Grey City Winter 2014

The Chicago Maroon’s News Magazine

Winter 2014

A PLAY FOR REYNOLDS The million dollar project you’ve never heard of » Page 8

PLUS Charting the history of disability at UChicago » Page 2

CPS rolls out a new path » Page 20

Academic leaves and getting back in » Page 14

and Q&A with Cathy Cohen » Page 26

Grey City | 1

DISABILITY ACCESS

2

CHANGE AT REYNOLDS

8 LEAVES OF ABSENCE

14 CATHY COHEN

2 | Volume 17

26

SAFE PASSAGE

EDITOR’S NOTE We’re told that to belong to this institution is to walk with tradition. You walk through Hull Gate on Day One, and walk out four years later. Unless, that is, you walk on the seal—then make that five. Or six. By that point, you’re out of step with tradition—you and the University of Chicago are on different paths.

For this issue of Grey City, our reporters have trampled all over the seal. Sindhu Gnanasambandan looks into students who take academic leaves by their own will, and those who have their exits thrust upon them. Rebecca Guterman traces the endurance of disabled students on a campus where the physical paths are often unaccommodating. Joy Crane speaks with Cathy Cohen, who explains how to navigate tradition and politics from the inside as well as the outside. Maira Khwaja and Bess Cohen walk the journey of CPS students whose paths have been diverted into routes unfamiliar, but ardently observed by the employees of the Safe Passage program. And finally, Emma Broder looks beneath the surface and behind the curtain of the science theater set to make its home at the crossroads of all UChicago pathways: the Reynolds Club.

This winter, our snow tracks betray the individual journeys students take, but also the shared ground on which we all tread. Onwards, we forge.

—Editors Colin Bradley and Joy Crane

STAFF Colin Bradley joy crane rebecca guterman sam levine emily wang bea malsky zelda mayer wei yi ow SYDNEY COMBS JAMIE MANLEY TIFFANY TAN frank yan

E DITO RS

MANAG ING E DITO R DE S IG N

PH OTO

Alan hassler BEN ZIGTERMAN

CO PY E DITO RS

wei yi ow teddy watler

ILLU ST RAT IO NS

TH E C H I C AG O M A R O O N 1 2 1 2 E AST 59 th STR E E T C H I C AG O, I L 6 0637

20 20

7 73 .702 .1 4 03 e d i to r @ c h i c a g o m a ro o n .co m C H I C AG O M A R O O N .CO M

enduring

barriers

2 | Volume 17

"Disability� in American Sign Language signed by Lecturer Drucilla Ronchen

"Access” in American Sign Language signed by Lecturer Drucilla Ronchen

By Rebecca Guterman Photos by Jamie Manley

“I think it was Stuart. Both of the bathrooms there [said] ‘men’ in Braille,” Daniela Estrada (A.B. ’13) said.

Estrada, who has limited vision and uses a guide dog.

“There was one occasion where I wasn’t sure [in which bathroom] to go, so that was kind of funny.”

Since the Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA) passed in 1990, private universities like UChicago are required to provide a number of “reasonable modifications” for students with disabilities to avoid situations like Estrada’s. On paper, the University has made great strides towards compliance with the federal statute.

But many students and staff with disabilities still have experiences that leave them feeling stranded.

Shortcuts in providing physical accessibility, classroom accommodations, and catering to prospective students with disabilities, leave them continuing to grapple with literal and cultural obstacles particular to this campus.

Their stories in sum suggest that the spirit of the ADA, rather than just its literal requirements, has yet to be championed at the University of Chicago.

Accessible buildings A turning point in campus accessibility came in 2004 when the U.S. Department of Justice (DOJ) found multiple violations of the ADA at the University during a periodic compliance check, according to Associate Provost for Faculty and Student Affairs Ingrid Gould (A.B. ’86, A.M. ’88). The DOJ and the University settled out of court in 2006.

The settlement focused most prominently on the accessibility of campus buildings and prompted the Provost’s Office to come up with a Physical Access Plan in late 2007 detailing improvements to buildings and pathways. The document lists updates to 58 different buildings, from restroom accessibility in the Biological Sciences Learning Center to adding Braille to Classics classroom signs to accessible seating in Max Palevsky Cinema.

All the projects in the Physical Access Plan were completed by 2010, according to a statement from University spokesperson Jeremy Manier.

Since then, the University has continued to keep accessibility in mind, Manier wrote in the statement.

The University has added a “street-side accessible entrance for the Reynolds Club,” accessible lab and class space in Crerar Library and an indoor ramp between Stuart and Rosenwald halls, among other recent proj-

ects. They also built the Reva and David Logan Center for the Arts entirely as an accessible building.

But disability advocates stress that there is more to accessibility than legal compliance with the ADA. Inaccessible UChicago is a photo blog of accessibility shortcomings and inconveniences across campus for the mobility impaired, or those who use wheelchairs, crutches, or other assistance to get around. After growing up with a father, an alum of the University, who has progressive multiple sclerosis and is wheelchair bound, sixth-year Christina Pillsbury started the blog in the spring of 2013. “I realized that [accessibility is] one of those things...that other people don’t notice that I...just always knew,” she explained.

Pillsbury pointed out that even when campus buildings are ADA compliant, they often are not welcoming, accessible entrances are hard to find, and the automatic door buttons are sometimes broken. “It’s technically accessible, but it’s really difficult, and it’s really demeaning: It’s second-class citizenship,” she said.

“There’s no signage [so] it’s really hard to find these entrances, and there have been times where we’ve walked around forever and can’t find it. And if [my dad is] by himself, very often he gets stuck,” she added, referring to narrow or uneven pathways.

On campus, the Student Counseling Service has a sidewalk buzzer instead of an accessible entrance to the building at 5737 South University Avenue. The counselors can arrange to meet with students elsewhere if they have a mobility disability. However, Pillsbury points out that this does not send a positive message to those seeking counseling, especially if it’s in part related to their experiences as a disabled person.

“Right off the bat, you’re starting it with ‘OK, you can’t come into this building,’” she said.

For Tracy Weiner, associate director of the Writing Program, which teaches expository writing and trains graduate student writing tutors and interns, the maintenance of accessible entrances to campus buildings is vital. Since developing arthritis three years ago, she now walks with a cane and described how previously-routine parts of her day now have to be carefully planned out. When she has to work around accessible doors that are broken, it further complicates her day.

Grey City 3 diffi“It’s extraordinarily frustrating in ways that|are cult to describe because it’s something that you come to rely on…. And so if the door is [broken], you can’t get through it but you’re carrying your stuff,” Weiner

2004 The Department of Justice commences a review of the University's compliance with the ADA.

2 0 1 0

2006

The DOJ and University reach a settlement specifying the accessibility improvements to be made by 2010, including those in the Provost Office's Physical Access Plan.

2011

Greg Moorehead starts in December.

Photo by Tiffany Tan

2013

Christina Pillsbury starts Inaccessible UChicago.

2014

Terms of settlement completed.

explained. “It takes something that should have been routine and it turns it into this enormous drama.”

When Weiner is assigned classrooms that are inaccessible, she confronts yet another barrier. “The invisible pressure not to make a fuss is just there, and sometimes I think that simply for political reasons I should always make a fuss. But, on the other hand, there’s always this internal conflict because to do that means to accept the fact that I can’t [always] get down the three stairs,” she explained, recognizing that others, such as those in wheelchairs, can never get down three stairs.

But when she asks for a room change, “I have never been told no,” she said. “I have every confidence that if I asked, I would get.”

Navigating alone

For students who needed assistance with accommodations or other accessibility issues before 2012, requests were handled on an ad hoc basis, as a fraction 4 | Volume 17 of one administrator’s duties, according to Stephen Pannuto, an English Ph.D. candidate and co-coordinator of the Organization of Students with Disabilities (OSD), an advocacy and social RSO. “All administrators here have lots of things on their plate and they call it a portfolio,” he said.

20 12

SDS is centralized early in the year.

Students found OSD in the fall.

Campus accessibility updates continue in main campus buildings such as Stuart Hall.

“The way that I had it explained to me is like someone had this as part of their portfolio, but it wasn’t the main thing they did. In fact, it was something they did for four hours a week out of a 40-hour week.”

Pannuto was already a graduate student here when he first started losing his vision. He developed a degenerative retinal condition that brings about the gradual loss of vision from the peripheral inward. In the early days of this condition, he was unsure of where to go for help.

“I talked to...the director of graduate studies [in my department] and she offered me some personal help, but [disability services] was handled on a case by case basis. There was no—no one knew what to do so she was really good about finding the resources for me to be able to...read in other means, like get electronic copies of texts and audible copies,” Pannuto said.

College advisers were also the main point of contact and advocacy for Estrada. Before matriculating at UChicago, Estrada met with her academic adviser and a University official who would be in charge of making sure she received course texts electronically or in large print, and to establish accommodations she might need. Most of the time, professors were prepared to accommodate her disability in a given class. Estrada recalled only

one instance in which the system broke down.

“When I arrived to this class, the professor didn’t know she was going to have a visually-impaired student in the room, so she was kind of a little bit scared when she saw me, like, ‘Did you get the right room? This is Statistics 220,’ or something like that…. For the first few days she also gave me stuff in really small print I couldn’t read. I’m like, ‘What happened here?’” Estrada laughed. “I let my adviser know and she clarified everything [with the professor].”

Professors try to accommodate students when possible, but some choose not to. When eighth-year Committee on Social Thought Ph.D. candidate Hannah Mosher informed a professor for whom she was going to be a teaching assistant of her visual impairment and that she would use a computer in class to read texts aloud to her, the professor would not allow an exception to a no-laptop policy for the class.

“I tried to do everything I could to explain to her how it worked, to reassure [her] that I’d done a lot of teaching, and that it had never been a problem with the students…. But in the end she [the professor] wouldn’t change her mind,” Mosher explained. In the end, Mosher switched to T.A.-ing a section with a more amenable professor.

The central office To give students a point of contact and advocacy within their schools, many higher education institutions have built centralized offices that can be a one-stop shop for students with disabilities.

Such centralization of services arrived at UChicago in 2012 under the already-existent heading of Student Disability Services (SDS), which aims to help disabled students navigate the process of receiving academic accommodations.

