Grey City Spring 2013

The Chicago Maroon’s Quarterly Magazine

Spring 2013

UNDER THE TABLE Inside food culture at the University of Chicago » Page 14

PLUS Q&A with Dean of College Admissions and Financial Aid, Jim Nondorf » Page 19

The State of the Humanities (And why you shouldn’t double major) » Page 2

Through The Portal: The Maroon Rabbit Revealed » Page 22

and Pierce’s last stand » Page 7 Grey City | 1

EDITOR’S NOTE In Hyde Park the years are measured not by the Gregorian calendar but by the cycles of the quarter system. As this year comes to a close we send you away with what we hope you will find a diverse variety of stories and portraits: the sixteenth edition of Grey City, the Chicago Maroon’s quarterly news magazine.

The last two issues of Grey City have forgone central themes. Despite our best efforts to follow suit, we find one emerging from these pages. At the University of Chicago we are at first thrown into an unfamiliar community. We at times embrace it, at times reject it; we grow and we begin to analyze it, to second guess it, to imagine what else it could have been (philosophers call that counterfactual).

In these pages you will find the tales of a great many communities, real and unreal.

Hannah Nyhart brings you down the rabbit hole into an alternate reality game that knew no bounds. William Wilcox profiles a community that is often neglected but continues to establish its own voice, one that we need despite what many might say. Emily Wang and Jon Catlin try to understand what makes one community, the humanities, so strong at this institution when it is so endangered elsewhere. Chris Deakin stumbles upon the long-buried archives of a community endeavoring to persevere the loss of its beloved tower on 55th Street. Meaghan Murphy lifts the lid on a start up community up against stacked odds. Sam Levine speaks to the gatekeeper of our undergraduate community, Jim Nondorf, who discusses his efforts to hold the door open. Finally, Emma Broder and Daniel Rivera speak of a food community still undecided on who to bring to the table.

Slow down and savor.

—Editors Colin Bradley and Joy Crane

STAFF COLIN BRADLEY JOY CRANE REBECCA GUTERMAN SAM LEVINE EMILY WANG ZELDA MAYER BEA MALSKY SONIA DHAWAN DOUGLAS EVERSON, JR. BELLA WU JAMIE MANLEY SYDNEY COMBS TIFFANY TAN FRANK YAN

E DI TO R S

MANAGI N G E DITO R DE S I GN

P H OTO

ALICE BLACKWOOD ALAN HASSLER JEN XIA BEN ZIGTERMAN

CO PY E DI TO RS

ALICE BUCKNELL BEN LANGE

I L LU ST R ATO RS

COVER PHOTO BY FRANK YAN

CHICAGO MAROON

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Foodies

1212 EAST 59TH STREET

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CHICAGO, IL 60637

Survival of the Humanities

2 Pierce remembered

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11 19 Q&A: Jim Nondorf

Start-ups

Patrick Jagoda’s transmedia world

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PHONE: 773-702-1403

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Enter, stage right: College Republicans

EDITOR@CHICAGOMAROON.COM

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WWW.CHICAGOMAROON.COM

Philosophy professor Gabriel Lear convinces a room full of undergraduates why they should care what Aristotle says about virtue. peter tang | the chicago maroon

2 | Volume 16

Harboring the Humanities

by Jon Catlin and Emily Wang In the wake of the 2008 recession, the liberal arts, and the humanities in particular, have had to defend their existence.

Collectively, states are spending 10.8 percent less on higher education than they were five years ago, a cut which prompted Governor Rick Scott (R-FL) to suggest that his state’s public universities charge students more for “non-strategic majors.”

Articles crop up ad infinitum in publications like the Chronicle of Higher Education defending the value of the humanities— and debating how to save them.

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past. “People, say, majoring in economics and philosophy... they feel like they’re doing something more practical—and then philosophy.”

Minors were first instituted at the University in 2003, the first wave all in humanities departments: Classics, Near Eastern Languages and Civilization, Romance Languages and Literatures, Slavic Languages, and Germanic Languages. Double- and triple-majors followed shortly after. “I heard colleagues from German saying, ‘Well, maybe not that many students want to major in German, but a number might just want to minor in German.’ So we instituted that as a way of trying to give students some transcript recognition,” said Dean of the College John Boyer (A.M. ’69, Ph.D. ’75), who initiated the changes during his third term as dean.

Dean of the Division of the Humanities Martha Roth pointed to the downsizing of the Core in 1998 as one driving force behind this trend.

“When the College Core was reduced in its requirement somewhat, the idea behind it had been... to have students spread their wings more broadly and take approximately one third of their courses in the Core, one third in their major, and one third in two minors or exploring things they never had any ideas about,” Roth said. “Unfortunately, one of the trends has been that people are now double-majoring, so they’re doing one third of the Core, one third of their major, and one third the second major.”

“I’m not sure why they feel that’s important. I’ve counseled my own children not to

do that, but people need to use this opportunity to explore and to try things you’re never going to have a chance to try again,” Roth added.

Yet in spite of her resistance to this surge, Roth also noted that flexibility and collaboration across disciplines accounted both for the historic strength of their programs and their capacity to adapt to an ever-changing market.

“Interdisciplinarity is in the DNA of this place,” Roth said, pointing specifically to the New Collegiate Division and majors like Interdisciplinary Studies in the Humanities (ISHum).

Departments have been structured with flexibility in mind. The introduction of the Philosophy and Allied Fields track and the Creative Writing Program in English demonstrate efforts to better accommodate differences in student interest.

Similarly, a burgeoning emphasis on “clusters” for undergraduates majoring in English places a premium on interdisciplinary learning. For a student interested in enslavement, for example, Hadley could encourage them to plan to “cluster” a history course on American slavery with a gender studies course focusing on prostitution.

“And what’s cool from that is just that students understand that this isn’t a grocery store—here are your Triscuits, here’s your celery…—but that you can actually construct not just a narrative but a conceptual node that speaks to some core interests,” Hadley said. “It’s kind of a synthetic thinking. Employers everywhere need people to do it.”

30%

32%

34%

A smaller doctoral presence

28%

Percent of humanities undergraduate degrees awarded out of total degrees awarded by the College

26%

degrees Percent of humanities college students

On one level, UChicago seems to have dodged existential questions of this kind.

This spring quarter, philosophy professor Gabriel Lear taught a lecture titled “Aristotle on Virtue”. On the first day of class, students were fighting each other for seats. She had taught a similar course about five years ago, but back then, she only needed one TA. “Now I have to have two, and I still had to turn people away...I feel that I’m hearing more stories of students not being able to get into their first choices of classes.” In Spring 2012, 3.7 percent of all degrees in the College were awarded in philosophy, up from 2.5 percent a decade ago. Though perhaps this seems like modest increase, it takes on new significance in a year where Forbes Magazine ranks philosophy the fourth least lucrative major, with an unemployment rate of 10.8 percent for recent graduates.

Philosophy isn’t the only humanities major with more students. English Department Chair Elaine Hadley attributed the increasing popularity of the English major, up 2.6 percentage points since 2002, in part to its inherent flexibility: “This department, in relation to other departments in our discipline, does value our self-understanding as an interdisciplinary place.” But Hadley views the growth in interdisciplinarity as potentially a double-edged sword: while the slew of double- and triple-majors over the last two decades has bolstered English major numbers, the same trend implicitly questions the value of an English degree on its own.

Lear, too, noted that her department has more students double-majoring than in the

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On the other hand, graduate humanities programs have faced more direct pressures from an adverse economic climate. Public universities and community colleges laid off humanities faculty in scores, and hiring has slowed to a halt—the number of available humanities faculty positions is still a third below its peak from 2007–8, according to The Chronicle of Higher Education.

“It’s really rough out there,” said Professor Malynne Sternstein (A.B. ’87, A.M. ’90, Ph.D. ’96), who became an associate professor in the Slavic Language and Literature department in 2004. “Insofar as it seems as though the economy is bouncing back overall... I think that universities in general are a little bit behind the curve,” she said.

And the competition keeps getting fiercer.

“It used to be, in my day, that we weren’t expected to publish as graduate students.

‘02 ‘03 ‘04 ‘05 ‘06 ‘07 ‘08 ‘09 ‘10

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17%

office of the university

16%

registrar

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Percent of humanities grad students

900 800

Humanities Ph.D. enrollment by year

700

Number of students

1000

all data obtained from the

Percent of humanities graduate sudents out of total graduate enrollment

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Year (as measured in Spring)

Today, it’s so competitive that if you don’t publish as a graduate student, you really don’t have a good chance of getting an extant position.”

In addition to the tight job market, the University’s Graduate Aid Initiative (GAI) has made graduate enrollment in the humanities both more affordable, but also more competitive. Announced in 2007 by President Robert Zimmer, the GAI pledged $50 million in funding to incoming doctoral students in the Humanities and Social Sciences for up to five years, covering tuition, health insurance, and a stipend. As part of the program, $2 million was allocated to providing health insurance to students who have matriculated since 2003 for the first five years in their programs.

But since each student comes with a higher price tag for the Humanities division, fewer students are being admitted. “The Humanities division in general just doesn’t have the money to fund students because the beautiful part of getting into graduate school here is that you have a full ride,” Sternstein said.

Before the GAI, graduate students were admitted with variable financial aid packages, with some paying tuition, others getting tuition waived, and many getting large stipends which were often inequitable.

“To use my own field as an example, we’d have students who would be admitted through Near Eastern Languages in the Humanities Division or History in the Social Sciences Division sitting in the same classes, with the same professors, with the same dissertations, and they’d have totally different

packages,” Roth said. “And they knew it— everybody knew it. And it created a lot of morale problems.”

While many departments, such as Philosophy, had already moved toward sustainable program sizes of fully funded students, others, such as Anthropology and History, took on large classes of unfunded doctoral students. “In Spring of 2006, when Bob Zimmer was named president of the University, I was a deputy provost for graduate education,” Roth said. “He talked to me and said, ‘Fix it. We’ve got to change. This is not tenable.’”

The implementation of the GAI varied on a departmental level, depending on what the viable program size was and where they had been funding students previously. “There’s a lot of them that were already funded at the right level, so it wasn’t an across-the-board cut,” she said.

