon’s role as both a community and campus publication. With the acknowledgment of this past, as recorded in this editorial series, and the desire to pursue a more just and truthful

future, we resolved at the start of this year to establish more inclusive and equitable reporting standards.

As we’ve argued in this series of editorials, UChicago’s interests have often been at odds with the interests of the community in which it is situated.

We are responsible for reporting on both sides of the equation: a University trying to increase the resources it offers to the surrounding community within the bounds of its own values and the community members whose lives are impacted by University investments.

One moment in The Maroon’s history stands out as a glaring failure in our commitment to equitable and sensitive reporting. Recent readers of The Maroon will probably recall when The Maroon published a photo of a Black minor arrested in a UChicago campus building

in 2019. The overwhelming majority of Maroon staffers called for this photo to be removed, and it was later taken down; however, this incident exemplifies shortcomings of the paper’s hierarchy and internal mechanisms of accountability that The Maroon is now striving to improve. After that incident, Maroon staff recognized the need to think more critically about how to incorporate an ethos of sensitivity and equity into our reporting.

As a student publication, The Maroon’s reporting has been largely focused on bringing University stories to our primary readership—UChicago students who choose to spend their undergraduate or graduate years here.

Our reporting serves students by keeping them connected to University and community events, with the majority of our coverage centering on University happenings. But too often, our reporting

overlooks the fact that events on UChicago’s campus happen in the context of the complex and fraught politics of the South Side.

We acknowledge our role as a source of information for many on the South Side and recognize that our task must be to inform our readers about the University’s presence on the South Side, in all of its complexity.

To begin improving the diversity of perspectives we source our reporting from and providing a space for internal discussions on The Maroon’s workplace environment, we have formed a Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion (DEI) board.

It was formed to overhaul our reporting standards on race and income on the South Side; it was formed to make the newsroom a more welcoming place to student journalists of all backgrounds; and it was formed to give staff a meaningful voice in editorial

decisions regarding these challenging issues. This board has revisited The Maroon’s standards of reporting and is in the process of creating a reporting guide for specific reporting beats that will help our reporters approach each article with a more complete understanding of historical context and the ethical standards to account for. The board also provides a forum to review articles when staff members raise concerns of equitable reporting and discuss how to improve our coverage in order to hold ourselves to the standards we’ve set out here. The Maroon has established a starting point, but we are not looking for an endpoint.

Our mandate is to create an institution that constantly checks itself and pushes itself to act as an equitable paper of record for both the University of Chicago student body and the surrounding South Side community.

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ARTS New Translation, Old Friend

By ZEFF WORLEY Arts Reporter It’s been roughly five centuries since the Aeneid was first translated into English—but there’s no sign of the work getting stale. Classics professor Shadi Bartsch’s new translation is evidence enough.

Bartsch, who has taught at the University of Chicago for over 20 years, studies imperial Roman literature as well as Roman rhetoric and philosophy. In conversation with Anastasia Klimchynskaya of the Stevanovich Institute on the Formation of Knowledge, hosted by the Seminary Co-Op, Bartsch explained what led her to translate the Aeneid, why she translated it the way she did, and what the work still has to teach us today.

A mythological account of Rome’s foundation, the Aeneid follows the hero Aeneas, who flees the ransacked Troy and eventually winds up in Italy, where he and the other Trojans make war upon the native peoples.

In the meantime, however, Aeneas adventures across the Mediterranean, falls into a brief—and ultimately tragic—romance with Dido, the Queen of Carthage, and even descends into Hell. Perhaps the single most famous literary work of the Roman Empire, the Aeneid was left incomplete by the time of Vergil’s death in 19 B.C.E., with the poet requesting on his deathbed that the work

be burned (this, of course, did not happen).

“There are many beautiful translations of the Aeneid out there,” Bartsch said, “but what I felt what they lacked was a sort of immediacy that is characteristic to Vergil.”

Instead of overly poeticizing or lengthening the poem, Bartsch sought to imitate Vergil’s own language as much as possible. “I wanted to get as close to Vergil as I could,” she said, adding that “Vergil’s language is fascinating, metrical, and almost like reading a novel or something that pulls you along.” This led to her making the entire text metrical (Vergil wrote in dactylic hexameter, the meter most often popularly associated with Classical epics such as Homer’s Iliad), with no more than six beats per line, ultimately leading to a very dense but readable text—a “good match for what Vergil was doing.”

Besides its being a fresh translation, Bartsch’s Aeneid also pays close attention to the cultural milieu in which Vergil was writing in order to help the reader better understand the work. The translation contains an extensive set of notes which help explain particularities, etymological context, and other noteworthy aspects of the poem which might be overlooked by or obscure to a modern audience.