Director of SDS Greg Moorehead said the services were centralized in response to the growing number of students with disabilities. “We’ve seen a critical mass of students with disabilities and so the University has reached that critical mass and so... this is no longer something that can be served by only a coordinator or only one position,” he said.

The College, Campus and Student Life, and the Provost’s Office were all involved in the decision to create SDS due to this increase in students, according to Manier. “This had become an accepted practice at many campuses, and the University saw the benefits of the approach,” he said.

Yet half a year after its formation, Lucas de Abreu Maia (A.M. ’13), co-founder of OSD, said that the office was not effective at connecting with different campus facilities on his behalf. de Abreu Maia is mostly blind with some light sensitivity.

“Moorehead called me and said, ‘Look, if you have an issue with the gym, then you should talk to the gym. If you need accommodations with

the dining hall, you should talk with the dining hall.

If you need academic accommodations, you should talk to your dean.’ And I was like, ‘OK, so remind me what is SDS for?’” he said. “I think that by the end of the academic year...I could feel that they were trying to improve and that’s already something to say.”

Over a year later, SDS currently serves approximately 250 students, including undergraduates, graduates, and the professional schools, according to Moorehead.

Of those students, about 60 percent have learning disabilities or attentional disorders, followed by the students with physical disabilities, and then the smallest group, students with psychological disabilities.

Moorehead could not give approximate percentages for the last two groups.

The office operates with two full-time employees and as of January 2, a third full-time administrative assistant, according to Moorehead. In addition, he estimates that they have 30–40 students and other employees working part-time each quarter, to provide services such as note-taking, document conversion, and test proctoring.

But according to students and staff, the previous two employees were not enough. As a teacher, Weiner said that when students approach her and her colleagues for accommodations, she has found it is quicker to provide accommodations for students by her own means if possible, without involving SDS. “They are seriously, seriously, seriously understaffed.

If there is one thing that could make life a lot easier for everybody with regard to this issue, it would be double their budget or triple their budget and give them a lot more people,” she said.

On the student side, one of SDS’ main services is to provide “accommodation determination letters,” which a student can show a professor to ask for extra time on an exam, course texts in advance, or any other accommodations for which he or she has been approved by SDS. However, SDS warns students that it can take up to 10 weeks—nearly one quarter—to get students their accommodation letters.

“They are wonderful, wonderful folks...and at the beginning of the quarter they beg and plead and implore everybody, ‘The minute you need something let us know.’ They’re very clear about the amount of lead time they need,” Weiner said.

Moorehead explained that the process generally only takes 10 weeks if students have to update or collect documentation of their disability, which SDS requires to be from the last three years and then verified by an expert. Between July 1 and November 20, 2013, most graduate students received their accommodations much sooner than 10 weeks because they provided the necessary documents quickly. For 80 percent of those cases, SDS reviewed students’ documentation, made determinations, and provided students their letters within a week, Moorehead said.

Moorehead also stressed that SDS can often provide provisional accommodations until the office is able to issue an official accommodation determination letter.

Fourth-year in the College Ani Marty, who has dyslexia, received her accommodation letter fairly quickly once she was able to apply, but the application process made her feel that SDS wanted to protect itself legally.

She tried to apply for an accommodation determination letter her second year, but was delayed because SDS was still hiring new staff members. She finally was able to submit her documentation—three IQ tests and a dyslexia test—in first quarter of her third year, but SDS initially rejected her two weeks later.

“I was very upset at that point because it was my first year trying to take four classes. I dropped my fourth class because I knew if I wasn’t getting [accommodations] I could not...could not function,” Marty explained. “At this point actually I was on academic probation because I was unable to finish the quarter before, [but] my GPA wasn’t that low because the professors had been very kind and gave me withdrawals instead of failures. So [SDS] said, ‘Well, your GPA is fine. I think you just need to learn to cope with it.’

And that was...a really rough couple of days.”

However, after she contested the rejection, Marty received her accommodation determination letter in a couple of weeks.

“I went and talked to [Moorehead], and the thing is the department is actually quite nice,” Marty remembered. “I think they realized I [was] going to go down kicking so perhaps that was more of an incentive because technically if they deny accommodations to a person who does have documentation...they can be sued, so there is a level of threat that can create.”

OSD co-coordinator and sixth-year English Ph.D. student Margaret Fink (A.M. ’07) also feels that SDS is not always as supportive as they could be. “They’re new and I want to give them the benefit of the doubt there, but...[SDS] really seems to be operating from this place of legal responsibility for the University.” At worst, she said, the office seems to be “just making sure the University doesn’t get sued.”

Looking to the future, Moorehead says that they are forming a strategic plan which they hope to have in place by June 30. In order to put it together, he has started meeting this month with students, faculty, T.A.s, deans, and others, about what the best staffing, resources, and goals of the office would be.

SDS is already partnering with Student Government in a new program announced on January 15 to train RSO leaders how to provide accommodations for students who attend their events.

An identity in the open Pannuto said that the problem on campus runs deeper than lack of resources, that administrators and campus culture treat disability as something to hide.

For instance, the “Fall Welcome and Update” to faculty, students, and staff from President Robert Zimmer could have mentioned accessibility improvements like those to the Reynolds Club, Pannuto said.

When he e-mailed Vice President for Campus Life

A model for Comparison In the Chicago area, OSD pointed to the University of Illinois at Chicago (UIC) as an example of a comprehensive office for students with disabilities.

UIC’s disability office was created in the wake of the ADA as a subsection of Student Affairs, became the Disability Resource Center in 2005, and now reports to the Office of Diversity, according to Director Roxana Stupp.

UIC’s Disability Resource Center provides services to about 562 students, including graduates and undergraduates, except for some divisions treated separately. It has five full-time employees to serve students with disabilities, in addition to multiple TAs dedicated to disability issues and many more graduate and undergraduate part-time employees, according to Stupp.

The Center usually works so that one student works with the same disability specialist consistently throughout their academic career, although Student Disability Specialist Sara Voigt would not describe them as advisers. “We operate from the social model of disability. We don’t see ourselves as gatekeepers to services where someone has to come in and prove that they have this disability and life has been so hard,” she distinguishes. “We’re not doctors trying to provide a prescription.”

When a student comes in to meet with a disability specialist about accommodations, the specialist talks with them and reviews all their documentation. Usually the accommodation determination letter is issued that same day, according to Voigt.

In addition, the Center employees try to include the student in every decision and help them figure out how to navigate campus on |their Grey life City 5 own.

“Our goal is to help them learn how to advocate for themselves because that’s what they’ll need in the job market,” Voigt explains.

Grey City | 5

and Student Services Karen Warren Coleman and Dean of Students in the University Michele Rasmussen about the absence of public discussion on disability, Pannuto received no response. Pannuto later brought it up at a Council on Diversity and Inclusion meeting during which Warren Coleman acknowledged the disconnect between the effort UChicago has put into improvements and the outward silence about them.

“With the Reynolds Club enhancements, those were enhancements that folks had been committed to for many years and they’re challenging because you have these old buildings, and of course, we do [building enhancements], and are we talking about them enough?” she said when asked about the interaction by Grey City.

Pannuto is not satisfied. “I’m ashamed of my University and I’ve thought about leaving many times,” he said. “The changes I want to see won’t happen in the time that I’m here because of the glacial pace of change at [UChicago].”

Still, he is determined to try to bring disability identity into the open. “With respect to disability, UChicago does not live up to its own high standards. I want to imagine a day when disability is openly recognized as a form of diversity and

6 | Volume 17

identity that is...fully integrated into the social and intellectual life of the University,” he wrote in a follow-up e-mail.

OSD, the advocacy and social RSO, is already functioning as a safe space for many students with disabilities on campus. Hannah Mosher was initially not sure how or if she could continue her studies with a visual impairment. “When I first started identifying as disabled, it was an identity that was alienating because it separated me from an environment that I didn’t know how to be a full part of anymore,” she said.

Over time, though, OSD played a major role in helping her feel positively about her identity.

“I was able to meet other students with disabilities and disability started to become an identity that’s a source of pride for me because I see it as a diverse way of experiencing the world and it’s allowed me to connect with a lot of people that I wouldn’t have connected with before, rather than feeling like it alienates me from people,” she said.

Applicants with disabilities Now that SDS is more centralized, Moorehead said the office is available to answer questions

from high school students and counselors about the accommodations provided here, but does not actively recruit high school applicants. In addition, Moorehead hosts sessions during Orientation Week for parents and students to make them aware of the office.

But students with disabilities applying to the University could be deterred by the lack of a highly visible support system on campus.

“I think there’s a lot of people that will say, ‘Oh, there aren’t people in wheelchairs on campus,’” Pillsbury said. “They have the cause and effect backwards...really, [campus is] not accessible, therefore there aren’t people with wheelchairs.”

For de Abreu Maia, who graduated from the University with a 4.0 GPA, that inaccessibility speaks to the anatomy of this institution.

“UChicago has this tradition, which is great most of the time, but sometimes it’s really frustrating, that you’re not a body, you’re a mind…. They pretend that disability is something to hide and not to talk about,” he said. “For the first time, I felt proud of being blind, of saying I did this and there was no, no concessions whatsoever. It is my own talent that took me here because I had very little support.”

The Historic Hyde Park Bank Building

1525 East 53rd Street, Chicago, Illinois 60615

Professional Office Suites Available

From 250 to 1600 square feet Meticulously maintained office facility located in the heart of Hyde Park with 24/7 access and on-site management office.

Uniformed security personnel monitor the building and parking lot 24/7.

Conveniently located just steps away from Lake Shore Drive, CTA and Metra Station and minutes from the Dan Ryan Expressway.

Newly decorated Executive Office Suites are also available which include: • Receptionist • Telephone Answering Service • Mail Receipt • Use of Conference Room by reservation • Receiving area for package pickup • Free Lobby Listing Directory • Your own personal Account for Fax and Copy Machine • Office Cleaning 5 days per week.

For more information or to schedule an appointment, contact the Management Office at 773-667-8900.