Some graduate students at the time of the GAI’s announcement felt that the package did not go far enough in providing support for current students, which culminated in a protest in 2008 during which over 150 students marched to the administration building to demand funding increases. But, many faculty members believe that the GAI has been integral in improving the overall health of their doctoral programs in the midst of a difficult economic climate.

Hadley recalled that the decision to scale back the Ph.D. program felt like it was generated in part around concerns about the humanities job market. “Part of our responsibility is not to flood that market in excess of what it can manage,” said Hadley,

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who has been teaching at the University since 1994. Programmatic efforts in the English department to help graduate students in the job market have included a professionalization day and a pedagogy course.

Lear noticed a similar effect of the GAI. “If you’re actually providing full funding for five years, you can’t admit as many students,” she said. But Lear also echoed the feeling of responsibility in her department. “I’m the placement officer. It’s not like there are a ton of jobs out there. We shouldn’t be admitting a ton of graduate students if we can’t have a reasonable expectation of placing them in jobs.”

For Hadley, though, the decision did not signal any kind of decline or attrition of the doctoral program. Rather, it was integral in improving the morale of the department. “I think if you walked the halls and just stopped colleagues of mine, those that pay attention to the graduate culture in the department, and you said to them, ‘Has the GAI been a good thing for the morale and spirit of the department?’ They would laugh and be like, ‘Yes’—they wouldn’t even pause to think, they would just say ‘yes,’ because they all come in, equal playing field, they know that they have their funding for a good amount of time, so there’s not this sort of panic.”

Not everyone acknowledges the connection between the job market and changes in humanities programming. “There’s never been a flush job market,” Roth said. “That’s the truth about academia. There was no ‘good old days’—they never happened. There have always been more Ph.Ds. than there have been jobs, and, in many ways, that’s

Grey City | 5

what you want. If all I was supposed to do was turn out my successor for the academy, then I’d have one Ph.D. student in my whole life, and is that what I want to do? For the vitality and health of any field, you’re going to normally have more people receiving their training and degrees than there will be actual one-for-one job matches.”

To Roth, economic concern would not and does not make sense as a central consideration for UChicago when funding its programs. “It’s not. I mean, wouldn’t that be a poor world? That’s turning out shoemakers.

I mean that’s not what we’re doing. We want people who are thinking...we want people who will question. I don’t want ‘yes men’ around me, I don’t want ‘Yes, Dean Roth, yes.’ No, they have to push back.”

A tricky shift When visiting German professor Christian Benne opened his presentation “How to Read Nietzsche” at the Literature and Philosophy workshop in March, he said he came to the University because Chicago was “the best place in the world to study the humanities.”

Elaborating on his remarks, he wrote in an e-mail: Of course, you can find great minds and scholars at many universities, also lesser known ones, but not necessarily such a critical mass of young talent on the graduate level. This makes all the difference, and people actually seem engaged in each other’s work.

This “critical mass” of the University—its large cohort of doctoral students—is one of the University’s most important demographics. Graduate students are largely responsible for organizing the University’s lauded workshops, of which there are currently over 60 in operation. Doctoral students are, with faculty, the standard by which Chicago’s reputation is weighed within academia.

Then, cutting back the doctoral program, Lear said, is “a tricky business, because if you cut back too far, then you don’t have a critical mass of students to form a cohort.”

Hadley felt that faculty were aware of the trend of an expanding College and decreasing Humanities graduate student enrollment.

“You will hear people say, ‘You know, we used to be a graduate institution, and now we’re an undergraduate institution,” she said. “And I think that’s always an ongoing debate—and it’s a completely valid one.”

But she dismissed any hint of panic about this trend called for by older faculty. “You’re

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going to meet people, especially if you meet people in their 60s and 70s here, who remember a period when it was...basically a graduate institution. And that was a lovely moment, but I also remember when, you know, bread was five cents a loaf and a movie ticket for a date was $1.25. Part of it is just we’re in a different era and we have to face the realities of that.”

An ethos that endures Ultimately, despite the apparent demographic shift, professors expressed confidence in an institutional safeguard that promises to preserve the humanities as a bastion of University culture: The Core.

In 1942, Robert Maynard Hutchins, the University’s fifth president, adopted the allCore four-year curriculum, from which the

“

Let me get this straight: You’re talking about Chicago students like they’re hatched out of an egg.

”

College has been gradually weaned.

What distinguishes the Core is its emphasis on primary texts, which essentially place the humanities at the center of College culture. “The kind of conversations, the kind of culture of intellectual life in the student body, I would argue, compared to other schools, is infused with the humanities, is infused with humanistic ideas,” Boyer said.

And there’s a practical connection that the Core requirement has with the University’s culture. In addition to bringing many undergraduates in contact with graduate students, who shoulder a good portion of the teaching load, “A lot of the teaching done in the Hum Core is done by the faculty, so I think this has been a way of always being able to protect the humanities...not just in terms of faculty lines and budgets but in terms of the mission of the place, which is actually quite important,”

Boyer said.

From Boyer’s perspective, the University, and, more specifically, the Core, continually shapes students to fit the prevailing ethos—not the other way around.

“I’ll tell you a story,” Boyer began. “I had a debate with a couple of colleagues who are leaders of our Core courses. So, they were saying, ‘Chicago students are very special,’ because people are worried, ‘as we expand the College, are we going to recruit a different type of student?’

“So I said, ‘Let me get this straight: You’re talking about Chicago students like they’re hatched out of an egg. They end up on 59th Street on September 18th readymade Chicago students?’ And they say, ‘Yes!’ And I say, ‘Okay, well, then what do you do with them in your Core course for the first year? What’s the value added?’”

Programs like Career Advancement, and the reduction of Core requirements, are intended to complement, rather than diminish, an education in the humanities.

These programs give students the liberty to study the Humanities without sacrificing freedom of career choice. “The idea of the career programs is not to say that there’s anything wrong with the liberal arts or the humanities but rather to validate my belief that in fact these are excellent programs,” Boyer said.

Roth believed that many positions could benefit from the critical thinking skills the humanities provide. “I think there should be more people with Ph.Ds. in the humanities in the Senate and House of Representatives. I think we’d be in a lot better shape if we had people who had degrees in history or anthropology or Russian languages and literatures or philosophy. I mean, I don’t think philosophers got us into the economic mess we’re in now, so why aren’t they in government? People in all walks of life need to make decisions, weigh evidence, understand the arguments, present the arguments, and those are the kinds of skills that we teach in the humanities and we impart to our students.”

For Hadley, an ideal world would be designed perfectly for humanities Ph.Ds., but she recognizes that we don’t live in that world.

“I’m a very pragmatic person, and I think we were creating an unsustainable model, which doesn’t mean that some of us don’t lobby and press for the fact that the humanistic knowledge and skill sets are incredibly valuable to society,” she said. “That’s an ongoing battle; it’s the battle we have to fight.”

by Chris Deakin

A VIEW FOR THE AGES

The Henderson House president excavates a Pierce History Grey City | 7

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here is only one way to get into your Pierce Tower dorm room. Check in at the front desk and move up the atrium steps. What looks like the original 1960s tile on each landing is now patched up with stripes of grip tape, which wear out quickly. At the top of these steps, take a right and cross the breezeway, a wide hallway full of furniture potentially clean enough to be salvaged before the building’s scheduled demolition at the end of this academic year. The elevators take turns breaking down, so you pass those and climb more stairs, to the fifth floor. Walk down the East hallway, whose carpet is more stain than fabric and through a comically skinny door. Never try to understand this door. It just is five inches too skinny for a normal door. Enter the lounge, which used to be white and gaping, furnished with living room couches and lamps, like a homey squash court. Since sliced in two by the installation of a second story, the other half is vaulted like a sad cathedral. Say a prayer for sunlight and walk on to the West hallway.

Your room is the first on the right, and your door displays its number and its occupants. You turn the knob, and it doesn’t open. You put your weight against the wood, and it’s still stuck. Your shoulder hurts, you’re attacking this door, which is never locked, but it just will not budge.

“The doors were fit relatively tightly. If the door was closed, you could wedge a penny between the door and the jamb. So you could ‘penny’ someone into their room with a penny, or two.” I’m speaking with Sidney Huttner (A.B. ’63, A.M. ’69), a recent retiree from the Special Collections library at the University of Iowa, and the Resident Head (RH) of Henderson House from 1968 to 1980. He figures he’s probably the resident who lived in Pierce Tower the longest, counting the time he spent here as assistant RH for Shorey, from 1961 to 1963.

The ‘Pennying-in’ prank was invented by the Tower’s earliest residents, and it rendered a door stuck from the outside. “It was a way of a person tormenting another person. Some of these disputes were humorous and got more serious, and some of them were serious and got more humorous.”

Huttner’s description is something I’ve heard

only two or three times before. My Pierce is the fortress dorm whose toilets explode and whose residents are slightly more restless than other students. But Pierce has stories and lineages which predate its recent reputation. Some have left tangible legacies, say circular pockmarks that demonstrate exactly where and how a penny could fit in the jamb to block the door. But much that makes modern living at Pierce what it is today will leave behind no paper trail. The door to this building will soon be shut for good.

I cannot for the life of me figure out how to keep a door shut with a penny, so I’ll try to prop it open instead.

There is a lot to explain. The beginning: In 1960, Pierce Tower was erected, and in 1961 it was filled with young men. It was designed by architect Harry Weese to fit groups of 60 to 80 students into each of four Houses—Tufts, Henderson, Thompson, and Shorey, in order of altitude from lowest to highest. Each house was allocated two of the eleven floors with a ring of double and single rooms on each floor circling a two-story lounge and kitchen area to be maintained and controlled by each house’s House Council.

The inaugural Henderson House Council of 1961 met once a week to discuss life and logistics, establishing a precedent that continues to this day. Each meeting’s minutes were typed up, copied, and distributed by the secretary, usually posted above the urinals on gauzy mimeograph paper, sometimes on a papyrus-like brown scroll. The position of secretary wasn’t prestigious at the time. David Watson (X ’73), house member from 1969 to 1973, carried the title despite leaving the dorm after only a year. Paul Freier (A.B. ’76, M.D. ’80), who lived in Pierce all of his four years remembers being stuck in the job: “Once I started, I doubt there were many contested elections.” There was nothing of great import in their day-to-day duties. In fact, most of the business was (and continues to be) excruciatingly mundane.

