CITY: The Case of the Checkerboard Blues PAGE 15 NEWS: Get Up-to-Date on the University’s Financial Issues
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The Arts Staff’s Ten Can’t-Miss Arts and Culture Spots across Chicago
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SPORTS: UChicago Tennis Reigns Over the Court
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ZACHARY LEITER
GREY
ARTS:
To the Class of 2028,
There are a few different ways we could start this letter—
You did it!
You made it!
Welcome to the University of Chicago! Actually, welcome to The Beginning of The Rest of Your Life!
—but, after going over our options, we believe the best way to start this letter is by making a small request: breathe.
We get it, and we’ve been there. You’ve said your goodbyes to your parents and loved ones, you’ve gotten unpacked (except for that one suitcase, which you always say you’ll get to tomorrow, until suddenly it’s the end of spring quarter and you don’t even remember what’s inside), and you’re ready to make new friends— and, of course, to join seven RSOs, to become house president, and to be at the top of your class before classes even start. All in one week.
You’d think you were on The Amazing Race (or, more appropriately, UChicago Survivor).
Trying to do O-Week “correctly” is like trying to drink water out of a fire hydrant. Is there even a correct way to go about doing it all? We mean, there are definitely wrong ways. Seriously, don’t skip out on the free merch (have you seen the Bookstore prices?), be nice to your RAs and RHs, and please don’t bring up your SAT score as a conversation starter.
First-years, this is the time to calm down. We know the hard work is only just starting, and we aren’t saying you should throw away your ambition, drive, and motivation along with your move-in boxes. Instead, use these things with caution
Editor’s Note
and care, and be thoughtful about where and how you want to dedicate your energy. Sure, we could tell you to “stay true to yourself,” but this O-Week, stay true to reality—there are only 24 hours in a day, and your four years here are remarkably short.
What do you want to remember about how you spent your time here?
Who do you hope you’ll be in four years?
Perhaps it sounds like we’re giving you mixed signals. After all, if you want to be the world’s youngest pediatric oncologist while also taking Booth classes on the side while also writing for the Chicago Maroon (we’d love to have you!), shouldn’t you get started right now?
What we mean is: UChicago attracts complete nerds. There’s no getting around it. But what sets UChicago students apart, and what makes this campus so special to be a part of, is the palpable care and genuine excitement that everyone has for what they do. In every lecture room, dining hall, and dorm corridor, there is some sort of thrilling and ridiculous conversation being had, from the beauty contained in mathematical equations to the nature of human connection to Hegel (because let’s face it, just like it’s always five o’clock somewhere, there’s always some UChicago student somewhere talking about Hegel).
Dedicate yourself to these conversations. Make deep connections and pursue your genuine passions with everything you have, while also finding the time to explore new ones.
Your O-Week friend group might not last, but don’t fear change. You also won’t be the same person in six months that
you are today, holding this issue in your hands, absorbing your first few days of your very first year. In the meantime, surround yourself with people you feel proud to be friends with. Make space in your life for those whom you feel inspired by, who will stay up with you in the study lounges to finish that final P-set question, and who will save you a seat in the dining hall because house meals are just that much better when you’re there. And if your friends don’t want to go to something with you, go anyway—learn to be comfortable with your own company.
On the academic side of things, go to office hours. Most of your TAs will be fellow undergraduates, and they’ve been in your shoes. Asking questions doesn’t mean you’re “behind” or that you aren’t capable of understanding the material— remember, you’re a student for a reason.
And as a student living in Hyde Park, don’t take where we are for granted. Explore the South Side. Respect and appreciate the beauty and rich history of the community you’re now a part of. We love it here, and you’ll come to learn all of its quirks and hidden gems only by getting out there and exploring.
To our second-, third-, and fourthyears, it’s good to see your familiar faces around campus. We already know the drill—it’s impossible to get used to the quarter system (cue the weekly exclamation, “It’s what week already?!”), ear plugs should be purchased in preparation for the quarterly finals week fire alarm, and snow days don’t exist in a Chicago winter (sorry). But still, UChicago isn’t the kind of place that gets old. We’re excited to have you all back, and whether you’re still battling the Core or planning
out your next chapter beyond Hyde Park, we wish you all nothing but the best this upcoming year.
Even with all of this being said, the four of us alone couldn’t even scratch the surface of all of the advice, dos-anddon’ts, and insider information that you’ll need to make the most of UChicago. This is why the O-Issue exists—to offer each of you a glimpse into what makes UChicago, well, “so UChicago” (don’t worry, you’ll get what we mean by the end of the quarter). We are so incredibly proud of the reporters, editors, and designers behind this issue, just as they are behind each and every issue of the Chicago Maroon, UChicago’s independent student newspaper. To our over 100-person staff, we appreciate each of you (and we really do mean each of you!) more than you know, and we can’t wait to see you back in the office.
Finally, while we take our jobs pretty seriously (here’s to a quarter of not sleeping on the quad), we’re first and foremost your fellow classmates. We’re excited to meet you, to get to know you, and to cheer you on as you change this campus for the better—in fact, we’ll be the first to write about it when you do.
If you’re in need of your friendly campus newspaper, send us an email. We’d tell you to stop by our office, but even some upperclassmen would be hard pressed to tell you where Ida Noyes is.
Congratulations again, and welcome home.
Eva McCord and Kayla Rubenstein, Co-Editors-in-Chief
Anushree Vashist, Managing Editor
Zachary Leiter, Deputy Managing Editor
Get Up-to-Date on the University’s Financial Issues
By PETER MAHERAS | Head News Editor
The University suffers under growing financial pressure as costs have increased dramatically in recent decades to compete with universities with larger endowments. In 2023, the University’s budget deficit reached $239 million—8 percent of the University’s $3.14 billion operating ex-
penses. The Maroon has put together an overview of significant events concerning the University’s financial issues over the course of the last year.
November 2023: Professor Raises the Alarm
At a Chicago Center for Contemporary Theory event in November 2023, Classics professor Clifford Ando outlined the findings of a paper he published claiming that the University had abandoned its core focus on liberal arts in an attempt to increase revenues. The event was a discussion between Ando and history professor Jonathan Levy.
“I think we’ve gone far down the road in which the only fields that matter are ones that are essentially isomorphic with particular occupations,” Ando said at the event.
Ando also claimed that mounting debt meant the University was spending nearly $200 million a year paying interest on a
“‘Or am I one of those parents whose tuition is just paying for debt?’”
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debt bill of more than $5.8 billion.
“Any tuition-paying parent at the University of Chicago should ask themselves, ‘Am I one of those parents whose tuition is going to pay for my child’s education? Or am I one of those parents whose tuition is just paying for debt?’ Maybe that will change our admissions,” Ando said.
In response to these financial problems, Ando alleged that the University had limited research spending, froze hiring, and cut departmental budgets. He claimed that this practice has led to a decrease in the number of College classes taught by tenure-track research faculty.
Ando also objected to what he viewed as an emphasis on lucrative pre-professional programs at the expense of humanities and social sciences divisions.