1206 E. 53rd St. 773-324-6227 DINE IN ∆ DELIVERY ∆ ToGo ∆ CATERING UofC students receive 10% off in dining room

1525 East 53rd Street • 773-667-8900 Licensed Illinois Real Estate Broker

SPEAKER SERIES FELLOWS SEMINARS INTERNSHIPS EDUCATION FOREIGN POLICY ENVIRONMENT IGNITING A PASSION FOR POLITICS & PUBLIC SERVICE GET INVOLVED AT POLITICS.UCHICAGO.EDU Grey City | 7

A PLAY FOR REYNOLDS

by Emma Broder

Who really calls the shots in the University’s only student center?

Illustrations by Wei Yi Ow

8 | Volume 17

“Science and art...they seek the truth and the meaning of life, they seek God, [and] the soul, and when they are harnessed to passing needs and activities...then they only complicate and encumber life.”

—Anton Chekhov

D

uring fifth week of winter quarter of 2012, almost exactly two years ago, the weather was mild and the third floor of the Reynolds Club, where a student lounge, some old offices, and the Francis X. Kinahan (FXK) Theater were located, was decidedly abuzz. Backpacks of many shapes and sizes were strewn about on the sagging couches and chairs in the shabby lounge. Next door in the FXK, a group rehearsed Anton Chekhov’s play The Festivities, which would go up that weekend.

Sasha Ayvazov, now a third-year, was making his directorial debut. “It was a tremendous amount of fun,” Ayvazov said. “It was far from a spectacular show, but I learned a lot and made a lot of friends through it, and it did make me feel welcome in the FXK and theater at large.”

At the end of autumn quarter of 2013, the third-floor lounge, notably spruced up, is empty of backpacks. All the old furniture has been removed, and the toilet in the thirdfloor bathroom does not leak anymore. Yet despite the facelift, as they await their new tenant, the lounge, offices, and bathroom— now walled off from the theater—sit empty of students.

T

“

information, in August and June of 2012, respectively. TAPS, along with ORCSA, continues to manage the FXK Theater.

While the facilities for both the arts and the sciences on UChicago’s dense urban campus serve their own disciplines well, when you attempt to combine them, as IME has done with Kawalek’s science theater, there is the problem of where to locate the project. Who ultimately decides where everything goes? “The provost and his staff, in consultation with academic divisions, professional schools, and administrative offices, oversee the allocation of campus space when competing claims between units arise,” Blair Archambeau, the associate provost for planning, said in an e-mail. When a new facility (such as Logan) is built, and programs or offices (such as UT/TAPS) relocate to the new building, the provost’s office, “in consultation with the relevant campus entities involved,” decides how to reallocate the vacated space.

“Typically the provost’s office solicits multiple proposals for new uses, and often must choose among numerous effective options,” Archambeau wrote. “With its global view of campus resources and programs and regular contact with all units, the provost’s office is best positioned to make such judgments.”

Deputy Provost for the Arts Larry Norman, currently on research leave in France, declined to be interviewed for this article.

With Norman on the road, the precise motivations for the placement of the science theater are not clear.

The renovation to the First Floor Theater began in spring of 2013, almost a year after Kawalek’s appointment. The transformation into the science theater was completed in November, a Facilities Services administrator said in an e-mail. However, at time of publication, the space continues to undergo renovation.

To date, there are no shows or rehearsals scheduled for the space.

The allocated budget for the renovation, including work done on the third floor offices, lounge, and bathroom: $1 million, funded by IME.

Kawalek is likely the first sciencetheater practitioner in the University’s history.

he website for the Office of the Reynolds Club and Student Activities (ORCSA) explains that the Reynolds Club “has become a vibrant and welcoming center for students and…is still thought of as the hub of student life.” Lately, Reynolds has also been a hub for both student and administration-led deliberation—in UChicago parlance, “dialoguing”—about allocation of various spaces within the building. This story tracks the changes made in order to accommodate a new undertaking by the Institute for Molecular Engineering (IME)— changes that have left many students uncertain about what their place is in the Reynolds Club, the University of Chicago’s only designated student center.

The First Floor Theater (FFT) and the spaces on the third floor were managed by University Theater (UT), a student-led theater troupe, and the Theater and Performance Studies Department (TAPS) until spring 2013. Since then, in addition to the third floor renovations, FFT has been undergoing renovation in preparation for its new role as home to a new “science theater” called STAGE Collaboratory. STAGE is the brainchild of Nancy Kawalek, a new professor at the IME, which was founded in 2011. The IME publicly announced the hiring of both Kawalek and her husband, David Awschalom, a researcher in quantum

”

K

awalek founded STAGE (Scientists, Technologists, and Artists Generating Exploration) in 2009 at the University of California, Santa Barbara, where both she and her husband worked at the time—she as a professor in the film department, and he in the College of Engineering. She is the only arts hire for the IME, and likely the first science-theater practitioner in the University’s history. Normally, practicing artists who are also

Grey City | 9

faculty members are hired through departments such as TAPS or Visual Arts (DoVA), but in this case, the Institute has incorporated an arts branch into its main body.

Kawalek’s science theater seems like it would fall under the purview of a three-year-old program called the Arts|Science Initiative, which fosters projects that “aim to find pathways of conversation between science and the arts,” according to Julie Marie Lemon, the program’s director and curator.

The initiative began in 2010, a year before the IME and long before the Kawalek hire.

Lemon has an office in the Logan Center for the Arts around the corner from several TAPS professors, with big sheets of white butcher paper on the walls. These hold phrases such as “the process of inquiry” and “unfettered forms of expression” written in small letters. There is a salvaged bird’s nest in one corner.

While the main purpose of the program is to allocate grants to graduate students and faculty, Lemon has also organized programming like Science on the Screen, an Arts|Science event that shows three films per year, followed by panel discussions featuring several different people, some affiliated with the arts, some with science (Nobel Laureate Roger Myerson was on one of last year’s

“

panels). Arts|Science has also hosted a discussion centered around the question, “How can we die better?” and hopes to organize a “color conference” this spring.

Lemon explained that she had nothing to do with Kawalek’s science theater, despite the two programs’ comparable aims.

They currently do not have plans to work together, though they share advocacy for collaboration between the sciences and the arts.

She thinks Kawalek’s arrival on campus marks a growing interest in the intersection of art and science, but emphasized the persistent nebulousness of campus collaborations between these disparate fields. “To define and find conversation across disciplines in a research university, you need to dig a little deeper,” she said. “I spent the first year [I was here] just talking to people, and getting people interested.” ourth-year James Fleming was rehearsing in Logan Center’s Theater West in the spring of 2012 when he had a surprise encounter with David Awschalom, who was taking an informal tour of campus theater spaces. Fleming guessed that Awschalom had probably been hired recently, because he introduced himself as a professor and researcher in the molecular engineering department. The two were introduced by a non-student, a “non-Logan” person that Fleming did not recognize, who was Awschalom’s tour guide.

“He was taking a tour of the campus theater spaces, he said, because he was ‘a great lover of theater,’” Fleming recounted.

Fleming reports that in the informal exchange there was no mention of his wife’s involvement in theater or IME’s ambitions to flex its artistic side. Awschalom did not respond to repeated requests for an interview.

Fleming is heavily involved in the campus theater community. An actor, director, and dramaturge, he has served on UT Committee and formerly been employed by TAPS. Fleming performed in his first three mainstage productions in FFT, and spoke of attending events there such as an annual Halloween Prom, a costume dance party with live music and food hosted by the student organizations that comprise the Performing Arts Round Table. He said his confusion about what was going to happen to the former FFT was infused with nostalgia. “I would say that Theater West is comparable, but it’s disappointing to lose a space, a space that’s located centrally on campus, in the Reynolds Club.”

Theater West, located in the Logan Center, and FFT in Reynolds both hold around one hundred people, but it’s not the size of the space that feels different for him. “The interesting thing about Halloween Prom was there was a ton of people there from all different fields, you know? And I think you’re less likely to be able to bring in a wide variety of students when you’re down in the Logan Center.”

I think you’re less likely to be able to bring in a wide variety of students when you’re down in the Logan Center.

”

F

4

10 | Volume 17

It’s been over a year since Fleming’s chance encounter, and although he has researched Kawalek, her science theater remains elusive, particularly the extent to which it will include students.

As far as publicity goes regarding STAGE, there has been one press release, and Kawalek has plans to host at least one open house, “so people can wander in and ask questions, ‘Oh, what do you do with this piece of equipment, or that screen, or whatever,’” according to Matthew Tirrell and Sharon Feng, directors of the IME. Kawalek was not able to offer a specific schedule for this quarter.

Neither senior TAPS staff nor students in UT have been briefed on the particulars of STAGE, despite the overlay of their missions. Nor has Lemon. For their part, Tirrell and Feng did not feel confident commenting on any specifics: “Well, again, it’d be better if you asked [Kawalek] about [her work]. She can speak about it more authoritatively. But generally she tries to create dramatic pieces, or help other people create dramatic pieces that deal with questions of science and technology and society,” Tirrell said.

Face in shadow over a table in Café Logan, Fleming said, “I’ve read about Nancy, and she seems like a very talented performer.

She has connections in the City of Chicago. I would love to meet her. But I don’t know how.”

O

ne night in fall 2013, fourth-year Hilary Clifford, the chair of UT, was having her hair and makeup done for the musical Grey Gardens in the basement of Logan.

Because she started her UT involvement by joining the improv-comedy group Off-Off Campus, which performs offcampus in UChurch, Clifford feels little personal attachment to First Floor Theater, and suspects that future generations of UT actors, ushered into the A.L. (After Logan) era, will share this in common with her. “As there are more graduating classes who never used that space, the nostalgia is starting to fade,” she said. “First Floor Theater is a theater company of people who graduated two years ago and they named their theater company after this space,” she said, referring to an alumni theater troupe located in Chicago. “It did mean a lot. At the same time, we have moved on.”

Third-year Marisa Chilberg, the secretary of UT, reported that when working in the third-floor theater, FXK, she had experienced a much more abrupt shift away from UT’s jurisdiction than what Clifford described. Last spring, when she was stage-managing The Vagina Monologues in the FXK, she was instructed by TAPS staff to keep the cast and crew out of the old third-floor offices where at that point they often hung out.