But what Watson and Freier wrote down is special, if only for contributing to Pierce’s now vital recorded history: Henderson House Council minutes from 1960 to 1980, along with a surprising array of other artifacts and ephemera, are today preserved and available for study in the Special Collections Research Center.

1. The Pierce Tower breezeway and its furniture “potentially clean enough to be salvaged before the building’s scheduled demolition.”

2. Thompson lounge sliced in two by the installation of a second story.

3. Pierce Tower awaiting the demolition scheduled for summer 2013. frank yan

| the chicago maroon

4. Screw Ball, a short-lived tradition, attempted to attract women from the co-ed dorms to Pierce. courtesy of the university of chicago archives

I never expected these records to have an effect on me, aside from feeding the nostalgia I now feel in the wake of Pierce’s imminent demolition. I was elected President of Henderson at the beginning of this year, a position from which I’ve been somewhat delinquent.

The week following my election I was absent from the meeting, and I’ve missed upwards of two meetings a quarter since, fully 20 percent of my obligation. Until recently, I’d told my housemates honestly, “I’m sorry, but you voted for me, there’s nothing you can do. We have no constitution, so my conduct is unimpeachable.”

Then my RH found our house records.

For better or for worse, the records revealed that since my inauguration, I have been burdened with far more legitimacy than I realized.

After hearing from Shorey House that they had found a scrapbook preserved, my RH searched the library Web site on a whim. He had no idea what heavy boxes we’d find in Special Collections. Our constitution is as old as the building it represents and older than the building it’s now preserved in, where it has resided for thirty years.

With it are six archival boxes worth of minutes, correspondence and photographs, the most material available in the library for any single house.

The origin of this treasure trove of history is as simple as it is inexplicably serendipitous. Huttner, or Sid as the old Pierce boys called him, was fresh out of UChicago’s graduate Philosophy program when he decided that he wanted a career that “stayed within academic institutions.”

In 1969, he jumped into second-in-command of the Special Collections Research Center, which was then in the process of transferring its collection from Harper Memorial Library to the new Regenstein. In 1980, he left for a position in Special Collections at Syracuse University, but he left behind a neglected legacy. “I was keenly aware of how little had been saved about the house system,” he says. “So over my 12 years I tucked away what I could and put it into archives as I was leaving in 1980. And there, I guess, it remains.”

The voice the records preserve most pervasively is that of the house secretary, given free reign to document as he or she pleased. Watson, who signed his full name at the foot of all his notes, was brashly playful and impressionistic.

He wasn’t so concerned with conveying information as he was with transmitting a feeling, usually one of exasperation with the bureaucracy of house governance. In winter of ’71 he wrote an homage to Br’er Rabbit on the topic of the cultural subsidy the house was discussing. In spring he sent out an envelope full of ticker tape, each piece with half an agenda item on it. By autumn, there are weeks he simply typed “what-

afuckingmess” in free form for three pages. But all the while he had at least half an eye on history. On Sunday, October 10, at the beginning of his second year as secretary, he acknowledged that the notes from the past decade’s meetings were in Sid’s apartment, which new residents could read at their leisure if they wanted “an interesting, if somewhat fanciful history of the house.” But on the phone in 2013, he expresses surprise at the preservation of his own writings after so many years.

Freier took over the post as secretary a few years after Watson and was just as surprised that his notes are still around. “I don’t remember [house meetings as] the highlight of the week or particularly well attended,” he tells me over the phone. To this underwhelming turnout, Freier reinstituted a rigor in the record that was there before but not so explicit. He maintained fealty to Robert’s Rules of Order, and if his notes were

are, that I felt guilty for not having contributed fresh material. I frantically solicited photographs and memorabilia from all members of the house. We owe interest and drama to the continuing record of this grand institution, I thought. We are at least as historically important as our forefathers. But it turned out that the archives were a fluke, a benevolent coincidence of people and place; the Henderson of 2012–2013 has little to contribute to the memory of the Henderson of 1960–1980.

Even so, there are remnants of inherited tales and traditions. Civil war in Henderson house tended to split along its most obvious lines.

From the beginning, the fifth and sixth floors had a mysterious enmity between them, which continues in the current age. Watson suggests it might be that the RH apartment is on the fifth floor, so those residents are offered less opportunity for boldness and daring. It might

4 absurd it was for the excess of order and not for the deficit. Given that the meetings were somewhat poorly attended, a rule was established that three absences in a row by any member of the council would result in impeachment (a rule to which I luckily was not held). Shortly after this rule was established, Freier entered into the record four consecutive meetings, each held on the same Sunday, November 17, in which he notes each time that the Henderson president is increasingly close to getting kicked out. In his last meeting, he calls for an honorary minute of silence for the ousted president, a motion that was “amended to one second. In discussion of the motion, it was generally agreed that the stereo would be turned off for that one second.

The motion passed.”

There was a period of time, between learning of the archives and realizing how special they

also be because there were more pot smokers on the sixth. Whatever the cause, from the mid-60s on, the sixth floor consistently agitated for independence from the lower half of the house. In 1963, the separatist movement announced itself quietly. Unrest flared again in 1965, this time with a full-blown manifesto. But the seceded state’s borders were limited to “Room 1620 (the left half).” By 1971, the sixth floor liberation front was legend and awaiting a proper history from Watson.

Sid offered a solution to the rivalry in the form of an essay contest, to the prompt “Is the 5th or 6th floor more consistently ingenious or ingenuous?” he received only two responses, but their passion made up for their low number.

One was a scroll of parchment, covered half in “no”s and half in “therefore”s. The other was titled “Nearer My God To Thee.”

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There are also two memorable house traditions that started post–Special Collections archiving, though their commencements predate my tenure. On birthdays at midnight, Hendersonians hunt down the house member and force him or her into one of the communal showers, in which he or she must remain under the water with his or her clothes on for the duration of the Happy Birthday song. This results in a thorough drenching for whoever is celebrated and a minor tangential soaking when the birthday kid retaliates, chasing the original kidnappers through the halls.

Our other custom is written into our house record, which we now e-mail rather than post.

During every house meeting, we offer three awards: the Wombat, the Flombat, and the Flasey. The Wombat is our mascot, and it represents supreme victory. The Flasey is a misspelling of False, and it is awarded for the week’s worst failure. The Flombat is a combination of the other two, given to the person whose single action or event embodied both success and failure.

The best example I can offer is my roommate’s Flombat last year: He placed a glass bowl full of water on the stovetop, not understanding that it would shatter. It did, but he wasn’t in the room with it when it happened. He saved himself from flying shards, by forgetting a key ingredient he had been planning to boil. Because his injury was averted by his forgetfulness, we gave him a Flombat.

Pierce was euphemistically labeled as the “social” dorm for a reason. The house business detailed in the archives includes the organization of a “beer party” at least twice a quarter. In 1966, a large Pierce-wide party was established and officially christened The Screw Ball, a traditional

formal dance whose name was crafted with the deft frankness one would expect from the quasi-fraternity brothers of Pierce. This tradition expired four years later, but the dream of female attendance to Henderson parties did not. Freier remembers one attempt in 1975. “We were having a party…and we invited the women of one of the coed dorms.” By which Freier really means, only the women of Lower Flint House.

In response to their invitation, they received a blunt accusation of sexist insinuation, written in blue marker. The boys offered an explanation rather than regrets: “Ideally, the ratio between males and females at the University of Chicago would be comparable to those found in real life.”

I’m reaching for a connection to this mythology since today’s residents haven’t upheld the rambunctious boys’ club atmosphere. Our current traditions must have replaced the old ones sometime in the years after the archives ended. Not once in the two archived decades did anyone forcibly shower anyone, at least not in a way that merited Council attention. There were yearly awards given, including a rather nice one dedicated to a former housekeeper, but no weekly celebrations of excellence or disappointment. And there’s no mention in the archives of any house mascot, let alone a Wombat.

I want to tell every story. I haven’t even mentioned the Talent Show drag plays or the coffee hour with Milton Friedman. I haven’t told you about the letter to Facilities Services, thanking them for retrieving the Henderson football from the roof of the Regenstein. I haven’t told you about the letter from a first-year entering the house, who later became the leader of a cult.

These are minor episodes in the lives of mostly normal, unremarkable people, but with the

demolition crew on its way, with my tenure as president coming to an end, I’ve realized there’s nothing more precious or legendary than the exploits of a few bored and horny undergraduates who happened to be assigned to Henderson House in Pierce Tower. And the whole story rests on the shoulders of Sid Huttner, a librarian with personal files he thought someone sometime might want to look at.

Sid remembers himself as a facilitator more than a leader. “I was only a member of the community. I can’t remember any serious issues I voted down,” he says. Others remember that he weathered with grace the councils who took their responsibility less seriously. “He was very laid back and patient with the adolescent idiocy,” Watson says. Sid served his term until spring quarter 1980. The last mention of his tenure is in the house notes some time in February, where a goodbye party is suggested. He isn’t mentioned again.

In his own folder, the last page he saved is a letter to a student, revoking their rights to play their stereo. Then: silence. An ominous, thirty-year silence, until now. He hasn’t kept up much with the students, and he doesn’t much dispute the decision to bulldoze the building. “Not much of a fight to be had. It was always a weird building,” he says. “The most responsible thing to do is to get rid of it.” But he’ll come back for the memories, if only “to look at the hole in the ground.”

You open the door into your room. There are windows on three sides, you’re facing west, and the sunset is on its way. Remember what Watson said on the phone, about his room so long ago that you’re now experiencing for the last time.

“You could go and put yourself out into the bay window,” he said. “And have this terrific view.”

Residents of the originally all-male dorm display the “rambunctious boys’ club atmosphere” of yesteryear. courtesy of the university of chicago archives

10 | Volume 16

next up:

start-upS T

by Meaghan Murphy

he legend of the college start-up has become something of a 21st century cliché.

