The Editors Blog

The Class of '14?

2009-07-05T19:46:00.003-05:00

The Office of College Admissions has posted this year’s religiously weird essay questions. The Uncommon App and the anti-common admissions czar might be gone, but you won’t find questions like these on a Northwestern application.

Essay Option 1

How did you get caught? (Or not caught, as the case may be.)

Inspired by Kelly Kennedy, a fourth-year in the college.

Essay Option 2

The late-eighteenth-century popular philosopher and cultural critic George Lichtenberg wrote, "Just as we outgrow a pair of trousers, we outgrow acquaintances, libraries, principles, etc. at times before they're worn out and at times-and this is worst of all-before we have new ones." Write an essay about something you have outgrown, perhaps before you had a replacement-a friend, a political philosophy, a favorite author, or anything that has had an influence on you. What, if anything, has taken its place?

Essay Option 3

"Any law that uplifts human personality is just. Any law that degrades human personality is unjust," wrote the Reverend Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., in his "Letter from Birmingham Jail." What is "human personality?" Is it obvious what uplifts and what degrades it? Can law be justified on the basis of it? We want to hear your thoughts on justice as it relates to this "human personality."

Essay Option 4

From game theory to Ultimate Frisbee to the great Chicago Scavenger Hunt, we at the University of Chicago take games seriously. We bet you do, too. Even if "just a game," sport, play, and other kinds of games seem to share at the very least an insistence that we take seriously a set of rules entirely peculiar to the circumstance of the game. You might say, in order to play a game we must take it seriously. Think playfully-or play thoughtfully-about games: how they distract us or draw us into the world, create community and competition, tease us and test us with stakes both set apart from and meaningful to everyday life. Don't tell us about The Big Game; rather, tell us about players and games.

Essay Option 5

In the spirit of adventurous inquiry, pose a question of your own. If your prompt is original and thoughtful then you should have little trouble writing a great essay. Draw on your best qualities as a writer, thinker, visionary, social critic, sage, citizen of the world, or future citizen of the University of Chicago; take a little risk and have fun.

I bet the admissions staff is looking forward to reading all 7 trillion responses about outgrowing childhood. Anyway, I’m pretty sure the answer to #1 is “my mistress’s ex-boyfriend hacked into her Hotmail account and forwarded all my love poems to the local paper.”

233

2009-07-04T14:20:00.002-05:00

(they're bald eagles!)

P.S. Read this if you haven't already.

Today in 'seriously, Chicago?'

2009-06-24T10:13:00.002-05:00

CBS 2 has a story today about how we're all pretty much going to die. Apparently, thanks to the recent violence across the city, Stroger Hospital is facing a massive shortage of blood type O-, the universal donor. And the rest of Cook County's supply isn't doing too well, either.

The blood bank showed us the eight units of O-negative blood that's left. Only three of the units are designated for trauma patients though. Any more outbreaks of violence on the streets pose a threat here.

"Tonight we may be in a very tough situation," Dr. Dennis said. "Because we're that short on O-negative blood."

Two things to take from this. First, do not have any bad accidents any time soon. Wear helmets, maybe? And armor? Second, give blood, even if you're not O-. LifeSource can help you find a place to donate nearby and set up an appointment.

It's a bird, it's a plane, it's an investment manager!

2009-06-23T15:16:00.005-05:00

The University has hired a new CIO to take over for Peter Stein, who announced in January that he would be leaving this month. Mark A. Schmid, currently vice president and CIO of Windy City behemoth Boeing, will be taking Stein's place.

The U of C CIO sits at the helm of the Investment Office and manages the University's endowment. The week before Stein announced his departure, administrators acknowledged that the value of the endowment had fallen some 25 percent since the fall's economic turmoil began. (University officials have stressed that this is in line with peer institutions, whose endowments have all taken a blow. Harvard, for instance, announced today that it would lay off 275 employees due to recession woes. One of the more devastating rounds in Hyde Park occurred in February, when the University of Chicago Medical Center cut its staff by almost 5 percent - 450 employees.) You can see a chart of the fluctuation of the endowment's value here. Schmid starts on July 6.