In order to keep the formerly connected spaces separate, UT had a new door put in so that the backstage entrance to FXK would no longer go through the old offices and lounge. According to Heidi Coleman, director of UT/TAPS, students are now restricted to FXK and its adjacent dressing room.

“It was basically framed as, students were in the offices during Theater[24], and whoever was moving her [Kawalek] into the

spaces didn’t appreciate it,” she said, referring to UT’s quarterly student-run, 24-hour play festival. The offices had not yet begun to be renovated, but the theater community was told that they would soon be prepared for Kawalek’s arrival.

In the meantime, the new door worked just fine—it led backstage. “That was the first I had heard of the science theater,” Chilberg said, “and the message was, ‘You need to stay out of this woman’s way.’” The offices and lounge adjacent to FXK, in addition to the former First Floor Theater, have been allocated to Kawalek’s science theater.

A

lthough many students and faculty members said that there were talks about the First Floor Theater becoming a lounge for the music department, Larry Zbikowski, who was chair of the Department of Music in 2012–13, wrote in an email that this was never a seriously considered option.

Zbikowski, the interim deputy provost for the arts while Norman is on leave, has a thick, white beard, and speaks with the measured tone and pacing of a piece of classical music. Speaking as a 20-year member of the University community, he noted that while the science theater might seem like a cultural shift away from undergraduate “control,” every generation sees its changes.

“When I first came here in 1993,” he said, “undergraduate life was to my mind not vibrant at all…. The University really then made a variety of different moves to make undergraduate

Grey City | 11

life more vibrant. One of the things that they did was to, for instance, bring the dorms back onto campus, and built Palevsky, for instance.”

“I think it is agreed,” he continued, “unless there’s some curmudgeons hiding someplace—it is agreed across campus that bringing undergraduates back on to the main campus and populating this area has been of enormous good to the University of Chicago as a university, not just as an undergraduate college. It’s been a real important thing.”

K

awalek agreed to meet on the sixth floor of the Searle Chemistry Laboratory, where the molecular engineering labs are located. When this reporter attempted to go to the sixth floor, the elevator had to be unlocked by a custodian. Kawalek explained how she came to the name STAGE Collaboratory. “I like it because of what it conveys,” she said. “Part of me wonders if it’s too pretentious a name, so that’s why we might pare it down to STAGE, only because I don’t like things to be pretentious. I like them to be very accessible.”

Kawalek said that she wishes to involve undergraduates from all disciplines and spoke about students working as teams. She envisions the science theater as a place where students, many of them, could stop in between classes to work on so-called team projects.

“We didn’t want to be off on the perimeter of the campus, because that’s going to make it really hard for students to take part,” Kawalek said. “That building [Logan] was planned a long time ago, to meet the space requirements of all those programs. So at the time that I came, it was too late in the game.

Working in Logan would have been fantastic.

It’s a brand new space. I mean, what more could you ask—what should I say? ‘Gee, it’d be great to work there.’ But that doesn’t work with everyone’s needs, and that’s completely understandable.”

When asked if she knew how the decision was made to place STAGE in the Reynolds Club, Kawalek said, “I don’t know. You know, here’s an example. You applied to this University at the same time as how many other students, right? Do you know why you got chosen to come, versus other people? I mean, I’m sure you’re really terrific, but you know what I’m saying. You don’t know all the behind-the-scenes things.”

Kawalek says she officially arrived at UChicago in August 2013, but has been out of town for over half the time since then. On December 8, she went to Sweden, where she directed two Nobel laureates and Fiona Shaw—a British actress who has appeared in the Harry Potter films as Harry’s Aunt Petunia—in a reading of the play Copenhagen, which centers around a meeting between physicists Werner Heisenberg and Niels Bohr in 1941.

The reading was an inaugural event to the Nobel Week 2013 festivities.

“

Despite this somewhat traditional-sounding affair, Kawalek desires to create truly innovative theater pieces of her own. “I’m interested in how you can use technology. How can you use video, or audio, or different kinds of sound to tell the story?” she said.

This seems to be the thrust of what Kawalek’s work will entail—using technology to explore science-related narratives.

As an example, she spoke not about one of her own plays, but about the work of Robert Lepage, a Canadian theater-maker, one of whose plays contained both a sibling rivalry and a trip to the moon, plus video footage from inside a washing machine.

“It’s sort of like when photography was invented, and people said, ‘Oh, well painting’s dead,’” Kawalek said. “Painting didn’t die, it just started to take different forms with Cubism and Surrealism and Impressionism. And so I think you have to start thinking in those terms, and that’s how I’m thinking.”

I

n the wake of changes to the Reynolds Club, it’s not just UT students that have expressed feeling excluded from the administrative dialogue about the use of space in the building. Third-year Aseal Tineh, vice president of the Muslim Students Association (MSA), spoke about the MSA’s basement office as a place where Muslim students are able to duck in and pray between classes, an idea that hearkens to Kawalek’s “teams” of students working on science theater during passing time.

Last year Tineh was chair of the Committee on Recognized Student Organizations (CORSO), which designates space in Reynolds to student groups. “Even just as a simple student leader,” she said, “I have heard of discontent among RSOs and their leaders that space has been limited.”

The shuffle of theater-affiliated space has run parallel with the Save Hallowed movement that erupted this past summer when news broke that ORCSA was harboring plans to move office space, intended to be an RSO advising center, into the seating area of Hallowed Grounds, a student-run café on the second floor of the Reynolds Club. While the conversion of the café into office space had already started during the summer when students were away, ORCSA had yet to notify students of the plans. Given significant student backlash, the plans were put on ice. But the task of congregating ORCSA advising offices, which are currently split between Ida Noyes and Reynolds, remains unresolved.

Fourth-year Matt Wolf, the general manager of Hallowed Grounds, was part of a committee of administrators and students that convened five times during September to attempt to resolve the issue. Following this series of meetings, the student members were told they would be contacted a week later, but have heard nothing since.

What will be the new center of student life if this is the path that the Reynolds Club is going to continue to take?

12 | Volume 17

”

ORCSA still seems to be working on the case. As a part of his job, Omar Castro (A.B. ’13), a building manager for the Reynolds Club, counts the number of people in various areas of the building every hour, which he presumes is so that ORCSA can come to a decision about where to move its advising space.

In an e-mail, he wrote, “It turns out that Hallowed Grounds has the highest number of users than the other spaces.” Castro, one of seven building managers, wrote, “It would make sense to not place those offices there.”

Student Government (SG) President and fourth-year Michael McCown expressed confusion about the role the science theater had played in the dispute. He wrote in an e-mail that SG was not consulted before the decision was made to put Kawalek’s science theater in Reynolds and was only made aware of the theater’s existence through conversations about where to move the new RSO advising center. Many students expressed confusion as to why the new ORCSA offices could not be placed into the former First Floor Theater, which at that time had been unoccupied for over a year. Given the general lack of publicity surrounding STAGE, most students were not aware that much of the seemingly vacant space in Reynolds had already been allocated to the program.

“Beyond that the [theater] space is unavailable, very little information has been provided to us about the project,” McCown said.

“Nobody mentioned the science theater in relation to this

issue,” Wolf said, adding that he suspects that the idea to put ORCSA space in the café is completely over.

Clifford, for one, thinks that Reynolds as it is now hangs in a treacherous balance. “How can you call this a student center?” she said. “And what will be the new center of student life if this is the path that the Reynolds Club is going to continue to take?”

A

fter True West was staged in winter 2012, the First Floor Theater officially closed its doors for student performances. Almost a year later, toward the end of 2013, the renovation was still underway. The transformation to STAGE seems to linger still in the distance, as the first floor theater, and third floor offices and lounge, continue to sit empty. Meanwhile students have mobilized in an attempt to preserve hallowed student space elsewhere in the Reynolds Club, largely unaware why the proposal to encroach on that space was made in the first place.

Though the extent to which undergraduates will be involved in Kawalek’s new science theater initiative is yet to be seen, students themselves are neither oblivious nor indifferent to their lack of control and input during these massive changes to the University’s student center. With the curtains drawn on The Festivities, Ayvazoz noted that now, working in the FXK is “more like visiting a town you moved out of than anything else.”

Moved out, yes, but not moved on.

Family, General and CosmetiC dentistry For all aGes

1525 E. 53rd. St. Suite 734 | Chicago, IL Serving the Hyde Park Community for 60 plus years.

Call Today 773-643-6006 www.chicagodentistry.com

Grey City | 13

The University of Chicago has one of the most flexible leave of absence policies in the country.

So why do some students still feel forced out? by sindhu gnanasambandan

14 | Volume 17

Editor’s Note: Where only first names appear, names have been changed to protect the privacy of the sources.

photo by frank yan illustrations by teddy watler

Harper. Second Floor. A student on the cusp of taking an academic leave from the University of Chicago walks into any one of the deans’ offices and a conversation ensues. The student explains his or her plans for the impending time-off from academic life, his or her leave of absence. There is a single sheet to fill out and then, just like that, the same student who entered the room exits the University.

Stacked up against peer institutions, the vast majority of students at the University of Chicago are offered a revolving door, courtesy of our school’s comparatively liberal Leave of Absence Policy (LOA). UChicago undergraduates can freely choose to take up to eight quarters off with practically no administrative discretion governing their returning. By contrast, at Yale, you can take at most two semesters of academic leave. At Brown, students who take a leave of absence for either a physical or medical illness also cannot return until after two full semesters. While there is a spectrum of stringency—Stanford allows up to two years as well and Princeton allows a generous three-year limit—among its peers, the University is among the most flexible in the nation.

“There is a long tradition of friendliness towards leaves. Students leave for a variety of reasons, and they do so almost always with our blessing,” said Assistant Director of Student Affairs Lewis Fortner, who has been at the University for 20 years and spoke of having worked with hundreds of students considering this option.

However, in a ten-week survey administered by Grey City that garnered 276 responses, 69 percent of student respondents felt that campus culture was not supportive of non-traditional journeys of education (defined in the survey as anything other than a standard four-year graduation).

The reason for this among the respondents is unclear. Third-year Robert Langworthy, reflecting on his own experience, commented that “it is definitely not

common knowledge that the University is so good about [giving leaves]” and said the system is “probably underutilized.” Langworthy considered but decided against taking a leave this past fall quarter, largely due to parental pressure and partly due to the stigma he perceived to be associated with taking time off of school.