Bartsch also touched on the relevance that the Aeneid still holds and the fact that it addresses issues which we still grapple with today—the relationship between origin

courtesy of alex gleckman

stories and nationalism, colonization and its impact, and cultural prejudice. “These questions are fundamental, and the epic is very much concerned with them,” Bartsch adds. It is for this reason that the Aeneid can still be read as refreshingly modern. And in a time when Classical studies, philosophy, and imagery are increasingly co-opted—and corrupted—by the far right, it’s more important

than ever to reclaim these texts.

“Whether we like it or not, at least up to the very recent past, the Classics have come with a certain sort of weight,” Bartsch said.

“If we accept that they have had weight, we need to treat them as, in a sense, texts which we should use for their weight because other people are using them for their weight.”

Little Oblivions: All Gore, All Guts, All Glory

By WAHID AL MAMUN Arts Editor The other day, I came across a quote from Ocean Vuong’s On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous on my Twitter feed­, “Sometimes being offered tenderness feels like the very proof that you’ve been ruined.” It is in this tension between devotion and burden that one can find Julien Baker’s new record, Little Oblivions, released on February 26 with Matador Records. The Memphis-based singer-songwriter has always waded through the black seas of addiction and self-loathing in her songs, armed with

nothing more than an electric guitar and her soaring voice. In her latest release, Baker ditches the sparse getup and adopts a bigger, more experimental sound, yet she still fundamentally turns to the same questions of love, faith, and redemption.

Perhaps this is why Baker may well have found her loudest, most searing answer yet in Little Oblivions.

It is difficult to say I enjoyed the record, because it is difficult to sit through 42 minutes of Baker’s painfully rigorous self-excoriation and come out of it with anything resembling enjoyment. The record wears you down with its relentless

nihilism, peddling in devastating turns of phrase that unsettle you well after you listen to it. At its heart, Baker wants you to believe that she is a bad person—within a minute of “Hardline,” the organ-infused album opener, she sings about “asking for forgiveness in advance/ for all the future things [she] will destroy.”

It is easy and even truthful to pinpoint this pessimism, as many reviewers have done, to Baker’s own struggles with an addiction relapse in 2019. But that is too limiting a view—and one that, in my opinion, reproduces the gendered logic that women can only make confessional music

or that only women can make confessional music. Instead, Baker’s ceaseless self-examination offers a cipher for the ways we all surrender to the loud, wailing voices in our heads that demand nothing less than perfection from us. True to the title of the record, we all make up our “little oblivions” to escape from our intrusive thoughts, whether that be in addiction, in faith, or in another person. As Baker sings in “Faith Healer,” “I’ll believe in you if you make me feel something”—even if that something may careen towards self-destruction.

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“At the end of the day, what does it mean to be good?”

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question—how can you allow yourself to be loved when you are steeped in intense self-loathing? Love, to Baker, is no saccharine matter. It is excruciating; it makes you feel like you take up more space in the world than you deserve. As she screams out in desperation over a shuffling drumbeat at the end of “Bloodshot” (my favorite track of the record), “there is no glory in love.” This interrogation hits the listener hard, especially in this strange world we have come to inhabit in the midst of a pandemic when the distances between us seem bigger than ever. Is it any wonder that Baker asks for a blank slate, for an exoneration from the people around her? Is it any wonder that she asks on “Favor”: “Who put me/ in your way to find?” To paraphrase Vuong, to be

loved is the very proof of ruin for Baker.

At the end of the day, what does it mean to be good? What does it mean to keep on getting second chances when you believe yourself to be broken? There is a line on “Relative Fiction” that is perhaps the closest thing to resolution on the record—“I’m finished being good./ Now I can finally be okay./ And not the way I thought I should.”

In an interview with Vulture, Baker talks about how reading John Steinbeck’s East of Eden made her realize that perfection is impossible and that goodness does not lie in a continuum that tends towards perfection.

With this lens, it becomes crystal clear that the emotional shipwrecks that litter this record are not proof of brokenness. For all its insistent self-criticism, Little Oblivions makes you believe that it is good enough to

keep on living, to plough through the sirens in your head and make it to the end of the day. As the poet Hanif Abdurraqib writes

in his essay on the record, “How lucky to still be living, even in our own mess.” There is no timelier reminder than that.

Julien Baker performing in New York in 2017.

courtesy of marquette wire/chelsea pineda

SPORTS A Year Later, UChicago Sports Return

By ALISON GILL Sports Editor

In the waning days of winter quarter, for the first time in a year, University of Chicago varsity athletics competed. As the pandemic has ravaged life as we have known it since last March, games for UChicago athletes can seem like an insignificant victory. But they also represent a light at the end of the tunnel, a sign that we can—and will—return to a semblance of normalcy. Baseball and softball both took to the mound on March 12. Women’s lacrosse kicked off their season on March 13. Track and field competed on March 27.