Pictured above is the Boeing 787, which was slated for launch in fall 2007 but, two years of delays (notably December 2008 and, curiously, today) later, is still on the tarmac.

Flashback

2009-06-19T17:16:00.003-05:00

So this is neat... my first article ever for the Maroon was covering a 2007 talk by Middle East scholar Michael Rubin, who is a resident scholar at the American Enterprise Institute and a senior lecturer at the Naval Postgraduate School. Rubin's talk was about how to prevent Iran from obtaining nuclear weapons. He argued very strongly against using military pressure against Tehran.

“There is no magic formula [for success] right now,” said Rubin. The solution, he said, must come from an internal shift among the people, most likely via grassroots democracy-oriented programs like the recent union of Iranian bus drivers, the first union of its kind in Iran.
...
Whether the U.S. should support such programs is another source of debate. Rubin advocated the practice, saying that the government should allocate funds to support things like labor movements in Iran. “The people are generally apathetic [about the government],” he said. “In a theocratic government, you’re going to oppose any reform movement or democratic trend that might undercut your authority [and] nuclear weapons give you a shield. You can have 12, 13, 14, 15 Tiananmen Squares and there’s nothing anybody can do.”

As of Monday, it looks like Rubin was arguing that the Ahmadinejad regime was not going to fall, and he sided with the neocons in slamming Obama's muted response. The LA Times has some longer commentary from him in a point-counterpoint series with Matthew Duss, a national security researcher and writer at the Center for American Progress. Rubin advises Obama to avoid overenthusiasm in engaging the Iranian government (whatever it might be) and maintains that the Mousavi crew won't be toppling the government any time soon.

Fax-checking

2009-06-19T17:05:00.003-05:00

Probably worth noting that a group of U of C folks started something called the Iran Fax Project. The goal is to use a new (or, rather, old) medium to help skirt clampdowns on Internet and cell communication and get news about the protests out of Iran and onto the international stage. Judging by the group's blog, it looks like they're having a somewhat slow start, but still - a pretty cool idea.

Thoughts on Iran

2009-06-19T16:50:00.005-05:00

[note: We're having trouble giving new users access to the blog, so for now I'll be posting on behalf of other writers as well. -Claire]

by Andrew Alexander, Viewpoints Editor 2009

If there is one good thing that will come out of the mass protests in Iran this week, it is that it is showing Western audiences how strikingly modern Iran is. As I reported for the Maroon two years ago, the Iranian upper-middle-class is well-educated, surprisingly liberal, and surprisingly Westernized. Iran has some of the best universities in the Middle East, has more blogs per capita than the U.S., and, until last week, had a government that was a strange hybrid of democracy within the framework of a theocracy. The irony in frosty U.S.-Iranian relations is that, judged on its people alone, Iran should be one of the U.S.'s closest allies in the Middle East.

Unfortunately, a half-century of bad blood between governments has prevented that.

And there's one thing that's been absent from a lot of the coverage by Western media of this week's riots. Namely: Iran is a deeply divided country, far, far more so than the United States. There is a large upper-middle-class that is pro-U.S., and journalists like to talk to them because they speak English. These are the people who are organizing the protests, it seems. If you look at pictures of the protests, there are a large number of banners and signs that are in English (despite, you know, English not being spoken in Iran). And the protests have also been scheduled to overlap with daytime in Europe and the U.S. They know they're on TV.

But there is also a large class that is very religious, very conservative, and whose members are very proud to have Mahmoud Ahmadinejad as their leader. They are much harder to report, and often get ignored.

So it has been very difficult to judge from Chicago exactly how widespread the support for these protests is. I have heard some reports suggesting that poor/rural voters (Ahmadinejad's base) have been surprisingly sympathetic to Mousavi and the protesters, but I have no idea how accurate this is. Twitter notwithstanding, we shouldn't try to pretend we have a complete view of what's going on in the country as a whole--we really don't.