“I do have regrets about not taking this term off. I think it would have served me better,” Langworthy said.

Dean of Students in the College Susan Art (A.M. ’74), who gets the final say on deciding leaves, did not release internal University counts of how many students take academic leaves each year, but estimated that around 50 or 60 students leave each quarter, and a similar number return, all willingly. She emphasized that, of a school of 5,700 students, this is around one percent.

While there are countless reasons for why students choose to temporarily halt their studies, there are nine official “exit categories” for administrative bookkeeping, a box for each of them in the Request for Leave of Absence or Withdrawal form.

One common reason for taking a leave is to pursue a career-related endeavor.

Daniel Yu, who started with the College class of 2015 and is currently on leave, left to start Project SAM, a company that aims to assist healthcare systems in developing countries in managing their supply shipments through basic feature-phones. He has no regrets about taking a leave.

“The past year of my life has been the best year of my life. To sum it up, I don’t think I have ever been more productive, worked harder, or enjoyed myself more,” Yu said.

International students from nations with conscription services occasionally have to take a leave as well, although Art estimates that this is “probably fewer than 10 per quarter.” Male Korean students, for example, can take a leave for two years to fulfill their military service requirements, the majority of those who do leaving right after their first year.

It is a rare case that one must leave for financial reasons, according to Art. One of the few, James Thoburn, started in the

Grey City | 15

College class of 2011 and is now in the class of 2014. He ended up working 90–100 hour weeks in landscaping during one of his years away from the College to save money for his return to school. Thoburn strongly believes that taking leaves enhanced and even guided his UChicago education.

“I feel like taking time off can be really useful and that I have learned a lot more about myself while taking time off than I ever have as a student. It’s almost a part of your education in some way,” Thoburn said.

For the most part, students who have taken leaves for any of the reasons—career, financial, military related—described above reported finding the experience as beneficial to their growth and overall well-being.

H

owever, of the nine official options for taking a leave of absence, the final two, medical reasons and psychological issues, are adorned with asterisks. Specifically, it is noted that “appropriate documentation of your readiness to resume studies may be required prior to your return to the University.”

These caveats to the open-door policy on academic leaves have distinguished the largely positive experiences of the majority of students from those of a minority who claim to have been shoved out against their will. Of the students who do take a leave for medical or psychological reasons, there are some that are not fully willing but rather pushed to exit the University. Then, after their time away, these students describe their readmission as a battle with the University to get back through the door.

This past summer, a UChicago undergraduate went public with the claim that she was coerced to take a leave of absence against her will and that she was denied reentry to the College when she requested it. After being sexually harassed during her study abroad trip to Pune during autumn quarter of her second year, third-year student Michaela Cross was diagnosed with post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) and began to suffer semi-regular catatonic episodes.

During sixth week of spring quarter in her second year, Cross suffered an episode on the main quad; she was taken to the University of Chicago Medical Center (UCMC).

But at the hospital, the situation continued to sour. During the three days she spent there, the only person she was able to reach from the University was the dean-on-call.

16 | Volume 17

“People weren’t answering my calls, and that includes my Student Health appointed therapist,” Cross wrote in an e-mail.

After spending three days under close medical attention at the UCMC against her will, Cross was given approval to leave the hospital by Doctor Danielle Anderson, but under the condition she take a “mental leave of absence.” Cross was denied her request to take summer classes, and instead told the date when she would be allowed to return, September 25, 2013, by Linda Tartof, the clinical director of the Student Counseling Service (SCS).

Cross’s story about the sexual harassment she faced in Pune and the way the University handled her situation captured the attention of national news outlets and social media forums.

Garnering 108,000 shares, over one million views, and countless commentary, Cross’s claims of University neglect had everyone talking.

Now a fulltime student at the University again, many of the questions posed in her public accusation remain unanswered: How does a leave of absence policy balance flexibility and students’ well-being? Are some students being treated as liabilities at the cost of their overall health?

N

atalie Jerkins (A.B. ’10) took three separate leaves of absence for mental health reasons. During her first year, Jerkins developed a very serious eating disorder and sought help from the Student Counseling and Resource Service (SCRS), an earlier version of SCS. She stood on the scale, and her BMI was calculated.

The Student Counseling and Resource Service psychiatrist, Dr. Elizabeth Steinhauer, gave her a number that her weight was not supposed to drop below. But Jerkins’ condition took a turn for the worse, and at a check-up appointment about six months later, she weighed in below that number. Her understanding was, in this situation, she would be given options for increased care. She did not know that she would be made to leave school.

“I was asked to leave school. But I wasn’t asked to leave, I was told. I didn’t really get a say.

[Steinhauer] told me that that was something that should happen for my sake and I was like, you know, ‘could we work with my therapist, could I go down to part time’ and she wasn’t really answering my questions,” Jerkins said.

“And she took me to the [Dean’s office] and I didn’t realize why.”

At the office of the dean on the second floor of Harper, Jerkins sat down with the associate dean of students and Steinhauer. During the 10-minute discussion, Steinhauer did most of the talking. At the end a leave of absence form was presented before Jerkins. She was asked to sign.

“I thought we were going to talk about options but instead I was tricked…. I feel bad saying that but that is what it felt like…. It really felt like I was tricked into signing my way out of school,” Jerkins said.

But by the administrative definition, Jerkins’ leave of absence is not officially recognized or recorded as “involuntary.” Art explained that the involuntary leave policy is narrowly defined, applying only to students who refuse to sign exit papers even after administrative prompting. This procedure is also distinguished from a suspension, which is sanctioned for misconduct by the College Discipline Committee. Involuntary leaves take place no more than “once every two or three years,” according to Art, and is a “highly unusual step.” A leave is considered voluntary as long as the Request for Leave of Absence or Withdrawal form is signed by a student, even if the student is pressured into doing so.

“I would say that we do coerce some students into taking a leave and signing the form, given the medical advice we receive, because we [Dean Art or her designate] don’t believe that the student should stay in school. That is the best medical advice we have,” Art said.

“Often this is following a hospitalization, sometimes following a suicide attempt. In cases such as these we may conclude that the student’s health is precarious and that she or he needs to focus on regaining stable good health, without being a student. We would rather that the student voluntarily take a leave, and understand what we will be looking for prior to approving the student’s return to school.”

Cross explained being on the other end of this.

“While you are in the hospital, you are signing things left and right because you just want to get the fuck out of a psych ward. So yeah, you sign the UChicago paper.”

The Grey City survey found that nine of the 276 student respondents considered their leaves to be “involuntary,” although they may not have fallen under the University’s defi-

nition of the category. Of the nine students, seven stated that their involuntary leaves were for mental health reasons, ranging from eating disorders to depression to PTSD. The other two students had to leave for reasons of physical health and financial limitations.

There are conflicting reports of how frequently students are made to take time off, and no publicly available data to settle the score.

Asked if she knew of any other students who, like herself, were compelled to take an academic leave against their wishes, Cross took pause. “I can think of four people off the top of my head who have been, all of them women, by the way,” Cross said. Each of these alleged forced leaves took place in the last academic year, she said.

“The three years thing is definitely not true.

[Art] is getting away with some sort of semantics,” said fifth-year student Jack. Jack took a voluntary leave last spring but said he knows

two individuals whose leaves were mandated by the University.

This confusion over what precisely constitutes an “involuntary” leave and the frequency with which they occur also extends to those who grant leaves to students: deans.

Fortner, who is also associate dean of students in the College, speaks with approximately one student per week considering taking a leave from the school. He stated that, “probably every quarter there are some mandated leaves,” explaining his understanding that “if they [students] are compelled to leave, it is not a voluntary leave.” This is considerably different than Dean Art’s “once every two or three years” estimate.

B

etween the medical confidentiality and deans’ discretional authority, the formal policy definitions tend to bear little meaning in cases like Jerkins’. But by not formally recognizing these coerced hand signatures as

Grey City | 17

“involuntary,” some students have grown skeptical about the net good of the LOA policy.

“You [the administration] are misrepresenting the student situation to make yourself look better,” said fourth-year Olivia Ortiz, who was mandated to take a medical leave in the spring of 2013. “If you don’t recognize the problem then that is extremely embarrassing, and that does nothing to help the students.”

It was an attempt of self-harm that brought her to the emergency facility at the UCMC and, after a day, to the Northside Hospital in Chicago. After two days at the facility, the hospital staff informed Ortiz that she would have to appear in front of three University officials—a psychiatrist from the student counseling services named Dr. Barrier whom Ortiz had never met before, Marianne West, associate dean of students, and Jim Wessel, the assistant director of housing in charge of supervising her house— who would determine whether she could continue attending school.

According to Ortiz, they had made their decision before she arrived to the meeting, ultimately voicing that she had to indefinitely forfeit her student status, and that “if [she was] lucky, maybe [she could] come back to school in the summer.

Ortiz explained that she was no longer allowed to sleep in her dorm, that she had to move out of housing within a few days, and that she was not provided with any information regarding off-campus housing that could accommodate her in the interim. Ortiz had a friend with a spare room in her apartment where she stayed for a couple days until she could get back on her feet.

Fortner, who was not involved in Ortiz’s case, explained that while “there is a certain amount of finesse in [deciding leaves]…everything comes down to a consideration of what is best for this young person.

In cases such as this one, however, the question of whether students are instead being treated as liabilities comes to the fore.

“It makes sense that [the Administration] has their own institutional self-interest. And they can argue that this is actually protecting the students, but if they really cared about their students they would just have far more comprehensive resources,” Ortiz said.

A host of the University’s peer institutions have been dealing with this issue as well. In November 2013, USA Today reported that the United States Department of Education Office

18 | Volume 17

for Civil Rights received a discrimination complaint against Princeton University claiming that a Princeton student was “coerced to withdraw ‘voluntarily’ from the university, which imposed ‘onerous and intrusive’ conditions for his return.”

T

he manner by which a student exits is only half of the story.

Jerkins’ private doctors vouched for her return to full-time student status well before the University allowed her back in. Steinhauer, her SCRS psychiatrist and the authority with whom Art consulted with for medical advice and final clearance, remained unwilling to permit Jenkins’ return even after her private doctors approved the move.