A group of guys (and, yes, it’s mostly the guys) meet in a freshman dorm room at one of the top universities in the country. They start a company, win big money. It’s the Genesis story for the digital age’s American dream, gospel legend for post-yuppie climbers.

In recent years, UChicago has churned out a handful of start-up frontiersmen. Kip Solutions, a social media consulting company, was founded by fourth-year Patrick Ip in 2011, then a second-year in the College. In 2012, Ip and his partner, Harvard undergraduate Kavya Shankar, raked in $10,000 of Booth School capital, and this year the company was acquired

by New York consulting firm, Post+Beam. Then there’s Sugar Bliss, a cupcake delivery service that evolved into a storefront establishment in 2009, founded by Teresa Ging (A.B. ’00).

And finally there was Entom Foods, a highly publicized venture founded by a team of UChicago undergraduates led by third-year Matthew Krisiloff that produced insects as a sustainable food source. Entom won the inaugural College New Venture Challenge for 2010–2011, and has graced the pages of The New Yorker, The Wall Street Journal, and The New York Times.

In conversation with this breed of UChicago entrepreneurs, sometimes a translator is in order. They aren’t exactly techies, nor are they your Scav-seasonal engineers moonlighting in the practical avenues of the business world before ascending the ladder of academia. Phrases like “minimum viable product,” “angel investor,” and “lean start-up methodology” creep up often, as do “gamification,” “accelerator,” “what’s your exit” and “go-to-market strategy.”

But often more important than the portmanteaus and neologisms are the acronyms.

Project SAM (SMS Accounting Management) is an application designed for “dumb phones,” aimed at assisting health-care clinics in the developing world to better track inventory and manage supply shipments. And its CEO and CFO are both trying to finish the Core.

While their story makes for good local news copy and would make quite a few mothers proud, it hasn’t quite carved out its space among UChicago start-up successes. The tempered reception of Project SAM’s young achievements— less flashy than the likes of Entom Foods and Kip Solutions—hints at the growing regularity of its kind. And this proliferation of mid-range start-up ventures is being newly matched by a nascent University entrepreneurial support system. Quietly, without its characteristic buzz and flash, an entrepreneurial scene is finding its footing at UChicago.

Second-years CEO Daniel Yu and CFO Victor Kung met as first-years in the College. Yu spent his first year bouncing around a couple of intense academic ideas. Having studied music composition very seriously in high school, he picked up an interest in Arabic and linguistics.

Kung settled into economics right from the start. In the spring of 2012, though, a quirk of housing turnover introduced them to part-time undergraduate Raghu Betina, a former college dropout and “serial entrepreneur” who returned to academia from Indiana University to finish his B.A. in economics at UChicago. “I think it started with moving into the eighth floor apartment [in South Campus] and meeting Raghu,” Kung explains. “That was definitely the turning point for both of us.”

Betina’s story is an inspiring one, to be sure. The triumphant young venture capitalist returned to his undergrad career after a successful run in the international start-up world, returning a forceful advocate for the power of buildable technology. The sole student selected to speak at the annual TEDxUChicago event in May 2012, Betina spoke about “the coding revolution.” The gist of his TEDx talk was simple: Anyone can learn to code; everyone should learn to code.

Yu describes the catalyst behind his own entrepreneurial success in the same way as Kung: “Meeting Raghu and getting a perspective on this whole world out there…that everyone should learn to code, and then how that empowers people to build their own ideas.”

Grey City | 11

the idea Hospitals call or text records using feature phone (any phone that isn’t a smart phone) Project SAM (from left): Hope Bretscher, Victor Kung, Daniel Yu, Dhrooti Vyas, and Freddy Boulton. tiffany tan | the chicago maroon

12 | Volume 16

All information sent to an online database can be seen by central supply manager

So a pre-pubescent Project SAM had found its mentor. Next up: an idea. Yu’s first “foray into building an idea” was, by all traditional accounts, a flop. His application “SafeRide Mobile” was a finalist in the Mobile App Challenge, an ideas competition (teams are evaluated on their pitch only) run

by IT Services and the Polsky Center for Entrepreneurship and Innovation at the Booth School. Theoretically, the app would efficiently route SafeRide around Hyde Park by having students request the service through a GPS–tracked smartphone application. But Yu’s first lunge into the start-up world was smacked down by a double blow. Not only was he not selected, but also the premise of his first idea imploded when NightRide replaced SafeRide in 2012.

Still in his first year, Yu had caught a bit of Betina’s zeal for “buildability.” “Once I started to learn these skills and see how they could be applied, I started thinking about my personal ideas that I could build out.

And that’s actually where I came up for the idea for Project SAM,” he said.

Yu’s piqued interest coincided with an increase in resources for entrepreneurship. Just this year, Career Advancement, with the support of the Polsky Center, awarded $20,500 in aggregate to a group of undergraduate start-up teams through the College New Venture Challenge, which began in 2010.

Fall 2012 brought new funding for the Polsky Center to shower on undergrads, and a new Career Advancement adviser. Hanging around the third floor of Ida Noyes, it’s hard to miss Director of UChicago Careers in Entrepreneurship Jerry Huang (just ask for Jerry—he’s on first name terms with nearly everyone). Huang has a presence as warm as his booming, jovial laugh. Many students involved in the start-up community are quick to credit Huang with the uptick in entrepreneurship ventures this year. But Huang himself credits the Alumni Board of Governors, the Board of Trustees, and Uni-

“

it's the genesis story for the digital age's american dream

versity President Robert Zimmer.

He also doesn’t tie the increase to any single year. “It’s a genesis that has been coming for a few years…. If I wasn’t here, I think there would still be entrepreneurial activity going on.” While it’s hard to argue against the money that’s been fronted by Career Advancement—seen by the students through personnel changes, Booth School connections, and eye-catching prize money— Huang’s personal touch has certainly made its own significant impression.

Project SAM has seen some early returns on the University’s investments. The team now consists of seven people from UChicago and Stanford, who have work experience in China, India, Egypt, and Peru. With contacts in the Ministry of Health of Peru and various NGOs through the UChicago chapter of GlobeMed, Project SAM has grown into more than just a good idea. With Yu at the helm, Project SAM has thrown down its gauntlet at six different collegiate competitions in just one academic year. The group was flat-out rejected from the first, an MIT competition with a $100,000 prize at the finish. But after an initial round of rejections and some “hard feedback,” Yu says, the team went on to be named “Resolution Fellows” at the Social Venture Challenge at the Clinton Global Initiative University conference to the tune of $5,000.

Yu, Kung, and second-year team member Hope Bretscher, just returned from a fruitful trip to Silicon Valley where they won the World Citizenship Competition within Microsoft’s Imagine Cup finals. Along with another check for $5,000, this competition afforded them the opportunity to form partnerships with Microsoft and Twilio Cloud Communications, to network with the industry’s elite, and to discover that Stanford undergrads must have scads of free time to work on their projects. Yu himself has had a taste of what that “free” time feels like: He’s been on academic leave since winter quarter.

When asked if he’s planning to return to classes next fall, he turns a little coy.

For all the recent growth in institutional support, the part-time status of many young entrepreneurs here brings into question the compatibility between the College’s rigor and start-up culture. Yu says that his return will depend on Project SAM’s success this summer in the final round of Booth’s Social New Venture Challenge, where they were selected as the sole undergraduate team among six finalists, narrowed down from a pool of 16 UChicago teams.

Many other College entrepreneurs have also chosen to go part-time this quarter in preparation for the upcoming College New Venture Challenge. And many of the team members expressed their concern with the knowledge gap that sits between a start-up’s business plan and the syllabus for the economics standard core.

However, Huang and other Career Advancement advisers seem confident that the College’s recent boom in entrepreneurship is just UChicago students tech-ifying the University’s great legacy for innovation across all disciplines. “You can go all the way back to the founding of the University and there’s been innovation in all fields,” said Marthe Druska, director of Student and Employer Services and Communications.

“Now we’re at the point, having Jerry here as program director…along with all the other things that are happening on campus and in the Chicago region, it’s this very large and exciting continuation of all the innovation and entrepreneurship that has come before.”

Few came to the College intending to enter the entrepreneurship game: not Betina, not Yu, not most of the team members competing in the College New Venture Challenge. Even if the barrier to entry for the start-up world isn’t overwhelmingly high, there are quite a few challenges on the road to that first $10,000 check. But the opportunities are here, they’re growing, and there are fat cash rolls paving their future.

”

Grey City | 13

The identities behind campus food culture

By Emma Broder and Daniel Rivera Photos by Sydney Combs 14 | Volume 16

“So it’s 6 p.m. on a Wednesday night.

And you get an e-mail, and in that e-mail it says something along the lines of, ‘Be in the first floor lobby of the Regenstein library at eight.’”

Robert Lipman stops, allowing himself a small smile that will reappear only when he later recounts bouts of institutionalized rebellion. (“There was a chocolate wine I made using a professor’s centrifuge,” he gushes, shoulders hunched as though he’s whispering about last night’s hookup.)

“You show up, it says, ‘Be here, bring your friend, and I’ll be there waiting.’ At this point—the night of the dinner—you know the day and the time, you don’t know what you’re eating, you don’t know who you’re going to be eating with, you don’t know where it’s going to be, until 6 p.m.”

Such is the structure of The Hearth, first-year Lipman’s much discussed underground restaurant. It seats only twelve people, once a month. Signing up for a spot requires only an .edu e-mail address: Registrants include students from “Northwestern, Stanford, [even schools on] the East Coast,” and professors. His smile grows bigger. “And one of the IOP fellows, who [was] the cabinet secretary to Obama.

He signed up, too.”

Ask someone what they think about food culture on campus or who comes to mind when they think of it, and you’ll likely get one of two answers. For the underclassmen, ushered into an era of mystery dinners, Robert Lipman is the go-to. “My friend went to one of his dinners,” they’ll say.

“Not me though. I mean, I put my name on the list.”

From an older crowd, you’ll get a slow grin, a faraway look. “The Hearth kid?” they’ll ask, raising an eyebrow. “No. For me, it was Max Chaoulideer.”

The purples of fourth-year Chaoulideer’s hoodie and shoelaces look defiant, and his smile is cocksure when we introduce ourselves. If you previously had any doubts about someone’s capacity to smoke their own bacon and brew their own ale for dinners that served an upward of 50 people, he at once allays your disbelief.