“The goal at UChicago appears to be the transformation of the University into a gleaming network of professional schools with a disfavored and somewhat shabby teaching unit at its heart: the abandonment, in other words, of the idea of the research university that was current at its foundation and which UChicago itself did so much to cement in the national consciousness,” Ando’s report reads.
December 2023: Boyer Responds
In an op-ed in the Maroon, former Dean of the College and current Senior Advisor to the President John Boyer defended the University leadership’s work over the past decades and objected to some of Ando’s claims.
Boyer pointed to an explosion in undergraduate enrollment in recent decades and an improvement of the University’s reputation as primary reasons to be optimistic about the University’s future.
“These structural changes have also allowed the College to strengthen financial aid, to add additional instructional staff, and to contribute powerfully to the financial stability of the University,” Boyer wrote.
Boyer wrote that the University has a long history of pre-professional training and that the expansion of these programs does not contradict the University’s core values. He claimed these programs also allow College students to take advantage of expertise that exist within these schools in their third and fourth years in the College.
While he did acknowledge that this progress has been “very costly from a financial perspective,” Boyer argued that the growth of the undergraduate population should help solve these issues, as alumni of undergraduate programs are often a significant source of revenue for large universities.
Boyer also defended the University’s record on supporting interdisciplinary liberal arts education and research.
“[T]he University has deployed considerable new resources to strengthen faculty scholarly achievements and curricular innovations and to encourage more interdisciplinary research collaborations in the graduate Divisions, both in the Humanities and the Social Sciences, as well as in the Natural Sciences, in Computation, and in Molecular Engineering,” Boyer wrote.
December 2023: University Hosts Budget Town Hall
The Maroon published details from an invite-only town hall meeting held in December 2023 by the University to discuss its budget problems and its plans to address the issue. The University identified rising interest rates, a drop in operating income, and a smaller endowment than comparable universities as some of the primary drivers of the deficit.
In response to these financial pressures, the University initiated a temporary staff hiring freeze, voluntary staff retirement packages, and budget cuts for some programs.
In the presentation, the University echoed many of the points Boyer made in his Maroon op-ed, claiming that these investments, although costly, have allowed the University to compete with better-funded institutions.
Much of the presentation compared the University’s finances to other schools in the “Ivy Plus” group of universities, which includes members of the Ivy League and other highly-ranked universities such as the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and Stanford University. Among these universities, UChicago said it falls on the lower end of the scale for number of faculty positions relative to the size of its endowment.
In the short term, the presentation said the University would work to lower costs, including through the potential closure
of certain programs or services. The University also said it would grow revenue through new masters degrees, summer programs, and professional programs. However, the presentation said the longterm solution to its financial issues would be growing its endowment through philanthropic donations.
February 2024: Second Invite-Only Town Hall
The University held a second invite-only town hall in February 2024 to further outline their plans and hear the concerns of some faculty and staff. The Maroon watched the town hall, which was hosted by President Paul Alivisatos, Provost Katherine Baicker, and Chief Financial Officer Ivan Samstein.
In the town hall, University leadership reiterated many of the points made in the previous forum, including their belief that the University’s investment in recent decades has placed it in a strong position to capitalize on donations from a much larger
undergraduate alumni population.
Alivisatos, Baicker, and Samstein each defended the University’s commitment to its core values even as it initiated changes to solve its budget issues.
Baicker said that the University’s plan for cost reduction would focus particularly on central administrative units, including the Communications Office, Office of the Provost, Financial Services, General Council, and Alumni Relations and Development, among others. Although these units make up roughly 15 percent of the University’s budget, the presentation set the goal of sourcing 30 to 40 percent of the necessary expense reductions from these units.
February
2024: The Maroon Interviews Baicker and Samstein
On the day after the town hall, the Maroon interviewed Baicker and Samstein about the University’s financial issues and plans to resolve them. In the interview, Ba-
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Eva McCord & Kayla Rubenstein, Co-Editors-in-Chief
The Maroon Editorial Board consists of the editors-in-chief and select staff of the Maroon
NEWS
Peter Maheras, head editor
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VIEWPOINTS
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Samstein emphasized the University’s new focus on fully capitalizing on its campus, especially during the summer.
icker reiterated many of the points made in the town hall but stressed that changes would take time to make a difference in the University’s budget shortfalls.
Samstein emphasized the University’s new focus on fully capitalizing on its campus, especially during the summer.
“If you see our campus in the summer, it’s pretty dramatic… the reduction
in people,” Samstein told the Maroon at the time. “If you go to many peer campuses, you’ll see a lot more programming throughout the summer…. I think that’s where the academic enterprise is looking
at all the areas where we can grow revenue… but in a way that’s consistent with the academic values.”
Baicker said the University hopes to equalize revenue and costs by 2028.
Stay Healthy Together: Your Guide to Mental Health Resources on Campus
By NAINA PURUSHOTHAMAN | Senior News Reporter
The University offers a number of services to students to support their mental health. The Maroon has compiled a list of some of the mental health and wellness resources available on campus and how to access them. A more complete list of the resources available to students can be found on UChicago Student Wellness’s website, as well as a form to subscribe to the Weekly Wellness Newsletter.
24/7 Mental Health Support
A 24/7 therapist-on-call is available to all students to discuss their concerns and determine next steps for support. The therapist-on-call can be reached at (773) 702–3625.
Students can also speak with an urgent care counselor at (773) 834–9355 or drop in to the Student Wellness Center during business hours at 840 East 59th Street.
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Finally, students have access to TimelyCare, which offers virtual mental health services. More information about how students can access these telehealth resources can be found under the “Mental Health” tab on the Student Wellness website.
Let’s Talk
Let’s Talk is a program open to all undergraduate and graduate students that provides free, informal, and confidential consultations with UChicago Student Wellness therapists. No appointment is necessary, and students are not required to give their names. Sessions are in-person drop-ins on a first-come, first-served basis.
This program is a good fit for students who would like to talk through a specific problem or students who are either not sure or not interested in seeking long-term therapy.
Thursday, September 26, 5 p.m.
Wednesday, October 2, 6:30pm Tuesday, October 8, 6:30pm
Mindfulness Meditation
The Mindfulness Meditation course is a weekly hour-long class taught over four weeks each quarter. The program, which has both basic and advanced versions, offers instruction on how to practice mindfulness meditation, a type of meditation in which one focuses on one’s senses and feelings in the moment. The course also provides additional mind and body techniques to help reduce stress.
Student Recovery Group
The mission of the Student Recovery Group is to provide support for students who are exploring sobriety or who are in recovery from alcohol or other drugs. Throughout the year, students are welcome to join weekly peer-led meetings where they can share their experiences and build community in a casual, non-judgmental environment.
For more information about meeting dates, go to the “Health Promotion” tab on the Student Wellness website.
Additionally, therapists at UChicago Student Wellness can perform substance-use evaluations in which therapists will make recommendations, including but not limited to a “harm reduction” approach or a more formal treatment for substance abuse or addiction.