Now several weeks into their seasons, student-athletes are shaking off the rust and adapting to competition in a pandemic after 12 months on the sideline.

The UChicago baseball team sits just north of 0.500 with a record of 5–4. The team has relied on its offensive firepower, exploding for eight home runs and an average of 8.56 runs per game. Outfield-player Payton Jancsy has slugged 0.625 to complement a team-high ten runs batted in, while thirdyear Carson Weekley boasts two home runs, nine runs batted in, and a 0.303 batting av-

erage. Second-year pitchers Tyler Sarkisian and Michael Allegri have shouldered the pitching load, each earning the most starts at three apiece and touting earned run averages of 1.42 and 2.53, respectively. The baseball team will lean on its veteran presences, including all-conference performer Brian Lyle, to navigate the remaining 26 games.

While the status of NCAA championships is uncertain, the team is striving to claim the Midwest Conference crown, which barely eluded them in 2019.

Looking to incorporate new and returning talent, the softball team has struggled early this season, recording two wins against seven losses. The team had a challenging slate to start the season, facing off against perennial stalwarts in Calvin, UW–Whitewater, Carthage, and Carroll eight times in their first 13 games. Third-years Samantha Lauro and Maddy Mudrick have paced the offense, both hitting 0.414. Third-year catcher Katie O’Donnell has anchored the young pitching core of first-years Delaney Choi and Delaney Romanchick and second-year Elizabeth Press. While certainly not the start that they have envisioned, the softball team has the upperclassman experience to finish

out the last 22 games in impressive fashion.

Without a conference, the Maroons will hope that a second-half turnaround is enough to earn an at-large bid to the NCAA postseason, where the program last appeared in 2017.

The lacrosse team has wasted no time racing out to an undefeated start. Poised to finish first in their conference, the Maroons have rolled through Hamline, Northern Michigan, and Aurora. Their average margin of victory? Eleven goals. This dominance has come from a balanced attack and a stout defense directed by second-year goalkeepers Emily Feigen and Kat Berritto. Six players on the team have accumulated at least eight points this year, while 16 total have contributed either an assist or a goal. Third-year defender Adriana Shutler has collected a team-high 10 ground balls and second-year midfielder Charlotte Rapp has nabbed 10 draw controls. After finishing second in their conference during the program’s inaugural season, the lacrosse team has the experience, depth, and talent to sweep through their conference and make a compelling postseason run.

At their first and only meet of the season so far, both the men and women’s track and

field teams finished second in a field of seven. First-year runner Maddie Kelly notched victories in the 800-meter and 1500-meter, while first-year thrower Molly Laumakis won the shot put and discus. The women’s 4x400-meter relay also claimed the top spot.

On the men’s side, fourth-year Kiyan Tavangar won the 1500-meter, second-year Jabari Owens won the 800-meter, and first-year Renato de Angelis won the 110-meter hurdles.

First-year Alex Lee was the top finisher in the high jump, and fourth-year Ted Falkenhayn nabbed the triple jump. UChicago will seek to capitalize on a strong debut in their next meet at the North Central College Invite.

The NCAA has yet to announce any modifications to the NCAA postseason for DIII, but, after cancelling fall and winter championships, there is uncertainty about their status. In the meantime, UChicago student-athletes will seek to capitalize on the seasons they are having. Each of these teams has higher aspirations, especially after being sent home last year just a few games into the season.

Of course, pandemic precautions abound.

The stands are noticeably empty, save for CONTINUED ON PG. 18

THE CHICAGO MAROON — MARCH 31, 2021

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“Student-athletes are...adapting to competition in a pandemic” CONTINUED FROM PG. 17

the cardboard cutouts of parents, dogs, and other select members that “cheer” on the lacrosse team. Mask-clad figures populate the sidelines and appear on the field, in the batter’s box, and on the mound. Players sit more than six feet apart on buses to and from away games, likely inspiring nostalgic remembrance of crowded and sweaty seating.

The fate of every game and practice hinges on continual negative testing and sufficient social distancing. But, regardless of these steps, we can celebrate that, after a long winter, spring is here, and the Maroons are back.

Fourth-year Eisuke Tanioka slid home to nab the winning score against St. Norbert.

photo courtesy of uchicago athletics.

Counterclockwise from top left: Third-year Lainey Hughes winds up to throw; third-year Abbey Pouba surveys the attack; second-year Isabel Layne sprints towards the finish. photos courtesy of uchicago athletics.