The University of Chicago is not so much an educational institution as a mental contagion for which there is no known antidote.
Exhibit A: Me.
Forty years ago, I got a B.A. at the U. of C., which has been in the news lately because of a controversial plan to make the place more fun. My Ph.D. from there is only slightly younger. So it’s been ages since I’ve felt driven to the library by pangs of guilt over a term paper come due. Yet scarcely a week goes by that I don’t travel halfway across the city to the university’s Hyde Park campus.
I’ll tell myself there’s a book I should read for some story I’ll be working on. Yet in this age of cyberspace, there aren’t many topics a reporter can’t research without getting up from his computer.
In truth, I need those South Side pilgrimages like an addict needs his fix. My habit is easily satisfied. All I need do is to walk down the long, dimly lit aisles of the library stacks. Running a hand across the spines of the books, I get a tactile high from their age. The oldest are bound in vellum. Slightly more modern ones are covered in leather.
Enormous volumes, far too large to stack vertically, are stored on their sides along the bottom shelves. They lie there as if awaiting some intellectual weight lifter to bench-press their heft of obscure knowledge.
Often, I’ll finish off one of these nerd’s-night-out expeditions at Jimmy’s, the campus bar. I rarely talk to anybody there, being cured of the impulse a few years back when I inquired about a locally famous bartender of the 1950s.
“Marcy?” replied the barmaid, who seemed fully a third my age. “I heard there was a guy like that who worked here once.”
Yet by listening to the banter up and down the bar, I feel part of the conversation. The nouns haven’t changed in half a century. The relative merits of Schopenhauer and Nietzsche still are debated nightly. So, too, are St. Pauli Girl and Budweiser.
Now, I realize that not every young person’s image of a college bar is a grubby joint whose visual focus is not an oversize TV tuned to sporting events but instead a set of Encyclopaedia Britannica shelved above the whiskey bottles. Jimmy’s eponymous founder posted those tomes there so patrons could resolve disputes– about, say, Trotsky’s position on China in 1920s, or the linguistic function of the periphrastic future–before they got to bashing each other with the bar stools.
I’m acutely aware the rest of the world isn’t like the U. of C. Most of us whose minds were permanently etched there suffered years of emotional exile in the neighborhoods of our youth. We were the ones who discovered we could zip through books just as schoolyard mates were finding they could hit breaking balls.
Of course, it’s not against the mores at many high schools to get good grades. Some teachers train up the brainier students by drilling them for the SAT test, much as the football coach makes his tackles and backs study the playbook. Americans love a good competition, on or off the athletic field.
But admit to liking the feeling of ideas bouncing around in your noggin and you’re going to sit alone in a high school lunch room. At best, you’ll share a table with some boy who dared to go out for the modern dance group.
Those among us whom the gods blessed eventually made our way to the U. of C., where we found ourselves no longer the oddball. Everybody was an oddball. Mirabile dictu, we even discovered that, with a little knowledge, you could get lucky. One exotic-looking young lady would dart across campus asking young men arcane questions. If you got the right answer, you got her.
She accosted a buddy of mine on the steps of the philosophy building. Her coal black eyes were matched by every stitch of her clothing.
“How many children did Bach have?” she demanded.
My friend knew something about music. He’d spent adolescent Saturdays in his father’s Northwest Side record store, sorting albums by Patti Page and the Four Aces. So he guessed 18. Alas, Bach had 20 kids.
The undergraduate program then was called the Hutchins College. More recently, it’s been known as the Core Curriculum, a set of prescribed courses spanning the range of knowledge. But what truly made the U. of C. work was a simple formula: The school brought together young and old who shared a love of books.
Once, my roommate was stopped by the distinguished sociologist Edward Shills, who demanded to see what he was reading. When my roommate handed over the volume tucked under his arm, Shills threw it away. He thrust upon him an anthology of love poetry by Walter de la Mare.
Walter de la Mare! The very sound of the name seemed to say I’d come a long way from my old neighborhood, where the closest thing to love poetry were the obscene grunts street-corner boys made at passing females.
By my 20s, I realized my time in Eden was drawing to a close, doomed by the inevitability of graduation. I thought I had figured out an end run around that terrifying prospect by training for a professorial career. My first week at my first teaching job showed the fallacy of that logic.
This was at a large state university in the Midwest. The department secretary asked whether I wanted season tickets in the faculty cheering section. To me, football always had seemed a cruel sport, in which small fleet-footed boys (like me) had to carry the ball into hordes of beefy monsters. Once escaped from the childhood obligation to play, I had no desire to watch others. So I replied: No thank you.
Those three words sealed my fate at the school. My mistake was to consider the secretary’s inquiry a question rather than an imperative. In addition to teaching their courses, professors were expected to sit together in the football stadium wearing the school’s colors and waving little pompom balls.
It slowly dawned on me that hosting the life of the mind isn’t a priority on most campuses. The geography of academe provided a clue. In Europe, where the university was born, it is a quintessentially urban institution. But American universities are located in the boondocks. Could their founders have hoped that, should some unwarranted thinking take place, the surrounding fields of corn and wheat would contain the habit from spreading?
There are good historical reasons for this. Long a frontier society, America couldn’t afford to be overly bookish. To win the West, John Wayne’s cowboy prototypes needed bullets, not books, in their saddlebags.
That is not to say the American university doesn’t do some things well, such as providing young people with meal tickets in the way of accounting and law careers. It also allows parents to get their kids out of the house while the hormones of late adolescence are raging. But precisely because universities function as a kind of reverse-season sleep-away camp, the life of a professor is distorted accordingly.
At a subsequent campus posting, I was asked to chaperon a student dance. This time, I knew not to say no. Still, I had not been prepared for this part of the job by years at the U. of C. devoted to reading Plato and Sartre. Come to think about it, can you imagine asking Sartre to be a chaperon?
Actually, given the French philosopher’s well-known eye for young female flesh, no dean in his right mind would do so. But the point remains: European professors aren’t expected to serve as after-classes camp counselors.
The evening proved a burlesque of a burlesque. As the times were already changing, the band turned out to be the Mothers of Invention. To this day, I still choke on the words: “Mr. Zappa, when I give you the signal, segue into `Good Night Ladies,’ and we’ll get the kids back to their dorms.”
Don’t get me wrong. I don’t fault former colleagues for accepting their lot. Think about being a professor where, on fall Saturdays, great crowds of alums march across campus, sloshed before noon and chanting: “Go Spartans!” On every fraternity house balcony, young people cheer the old grads on while squashing beer cans in each hand.
It would take a prof with the fortitude of Socrates (and recall what happened to him) to stand in front of the stadium and shout: “Don’t you know the unexamined life isn’t worth living?”
Which was the beauty of the U. of C. Questions like that could be asked. There was no football, even less of a social life, to get in the way. It was higher education stripped down to the bare essentials: good books, inquiring young minds and profs who didn’t have to worry about what flunking a fullback might do to their chances for tenure. That made it the most un-American of universities. But for us privileged few it was a pimply-faced Camelot.
Should the administration push through its proposal to change the game at this late date–if it waters down that classic curriculum, in the name of fun or whatever–we who went to the University of Chicago should consider a class-action lawsuit. After all, the experience they provided us there ruined us for any other take on life. So consider the wisdom of the ultimate dork–that bearded fellow named Karl who dared to think life could be made better by writing and reading books.
Were the old revolutionary around today, he might write us a Chicago-alums cheer:
“Nerds of the world unite! You have nothing to lose.”