Therapy Groups
For students seeking group therapy, UChicago Wellness offers a variety of programs for both undergraduate and graduate students. Group therapy can be a good fit for students who are seeking clarity about current challenges with the help of a support system as well as a counselor.
Group therapy provides an opportunity for students to listen to the experiences of other group members and receive feedback, support, and validation in a safe space.
For more information about the kinds of groups offered, go to the “Mental Health” tab on the UChicago Student Wellness website.
Wellapalooza
Every fall and spring quarter, UChicago Student Wellness hosts Wellapalooza. In the past, the event has featured inflatable slides and games, food, face painting, and balloon art. Flu shots and information about campus resources have also been offered.
Winter Wellness Challenge
The Winter Wellness Challenge occurs every year during winter quarter. Teams or individuals can sign up to complete wellness challenges, such as exercising, taking selfies at sunny spots on campus, writing journal entries, and more. At the end of the quarter, participants receive prizes like meditation app subscriptions, stress balls, sunlamps, and more. More details about the challenge will be published at the beginning of January.
If a situation seems life-threatening, or if you need immediate treatment, go to the nearest emergency room or call 911. For those on campus, the University of Chicago’s Emergency Department is located at 5656 South Maryland Avenue and can be reached at (773) 702–6250.
Resources for sexual assault and interpersonal violence survivors can be found under the “Mental Health” tab on the UChicago Student Wellness website.
Autumn 2024 Brings Five Signature Humanities Courses
By ANUSHKA BANSAL | News Reporter
Signature Humanities Courses are faculty-led classes in the humanities or humanistic social sciences that offer distinctive and impactful learning experiences and “allow students to sample the best that the various humanistic disciplines and fields have to offer.” Five of these courses will be offered this autumn.
In an interview with the Maroon, Anand Venkatkrishnan, who will be teaching Philosophy and Literature in India, told students taking the courses to “be open to being surprised.”
A professor in the Divinity School, Venkatkrishnan designed the course to explore the rich literary and philosophical traditions of South Asia, spanning over 2,000 years of history. Venkatkrishnan’s favorite part of the course is “the idea of the self—is the self-something stable? Is it ever one? Is it multiple? Is it perceptible?” His course will examine how philosophical ideas are articulated in literary forms and how literature raises profound philosophical questions.
Mind, Brain, and Meaning, co-
taught by Jason Bridges, Leslie Kay, and Chris Kennedy, addresses a fundamental question: “How do physical processes in the brain lead to thought and consciousness?”
“This course is open to anyone, and we don’t assume anything in advance. Come into it with an open mind, and be willing to be challenged in how you think about [the mind],” Kennedy said in an interview with the Maroon. “This is a course that can send you off in a bunch of different directions across the University. Unlike core classes, which are focused on certain areas, this can serve as a basis for going into any of them and
demonstrate how they are linked together.” He is also particularly excited about weaving discussions on artificial intelligence into the course.
The other courses offered this quarter are Audience, Algorithms, and Ingenuity, which explores theatrical and digital performance with a focus on surprise as a key element; Monumental Buildings and Sculptures in the Past and Present, which examines the cultural significance of monumental architecture; and Queering the American Family Drama, which reimagines traditional family narratives through a queer lens.
University Announces New Via Rideshare Service to Replace Lyft Program in September
By AMY MA | Deputy News Editor
Former Dean of Students Michele Rasmussen and Associate Vice President of Safety and Security Eric Heath announced in an email to students on June 18 that the current Lyft Ride Smart program will be replaced by Via as the point-to-point transportation service on campus. The change took effect on September 1, ahead of the 2024–25 academic year.
The previous Lyft program, which was scaled back for the 2023–24 academic year, offered students seven rides per month—each subsidized up to $10. The new Via program will provide students with unlimited free rides in shared vans. Through the co-branded UChicago/Via mobile application, students will be able to request a shared van anywhere within the off-campus service area and from “defined ‘virtual spots’ on campus,” which will be set in front of academic, residential, dining, and student activity buildings. Via will maintain the same service area and operating hours (5 p.m.–4 a.m.) as the former Lyft program.
Previously, the University had expressed that, “if [Via] couldn’t find you a ride within [15] minutes, they would reroute you to a Lyft that [the University]
would pay for.” An August 28 email from Heath and Associate Vice President for Student Life Michael Hayes confirmed this feature.
Members of the Undergraduate Student Government (USG) had been advocating for this complementary policy throughout the past academic year.
USG President and third-year Elijah Jenkins told the Maroon in July that USG would be “coordinating meetings over the summer with the UChicago Department of Safety & Security and Via to discuss the free Lyft option and other concerns we have received and monitored on Sidechat.”
Via, a New York-based software company, will provide the University with the digital infrastructure for managing the new rideshare service. The company has several existing collaborations with other universities, including Northwestern, NYU, and Harvard. Students from these institutions have generally praised Via for its user-friendly interface, but they also pointed out issues with the service’s punctuality. Dani Karr, a Northwestern undergraduate, previously told the Maroon that “the vehicles often take 30–45 minutes to arrive.”
The new UChicago/Via app will also display nearby transportation, such as UGo Shuttles, for a comprehensive view of all available transportation options on campus.
The announcement follows a year of discussions within the administration about pursuing alternatives to the Lyft arrangement. The Lyft Ride Smart Program, which was first launched in September 2021 and originally offered students 10 rides each month subsidized up to $15 per ride, was curtailed for the 2023–24 academic year after reductions for July and August 2023.
In an October 2023 safety webinar, University officials floated further cuts to the Lyft program. During the webinar, Rasmussen said the program was not in place as a response to crime. The University has, however, had used expansions to the Lyft program as a response to crime in the past. After a wave of violent crime in the fall of 2021, including the murder of graduate student Shaoxiong “Dennis” Zheng, the Lyft program—which was initially in place only on Thursday, Friday, and Saturday nights—was extended to every night. The expansion, although initially promoted as temporary, was later made permanent.
When asked about the Lyft reduc -
tions last fall, University President Paul Alivisatos told the Maroon that “there was some reasonable data that showed that there were a number of Lyft rides that were being used, essentially, in times and places that were substitutional to the shuttle services.”
Alivisatos added, “And so that’s an example of having a harm to the public good because the shuttles are important, because they provide a way that’s appropriate for getting people around that doesn’t use [individual cars] and it doesn’t clog the street.”
In an interview with the Maroon in February, Heath said that the University believes that the new Via program will “[increase] access to nighttime point-to-point transportation,” while reducing the high costs associated with the Lyft program, alongside other safety and environmental concerns. In an October statement to the Maroon, the Environmental Justice Task Force criticized the University for citing environmental concerns regarding the Lyft program, which has not been the subject of any organized calls for emissions reductions, while not taking action on initiatives students have advocated for.