The decision-making process involves “private doctors speaking to university doctors,” according to Art, but with the SCS psychiatrist having the last word. “I am not an M.D. so I have to

“

I know most of those people [who were coerced into taking a leave] would say they were grateful for the time off, the treatment, and the recovery, but very resentful of the way it was handled.

”

depend on their professional advice,” Art said.

Jerkins claims that when she first began her time off there were no requirements or contingencies for her eventual resumption of full-time student status. To her knowledge, Art did not, nor did any other authority, provide a specific amount of time she had to sustain a healthy weight.

“I am completely sure, just couldn’t be more sure, that I was not given an amount of time I had to sustain the weight,” Jerkins said. “It was nothing like that, it was just when I feel like it, you can come. My therapist said she could never get a reason out of [the SCS therapist]. That is eventually how I got back in.”

Art does not think that the requirements are unclear. According to her, when a student has an eating disorder, the school asks the student to remain in regular treatment, to maintain a healthy

weight over a period of time, and to add stressful activities during that period of time to make sure that there are no setbacks.

“We put these requirements in writing and encourage the student to remain in touch while on leave, and ask questions of us if needed,” Art said in an e-mail.

The fact that a student is upset about being forced to take a LOA doesn’t make the decision a bad one. It is true that, in some cases, mandated leaves have increased the well-being of a given student. Both Jerkins and Ortiz, for example, felt that while the ways in which their leaves were administered were misleading, the leave itself was largely beneficial.

“I know most of those people [who were coerced into taking a leave] would say they were grateful for the time off, the treatment, and the recovery,” Jerkins said, “but very resentful of the way it was handled.”

A lack of understanding of the process underwrote the accounts of many students who were placed on coerced leaves.

“The laws you are dealing with, you don’t understand…. If you are someone who is even on the borderline for maybe considering taking

a mental leave of absence, or attention has been drawn towards you, you are not in a place to look up all these laws,” Cross said.

“We need an advocate when we are in this situation, not people sort of shadowy in the background pulling strings. It makes you feel really disempowered, and that’s the worst thing about this entire situation. You end up losing your rights as a student. You end up feeling worse.”

The fear of being forced to leave rather than leaving on their own volition has prompted some students to abstain from mentioning mental health when speaking with a dean about the matter.

“It may have helped to talk more about my mental health reasons for leaving, but I was reluctant to do so because I had actually read [in the Maroon] a case of a student who the University would not allow to return,” said Aaron, originally class of 2012. “I was afraid of the administrative aspects of that and so I did not say anything besides, ‘I want to improve my academic performance.’ Because I thought that was the narrative that I needed to present.”

According to Art, though, involuntary medical leaves only occur in extreme circumstances and

the vast majority of leaves taken for mental health reasons run smoothly.

“I told Dean Art [about my mental state] and she said she highly recommends I move forward with taking a leave…. I think she gave me enough space where she told me what she thought, but allowed me to make the decision or at least gave me the illusion that the decision was in my hands that she wanted me to make anyways,” Jack said. “I personally could not say that mine was involuntary.”

Even given complications and contradictions within the formal Leave of Absence policy, sometimes the most palpable pressures come from the uncodified: the cultural stigma that to belong at the University of Chicago is to stay on the beaten path.

“My experience with [coming back] can be summed up with the tradition of stepping on the seal…. I have definitely heard people in Reynolds Club giving tours for the admissions office saying ‘don’t step on the seal, you won’t graduate in four years’” Ortiz said. “It is the ‘darker side’ if you do not graduate in four years, it is deemed as a curse. You don’t see people like me on the admission brochures.”

PERSONAL. SPACE. STUDIO AND ONE-BEDROOM APARTMENTS FROM $750.

• Located in the heart of the New Harper Court Development • Cameras covering interior and exterior-monitored • Free WIFI for all tenants • Immaculate, newly rehabbed units • Hard wood floors • Heating system in each unit • Laundry room email: wayne@hallmarkjohnson.com call: Brenda 773-261-1550 for information

Y

H A R P E R T E R R AC E A P A R T M E N T S

1/2 pg. Magazine Ad.indd 1

Grey City | 19 1/16/14 1:45 PM

SCHOOL

W A L

K

I

N G

T H E R

I G H T

20 | Volume 17

P A T H

By Bess Cohen and Maira Khwaja

A back-alley look into how the city tries to keeps its children safe on their way to and from school.

Illustrations by Wei Yi Ow Photos by Jamie Manley

Grey City | 21

E 48th St

E 48th St

SCHOOL

Bixler Park

E 58th St

E 58th St Harper Quadrangle

Oriental Institute Museum

Stony Island Ave

RAY

BRET HARTE S Blackstone Ave

Botany Pond

Medical Center

SCHOOL

S Harper Ave

E 57th St

S Dorchester Ave

Payne Dr

r

E 55th St HYDE PARK

SCHOOL

S Woodlawn Ave

S Ellis Ave

S Cottage Grove Ave

Payne D

S Kimbark Ave

E 56th St Dr

S Cornell Ave

Nichols Park

Court Theatre

Stagg Field

e Park Av

Florence Stout Park

S Blackstone Ave

E 54th St

Harold Washington Park

KENWOOD ACADEMY S Dorchester Ave

E 53rd St

E 54th St

E 55th St

rga n

ve S Kenwood A

S Woodlawn Ave

E 52nd St

S Drexel Ave

E 53rd St

SCHOOL

Madison Park

E 51st St

E 52nd St

Mo

S Cornell Ave

SHOESMITH

S Lake

51st St

G

SCHOOL

E 50th St

S Cottage Grove Ave

E 50th St

CANTER

E 49th St

S Ellis Ave

S Drexel Blvd

E 49th St

Museum of Science & Industry

E 60th St

E 61st St

61st Street Farmer’s Market

E 63rd St

HYDE PARK ACADEMY

E 64th St

S Blackstone Ave

E 67th St

S East End Ave

E 69th St

S Cornell Ave

E 68th St S Dante Ave

E 69th St

E Marquette Rd

S Dorchester Ave

WADSWORTH

Stony Island Ave

S Kenwood Ave

S University Ave

S Greenwood Ave

S Ellis Ave

S Minerva Ave

E 65th St

E 67th St

Oak Woods Cemetery

SCHOOL

ell Ave

S Ellis Ave

S Ingleside Ave

S Cottage Grove Ave

S Evans Ave

S Langley Ave

S Champlain Ave

SCHOOL

22 | Volume 17 E 69th St

E 65th St

S Drexel Ave

65th St

S Kenwood Ave

E 63rd St

E 64th St

E Marquette Rd

E 62nd St

S Woodlawn Ave

S Evans Ave

S Langley Ave

S Champlain Ave

E 63rd St

68th St

Law School

E 62nd St

E 62nd St

67th St

S Ellis Ave

S Ingleside Ave

S Drexel Ave

FISKE

E 60th St

S Corn

SCHOOL

S Cornell Ave

Midway Plaisance

Dr

eorge Jones went to Sexton Elementary in Woodlawn, his children went to Sexton, and so do four of his grandchildren. Now 70 years old, he once served on the Local School Council at Sexton in addition to his work as a supervisor in a Chicago mill.

Nearby Fiske Elementary school was one of 48 schools closed this fall by Chicago Public Schools (CPS), its students were rerouted to the old Sexton building, and the building renamed Fiske. Through this change, Jones stuck by the old school, as one of four paid employees on the new Fiske school’s Safe Passage route.

When CPS announced their plan to close underutilized city schools this fall, safety on the walk to and from school was a top concern for parents. About 12,000 students saw their schools closed and were sent to designated welcoming schools, like the new Fiske. The addition of even a few blocks to a student’s walk to school might require her to pass through unfamiliar, potentially dangerous neighborhoods, many plagued by gang-related violence.

CPS responded to these concerns by expanding an existing safety initiative called the Safe Passage program, in collaboration with various city agencies, including the Chicago Police Department (CPD), Department of Buildings, and Department of Transportation. At its most basic level, the newly expanded Safe Passage program aimed to establish a network of walking paths to and from 51 elementary and middle schools throughout the city, patrolled by unarmed, neighborhood watchmen to ensure traveling children’s safety.

The program began in 2009 when a high school student, caught in the cross-fire of rival gangs, was beaten to death and a video of the incident spread on the Internet.

Staffed initially by 10 community organizations, the program

unaccompanied children, basis,” Chou said, even those “that have nothJones wished students a ing to do with our students, but because they’re good weekend, corrected near a route we’re still monitoring them.” minor transgressions like However, when asked for follow up comcursing or teasing, and ment on the December 2 shooting shortly after found a way to interact the initial interview, a CPS spokesperson could with every passerby in not provide additional information about the some way or another. incident beyond the fact that the boy was not a When a few boys who CPS student, and that Safe Passage guards were looked too old to be leavinformed of it upon returning to their posts ing a middle school started that same afternoon. hanging around in a parkYet when asked a few days later, two guards ing lot behind him, Jones at Fiske said they were not aware of the incihollered in their direction. dent.

“If you’re not a student, James Poole, a Sexton graduate and comGeorge Jones, CPS Safe Passage employee of Network of you gotta keep moving. munity organizer in Woodlawn for the past 20 Woodlawn, stands near his post at Fiske Elementary.

Three small children years, has worked for CPD’s “Chicago Alternawalked alone across the street, the older tive Policing Strategy” (CAPS), a community designated walking routes for 35 high schools brother—about seven—walking ahead of two policing program, for the last four. He controls throughout the city that students were encouryounger girls, trying to read a picture book traffic at one corner at Fiske and occasionally aged to take. at the same time. “Watch your sisters!” Jones breaks up scuffles between students, once havIn its earlier, less-expansive form, Safe yelled to the little boy. Jones says that kids that ing had to handcuff a fighting student. OtherPassage “led to a 20 percent decline in criminal young rarely walk alone. He explained that wise, he explained, this area is not problematic. incidents around Safe Passage schools, a 27 there is an unspoken understanding among Both Poole and George Jones pointed to percent drop in incidents among students, and Fiske community members: “I’m watching Fiske’s neighbors at 63rd Street and Martin a seven percent increase in attendance” at the your kid, you’re watching mine.”