Which brings me to my second point. I think the best these protesters can hope for is that they somehow get the support of the army and start a civil war. (Iran has two parallel militaries, the regular military and the "Revolutionary Guards," which is very loyal to Ahmadinejad.) The worst-case scenario––and the far more likely one––is that the election and the protests spark a new wave of crackdowns and human-rights abuses that bring Iran back to the police state it was in the 1970s (under the Shah) and the 1980s (in the early days of the Islamic Republic).

Even if there is widespread support for the protesters, there are three major difficulties they face:

1) Ahmadinejad and his goons are organized. Being able to spark a flash mob is very different than actually organizing something--a revolution, a government, whatever. It's not clear what the protesters want (Mousavi as president? A revolution?) or who their leader is (since Mousavi certainly isn't). They have remarkable energy, but it is not focused.

2) Ahmadinejad and his goons are the status quo. One of the most impressive things about these protests is their size and duration. But Iranians cannot keep protesting en masse like this forever. The government only has to sit by and bide its time (as they have been doing) until either a) the protestors get tired and stop demonstrating, or b) the situation escalates into violence. And in that case...

3) Ahmadinejad and his goons have guns.

It is a depressing situation--not the least because I had been counting on Mousavi to be elected so that he could loosen visa restrictions for Americans and I could spend next summer in Iran. What is truly tragic is that this revolutionary fervor--this earnest, if undirected, desire for a better life and belief that it can actually be achieved through popular will--will almost certainly be crushed, and cruelly.

Another lovely day in Chicago

2009-06-19T13:44:00.005-05:00

This morning was to storms as Kim Jong-un is to Sasha and Malia Obama.

Chicagoist was nice enough to document the apocalypse:

Meanwhile, a string of cheerful alerts were issued by the National Weather Service.

THIS IS A DANGEROUS STORM. SEEK SHELTER INSIDE A STURDY BUILDING AND
STAY AWAY FROM WINDOWS.

It has since stopped raining, which is good for non-fish, but the NWS notes that Cook County is still rocking a flash flood warning, flash flood watch, flood warning, and severe thunderstorm watch. So that's good.

The case against high-school diplomas

2009-06-18T09:31:00.006-05:00

A piece in The New Republic today is probably making former U of C president (and father of the Core and all that is "so U of C," tie-dye kid notwithstanding [not literally though]) Robert Maynard Hutchins roll around in his grave - but maybe, just maybe, out of joy.

The author, John McWhorter, argues that students should be allowed to bust out of high school and into the real world a couple years before they are now (Hutchins started at Oberlin College when he was 16). Further, he says that college should be discouraged in favor of either not getting a degree that isn't really necessary or going into more technical-minded vocational training. The likely end result? Universities go back to being book-obsessed communes of robotic-claw libraries. Life of the mind!

In much less time than we take students' time up with now, they would be given a substantial but no-nonsense education tooled to preparing them to be productive citizens. This can be done without the pretense that any but a few Americans need to be plied with "book learning" for its own sake--as opposed to being taught how to think critically and having one's horizons extended, which is not the same thing--over several more years beyond this basic toolkit.

(Granted, I'm not sure that Hutchins would appreciate the thought of book learning "plying" anyone or that that kind of education might be a "pretense," but hey, can't win them all.)

Chronic failure

2009-06-18T09:14:00.004-05:00

In what can only be attributed to crumbling before the competition (or perhaps just reading Viewpoints columnist Steve Saltarelli), the University of Chicago Chronicle has ceased publication.