Siebel Scholars Class of 2025
The Siebel Scholars program was founded in 2000 to recognize the most talented graduate students in business, computer science, and bioengineering. Each year, over 80 outstanding graduate students are selected as Siebel Scholars based on academic excellence and leadership and join an active, lifelong community among an ever-growing group of leaders. We are pleased to recognize this year’s Siebel Scholars.
BIOENGINEERING
JOHNS HOPKINS UNIVERSITY
WHITING SCHOOL OF ENGINEERING
Jieneng Chen
Anastasia S. Georgiou
Benjamin D. Killeen
Denis Routkevitch
Fangchi Shao
MIT
SCHOOL OF ENGINEERING
Elizabeth Choe
David Kastner
Owen Leddy
Felicia Rodriguez
Anna Romanov
BUSINESS
MIT
SLOAN SCHOOL OF MANAGEMENT
Nick Anderson
Leah Null Budson
Britney Cheng
Rachael Knapp
Abhi Parikh
STANFORD UNIVERSITY SCHOOL OF ENGINEERING
Chew Chai
Andy YiHsuan Chen
Taylor H. Nguyen
Andrew Sho Perley
Netra Unni Rajesh
UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA, BERKELEY
COLLEGE OF ENGINEERING
Claire Hilburger
Eric Markley
Sakshi Shah
STANFORD UNIVERSITY
GRADUATE SCHOOL OF BUSINESS
Helen Berhanu
Isabella Haegg
Michael Liu
Ian McRae
Philipp Schellhaas
COMPUTER SCIENCE
CARNEGIE MELLON UNIVERSITY
SCHOOL OF COMPUTER SCIENCE
Sara McAllister
Aashiq Muhamed
HARVARD JOHN A. PAULSON
SCHOOL OF ENGINEERING & APPLIED SCIENCES
Zana Buçinca
Daniel Halpern
Tao Lin
Spandan Madan
Sanket Shah MIT SCHOOL OF ENGINEERING
Song Eun Kim
Mingyang Liu
Tuong Phung
Sarina Sabouri
Jinbi Tian
PRINCETON UNIVERSITY
SCHOOL OF ENGINEERING AND APPLIED SCIENCE
Kun Woo Cho
Dan Friedman
Sunnie S. Y. Kim
Sadhika Malladi Zirui Wang
STANFORD UNIVERSITY
SCHOOL OF ENGINEERING
Robert Chen
Ammar Ratnani
Joe Tsai
Zhiyu Xie
Han (Paris) Zhang
TSINGHUA UNIVERSITY
DEPARTMENT OF COMPUTER
SCIENCE AND TECHNOLOGY
Qilin Chen
Haitao Li
Hao Liu
Niqi Liu
Zheyuan Zhang
UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA, SAN DIEGO
JACOBS SCHOOL OF ENGINEERING
Wade Johnson Nishta Krishnan
Zhengxing Li
Ali Sarikhani
Helyaneh Ziaei Jam
UNIVERSITY OF CHICAGO
BOOTH SCHOOL OF BUSINESS
Yigit Akdemir
Yana Kaplun
Dongyu Mao
Carolina Ortega-Londono
Michelle Xuming Zhang
UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA, BERKELEY COLLEGE OF ENGINEERING
Cade Gordon
Jessica Lin
Oliver Yu
UNIVERSITY OF CHICAGO
SCHOOL OF COMPUTER SCIENCE
Zewei Liao
Michael Rosenbaum
Brennan Schaffner
Lennart Maximilian Seifert
Shawn Shan
UNIVERSITY OF ILLINOIS AT URBANA-CHAMPAIGN
COLLEGE OF ENGINEERING
Tanay Dixit
Hao-Yu Hsu
Baoyu Li
Ashutosh Sharma
Alan Wang
www.SiebelScholars.com
Recap of the DNC: Politics, Police, and Protests
By ERIC FANG | News Editor and TIFFANY LI | News Editor
The Democratic National Convention (DNC) began at Chicago’s United Center on Monday, August 19.
Throughout the week, UChicago provided housing for some of the estimated more than 500 police officers from across Illinois and from Milwaukee, Wisconsin, who provided security at the DNC. The Maroon confirmed this from a University spokesperson prior to the convention.
According to a post on X by Chicago Police, the Woodlawn dining hall was also used for a Chicago Police training session for “over 300 officers from Illinois and Milwaukee.”
On the first day of the DNC, the March on the DNC took place with the main demand of ending U.S. aid to Israel. Community members and UChicago students participating in the march included Southside Together Organizing for Power (STOP), an organization that works against the displacement of Black communities in Woodlawn and its surrounding areas.
The march consisted of a few thousand protesters, who gathered to rally at Union Park. 13 people, whom police said were unconnected to the main protest march, were arrested after they breached
the fence around the convention center.
On day two of the DNC, prominent Democrats spoke in support of former California Senator and Democratic presidential nominee Kamala Harris. Several speakers were affiliated with the University, including former President Barack Obama, former First Lady Michelle Obama, and Senator Bernie Sanders (IVT.) A.B. ’64.
Barack Obama, who taught as a senior lecturer at the University of Chicago Law School from 1992 to 2004, delivered the keynote speech.
“History will remember Joe Biden as an outstanding President who defended democracy at a moment of great danger,” Obama said.
Obama also said Harris is the best candidate to beat former President and Republican nominee Donald Trump and serve America.
“She’ll work on behalf of every American. That’s who Kamala is,” Obama said.
Obama’s speech came on the heels of a speech by his wife and former First Lady Michelle Obama. Beginning in 1996, Michelle Obama served as UChicago’s associate dean of student services. She was then named UChicago Medical Center’s
executive director for community affairs in 2002 and became vice president for community and external affairs in 2005.
In her speech, Michelle Obama praised Harris and directed several attacks at Trump. Ultimately, she encouraged voters, regardless of political affiliation, to make their voices heard and to protect democracy.
Earlier in the evening, Sanders, who graduated from the College with a political science degree in 1964, listed some of Congress’s accomplishments since 2020.
“My fellow Americans, in the last three and a half years working together, we have accomplished more than any government since FDR,” Sanders said. “But much, much more remains to be done.”
Through the Institute of Politics (IOP), a cohort of UChicago students attended the second day of the DNC along with IOP Director of Career Development Mark Schauerte. One of the students attending was Leonardo Lopez, a second-year political science major in the College.
“I’ve never really felt that energy of people being all together in believing in something, just being there to support who they think would be best for the country,” Lopez said. “So it was a really thrilling experience to see and also to meet really prominent politicians that you see on the news all the time.”
Day three of the DNC saw the IOP host Youth VoteFest and UChicago’s Bengali students association, Kheyal, hold a protest near the DNC. The convention activities featured a keynote speech from vice-presidential nominee and Minnesota Governor Tim Walz, following high-profile figures, including former president Bill Clinton and Speaker Emerita Nancy Pelosi.
U.S. Secretary of Transportation Pete Buttigieg and Chicago Mayor Brandon Johnson were among numerous prominent speakers at the IOP’s Youth VoteFest, which consisted of a series of talks and workshops intended to help attendees increase youth political engagement. The IOP held another VoteFest this July in Milwaukee during the Republican National Convention.