Then mocks it.

“It started more or less O-Week of my first year,” Chaoulideer explained of his legacy. “I cooked, like, a huge Persian meal for everyone I had seen. I didn’t even know anyone; it was people I’d like, encountered.

And it was awesome.”

If Lipman’s approach to dinners is de-

Robert Lipman’s The Hearth dinner held in April brought 12 students together for more than just canteloupe and prosciutto on Botany Pond.

Grey City | 15

liberate and controlled, then Chaoulideer’s is by comparison wild and anarchic. For Chaoulideer, it was about creating “social forums where you could actually, like, have a decent conversation,” the lack of which he was surprised by, given “it’s UChicago.”

After that first dinner, which he staged in Blackstone, his dorm at the time, Chaoulideer gained momentum. Eventually he moved to the I-House kitchen at the suggestions of friends, and “it just got bigger and bigger.” The first-year who cooked impromptu dorm dinners was suddenly the proprietor of an e-mail listhost to which almost one hundred students subscribed. Unlike The Hearth, Chaoulideer’s dinners had an open invitation—all that was required was an RSVP, and you could bring as many guests as you liked.

“What I wanted originally,” Chaoulideer said, “[was] like a little group of my best friends sitting at a table…under pleasant conditions. It ended up being a very different kind of thing. It became a place to meet people, a place for me to cultivate whatever kind of friendships I wanted.

That was the main motivation.… Everyone has to eat, so why not eat together?”

It’s a sentiment that pervaded every conversation we had. Food builds community.

Community is everything.

The same philosophy drives second-year Eric Singerman, who writes for the food blog Serious Eats and who met Chaoulideer last year through the Culinary Club. (He’s been to one of Lipman’s dinners, but never to one of Chaoulideer’s.) Like Chaoulideer, he began cooking communal meals in his dorm, opting for simple and reliable fare like roast chicken, and plans to continue the tradition in his apartment next year.

“I feel like it would be really cool to have random people show up, just friends

16 | Volume 16

of friends. I feel like that would be a really organic environment. I mean, no one’s awkward around food, right?” he told us.

Singerman sports flip-flops and has a propensity for shooting our questions back at us. It’s not calculated, though; little about him is. When he stares you down and asks, “What do you think about foodie culture?” it’s with genuine interest.

“I’m not really into the presentation of my food. I like simple things, things that taste like what they are,” he confessed, yanking a foot up onto the opposite knee.

“I would shoot myself in the head before I serve a meal as formal as Robert does.”

Food is for Singerman primarily a conduit for social connectivity. “I came to college thinking RSOs, totally, that’s totally how you make friends. But no, not at all,” Singerman said. “I think the [foodie] community can only be centralized by meeting each other, going over to each other’s dinners, hanging out. That’s how you make friends in real life.”

Forging bonds is Lipman’s goal as well, whether despite The Hearth’s formality, or because of it. “This type of thing does not exist at any other university in the world except for here. And this is the perfect place to have an underground restaurant,” he said. “When you see what happens at that table, it almost becomes magical. Like, these strangers become friends.”

Unlike Singerman, however, who specified that these friendships need to be formed in “real life,” Lipman subscribes to the notion that sharing a moment of “magic” will result in ties that bind. During our first conversation, when pressed to give information about his plans for what was then his April dinner, a modern art affair to be held on Botany Pond, his eyes widened.

We knew too much. “I’m worried about

you guys,” he admitted. “If you haven’t been going, I don’t want to spoil it.”

After all, so much of the experience is about going in blind. “These kids, they really have to trust me,” Lipman acknowledged. “I mean, I don’t tell them anything.

They don’t know what they’re going to eat, for crying out loud. I don’t have a food license; they need to trust that I don’t poison them, too.”

While Lipman prepares all his dinners on site, his job extends beyond just the food at hand—to an extent, he’s responsible for the conversations that happen at his table, as well. “I think that if I were in his position I would feel very socially anxious about it,” second-year Olivia Myszkowski, a TEDxUChicago representative who attended Lipman’s latest dinner, said to us over coffee. “You feel responsible, when you bring any sort of group of people together, for them having a normal and fulfilling social experience.”

Lipman auditioned for this year’s TEDxUChicago student speaker competition. He was chosen from a pool of 40, of which he was the only undergrad. Although Lipman (@hearthchef ) tweeted that he “was asked” to deliver a TED talk, Myszkowski said, “Robert very much made himself known.

That’s not a world I inhabit normally.”

The goal, Lipman said, is to get “these kids to step away for two or three hours, or however long I have them for, and have like, a private little environment.” A dozen people, we noted, is quite a responsibility.

Not exactly twelve, he corrected: “I usually keep two seats open for media.… One guy from The New York Times is coming, and one guy from, like, RedEye Magazine.”

“That’s huge. The New York Times will be at your dinner?” we asked.

“They better be. They actually canceled

on me once.” Lipman here seemed to reconsider himself. “So if it doesn’t happen then I’ll be very sad. I don’t think it will happen.”

It didn’t happen. The Times cancelled on Lipman once again.

Over the past few months, second-year Kirsten Gindler, a Maroon staffer, has been mentally gearing up to become something of a protégé to Chaoulideer. Building off his model, she wants to host dinners in her own apartment next year: “I really want it to be about the food, and people appreciating the food, and preparing the food together.”

Communal preparation is key for Gindler. “I envision people coming together, and I guess, whoever’s planning the meal can announce the menu, and then whoever wants to contribute to the preparation will just show up,” she explained to us.

“So many people want to help, so many people want to be part of the food culture at UChicago. So many people are knocking at the door of these initiatives and being turned away.”

For Gindler, a frequent food blogger, exclusivity goes hand in hand with the school of thought that says people should connect over an interest in food, rather than simply over a meal. It’s a notion that for her is emphasizing the wrong thing: “Food is something I enjoy and spend a lot of time thinking about, but I think it’s something that can be enjoyed in good company, and the company has to be formed around other things.” In other words, food provides an occasion, not main event.

Gindler allows that the setup of The Hearth is inherently interesting. “If it generates the enthusiasm, then that’s great,” she said. “But it really doesn’t serve me, or most students.”

Chaoulideer would agree. Speaking about Lipman’s propensity for secrecy, he said the mystery spots are ultimately not for him. “If that works, and he enjoys it, then that’s great, but [in my own dinners] I wanted to avoid things that could be construed as gimmicky, or as, you know, auxiliary. I just wanted good food all the time.”

“

I don’t have a food license; they need to trust that I don’t poison them, too.

”

Lipman’s showmanship has been picked up by the College Web site and Admissions Tumblr. Garrett Brinker (A.B. ’10), director of undergraduate outreach for Admissions, backed up Lipman’s assertion that The Hearth’s efforts are unique to this school. Brinker led us into his quad-facing office, which his colleagues had papered with pictures of his own face. On his whiteboard were written various social media strategies: “Tumblr coffee table,” “Twitter cocktail,” “Facebook backyard BBQ.” He’s been working at the University since graduating, as his LinkedIn reveals. It’s also

evident through his accumulation of what one might call UChicago swagger, right down to the sticker on his potted fern.

During our interview, he told a story about a conversation he had with a fellow alum who confessed, “‘I don’t know if I’m interesting, but I know I’m interested. I know I share that with every other student on this campus.’”

“And that’s how we see Robert,” he continued. “We see him as interested, and others as interested in his specific work. We think [The Hearth] is a really fascinating way to create community on campus.…

What’s great about this is that you can so easily put a face to the movement. You can really get a true feel for a type of student that exists here.

But there is a glaring absentee from the “movement” that Brinker described: the dining halls, the lowest common denominator of campus affairs, which have received more flack than ever this past year after failing multiple city health inspections.

“I lived in South last year and the dining hall was a bit…” Gindler paused. “Lackluster.”

Chaoulideer, who’s graduating this spring, was less concerned with censorship.

Speaking about whether or not he’s seen a change in the dialogue surrounding dining halls over the past four years, he said, “More people are talking about the fact that it sucks.… My first year I tried really hard through various deans and stuff to reform the dining halls. I was so incensed that a university of this caliber would have the balls to serve me this food. I thought, ‘Wow, what an insult.’” And that was before Cathey Dining Commons was temporarily closed, and Pierce and Bartlett both failed health inspections for a host of

Grey City | 17

problems including fruit flies and mouse droppings. “This is a good time to attack,” Chaoulideer said.

Under the qualifier that she’s “somebody who’s not super involved in food culture on campus,” Myszkowski posited a connection between the growing food movement and the “lackluster” campus options. “Part of me feels like this is a reactionary thing to that,” she said.

“When people talk about the dining halls, they don’t really talk about the food,” said third-year Lauren Kelly-Jones. “It’s more like, ‘Oh, I love my house table. I love what came around mealtimes.’”

Kelly-Jones carries herself lithely and works for the Admissions Office as an outreach intern, which means that she, among other things, moderates the incoming classes’ Facebook pages. She said that before Lipman arrived on campus, during the summer of 2012, he would post photos of food he had made on the 2016 Facebook page. “It was definitely Robert, I think, who generated this hype,” she said.

When Lipman launched The Hearth, Kelly-Jones wrote an article about his activities for The Uncommon Blog, Admissions’ official blog. She attended his Valentine’s Day dinner in the Regenstein Library.

Lipman served five dessert courses chosen from some of the world’s most famous restaurants (“I’ve never been to any of them, I can’t afford them,” he told us. “But I know everyone wants to go to them.”)

Kelly-Jones is one of the only students who has attended both Lipman’s and Chaoulideer’s dinners. She began going to Chaoulideer’s apartment when she was a first-year, living in housing.

She said she was nervous to go to an unknown apartment off-campus, but then again, later on she also told us about becoming personal friends with a street vendor in Paris whom she now considers “a father figure.”

“I just turned up. Max was in the middle of the chaos, just being Max and cooking this amazing meal,” she said, smiling wistfully. “I used to go every week, it was my favorite thing. And he and his friends just love food, when they talk about it you can just sense they’re just salivating, and it was just such a nice community.”