...[R]eading habits have changed dramatically in recent years. A survey of Chronicle readers this spring showed that 96 percent get some or most of their news from the Internet. Intended for an audience of more than 27,000 faculty and staff members, students and friends, fewer than 4,000 copies of the Chronicle were picked up from the free drop boxes around campus and the neighborhood during each of three different samplings this spring.
...
“After 21 years in newspapers, I don’t relish the thought of ending the Chronicle,” [Associate Vice President for News and Public Affairs Steve] Kloehn said. “But as we look to make the best use of our finite resources, it becomes clear that we have better tools available.”

In all seriousness, it's sad to see the 28-year-old U of C PR megaphone disappear. Sure, there are probably better uses for trees, but the newspaper apocalypse didn't need the extra tally mark. Maybe Sam Zell will buy it?

24-hour Mansueto cam will probably not be running all 13,248 hours till opening

2009-03-28T13:16:00.003-05:00

It's (a)live.

Great moments in money laundering

2008-11-09T09:18:00.005-06:00

This is why we don't get nice things, here in Hyde Park:

A few details warrant further examination here, hopefully in Tuesday's Maroon. First, how can you doctor a $5 bill to make it look like a $100? And wouldn't a $1 bill have been easier? At the very least it would have saved these gentlemen four dollars. Second, after seeing a $5 bill with, presumably, the "5" crossed out and "100 dollirz" written in its place, why would the first instinct be to grab a counterfeiting pen? Third, and most importantly....the Secret Service? Really?

Anyways, be on the lookout for someone in a blue jacket and someone in a blue jacket with white stripes! The scoundrels!

Richard Epstein sips the haterade

2008-11-08T14:30:00.006-06:00

Given the run on newspapers across the country Wednesday, we were hoping something similar would unfold Friday with the Maroon, the morning after the earth-shattering announcement that the GSB was changing its name to "The University of Chicago Booth School of Business." Surely, the lines would be snaking around the block at Ida Noyes, when the delivery rental car arrived with the coveted papers. By the end of the day, we'd be printing extra copies and readers would scramble for the issue on eBay.

None of that happened, and there are still copies of the Maroon available most everywhere. Apparently the allure of seeing photos of administrators wearing goofy sweatshirts and drinking champagne is not so strong. But if you haven't picked up a copy yet, you absolutely must, to read this feature, in which University faculty and former Law students reflect on the election of Barack Obama to the office of "Decider."

Most of the distinguished persons interviewed spoke briefly about how nice it is that they actually know the president-elect, and how he's a smart guy who likes basketball, and thinking things through.

And then there's Richard Epstein.

Epstein, who previously vented to the New York Times about The One's failure to befriend him, once again turns into Debbie Downer, comparing Obama to Woodrow Wilson, and making a snide remark about how Obama "became too successful to teach here." Oh!

Here it is:

CM: While Senator Obama was a senior lecturer at the law school, and not a full professor, he is still the first president since Woodrow Wilson, who was a professor and eventually president of Princeton, to have a long-standing affiliation with a university. How important is that academic experience?

Richard Epstein: Wilson was an extremely important intellectual figure before he became governor of NJ. Obama was a part-time teacher; he was not a professor in terms of having an academic output. He was a tremendously gifted teacher, but he was a man who was not a full-time academic. In the end he became too successful to teach here—I wonder why.

Wilson had some good practical skills, but the problem with Wilson was with the administration. He re-segregated public service; he was a large and powerful progressive. He was able to drive all corporations out of NJ by imposing a tremendous tax on them. He wasn’t a successful politician because he didn’t understand they way that people respond to initiatives. He thought you could just tax them and that they would stay. Instead, they went across to DE, which has repercussions to this very day.

I hope Obama doesn’t make the same mistakes. He thinks you can impose taxes and achieve redistribution of wealth, and doesn’t look at alternative strategies people might employ. There’s a great deal of similarity.

Obama comes from academic experience on one issue, which is the race question, on which he’s very astute. But that’s 10th on the list of issues he needs to deal with. With all of those issues, the more you know about them, the less confident you are.