Luther King Drive. “That area has many more schools served in the past two years, according problems,” Poole said, mentioning the Safe to CPS’s website. CPS now contracts a total of 29 community organizations to staff the espite this consensus of vigilance, there Passage route serving the Dulles School of Exwalking paths for 91 schools. was a problem on the Fiske Safe Passage cellence as one that had seen challenges, though “When this came up I said ‘put my name on route a few weeks later. Just before 2 p.m. on the he did not elaborate.

CPD crime maps report a greater number of the list’,” Jones said, shifting his toothpick in his afternoon of December 2, a drive-by shooting at mouth. He didn’t have to travel far. Standing 62nd Street and South Cottage Grove, just two incidents at this junction in the months since at his post in a row of neon-vested Safe Passage blocks from Fiske, left a 15-year-old injured. school started in 2013, though not during Safe workers along 61st Street, Jones pointed to the The boy was treated immediately at the Univer- Passage hours. building behind him. “I live right here in this sity of Chicago Medibuilding,” he said. cal Center and the inAccording to Jones, many of Fiske’s Safe cident was reported by Passage workers did not know each other before only a few local news the program began at the school this year, outlets. but most live in the neighborhood and have Two days after family attending the school. After a few days of the incident, Jadine training in August, the group began their work Chou, CPS’s chief guarding from 7 a.m. to 9:15 a.m. and from 2 safety and security p.m. to 4:15 p.m. each school day, with daily officer, said in an incheck-ins to discuss what is going on on near terview with Grey City the route. that she was “happy Jones, who has a nearby block named in his to say that we haven’t honor, has made the position his own. “[The had a single incident kids] all know me. These are my same kids. I where a child has been see them everyday, at least a hundred of them.” seriously injured or…

As school let out, clusters of kids, many of shot” on a Safe Passage whom were accompanied by older siblings or route. parents, began to stream past him; Jones then “We are monitoring Chris McKiney, a Leave No Veterans Behind employee, stands began his work. Paying special attention to the the incidents on a daily at his post outside of Shoesmith Elementary.

D

Grey City | 23

Indeed, CPS and CPD are tracking incidents, but it seems there are inconsistencies between what CPS might take into account in its evaluation of the program and what the people living near a school consider a safety concern.

Perhaps spurred on by these varying criteria, skepticism about the efficacy of the Safe Passage program remains. Can an unarmed guard prevent a criminal from shooting? Is this program enough to keep children safe?

I

n mid-December, an incident was reported a block away from a Safe Passage route in the Belmont Cragin neighborhood on the Northwest Side. On her way to school on the morning of December 16, a 15-year-old girl was beaten and raped in a backyard. This time, the attack garnered national attention and local panic, both over the unknown whereabouts of the perpetrator and the belief that it should have been prevented, with a Safe Passage route so close to the scene of the crime.

On December 4, Chou explained that the effectiveness of the program can’t be measured based on past rates of violence, as the program now exists on a larger scale in different areas of the city. “[This year] we’ve set up the standard and will begin tracking it for future years,” she said. By keeping track of incidents that have been averted by Safe Passage workers who “pull in the proper authorities, like Chicago Police,” they will be able to compare incident rates over time.

It is hard to say whether the Safe Passage program could have prevented the publicized incidents.

Both notable December incidents, the first concerning a non-CPS student and the second slightly off of a Safe Passage route and before patrol hours, do not fall within the direct purview of Safe Passage’s objective, but both were youth victims of brutal violence on or near a Safe Passage route during the daytime.

Just a few minutes or a few blocks can be the difference between whether a crime is considered in the jurisdiction of Safe Passage or not.

“C

learly, no one knows the communities as well as the parents who live in them,” Chou said on the phone in early December.

At the outset of this revamp of the program in August, parents were encouraged to attend

24 | Volume 17

meetings to establish the route for each set of closing and welcoming schools. Meeting twice with representatives from CPS and CPD, “[members of each pairing of schools] were able to point out hot spots that we needed to keep an eye out for, and provide feedback on the routes themselves,” Chou said.

Chou noted that community engagement of this kind is “something that we [CPS] haven’t done as well in the past.”

CPS received a barrage of criticism for their decision to close so many schools in the spring of last year. Many parent activists and school employees felt that their input at community meetings about the school closings, frequently related to safety concerns, were not seriously considered during the CPS decision-making process.

“

Can an unarmed guard prevent a criminal from shooting? Is this program enough to keep children safe?

”

This embrace of community involvement could indicate a change of tune for CPS, one driven by the community organizations hired to facilitate the program. “[Keeping children safe] is one of the most important things we can be doing right now, and they’re right in the middle of it,” Chou said.

Safe Passage guards do not report directly to CPS, working instead with higher-ups at individual vendors contracted by CPS, as well as with school administrators. To facilitate communication, Chou explained, representatives from vendors have monthly meetings with CPS administrators to discuss “best practices” of the program.

While CPS trains and pays Safe Passage employees and provides vendors a set of guidelines by which to run the program, the latter have a significant amount of autonomy. This decen-

tralization enables organizations to be flexible when working with schools to meet the needs of the individual communities they serve, as well as to reach their own organizational goals.

The Network of Woodlawn (NOW) is the vendor that oversees Fiske, Wadsworth, South Shore, and Dulles elementary schools in Woodlawn, and hired 41 of 250 applicants as guards on the routes over the summer of 2013. Many, like George Jones, were recruited at the Apostolic Church, about 12 blocks away from Fiske.

On the phone in December, Ryan Priester, New Communities Program director at NOW, explained that Safe Passage has become just one of many programs geared toward NOW’s “larger goal to help stabilize the Woodlawn community by involving family and parents.”

His organization’s strong presence in the neighborhood and schools allowed them to both reach out to and hire already highly involved parents and community members.

Nearly two decades old, NOW also provides literacy training and professional development to some of its Safe Passage employees, extending the reaches of the program far past the designated routes.

C

lad in her black jacket and blue woolen hat, Barbara, who did not give her last name, is stationed near the back entrance of Hyde Park Academy, at the corner of East 63rd Street and South Park Shore East Court. A former post office employee, Barbara travels from Roseland to the school everyday, a roughly 50-minute commute, to stand near the school during arrival and dismissal hours, for a total of five and a half hours each weekday.

Leave No Veteran Behind (LNVB), the vendor serving Hyde Park schools, has a different mission and approach. LNVB employs veterans of the Iraq and Afghanistan wars to work as positive role models in communities, and has been providing Hyde Park Academy with a Safe Passage route since the program’s origin in 2009.

“If we see something seriously going on,” Barbara said, “we relate it to our boss and he normally has a boss who can call [the head of security at Hyde Park Academy].”

The problems Barbara and her colleagues tend to report are typically incidents between students. “Lately [some students] have been

getting out of school before it’s time.… Twenty of them left early out of the security doors.

[Also], around that bus stop around Stony Island…the girls will have a little confrontation.”

The goal of Safe Passage is to create a natural community watch, explained Eugene Tesdahl, development director at LNVB. “Our program does not just make veterans into crossing guards; these veterans are community watchers, a community presence. They walk around the neighborhood and get to know shop owners.

The notion is that many vets have skill sets that can work with youth.”

“There’s one [guard who is a] young lady who likes to talk to the young girls when they walk by. She has a reputation that they can all go to her [if there’s a problem],” Barbara said.

Though LNVB employees are CPR, first-aid, and emergency-preparedness trained, Tesdahl says that this kind of personable relationship is one of the more important provisions of the program.

W

hen the Safe Passage program began at the end of August, Mayor Rahm Emanuel joined students on a route in West Englewood on their walk to school. Among the chatter of appreciation for the large police presence on the passage in the area with the highest shooting-rates in Chicago, a tone of mild

skepticism filled the neighbors’ front porches.

Some community members thought the program wouldn’t last the full year, as promised, while others thought that it wouldn’t be nearly as strong come mid-September.

For all the skepticism they faced at the outset of the revamped program, Safe Passage workers have progressed in creating a positive environment on the walking paths in Woodlawn and Hyde Park.

On 63rd Street and Woodlawn Avenue, three young boys passed a yellow reflective sign, indicating the Safe Passage route next to Wadsworth Elementary, in late November.

The eldest, a tall boy in seventh grade, walked quietly with his head down as his scrawnier younger brother and cousin ran around him on the street’s construction markers, goading him to get home faster.

Students affected by the school closings have had to navigate a hefty load of changes in adjusting to their new schools. But according to this Wadsworth student, the change in how he travels to and from school has alleviated some of that pressure.

“Now since we got a new school, they’re working on it, making our school safer,” he said.

One Wadsworth Safe Passage guard—and graduate—agreed. “It makes their days to see

someone out here watching them. [There are] some that look forward to seeing me…the job is what you make of it.”

Tasked with providing another “set of eyes,” Safe Passage guards require a two-way lens: to watch and to be seen. At George Jones’s corner, he makes sure students know he sees them, loudly greeting or correcting each one. When a passing student stops teasing or shoving, Jones achieves one of the program’s goals—he’s watching and effectively discouraging conflict between students.

Yet the noted incidents show that the guards may not effectively be seen by outsiders on the routes. By design, they are not a community watch on all corners or during all hours of the day. Outside of creating a positive community presence that perhaps de-escalates violence, it remains to be seen how effective Safe Passage is in preventing violence in the aftermath of school closings.

For the most important stakeholders, like the seventh-grade Wadsworth student, the complex collaboration of many city departments is, however, a step in the right direction, forging the path in some communities towards a safer reality for children within them. “There was only one crossing guard [before],” he said.

“It does feel different, I’m not used to a lot of people outside. I do feel safer.”

George Jones with his grandchildren and their friend, all students at Fiske Elementary, on their way home from school.

Grey City | 25

Q&A with Cathy Cohen

by Joy Crane 26 | Volume 17

A

t high points in its history, the University of Chicago has clinched a few firsts in the name of diversity. In 1921, it tied to become the first American university to award a Ph.D. to a black woman, and in 1948, it was among the first non–historically black universities to tenure a black faculty member. In July of last year, Professor Cathy Cohen was elected the chair of the political science department, making her among the first black lesbian women to hold such a position at a major research institution.