18 | Volume 16

Kelly-Jones thought of working on an Admissions piece about Chaoulideer, but said it fell through as the frequency of the dinners dwindled, underscoring the fact that while food-centered communities may be meaningful, they’re by no means permanent, often relying on one passionate leader. “I talked about him a lot,” she admitted. “But then everyone got really busy. He got really busy, and stopped doing the dinners.”

Kelly-Jones’s experience illustrates a few paradoxes at play within campus foodie culture. It aims to walk a line between dining hall table and party; a free-for-all watering hole that you’ll have a fair shot at actually remembering the next day. A way to engage with your peers honestly—in Chaoulideer’s words, events in which “the goal [is nothing] but just like, hanging out.” Foodie communities, then, seek to satiate a deeper hunger. For a school that prides itself on the life of the mind, creative discourse, and “interested students,” undergraduates never quite seem to get their fill.

It should also be noted that no one we spoke to had any interest in pursuing a food-related career post-graduation. In a conversation with the founders of campus food magazine Nonpareil, second-year Jenny Swann said, “UChicago is not a hospitality school, so I think that it doesn’t necessarily select for people who want to go into the food industry as a function of the way it is. You probably won’t meet a person who wants to open a restaurant.”

While Lipman and The Hearth have most noticeably kept food culture alive for a new wave of UChicago students, there is still a strong current among campus foodies that prompts us to remember that food is more than one chef, one meal, or one unified UChicago brand.

“It’s the difference between the school giving money and the school sponsoring [a dinner],” Singerman said. “It’s like that Shady Dealer article at the beginning of the year about President Zimmer and donuts.

Like, there was no President Zimmer, and everyone showed up to that one. People who weren’t normally there. If you take away the school, just donuts, everybody wants to go all of a sudden.”

Q&A with Jim Nondorf A conversation with the VP for Enrollment and Student Advancement and Dean of College Admissions and Financial Aid

by Sam Levine

sydney combs

| the chicago maroon

For the first time this fall, almost every student in the College will have been admitted under Jim Nondorf, who took over as Vice President and Dean of Admissions and Financial Aid in July 2009. During Nondorf ’s time leading admissions, interest in the College has soared. Overall applications have more than doubled, the yield rate of accepted students who choose to matriculate has increased and the College’s acceptance rate has declined to 8.8 percent this year. Nondorf has also overseen a significant expansion of financial aid resources, including a nearly $40 million increase in the overall financial aid budget since 2009 and the launch of UChicago Promise, which converts loans to grants for all students with demonstrated need who attend the University from the city of Chicago.

Nondorf, who sang in the Whiffenpoofs as an undergraduate studying economics at Yale and still goes out karaoking with his staff, sat down with Grey City to discuss financial aid, the College’s increasing popularity and the death of “Where fun goes to die.”

Read the full interview at www.chicagomaroon.com.

Grey City (GC): What are the challenges of expanding financial aid in a financial climate like the one we’re in now?

Jim Nondorf ( JN): Well, I think that the biggest issue is, post,

Grey City | 19

despite, the financial crisis, where a lot of schools had been very aggressive prior to that, perhaps more aggressive than they should have been, and then struggling towards coming back to meet the programmatic promises that they’ve made, the University has really been thoughtful in that it continued to be moving forward. So, I would say every year we have made improvements to financial aid in a whole variety of ways.

You always want to do more, and unfortunately it’s need-based aid, not want-based aid.... It would be great if we could just give everybody more...so it’s really choosing which policies or which things to do. And then you see what the actual results are. When you really model, you don’t know how much something is going to cost because you don’t know what the incoming freshman class is going to look like until you actually have a program, and then you can see what the results are. You want to do a lot and you have to balance it with what you can afford.

You talk about what should we learn from our peers. One thing is, there wasn’t that kind of, ‘Are we gonna be able to afford this in the long term?’ for some schools, and now they’re paying the price for it. We want to make sure that everything we do, we can continue to do in the future.

GC: You’ve met recently with students who have been pushing for a ‘no-loan’ policy. What have you learned from those meetings?

JN: We all share common goals of making sure

123% 19

Increase in applications during Nondorf’s tenure

Number of percentage points that yield has increased under Nondorf 20 | Volume 16

that we’re supportive. Within that, we have whole sets of priorities and I think financial constraints that…we’re balancing. Where do we spend the best dollar? Even within financial aid where do we spend the best dollar?

I think that we are affordable and we make sure that every student can attend here…our loan average is way under everybody else’s. It’s $2,500 [less than the average] I believe. It’s $150 dollars a month for a student loan payment. I think with a University of Chicago education you should be able to afford $150 a month. That’s what I borrowed, and that was 20 years ago.

And everyone should have skin in the game.

Parents contribute, students contribute, the school contributes, alumni contribute; I mean everybody is putting something in to make sure that college is affordable.

GC: Why do you think so much of the campaign has centered on the fact that so many of our peer schools have no-loan policies?

JN: Not that many, actually. Very few [laughs]…. You know, I don’t know. I think it’s an easy thing to talk about. In some ways, I think the highly selective schools do themselves a disservice by making any kind of loan feel like a bad thing to the families. You take out loans when you’re an adult. It teaches fiscal discipline, it teaches you [about] credit rating. You know, there’s a lot of good things about having reasonable, normal loans.

You know, I find that when I listen to parents, it’s like, ‘Oh my God, they should have no loans,’...and we’re like, ‘It’s a small student loan, most of America grew up that way.’

Where the jump goes are people that borrow $100,000 or something crazy. We would never advocate for that. No student should do that.

I mean what we do for aid is so much better than 90–99.9 percent of universities and colleges. We meet the need. There’s not many schools that do that when you really think about it…. I mean that’s an enormous commitment when you think about it. Sight unseen, we’re saying anybody can come here and, based on the formulas for aid, we’ll meet everything you can’t afford, essentially.

GC: When you see the yield of accepted students and the number of applications increasing, and the acceptance rate going down, what does that mean to you?

JN: When yield goes up and when applications go up, I feel really, really excited because it tells me that people in the United States are appreciating the University for what I think it is. I think in some ways maybe it was underappreciated, but at the very least now there’s recognition for what an amazing place it is. I think they knew it was an incredibly academic place, and it still is. That it’s also a place where we help people prepare for their career, where people come and enjoy themselves, perhaps not in the same way as at other schools, but they are having fun at Summer Breeze or Scav Hunt, or that zombie thing that goes on at the beginning of every quarter, which I find fascinating.

8.8%

More applications is a sign to me that there is a growing appreciation for what we offer. A rigorous academic experience in a positive environment is highly sought after. I would say in yield, that’s even more exciting because it tells me that the best and brightest who get into the University of Chicago and lots of other schools, that they think we are the best fit for them. There’s two reasons that I like that. One of the reasons is that tells me that when you look at comparable schools, the other Ivies or West Coast, Stanford or MIT, CalTech, all these different schools, they think that we are just as good or better from a public standpoint. But it also tells me that my admissions officers are doing a good job reading files and admitting students who are a good fit for our kind of education. You know in many ways it’s all about the fit. The students who are going to make the most of a UChicago education, not just a highly selective education.

JN: When all of the classes have been admitted by you as the Dean of Admissions that’s like a huge deal. Because then pretty much everybody you see you’ve interacted with a few times before.

GC: What are some of the things you hear in high schools now that are different from when you started?

JN: Oh, gosh. Well, you know I don’t hear, ‘Is this where fun goes to die?’ that often, I have to say. The fun dying has died, which is great. Or it’s being resurrected here [laughs].

What’s nice about us is that we’re not the same as every other school. The kids who want our kind of education, who are rigorous and really love to learn, they’re gonna get that vibe and they will apply, I think followed by we’ll love them and they’ll accept. And the students who aren’t a great fit, they’ll know it too.

I always laugh—people fly in here to Chicago and they’ll visit our northern friends up there [Northwestern] and us. And you can usually tell when a student has visited one and they left there early and came. Or they came here fairly early on [and] you can tell, ‘Oh, that student

Acceptance rate for the Class of 2017

was probably happier up there.’

GC: Next year, all four classes in the College will have been admitted by you. How do you think the College is different now than it was when you started?

Another big thing is that there are more of you now than when I first got here. That had something to do with being slightly over-admitted the last couple of years [laughs]. I would say those are the big differences: there’s more of you and just knowing a lot more of you just makes it feel more homey for me personally, I would say.

I don’t think there are a lot of other differences in terms of faculty who love you guys.... In fact, I get a lot of compliments about the quality of the students. Students seem as happy, happier even…. I feel there’s more energy.

GC: The last few years the yield rate has exceeded what was projected. What are the challenges of admitting a class but also looking at realistic accommodations for student life?

JN: Because I was slightly over last year, I really shot high this year in my yield predictions. And of course we hit those yield predictions. I mean, I wasn’t really predicting that number, I was like, ‘Well, I’ll take this percentage and then I’ll just take students from the waitlist because we’ll never go up that much again.’ And then we did.

And a little more [laughs]. So I’m hoping that a few students will take gap years over the summer, which they usually do. I mean the yield has gone up almost 20 percentage points in four years.

It affects the admit rate dramatically as well. So I’m admitting about 1,000 less students than I would have admitted a couple of years ago.

Which is kind of a downer part of having a high yield…that you don’t give out as many offers of admission.

Interview has been condensed and edited.

Grey City | 21

Down The Rabbit Hole By Hannah Nyhart

An English professor’s experiments in pervasive play

22 | Volume 16

“There is no once upon a time at the beginning of a game,” says Bill Hutchison.

The fairy tale reference flows easily from his lips, and it should: he has spent the last month acting as the Grand Ort in an elaborate alternate reality game, “The Project.” His tone and attire are now free of his retired character’s sputtering absurdity, a pointed cap and a coat decorated with beanie babies traded for a buttondown shirt. And the bespectacled graduate student is right. The Project didn’t have a single beginning, much less a once upon a time. For the player, the story began the first days of spring quarter; clues and teasers cropped up across campus, ranging from human marionettes to notes scrawled in bathroom stalls. For The Project’s creators, it began fall quarter in Transmedia Games: Theory and Design, a class taught by Assistant Professor of English Patrick Jagoda and Sha Xin Wei, Director of Montreal’s Topological Media Lab. For the fictional characters at the heart of the game’s narrative, the story tore open two years ago with the discovery of a portal to another world, The Sandbox, a realm where very little was impossible.