In a speech before the Q&A, Buttigieg spoke about how Democrats had begun
to take back the concept of “freedom” from Republicans in their messaging.
“Often, good government is about making sure that our freedom is enhanced through good policy intervention,” Buttigieg said.
Buttigieg also said he chose to appear on conservative television channels such as Fox News because he wanted Democrats’ messaging to reach voters it wouldn’t otherwise reach, promoting healthier conversations.
“I can’t be mad at somebody for not embracing our message if they’ve literally never heard it,” Buttigieg said.
During a live episode taping at VoteFest, New York Times’ “The Run-Up” host Astead Herndon spoke with Brandon Johnson. During their conversation, Johnson said he felt the progressive movement is making headway and that he thought Democrats could win young voters over despite their current and historically lower levels of engagement.
Kheyal held a protest near the DNC on Wednesday in honor of a 31-year-old trainee doctor whom the perpetrator raped and murdered on August 9 in Kolkata, India.
“We demanded justice for the victim and a speedy trial, and we demanded strict punishment for the perpetrators,” said Soumik Ghosh, a member of Kheyal and a fourth-year computer science Ph.D. student. “More broadly, this was a protest against the deeply ingrained patriarchy and the misogyny that’s present in society that makes daily life unsafe for women.”
On Thursday, the final day of the convention, Vice President Kamala Harris became the official Democratic Party presidential nominee. UChicago students fourth-year Cameron Landin ’25 of Georgia and third-year Dariel Cruz Rodriguez of Florida were among the delegates who had cast their votes for her in a virtual nomination process earlier in August.
“It definitely is the experience of a lifetime. I can say that much, as one of the youngest delegates from Georgia,” Landin said in an interview with the Maroon after the convention.
Both Landin and Cruz Rodriguez said they supported Harris as the nominee
Vice President and Democratic Presidential candidate Kamala Harris speaks at the final night of the 2024 Democratic National Convention in Chicago. eric fang .
Class of 2028
“I’ve never really felt that energy of people being all together in believing in something [...]”
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but also wanted to see more action from her and her potential future administration on the Israel-Hamas war.
“For me personally, the biggest issue right now is calling for an immediate and permanent ceasefire in Gaza and stop[ping] the Palestinian suffering in Gaza,” Cruz Rodriguez said. He added that he was also disappointed that the
DNC had not lifted Palestinian voices.
Landin said he was “livid” that the DNC denied a speaking slot for a Palestinian American. The denial led to a sitin of a group of ceasefire delegates outside the United Center from Wednesday until Thursday night.
Harris said in her speech on Thursday that she would “always ensure Israel has the ability to defend itself” and that she
and President Joe Biden were “working to end this war, such that Israel is secure, the hostages are released, the suffering in Gaza ends, and the Palestinian people can realize their right to dignity, security, freedom, and self-determination.”
Third-year UChicago student Simone Nelson attended the DNC through the IOP as a guest in the United Center. She spoke to the Maroon about her experience.
“It was truly the most amazing thing getting to see the Obamas speak. These are once-in-a-lifetime opportunities, and I’m just so grateful to the IOP,” Nelson said. “Being able to be around people who are really excited about voting and democracy in the election has been really energizing and a really cool experience.”
Trades and Supply Chain Workers at UChicago Medicine End Strike
By EVGENIA ANASTASAKOS | Senior News Reporter
125 trades and supply chain workers at UChicago Medicine (UCM), represented by Service Employees International Union (SEIU) Local 73, ended their strike on Saturday, July 20, after six days of picketing.
SEIU Local 73 had been in negotiations with UCM for more than six months without reaching an agreement. Their demands included wage increases to match inflation, more affordable health insurance, and improved benefits. The union had also filed multiple unfair labor practice charges with the National Labor Relations Board (NLRB), including surveillance of union activity, canceling bargaining in retaliation for concerted activity, and failure to provide information relevant to bargaining.
In a press release, the union announced the new three-year contract, which offers year-over-year pay raises of 5 percent, 3 percent, and 3 percent with an $800 bonus; “improvements in shift differentials;” and “stronger language on holidays, bereavement, and Advancement to Operating Engineer.” The contract makes no progress on healthcare costs or quotas for supply chain workers, which were some of the union’s other main demands. According to union officials, a previous proposal extended to the union on Friday, July 12 had allocated 2.1 million dollars for wages but was criticized
by union leaders for not addressing other key demands.
“This is the best contract I’ve seen in my time here at the hospital,” painter Justin Babitsch said in the SEIU press release.
Enterprise Facilities Operations and Environmental Health & Safety Vice President Judd Johnson and Supply Chain and Support Services Senior Vice President Eric Tritch addressed the University of Chicago Medical Center (UCMC), Biological Sciences Division, and Ingalls Community in a communication on Saturday. Johnson and Tritch thanked a federal mediator, SEIU’s bargaining team, and those who negotiated on behalf of the hospital in the communication.
Workers returned to their regularly scheduled shifts on Sunday, July 21 at 7 a.m.
During the six days of the strike, while workers and union officials gathered for rallies, marches, and speeches, UCM hired replacement workers to continue service as normal.
In a statement to the Maroon on Wednesday, July 17, UCMC wrote that “This workforce disruption does not impact ongoing patient care and we have engaged experienced replacement workers who are ensuring all our operations continue seamlessly. No one benefits from a
strike and we look forward to welcoming this group of nearly 130 employees back after SEIU’s strike concludes.”
“We’re out here because we’re fighting for fair wages, affordable healthcare, discipline policy that makes sense. We’re fighting for the things that they deserve. They’re the people that make sure the supplies run through this facility, that the boilers stay running, that the doors stay working, that this whole entire hospital stays moving and making sure that they can provide the best patient care,” SEIU Local 73 Executive Vice President Jeff Howard said during a Monday press conference.
At a Solidarity Rally on Tuesday, July 16, workers union officials gathered in what they called a “protest plaza”—an
area outside of Mitchell Hospital enclosed within plastic crowd control barriers— and chanted phrases like “Who are we? 73!” and “U. of C., you can’t hide, we can see your evil side.” The crowd included workers and union officials, along with some nurses and doctors from UCM.
The strike was met with demonstrations of solidarity from other unions on campus, including UChicago Graduate Students United – United Electrical, UChicago Faculty Forward, and National Nurses United. John Hieronymus, a registered nurse at UCM, said that the nurses’ union sent an email to UCM management urging the hospital to listen to SEIU-73’s demands.
“Nurses depend on the work of each
evgenia anastasakos .
“And we
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sure as hell depend on our supply chain workers.”
and every UChicago trade and supply chain worker that shows up to work. We depend on our painters. We depend on our engineers. And we sure as hell depend on our supply chain workers. Without supplies we cannot provide the kind of care that people travel from all over the world to receive at the University of Chicago,”
Hieronymus said.