A nation of letters

2008-11-08T12:42:00.003-06:00

Well, it's official now. Robert Zimmer, clearly pining for a prime cabinet post or ambassadorship to someplace warm, has written to the president-elect to offer his congratulations on behalf of all of us. Okay, well, that's fine, I guess, but very un-Zimmer-like. The Robert Zimmer we knew would have fired Barack and Michelle, expelled the kids from the Lab School, and announced the University has bought the house next door and is leveling it to build a hotel, or something--and then declined to comment publicly. You know, bold and dramatic action.

Anyway, here's the letter:

The Hon. Barack Obama
President-Elect of the United States of America
P.O. Box 8102
Chicago, IL 60680

Dear President-Elect Obama,

On behalf of the University of Chicago community, I congratulate you and your family on yesterday's extraordinary victory. It is with honor and pride that we, like our City of Chicago, watch one of our own ascend to the nation's highest office.

The campus was electric on Tuesday night. From the Library to the Law School, hundreds of people came together to watch—and celebrate—the election of a "University of Chicago Democrat," as described in Cass Sunstein's much-quoted New York Times Magazine portrayal. Prof. Sunstein characterizes our mutual dedication to pragmatism and independence, a reliance on data, not dogma, that will be required to address the challenges—economic development, education reform, healthcare access, international relations—that we face.

We value the contributions that you and Michelle have made to the University and to the community. We share your commitment to “our better history” and to ensuring that the University's efforts—research, teaching, medical care, and community outreach—provide vision and leadership for our city, our nation, and the world. To that end, we hope we can assist you as you craft your policy agenda.

We are all heartened by your achievement.

Yours sincerely,
Robert J. Zimmer

High and dry

2008-11-08T12:16:00.003-06:00

Well, I guess this was inevitable. From the Hyde Park Herald:

"Two teenage boys broke into the vacant Doctors Hospital building on Monday, Oct. 27, nearly escaping with a backpack full of old medications they took from the facility

...

The boys were taken to the 21st District headquarters for processing. While there, the 16-year old said the older boy had stolen medication from the building before."

Alcohol is now off-limits in the 39th precinct, because that would lead to parking congestion or jobs or something, but if you're still looking for a fix, you can still find medicine in abandoned buildings. So that's encouraging.

What we're reading

2008-11-08T12:04:00.003-06:00

In case you haven't seen it, NEWSWEEK has produced a 50,000-word, behind-the-scenes look at the campaign, relying on previously off-the-record reporting. It's horribly addictive--if only my readings for class were this compelling--especially for those of you suffering from post-dramatic campaign stress syndrome after 20 months (!!) of seemingly never-ending theatrics. It's tough to just pick a few highlights--there's dirt on infighting within the Clinton campaign, reaction to Bill in South Carolina, and, of course, plenty on Palin. Here's my personal favorite nugget so far:

At the convention in St. Paul, Palin was completely unfazed by the boys'-club fraternity she had just joined. One night, Schmidt and Salter went to her hotel room to brief her. After a minute, Palin sailed into the room wearing nothing but a towel, with another on her wet hair. She told them to chat with her laconic husband, Todd. "I'll be just a minute," she said. Salter tried to strike up a conversation. He knew that Todd was half native Alaskan and a championship snow-machine racer.

"So what's the difference between a snowmobile and a snow machine, anyway?" Salter asked. "They're the same thing," Todd replied. "Right, so why not call it a snowmobile?" Salter joshed. "Because it's a snow machine," came the reply.

Later, Schmidt and Salter went outside so that Salter could have a cigarette. "So how about the Eskimo? Is he on the level?" Schmidt asked. Salter just shrugged and took another drag.

Anyway, the whole thing is one giant after-dinner mint, so read it all here.

Robert Zimmer is like yeast

2008-11-07T09:07:00.002-06:00

He raises the dough. Not too much you can say to that news except...wow. Our take here.

Because of Ashley

2008-11-05T01:29:00.002-06:00

Well, we survived the exodus from Grant Park on the horribly re-routed (and slow) 6 bus, and just got back to Hyde Park. We'll be up and blogging shortly.