Blending video, audio, and real life gameplay into an ever-evolving narrative, The Project experience stretched across online forums and transformed campus spaces.

Photos by Bea Malsky and the Richard and Mary L. Gray Center for Arts and Inquiry Illustrations by Benjamin Lange Grey City | 23

The players, student participants in the game, first met the cast of more than 20 characters in early April. Directed by promotional posters and garbled audio messages, players participated in one of three “initiation” events, during which they were introduced to three conspiracy groups; Ilinx, the army; Ortgeist, materialist bureaucrats; and SONOS, a shadowy cult of sound-worshippers. In transmedia games like this one, these entry points are known as “rabbit holes.” Each group had its own cast of characters, acted by the game’s undergraduate and graduate student designers, who explained and distorted the game’s narrative in equal doses via scripted and improvised interaction with players. Outside of formal events, the Facebook presence of “The Maroon Rabbit,” further directed players in and out of the game’s elaborate narrative through imperious posts. Referring to himself as the players’ “monarch,” The Maroon Rabbit would prove to be the game’s most artful manipulator: navigating, directing, and deceiving players in a single stroke.

If the game sounds confusing, it was.The Project’s mythology and gameplay shifted and multiplied, until no one figure knew everything.

That complexity, and the effort required to craft or understand it, spurs nagging questions: Why do people make a game like this? Why do people play?

One set of “players” had a different motivation than most: The Documentarians, three budding filmmakers who had ostensibly stumbled upon The Project and decided to follow its course. If the team seemed the a step ahead, their equipment a marionette touch too nice for rogue recordists, bonnet their Twitter feed a bit too quick on the uptake, it was because they were in fact double agents. Pulled from across the game’s design teams, The Documentarians served dual functions, that of leaders among the players and recordists employed by The Project’s sponsor, UChicago’s Richard and Mary L. Gray Center for Arts and Inquiry. Their finished work, a month-long chronicle of the game’s evolution, distinguishes The Project from all other transmedia games to date; the volume of such a record is unprecedented, facilitating study of the game’s dynamics for academics like Jagoda.

The game’s narrative revolved around The Portal, which was occasionally set in Taft House room 301 and linked our world and another, The Sandbox. Between March 28, when the first concrete clues appeared online, and April 25, the final event, players were led through a gamut of challenges and online puzzles, charged with opening The Portal for ends unknown. As the game marched on, players would themselves become characters; some would become heroes. But before heroes can be heroes, there have to be trials.

Throughout April, trials played out partly on online forums, hosted by theproject.uchicago.edu, a glitched collage of a Web page whose garbled text pointed the way toward challenges and events. A Web site “The Fable” hosted the fiction behind the game in soothsayer’s prose, which was offered piecemeal. Daily clues pointed to puzzles, and each revealed password unlocked another link of narrative. But the heart of the game was in its offline presence.

Real time events ranged from the absurd to the ominous, a move designed to keep players off-balance. The “initiation” for conspiracy group SONOS led players through a series of rooms in the basement of The Logan Center for the Arts. The event was advertised as an “interactive game concert,” a framing which fourth-year Documentarian

24 | Volume 16

and designer Rahul Roy said the creators hoped would attract both gamers and the musically inclined. Roy’s roommates performed as the advertised headliner, noise band “Fugue State,” whose sound Roy described as “really grating and dissonant.” In a online debrief longer than this article, fourth-year player Madeline Barnicle described the experience as “serious headache time.”

The designers behind SONOS crafted a mythology which crowned sound as the supreme human sense, and rejected touch, taste, and sight, as empirically flawed ways of knowing. The rooms in Logan were as dark as they were loud. A blindfolded character led players out in foursomes to partake in a series of carefully orchestrated challenges. In the first room, four players had to find the four places in the room that would make four string musicians play a unified chord.

A different room featured a sensory deprivation hood that led unseeing players through a perilous imagined obstacle course, and another an EEG monitor which raised and lowered the room’s noise level based on an player’s brain wave activity.

In a challenge for the materialist bureaucracy Ortgeist, players were offered a transformed Bartlett Hall, theirs for a Saturday night second week of spring quarter. Circles of light illuminated a scene from an I Spy spread, the near pitch-black dining hall dotted with patchwork blanket forts full of mundane, household objects: cassette tapes, scissors, a lighter, toy cars, a broom head and handle, an action figure hanging by a thread. Patrolling the revamped cafeteria were human marionettes, faces painted and strings dangling from their arms. Players were charged with disabling the rogue marionettes who, expressionless and garbed in frills, projected menace through the shadows. Sent through a blanket tunnel to scurry around the arena, players attempted to disable the marionettes using the objects scattered around them. After a trying hour, shouts of victory erupted from the hall’s sidelines as the last marionette fell, limp as a doll.

Over the course of three weeks, the game brought players together in real life 13 times. Between trials, student players were directed to Taft House, the site of The Portal to that magical world, The Sandbox.

Those trips offered the players their clearest mandate for the game.

The three conspiracy groups shared a desire to open The Portal. In Taft 301, lived Lamona the sleeping medium, the only one with the power to open The Portal, enabled by totems that the players collected.

As the final event approached, scraps of narrative gleaned from challenges, Facebook, and the online “Fable” were pieced together in online and offline forums; the story was growing into its own. Large, glossy posters tacked around campus advertised an “installation” while The Maroon Rabbit promised an “ascension”, purposely disparate messages meant to lure both players and newcomers for what designers hoped would be a powerful finale.

Across the board, the players’ efforts to overcome the trials paled in comparison to the work it took to construct them. The students who designed The Project wore self-effacJeremy the blender ing smiles when they admitted the amount of time they had dedicated since winter quarter. By late April, the game’s script stretched to 103 pages. Meanwhile, across national borders, another group was also moulding and welding the game: a team, led by Wei, of artist-experimenters from Montreal. Less than a week before the game’s culmination, the group arrived on campus. By the eve of the finale, Logan 014 was the workshop of madmen.

Why do people make a game like this?

Why do people play?

Grey City | 25

While “Once upon a time” was too trite, for The Project, the idea of a land far far away, or “worldbuilding”, was integral. “To envision a compelling world in imagination, alone, is difficult enough, but to create a fictional space in which 70 other people can immerse themselves enough to play together presents a different kind of challenge,” Jagoda said. The world of The Project was informed by the campus spaces it occupied. The design leader of SONOS, Northwestern graduate student Chris Russell, held up the UChicago landscape as a force that shaped both the tone and the form of the challenges, citing specifically As the game the University’s gothic architecture marched on, and Logan basement space. Russell, who had enrolled in Jagoda’s fall players would class and continued to commute themselves to campus for the game’s duration, become pointed out another uniquely UChicago asset that helped facilitate characters; the game. “The culture here is far some would more,” he paused, as if to choose a more tactful phrase, “nerdy.” become Third-year Eric Thurm, a former heroes.

Jagoda student and eager player, reflected on the tension between that nerdiness and the fear of being the most involved player. “There’s a sense in which it’s kind of embarrassing to be the person most into the game, calling all these ridiculous characters ‘Sir’ and engaging wholly with the puzzles. It’s sad, because being into the game is fun.” There was another concern behind the sometimes sheepish restraint exhibited by players and designers alike. “The process of creating a world is different than the process of discovering a world,” reflected secondyear Documentarian Bea Malsky. There was a fear of peering behind the curtain, pushing hard enough that some panel of the imagined set would give, to reveal an actor where there had been a character.

But if second-year Maeghan Fry and first-year Isabel Jensen had those inhibitions, they didn’t show them. Fry pledged her loyalty to the Ilinx group, but Facebook-messaged The Maroon Rabbit in secret, hoping to learn more about the game’s narrative, and shared the correspondence with Jensen. Through a virtual message exchange, Fry professed her closeted loyalty to The Maroon Rabbit even as the Rabbit publicly revealed his true identity as the game’s villain: Aaron Pophis, a scientist who, trapped in The Sandbox, had become a despot. Pophis disclosed that the players’ challenges to date were his own design, a

26 | Volume 16

means to open The Portal and extend his sand kingdom across our world. “So you’re the one everyone is searching for,” wrote Fry. “It’s an honor to know you’re the one I’ve been talking with this whole time.”

With that pledge of loyalty came an idea for the final event, a way to take down the villain that would feel definitive for players. Jagoda explained that the concept drew on ages of mythology: “Speaking the demon’s name dispels that demon. It’s a kind of Brothers Grimm Rumplestiltskin moment.”

And so The Maroon Rabbit, manned by Jagoda and third-year designer Philip Ehrenberg, sent Fry a Facebook message on the day of the The Project’s finale: “[My] true name is PONOS, the PARIAH. Do not share this truth with anyone.” The stakes were high. “In a sense,” Jagoda said, “the entire finale rested on this one person [Fry] showing up, and knowing the name when the time came for knowing the name.”

Pophis’ downfall came in the basement of Logan during the finale, an event structured to allow players to cap the narrative as the event transitioned into an exhibition of The Project to the public. More than 70 people clustered in Logan courtyard for the event. Taken from Taft, the medium, Lamona, who had by now been revealed as Pophis’ captive daughter, stood above the courtyard on Logan’s third floor patio. Her white dress, an enormous cloth parachute, flowed three stories down to the stone square. Distressed, she directed the players to Logan 014, where Pophis would appear through The Portal. Appear he did, through a video projected in stark contrasts on the wall. He froze and blinked away when the crowd of players, led by Fry and Jensen, called out the villain’s true name. A sigh of relief trembled through the room.

The moment could have gone differently; Jensen had been lobbying Fry to do an experiment of their own. “What if there was a way for the bad guy to win?” Jensen reflected, “Because the bad guy never wins. I figured it would be interesting to see how the rest of the story would fall out.” The pair didn’t want to break the game, but unbeknownst to them, they could have held their peace. “We did have a backup plan,” Jagoda said, “but it would not have been nearly as exciting.”