At the rally, SEIU-73 Executive Vice President Jeff Howard said that strikers had experienced intimidation from management, who had called police on picketing workers and had cooperated with UPS to remove delivery drivers who refused to cross the picket line.
“They’re trying to find any little thing
that they can to screw with us and try to get us to not do what we’re doing. And all we’re asking them to do is come in here and negotiate a fair contract, so everyone can get back to work,” Howard said.
On Wednesday, workers were joined by Representative Jesús G. “Chuy” García (D-Ill.) during a march around campus. They were also joined on the picket line
by a giant inflatable “Fat Cat,” intended to symbolize greedy management.
In a press release after the conclusion of the strike, SEIU Local 73 President Dian Palmer said “We will only get stronger! I’m proud of all of you and this fight is not over. We will continue to build and grow stronger and continue to fight UCMC to get what each of you deserve!”
UChicago United for Palestine, 2023–24
By KATHERINE WEAVER | Deputy News Editor
In the 2023–24 academic year, colleges and universities across the country saw a major increase in student activity surrounding the conflict between Israel and Hamas in Gaza. This activity was sparked by Hamas’s attack on Israel on October 7, 2023, and Israel’s subsequent invasion of the Gaza strip and continued military engagement in the region.
The protests came to a head in April and May of 2024, when dozens of campuses became the site of pro-Palestine encampments—collections of tents and other spaces occupied by students. They demanded, among other causes, that their institutions disclose and divest from investments and sever scholarly ties related to Israel, as well as take steps to support a ceasefire in Gaza. UChicago United for Palestine (UCUP), a coalition of groups which—among other demands—calls for the University to increase transparency around its endowment, divest from arms manufacturers, and cut academic ties with the Israel Institute, led many of these protests on UChicago’s campus. UCUP’s actions last academic year brought into focus the University’s professed commitment to free expression policies and a history of student protests on our campus.
November
11, 1967
The
Kalven Report
Following two major protest movements on campus, the Vietnam War Selective Service protests and a sit-in in opposition to racially discriminatory housing policies in University-owned buildings, then-University President George W. Beadle appointed the Kalven Committee to create “a statement on the University’s role in political and social action.”
This is the origin of UChicago’s idea of “institutional neutrality.” The University’s professed stance is that it tries not to take a stand on social or political issues in order to encourage the expression of all individual opinions on those issues. The report does include an “exceptional instance” clause, which allows for the University to take political action when “the very mission of the university and its values of free inquiry” is under threat.
1980s
Divestment from Apartheid Africa
Throughout the 1980s, students led marches, set up picket lines, and wrote letters to encourage the University to divest to put pressure on the apartheid regime
in South Africa. While other universities, such as Harvard, Columbia, and the University of California, divested in response to student protests, UChicago did not.
2008
Founding of Students for Justice in Palestine (SJP) UChicago
The first chapter of SJP was founded in 1993 at UC Berkeley; since then, more than 200 chapters have been established across North America. The organization’s stated mission is “to promote justice, human rights, equality, liberty, and self-determination for the Palestinian people.”
January 2015
The Chicago Principles
Then-University President Robert J. Zimmer commissioned the Committee on Freedom of Expression in July of 2014 following a string of incidents at schools across the nation where students attempted to prevent controversial commencement speakers. The Committee drafted and released a document widely known as the Chicago Statement or the Chicago Principles.
The Chicago Principles reiterated UChicago’s commitment to free expression and discourse, as well as its ideas of institutional neutrality. Several colleges across the country have since committed to similar principles of free speech.
October 7, 2023
The War Begins
On October 7, Hamas, considered by the United States to be a terrorist organization, launched an attack on southern Israel, killing around 1,200 people and taking 240 hostages. Israel launched a counterattack the same day, which led into the
present Israel–Hamas war.
October 9, 2023
Response to October 7
Several campus Jewish organizations, including UChicago Maroons for Israel, University of Chicago Hillel, UChicago Kehillah, and UChicago Chabad, hosted a vigil on the quad for those killed on October 7.
October 16, 2023
Autumn Quad Occupation Begins
On Monday, SJP began daily protests in the central quad, which continued for most of the remainder of the quarter. Later that day, several UChicago fraternities host an event titled “UChicago Greek Life Coming Together to Condemn Terror.”
October 20, 2023
Opposing Protests
A collection of UChicago Jewish organizations hosted a rally on the quad in opposition to the SJP protests. University officials briefly intervened when an altercation broke out between a handful of demonstrators around 12:33 p.m.
November 9, 2023
UCUP Occupies Rosenwald Hall, Protesters Arrested
The existing group UChicago United adopted the name UChicago United for Palestine; the group is made up of several pro-Palestine organizations including SJP, Faculty for Justice in Palestine (FJP), and the Environmental Justice Task Force. The group held a sit-in at Rosenwald Hall, which houses the Admissions office, which ended in the arrest of 18 undergraduates, eight graduate students, and two professors.
Students marching on the quad in the 1980s. the maroon archives
Faculty members taped signs to their chests with the names of professors and academics killed in Gaza.
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December 20, 2023
Charges Dropped Against Rosenwald Protesters
State prosecutors dropped all charges of criminal trespass against the 26 students and two faculty members who were arrested at Rosenwald Hall.
January 21, 2024
UCUP Creates Art Installation of 23,000 Flags on Quad
UCUP members and affiliates spent two days drilling holes into the frozen ground on the quad to plant 23,000 small flags in the shape of the Palestinian flag. The 23,000 flags represented the 23,000 confirmed deaths in Gaza at that time.
January 24, 2024
Yinam Cohen Visits Campus
Israeli Consul General Yinam Cohen visited UChicago to meet with University President Paul Alivisatos, as well as with students from Hillel and Chabad, two Jewish student organizations. UChicago Jews for a Free Palestine published a letter denouncing the meeting, while some students present at the meeting with Cohen said it was constructive in addressing the antisemitism they faced.
January 26, 2024
Protest Against Cohen’s Visit
Two days after Cohen’s visit, UCUP held a march and staged a die-in at campus coffee shop Pret A Manger. The chain had announced an expansion in Israel in 2022 and abandoned the effort in June 2024. The meeting was criticized as a violation of UChicago’s purported institutional neutrality, as University leadership had not
met with any Palestinian or Muslim students despite multiple requests to address campus Islamophobia to the same degree as antisemitism.
“University leaders routinely meet with international leaders… and such meetings do not represent political endorsement,” a University spokesperson said regarding the meeting.
April 29, 2024
The Encampment Begins
UCUP began their nine-day encampment on the quad on a Monday morning with signs and about 20 tents set up on the side of the center quad neighboring Levi Hall. The Maroon reported live updates each day of the encampment as it grew to 150 tents, garnered hundreds of supporters, and held daily protests and other events.
Only the three largest incidents throughout the encampment are included on this timeline.