A social activist, author, and specialist in marginal groups in American politics, Cohen has made a career and a life out of vacillating between a place within the ivory tower and throwing rocks from the outside. Among her extensive accomplishments, Cohen is the founder of the Black Youth Project, a youth activist blog which launched an online petition last January calling on President Barack Obama to return to the South Side to speak on gun violence after the murder of 15-year-old Hadiya Pendleton. Garnering over 48,000 signatures, the petition is widely credited for bringing the President to Hyde Park Academy two weeks later.

Read the full interview at chicagomaroon.com.

Grey City (GC) : I understand that you were appointed chair of [the] political science department last year.

Cathy Cohen (CC): Last year, July 1st.

GC: What are your thoughts on the significance of the appointment, both for you and for this institution?

CC: There’s lots of different ways to think about the significance of my appointment.

First of all, you are honored any time your colleagues vote you to do anything in particular in a position of leadership. I think it’s important not only because I’m a black woman, or because I’m a black lesbian. I don’t think that’s actually what they were voting for. Hopefully, it’s some type of recognition of the significance of the area that I work in, so race in politics. And it’s important to thinking about politics in a comprehensive way, and it’s important to thinking about American politics in a comprehensive way and to the work that we do here in the department.

I also think that it hopefully reflects the best parts of this University in terms of its evolu-

tion—a kind of opening up of the gates, as we might say, towards communities and particularly towards communities on the South Side to figure out ways to make the issues that they struggle with significant. And to make the University responsive to those issues, not as a kind of landlord or employer only, but also as a partner in thinking in kind of creative ways to empower the communities around us. I hope that my appointment reflects the new direction of the University that continues to be clearly committed to intellectual rigor, but also understanding different subjects as animating the questions that we’re concerned with, and the individuals, and communities that we want to highlight.

GC: So I listened to a speech that you gave at the Black Women Academics in the Ivory Tower Conference…

CC: (Laughs) This is the danger of middle age.

GC: You brought up the problem and question of black women in the academy. In particular, you stressed the tension of being at

Grey City | 27

once both an “insider” and an “outsider,” and how one can reckon with the political struggles that brought one to this position.

Where [are] your thoughts…on that question at present?

CC: I think if you look at the history of people of color in the academy, I think that history has always been of individuals being insiders and outsiders. If you look at the earliest African Americans who were students at the University of Chicago, most didn’t live on campus, right, they lived off campus. They engaged with different groups of interlocutors, they talked to students in their classroom when they would talk to them, but they also were engaged with people in the community. And I might argue it enhances how you think about the subjects that you’re pursuing when you are in those different conversations.

I want to say that that’s the same today. And—I don’t want to say this is the case for all faculty of color—but I think many faculty of color who both, of course, adhere to the standards of rigor and intellect of any university, they’re also engaged with communities that don’t predominate in these institutions. So we’re often having multiple conversations with different communities. And I’d like to argue that it broadens the way you think about things. It inserts a certain type of creativity into the thinking. It does what we want any social scientist to do which is to think about questions from multiple angles. So I would say that the kind of insider-outsider status enhances one’s ability to be a critical thinker and to be the best type of scholar.

Now that said, you also want our institutions to be reflective of larger society. So there’s a study that just came out I think at Stanford, 41 percent of the undergrad population is white, and 74 percent of the faculty is white. At Berkeley, supposedly more progressive, undergraduates are 28 percent white, faculty 78 percent white. Harvard 80 percent white [faculty]...Chicago I suspect is about the same…. We should find out those numbers.

So the insider-out status, right, it gives you some constance about why that’s important. It makes glaring the homogeneity of the faculty and often of the students here. It highlights what we lose by that type of homogeneity.

GC: And how that question relates to your own career? Have you lost sight of the political struggle as an individual?

CC: Never. No, never. I’ve always been a political person who’s been committed to doing political work outside of my job. The Black Youth Project, although that’s a little bit [insider-outsider] also. I’ve been involved in the Black Radical Congress, African American Women in Defense of Ourselves, Ellis Daughters, Audrey Lauters…I mean we could go down a very long list of political activities.

All that stuff I just talked about—the homogeneity of these institutions—the only way they’re changed...it’s not because people wake up one morning [saying], “Oh, we’ll change.” It’s because people outside those institutions demand a change, so you want to be committed to that kind of politicized work. So, for me, I want to do my job and I want to do it well, but I am interested in seeing institutions transform for the better and often times that takes some pushing from the outside.

Number of faculty part of minority communities or pursue topics that are diverse in nature, according to the University website.

28 | Volume 17

88

That’s probably why I teach social movements—because that’s my theory of change for institutions like the University of Chicago.

GC: You were at Yale, got tenure, and then you came to UChicago.

Why? CC: Everyone’s like, “Why would you leave Yale if [you] get tenure there?” So let me say something about Yale. I love Yale, in the sense that students were great, wonderful institution, resource-rich institution. But I study race and politics and I can’t imagine a better place to study race and politics than the City of Chicago.

GC: If you could design how this University engages with the community, or an ideology that could underpin it?

CC: Wow, you just blew my mind. Well, to me the ideology, if you think about engaging—Do we engage by imposing or partnership and dialogue?—this is the first step. I think we are moving, hopefully, to an understanding that a successful way to be in this part of the city has to be in dialogue and partnership. I think for a long time the University had a strategy of either enclosing itself off or imposing its will, and I would like to think that we are moving in a different direction. Now, I would say that a lot of that direction right now is about service and the provision of resources. We will provide education, or we’ll provide health care, through the Urban Health Initiative, or we’ll provide research through the Crime Lab—problematic name, but anyway.

And I think the next step, and I think this will happen in particular through the leadership of [Vice President for Civic Engagement] Derek Douglas, is to think creatively with communities about what they need and they want. And that will create some difficult moments like when communities say we want a trauma center and the University says, “But we don’t want to pay for it.” But it means a commitment to how do you engage in a long term process where you build trust and you really try to work out these issues of partnership because you’re invested in both entities succeeding. We want the communities around us to flourish. We want them to have development. We want folks to have jobs and health care and good education. I think if we can clearly communicate that commitment and demonstrate that commitment then the communities around us will not think of as a kind of “evil place” and say, “I also want to be proud and invested in the U of C.” GC: This burgeoning commitment [to community engagement], is this widely held, or is it just Derek Douglas and you?

CC: I know that the Urban Education [Institute] has that commitment, the Urban Health Initiative…I believe…I want to believe that President Zimmer understands the significance of moving in that direction, and hopefully has that commitment also.

GC: Why are you wanting to believe as opposed to believing?

CC: Well, it’s not like I’ve had [a one-on-one meeting] with him, but I don’t think that any of the good things that we talked about happen without his leadership. So that demonstrates to me that there’s [some] commitment there. I suspect that we might not agree on everything in terms of an agenda like that. I would be shocked if we did. But I like the direction where we’re moving, I really do.

But there are other things: There is building relationships with communities and being serious about that, and empowering those commu-

CC: Unfortunately, I think it’s pretty clear. We are still wanting in terms of some basic demographic diversity of the faculty. We live in a city that I believe is the second–most populous in terms of Latinos in the country, and we don’t have enough Latino faculty on campus. We’ve been searching, in terms of political science, for a number of years to hire someone in Latino politics and we haven’t done it. That’s really unacceptable and something we really have to rectify, and I would argue that that’s the case for most of the departments here.

You know, there aren’t enough African American [faculty] on campus.

If you look at the number of senior women, there needs to be more senior women. It’s important to have faculty in general, but it’s important to have those who are tenured, because in fact you have longevity here, the University [has] made a commitment, you have something we call power.

I think the University has suffered because in the ’70s and ’80s when everyone else built African American studies programs, ethnic studies programs, [women’s] studies programs, we didn’t. So the basis of generating that type of research, while it happened in different parts of the University, was never really centralized and coordinated in a way that’s comparable.

We now have the Center for the Study of [Race, Politics, and Cul-

GC: Do you think that undergraduate students are political? Are they pushing those boundaries and really [interacting] with the institution?

CC: When I first got here I was asking about political mobilization of students and they said, “Oh no, the only time that students mobilize is when the library closes.” That was the story.

But I have seen students mobilize around OMSA [the Office of Multicultural Student Affairs], the creation of OMSA, the opening of 5710, the expansion [of ] the Race Center. So I know the students mobilize.

I don’t think that they are as active as I see on other campuses. I think that’s changing, slowly though.

I don’t know if it’s for students part of the idea of being an intellect, that that’s something that you buy into when you come here, if that they think that means...they can’t be political. I don’t know if we haven’t reached a kind of critical tipping point in those communities where there’s a longer history of political activity and mobilization, so if you get more students from those traditions maybe we would see more activity on campus. I don’t know if that the lower numbers of faculty of color means that there’s less support in terms of one-on-ones and in classrooms in terms of talking about the issues, so maybe that has an impact.

It’s not clear to me why, but it does seem that there is less political mobilization on this campus.

BE FULLY Interview has been condensed and edited.

SERVE AND BE SERVED. LEARN JOY. TEACH JOY. SHARE THE WONDERS OF THE WORLD. MEET YOUR NEIGHBORHOOD. SENSE SOMETHING SACRED. FEEL SOMETHING REAL. SING LIKE YOU NEVER HAVE BEFORE. TAKE A BREAK FROM ISOLATION. BE SEEN FOR WHO YOU REALLY ARE.

ALIVE Come this Sunday for the 11:15 service.

At the corner of 50th and Dorchester | sp—r.org

GC: This issue of Grey City, our reporters are very much focusing on student groups who are at the margins. I’d be interested to hear, from a faculty perspective or administration [perspective], what groups there are at the margins.

ture], the [Center for the Study of Gender and Sexuality], and those are really amazing places that do scholarship, teaching, and programming, but they probably don’t have the same types of budgets or institutional power that you see in other places where they’ve been established for 30 or 40 years. So there’s clear work to be done.

St. Paul & the Redeemer Episcopal Church

nities so push back on the decision that are being made.

But then there’s the question of how do you diversify this community, meaning the University of Chicago. And I hate to say, but I think we’ve had less success there.

Grey City | 29

Winter 2014