For all The Project’s intricate pathways, most roads led to Jagoda.

“There is a lot to be said for the cult of Jagoda,” Malsky said. “No one’s doing what Patrick’s doing,” added Roy. “It’s unique. He’s carved out something of his own.” Jagoda kept a quiet presence at events: he twice played the unseen Controller character, hunched over a computer screen in Taft House. He dropped in on Ortgeist’s marionette challenge and appeared as an eager audience member when the Documentarians presented their findings mid-game, in character, at the April 12 iteration of Logan Center’s “The Cabinet,” an arts and science discussion series. At

the finale’s climactic moment in the basement, a player looking toward the door would have seen him leaning across the frame peering into the darkened room, smiling.

It was Jagoda who wrote the fanciful “Fable” that players uncovered a puzzle at a time. Jagoda also wrote the overarching script, but other storytellers emerged. The Documentarian Twitter feed read as a play-by-play of the game. First-year Lucy Fish started a blog to reflect on the clues and challenges online and off. And in the end moment of the game, everyone—players, voyeurs, characters, and Documentarians alike—became a storyteller.

With Pophis vanquished, the crowd returned to Logan courtyard to find the game unfinished. Lamona, the medium, was still three floors above, paralyzed by a force greater than Pophis: her own nightmares, made powerful by her time in The Sandbox. The characters began to offer up their own fears, in an attempt to ease Lamona’s. While confessing, they faced the players, urging them to unload their own trepidations. The mood shifted. Amid the largest crowd yet, designers demanded a new dimension of participation: non-fiction. For a palpable moment, it didn’t seem like players would make the leap. “I was like, ‘Patrick, you’re so brilliant, but you’re wrong. This is not gonna work,’” Malsky said. “And then it happened, and I was like, Oh. Yeah.

He’s right. He gets it.”

Urged on by the characters around them, players shed their armor of the fictional. They began to shout out confessions: “I’m afraid I’m never going to have enough time,” “I’m running out of money,” “I don’t know what to do after college.” After each, the crowd chanted: “You are not alone!”

The nightmares, projected as video clips across the giant skirt that flowed from Lamona to the courtyard, faded with each fear and affirmation, until they were vanquished all together. “We wanted there to be a moment of not simply saving Lamona, but of vulnerability and intimacy among players. We wanted to mark the game’s collective dimension at the climax,” Jagoda said.

Not everyone was so enthralled by the final moments. In her online write-up, player Barnicle called it “tacky,” writing, “After three weeks of glorious fun for its own sake, UChicago eccentricity at its finest, we have to be all moralizing about how we’re here for each other?” An avid follower of the game, Barnicle also wrestled with leaving the narrative behind, without an explicit epilogue for some characters. “I like having my loose ends wrapped up,” she wrote. “But maybe we get to dream our own endings.”

Narrative aside, some questions do remain. Designers poured work

toward an ultimately transient staging that rarely drew a crowd larger than the team that had created it. Players ran through the darkened midway, wrestled with codes, and willfully suspended disbelief to partake in the world presented to them. But why? Why build The Project? Why choose to believe it?

Everyone has their own answer. “Part of the reason we build worlds, I think, is to escape this one, because it’s so limiting,” said Hutchison, even as he described the overwhelming nerves he felt playing the Grand Ort. “It’s almost, why not?” said fourththe Listener year Anna Dozor, a designer and Jagoda student. “There are a million and a half ways [that] stories can be told and experienced, and for the most part we’ve decided to limit ourselves to these pre-existing genres and forms.” The game’s draw, for Dozor, was an exploratory and artistic one, divorced from the larger arguments about the form’s greater potential for impact that drove some of her co-creators.

“Being involved in this project just pulled me in and gave me this community,” Fry said, the player who had become such a narrative linchpin. Prior to the game, she had been considering transferring out of the University. “It made me remember why I really love this school.”

As Jagoda answers, sprawled across an office chair two weeks after the game’s finale, he parses the idea of play itself. “Leisure is merely restorative and temporary; play, on the other hand, is imaginative and transformative,” he said. “Actual play...It’s difficult. Play is not the opposite of work. Play is not the opposite of seriousness. Play is both of those things.”

The game continues. There is a documentary in the works from the material collected by the Documentarians, funded still by the Gray Center. Designers are crafting a media-enabled version of the online fable, with hyperlinks to events and puzzles and video clips. There is a Tumblr dedicated to the sky blue kitchenaid blender that was featured in several challenges, and Jensen hopes to write her version of The Project in fairytale form. There are rumors of another game next year. The act of creating spurs creation. The Project becomes many.

Play on.

Editor’s Note: Bea Malsky was recruited to design the pages for this article due to the intricate nature of The Project.

Disclaimer disclaimer Malsky conflict

Grey City | 27

VOICES FROM THE RIGHT

W

orkroom 006 in the basement of the Institute of Politics (IOP), a concrete room with a conference table and exposed pipes labeled “chilled water supply,” is, for some, an ideological oasis in what sometimes seems a univocal desert of campus discourse. The ten people gathering in the room are part of an ideological minority on campus that represents a social group with a much greater presence outside the confines of Hyde Park: conservatives. College Republicans meetings provide a space where students who sit on the right side of the spectrum can finally hear someone say “good point”, or in case of disagreement, the critique is for being “a little too John McCain Republican.” Theirs is a discussion where people critique the coverage of President Obama within the metric of what the media would be saying “if this were George Bush.”

“You’re very lonely in the sense that you don’t have many other people who believe what you do,” said second-year Arianna Wilkerson, a member of College Republicans.

And yet despite the feeling of isolation—eight percent of undergraduates identify as conservative in a year where Mitt Romney garnered about 48 percent of the popular vote for president—College Republicans say that University of Chicago is a place that is open to all ideas in the stream of discourse, even those with which, on the surface at least, most students sharply disagree. President and third-year Jacob Rabinowitz believes that the intellectual rigor and curiosity of students allows the discussion to remain intelligent and not fall into ad hominem attacks since the views from both sides are based not in mindless political allegiances but in well-reasoned discussion.

“I think this is a place where people take ideas seriously and I don’t

alice bucknell | the chicago maroon 28 | Volume 16

BY WILLIAM WILCOX

think it matters whether you’re conservative, liberal, Republican, Democrat,” Rabinowitz said. “No one is able to express an opinion here without justifying it. Sure it’s challenging to be a conservative because a lot of people aren’t but it pushes me to justify the things I believe in and it forces me to think about the things I believe in.”

Second-year Jonathan Godoy, a member of College Republicans, also explained that while heated debate often occurs in social situations no real animosity becomes of it because people are willing to see past political differences. Rabinowitz described that overall he’s felt little negative judgment of his values as a Republican because people seldom judge his views without giving real thought to them and are more often than not willing to have a civilized discussion about the issues.

But a college campus, unsurprisingly, is not immune to social stigmatization. “There’s this kind of ironic thing where the left, liberals, preach tolerance but not when it’s tolerance for people who don’t think like them,” Wilkerson said.

“This year at orientation week we had a college republicans table and it’s interesting to see these first years walk by,” Rabinowtiz said.

“Some people walk by and don’t really care—that’s most people. Some walk by and are like ‘Oh I’m a Republican how do I sign up?’ And then there are a few people that walk by and are like ‘Why are you here? I came to U of C so I wouldn’t be around people like you.’ You have to smile at them and just say ‘I’m here, let’s talk.’”

This method of discussion in the face of attack is the general model for the College Republicans in their coexistence with the liberal majority on campus. Still some students explain that there are systemic issues that arise from consistently holding the least popular opinion in the room.

“I know that there are many people on this campus that self-identify as conservative that are wary of talking about politics because of perceived social repercussions,” third year member Eric Wessan said. “I think there are definitely people I know on this campus who after finding out I was conservative were no longer willing to be friends with me.”

But there is a strange phenomenon: Despite their small numbers and occasional reticence to advertise their opinions, the campus conservative voice has benefitted from a powerful mouthpiece. The Institute of Politics, in an effort to cement its non-partisan status, has embraced the small group of College Republicans and set them on equal footing with Uni-

College Republicans find a room of their own in the Institute of Politics. frank yan | the chicago maroon versity of Chicago Democrats. Members of College Republicans see the IOP as a source for a number of opportunities that did not exist before for politically active conservative students such as internships with conservative politicians and organizations, and the chance to meet with high-level Republican strategists and conservative thinkers like top Romney 2012 strategist Beth Myers. Hoping to cement the collaboration, College Republicans is in the process of adding an IOP Liaison position to its board.

“You name it, across the board, the IOP has improved our experience,” Rabinowitz, also a member of the IOP Student Advisory Council, said.

“Two years ago you’d bring in speakers and they’d be on campus for a couple hours and they’d host a good event for a couple hours and that was it. With the IOP we have fellows who stay here for weeks at a time. I wish this would have been here my first year. I’m happy it’s here my third year.”

Former President of UC Democrats and fourth-year Stephen Lurie explained that from his viewpoint the IOP has legitimized the Republican voice on campus amidst increased conservative political events.

“I think that the fact that the Student Advisory Board has more College Republicans than UC Dems is evident of their inclusion,” Lurie said, adding that a number of members of the UC Dems executive board applied unsuccessfully to the IOP Advisory Board.

Beyond these changes brought with the IOP, College Republicans is in the process of trying to strategically restructure its organization to open up to more students and to recruit more aggressively. While members believe that they have a solid group, they know that there are more conservative students on campus that they aren’t currently drawing in to their meetings. They say that many of these people are self-identifying conservatives that don’t want to or feel comfortable talking about their political views in social situations.

“The whole entire goal we have is to get our numbers up for our meetings. We’re trying to do heavy recruiting for the freshmen coming in and just trying to make our brand bigger,” Wilkerson said.

With a listhost of about 700 emails and general attendance greater than the turnout that the UC Dems gets at its meetings, College Republicans strives to continue to engage conservative students across campus. Even in the most Democratic leaning county in the United States, and the home of President Barack Obama, Republicans have still found a home.

“I live three blocks away from Obama’s house but I have a Romney sign on my apartment still,” Godoy said.

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Grey City | 29

Spring 2013