May 2, 2024
Palestinian Flag Raised on University Flagpole
The American flag, which usually flies in the center of the quad, was taken down around noon by University Facilities Services workers in anticipation of inclement weather. Before Facilities could raise it again, encampment participants commandeered the flagpole to raise a Palestinian flag, which they guarded from police attempts to remove for several hours. Before nightfall, protesters taped the flagpole’s halyard down to prevent the flag from being taken down.
May 3, 2024
Fraternity Members March on Encampment
A group of individuals associated with University fraternities marched on the encampment with American flags while playing America-themed music, with the goal of reinstalling the American flag on the flagpole. The two protests faced off in the center of the quad; as tensions rose, UCPD officers in riot gear formed a line between the groups to separate them and remained on scene for the next two hours
as the counterprotest slowly dispersed. At the height of the protests, the Maroon estimated that the crowd numbered roughly 1,000 people.
May 7, 2024
Police Raid the Encampment
After two nights of false alarms, UCPD officers raided the encampment at 4:35 a.m. on its ninth day. Protesters had only minutes to comply with orders to disperse before UCPD officers entered the encampment and began dismantling it. Once protesters and members of the press—including Maroon staff—had been pushed out of the quad, officers handed protesters slips of paper detailing the consequences for remaining on the quad.
May 15, 2024
Faculty Die-In
A week after the encampment’s dissolution, members of UChicago FJP held a rally, teach-in, and die-in in front of Levi Hall, just outside of the area of the encampment. Faculty members taped signs to their chests with the names of professors and academics killed in Gaza. This date was also the 76th anniversary of the Nakba, the historic expulsion of Palestinians from the land which is now Israel.
May 17, 2024
Protesters Occupy Institute of Politics
On Friday of UChicago’s annual Alumni Weekend, a group of alumni and students organized a rally on the Midway which led to a march to the Institute of Politics (IOP). Protesters then occupied the building for less than half an hour before UCPD entered and the protest moved back outside the building. They also hung an effigy of
President Alivisatos from a tree. Around 9:30 p.m., the protesters marched to the home of President Alivisatos and chanted outside. They dispersed by 10 p.m. and no arrests were made.
May 24, 2024
Degrees Withheld from Protesters
Several students received emails from the Associate Dean of Students informing them that their degrees would be withheld due to ongoing disciplinary procedures related to the encampment and IOP occupation. A petition calling on the University to award degrees to the students gathered more than 5,000 signatures in under a week.
June 1, 2024 Graduation Walkouts
At least 100 students walked out during the University’s convocation ceremonies in protest to both the University’s continued refusal to divest and the decision to withhold degrees from a total of five students from various departments. After the walkout, police arrested one individual, who was unaffiliated with the University, after physical altercations between police and protesters broke out at a closed intersection.
August 7, 2024 Withheld Degrees Conferred
Disciplinary procedures against the five students whose degrees had been withheld—four undergraduates and one MAPH student—were resolved in July and August, and all five students received their degrees by August 7.
A UCUP speaker at the installation. nathaniel rodwell-simon
Protesters at the IOP nathaniel rodwell-simon .
nathaniel rodwell-simon
Magic Protects This Space
Every sunrise, swimmers gather at Promontory Point to dive into the open water.
What makes this place so magical for these swimmers?
By EVGENIA ANASTASAKOS | Grey City Editor
It’s 5:30 a.m. on Thursday at Promontory Point. Two swimmers chart their course from the rocks, strapping swim caps around their chins and clipping brightly colored inflatable buoys around their waists. They descend the ladder on the edge of the rocks, wading through waist-high water before slipping in, bright neon swim caps indistinguishable from the buoys floating on the rippling surface. Surprised laughter echoes out as skin meets cold water. The sun is only just crossing the horizon, dyeing the sky a blazing pink and orange.
Perched on the mismatched steps of the limestone revetment, it feels like it’s just me and the clouds of gnats, and maybe the occasional lone runner in the distance. Lake Shore Drive is quieter than usual, a dull thrumming in the background instead of its usual roar. The 4:50 a.m. wakeup call was brutal, but the sunrise makes me believe, if only for a moment, that I could start doing this more often. The rest of Hyde Park is still shaking off its sleep— except for the swimmers, who continue to arrive at the Point, alert and ready to brave Lake Michigan’s open waters.
A swimmer turns around the jutting end of the peninsula: long, careful freestyle strokes are punctuated with a splash as hands collide with the surface and the water gives way. He nears the rocks, grips onto the metal ladder, and hauls himself out of the water.
Bill Stamets is a stalwart Point swimmer and a regular poster in the “Promontory Point Swimmers” Facebook group, where he shares daily pictures of water temperature readings held up against the backdrop of the sunrise. On the shore, he
greets the new arrivals as he dries off. Today, Bill can’t linger as long as he usually does: he has a train to catch, and he hurries away before many of the usual faces can appear.
Although he isn’t a swimmer, David Travis is one of the first few on the rocks. He snaps pictures of the sunrise on his phone and chats with the swimmers as they gear up. David has been photographing the sunrise swims for years. He says he’s also drawn to the water, but as a sailor, not a swimmer.
Two more swimmers, Veronica Locher and Gretchen Wahl, head out, carving arrows through the gently rippling water. A duck passes through their wake. Tiny fish are hopping out of the water, which Gretchen later tells me is an unusual sight. She thinks it’s because the water is so calm today.
Swimmers share news about family, work, and what books they’ve been reading as they clamber down the steep rocks. As one descends the ladder, her red goggles slip from her hands. Another swimmer dives in to search, rising out of the lake with the goggles in hand, hoisted up like a trophy.
Alfred Caldwell, the Park District landscape architect who designed the Point, said that he hoped to build “a place you go to, and you are thrilled—a beautiful experience, a joy, a delight.” Every morning, the swimmers chase that thrill, risking freezing water and unruly waves.
The park wasn’t always there to swim off from. Underneath the peninsula’s grass is artificial landfill—mostly sand and garbage—which was constructed in the 1920s. An article from the Hyde Park Herald in
1926 described the “unsightly appearance” of the Promontory Point construction site, which had long been “used as a dumping ground for all sorts of rubbish—ashes, tin cans, broken brick, plastering from walls of demolished buildings, dirt from excavations, etc.” In warmer weather, residents of the nearby homes found that the lake breeze wafted ash, dust, and plaster from the landfill through their open windows. Sand had already been pumped in over the landfi ll near the north end of the peninsula, but work was slower on the southern side, where debris was still being hauled in by carts and wheelbarrows. Caldwell was put to work reshaping the promontory in 1936. His redesign included the central meadow and the hill upon which the fieldhouse would later be built. In an interview celebrating the park’s 50th anniversary, he said that he had hoped to convey “a sense of space and a sense of the power of nature and the power of the sea.”
Caldwell took cues from the Midwest’s natural environment, planting native trees and plants. The historic limestone revetment, which the swimmers enter the water from, was meant to mimic the Midwest’s natural rock formations and glacial ridges.