He voted

2008-11-04T16:13:00.002-06:00

Spotted at CVS while picking up batteries and notebooks for tonight's Grant Park excursion: A middle-aged man with an official Chicago board of elections ballot receipt stapled to the front of his jacket.

The third way

2008-11-04T15:05:00.002-06:00

Well, I don't think anyone thought that Hyde Park was McCain Country, but if this flier at 57th Street Books is any indication, Mac is a third-party candidate in Chicago, behind Obama and "Duck." Who is Duck? Was he vetted? Where does he stand on ethanol? Could we finally have another major American political figure worthy of the nickname "Old Fuss and Feathers"? All valid questions.

The safest block in Chicago

2008-11-04T14:48:00.003-06:00

Over the last 48 hours, the security perimeter around Barack Obama's slum-landlord-Rezko estate has at least doubled. Hyde Park Boulevard and 52nd Street are closed off from Ellis to University (at least), with police and steel barriers blocking the alleys as well. I imagine the same procedure was followed to the north, as well, meaning, in one last delicious bit of red meat for FOX News, the secret service very nearly extends to Louis Farrakhan's house at 49th and Woodlawn. Wonderful.

Anyway, that's a large chunk of Hyde Park that's now off-limits to non-residents, but I imagine it's also the safest neighborhood in the city right now. So there's that. What happens tonight will likely have a significant impact on security in Hyde Park over the next four years, and force both the University and Chicago PD to make some changes in their patrol zones...

"Elated!"

2008-11-04T12:21:00.003-06:00

As a quick follow-up to my earlier post about Obama's voting trip, apparently none other than my geography professor was waiting in line, when the senator showed up and, presumably, cut everyone. The professor, originally from England, started class gushing about watching the motorcade come down the street, where (he claims) he could see Obama's profile through the tinted glass. His post-voting reaction, at the beginning of class, was pure, God-Bless-America goodness: "I've been up standing in the streets for two and a half hours, I haven't eaten breakfast, but I'm elated!"

Word.

Candidates of change

2008-11-04T11:50:00.004-06:00

If potatoes and cookies aren't your thing, the Divinity School coffee shop has been offering its own take on the election season, featuring a myriad of compelling races. Here's Zeus, taking what is rightfully his.

And, as you can see on the right, Moses cleaned up against someone named "Chuck." We should have seen that coming. According to the student behind the counter, Gandalf defeated Dumbledore in a landslide in an earlier decision--"It wasn't really close," was his exact quote, I believe. The Tolkien supporters were aided by a stellar get-out-the-vote effort, highlighted by the one customer who left a $10 bill in the Gandalf cup. And there you have it.

Decision '08: The potato or the cookie

2008-11-04T11:28:00.003-06:00

Posters in Stuart Hall--and all over campus--advertising the upcoming Latke–Hamantash debate are taking on a familiar motif. So much for "change versus more of the same." It should be noted that Obama economics advisor Austan Goolsbee argued in favor of the latke at last year's debate, against Matthew Stolper of the Oriental Institute. The crux of his argument:

The economics unequivocally demonstrates the superiority of the latke. But anybody who's tried one pretty much knew that already.

Obama votes

2008-11-04T08:34:00.003-06:00

Well, if you were planning on staking out the Shoesmith Beulah Elementary School to watch the Obama vote, you should probably find a plan B, as he apparently voted first thing this morning. The Tribune has video and a photo. Meanwhile, Politico's Ben Smith was in Hyde Park last night. His take on the neighborhood: "extremely quiet." And, giving credence to the Senator's claim that Bill Ayers was "just a guy in the neighborhood," guess who showed up to vote:

The pool reporter waiting for Obama at his polling place ran into Ayers, who lives a couple blocks down 50th Street from the candidate, and showed up with his wife to cast his vote. He didn't respond to a question about who he voted for.