The sandpapery, pockmarked limestone slabs of the revetment curve and ebb, like stepping stones rising out of the lake. Scattered among them, you might see painted no-swimming signs with symbols of swimmers, mid-freestyle stroke, with red lines struck through them.
People have been swimming at Promontory Point for decades—not always legally. Until the Chicago Park District created a designated swimming area, swimmers periodically faced legal consequences, such as tickets or even arrests.
On a summer evening in 1987, two Point swimmers, Ted Erikson and Deborah Sigler, were ordered out of the water by lifeguards. When they refused, they were charged with disorderly conduct and breach of the peace. Another swimmer had already been arrested, just half an hour earlier. Although the Park District lifeguards usually turned a blind eye to the swimmers, a recent series of drownings had prompted a crackdown. Officials worried that swimmers set a bad example. Sigler and Erikson were handcuffed and briefly detained.
Erikson had been a long time open-water swimmer and Hyde Park resident. In 1961, he was the fi rst to swim across Lake Michigan, and in 1965, he crossed the English Channel, both ways. Up until his death in 2021, he continued to be a frequent Point swimmer. (Ask any of the regulars, and they’d be happy to share their stories.)
“If I drown, I drown—and it’s a good way to go, incidentally,” he told the Chicago Tribune in 1987.
Sigler, also a Hyde Park resident, told the Herald that she thought of the lake as her “swimming pool.”
A day later, Erikson and Sigler led a “swim-in,” to protest their arrests. Erikson also circulated a “right to swim” petition, which allegedly garnered around 150 signatures. The conflict between swimmers and the city also played out across the pages of the Hyde Park Herald, where swimmers expressed their frustration with the lack of a clear policy on lake swimming through angry op-eds and letters to the editor. On one page, sandwiched between a tirade about shopping center development and a clarification that, acCONTINUED ON PG. 13
“To take away this space, you kill the community.”
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tually, the Medici’s hamburgers are always fresh, is a letter from a Point swimmer to the Hyde Park Herald, which calls the lake “one of the joys of a Chicago summer.”
“Our own experiences with swimming conditions have led to the conclusion that the Chicago Park District has, at present, essentially no policy, and that one is badly needed,” the letter said.
Tickets and citations continued, onand-off, during the decades after Erikson and Sigler’s arrests. In a letter to the Hyde Park Herald, the Community Task Force for Promontory Point (which would later become the Promontory Point Conservancy), complained of “overzealous police officers” harassing swimmers and “criminalizing an innocent recreational activity.” In a 2008 letter to the Herald, Ted Erikson, then in his 40th year as a Point swimmer, asked, “Must we again remind the city that Lake Michigan belongs to the people?”
The swimmers weren’t the only ones in a fight against the city.
You can still see the Promontory Point Conservancy’s stickers around Hyde Park, on car bumpers, computers, and sometimes even dorm room walls. They flash catchy sayings like “Save the Point… Again!” and “LIMESTONE ROCKS!” For the past 24 years, the conservancy has been waging campaigns to save the Point again, and again, and again.
Alfred Caldwell designed the Point’s limestone lakefront to be made of blocks laid in terraced layers, which can be flexi-
ble under the crashing waves. This was one of the strengths of the design, according to Debra Hammond of the Promontory Point Conservancy. While concrete can crack under the water’s impact, the stones can move with the elements. Still, decades of storms and damage have left Caldwell’s limestone crumbling, rocks jutting like crooked teeth.
In 2000, community meetings were convened in response to city plans to rebuild the historic revetment. The city had already replaced other stretches of lakefront with concrete, and Hyde Park residents hoped to save their remaining limestone.
The Hyde Park Herald wrote that the crowd “mumbled and sighed” when an official from the Chicago Department of the Environment said that the limestone would be too expensive to fix. Swimmers also happened to be present at the meeting, with their own complaints and fears about water access.
The activism in Hyde Park sparked animosity between Point organizers and the city. A year later, Fifth Ward alderman and Point advocate Leslie Hairston accused the Park District of excluding her from budget meetings and for unfairly targeting Hyde Park for recent activism. Similarly, a 2002 Hyde Park Herald editorial alleged that crackdowns on swimmers were in response to Point advocates.
“As goose-pimpled swimmers hop from foot to foot while officers slowly write out tickets that judges historically have
dismissed, we wonder: Is it because we fought so hard against the park district’s plan to replace the limestone and wood revetments at the Point?” the article asked. Just the year before, during heated battles over the revetment plan, park officials had announced that Point swimming would no longer be tolerated.
“Is Hyde Park being punished for its activism?” the author continued.
Since then, it’s been a back-and-forth between activists and the city. In recent years, the Conservancy secured Promontory Point’s listing on the National Register of Historic Places and achieved a Chicago Landmark designation. This February, the Point Conservancy sounded the alarm after obtaining drawings that showed the Department of Transportation’s proposed contractor’s plan for the Point, in which the revetment was replaced by concrete and ornamental limestone was scattered through the park. In a press release, the Conservancy predicted that, if the plans went through, the Point could be closed for three to five years.
However, this May, the Conservancy breathed a sigh of relief. The Chicago Department of Transportation, Chicago Parks District, and U.S. Army Corps of Engineers released a statement saying that there is “no intention of replacing the limestone with a continuous concrete revetment.”
“To take away this space, you kill the community,” said Jack Spicer, president and founder of the Promontory Point
Conservancy, in an interview with the Maroon
There’s no single group of Point swimmers. There are the swimmers at dawn, groups who come later in the morning, and even the “happy hour crowd,” as one of the early risers calls them. Some swim every day, while others come less frequently. Experience and goals range: you’ll see anything from casual treading water to long-distance race training. The crew expands during the summer and ahead of races, with just a small group staying yearround. Many of them are Hyde Park residents, although some make the journey from elsewhere in the city.
Over time, the early morning Point swimmers have gotten to know one another, constructing their own language of landmarks and routes. They swim to “the lonely buoy,” pass by “the ugly sculpture,” go towards “the beautiful view.” Swimmers watch out for one another, careful not to lose anyone in the infinite blue.
“It’s sort of like walking. There are paths, almost, that you can swim,” Alison Cuddy tells me.
Alison is a writer, who has written extensively about her experiences as a year-round lake swimmer. She has been swimming in Lake Michigan since moving to Chicago in 1999. A friend who grew up in Hyde Park introduced her to the Point, and she fell in love. She eventually moved to Hyde Park and would swim after work, before connecting with the early morning Point swimmers and beginning to swim long-distances in the open water.
“That’s when I realized, ‘Oh, I can swim all the time.’ And really swim,” Alison tells me.
She says that the Point is an accepting place, with people drawn together by the lake.
“You can get in and learn how to be in it and feel confident,” she says. “It’s interesting to swim alongside people who are competitive swimmers and people who are just learning how to swim. I love the continuum of that and feeling that there’s not any one way I have to be.”
Veronica, a third-year Ph.D. student at UChicago and a fellow swimmer, also finds swimming at the Point to be an empowering experience.
“Being there in a swimsuit requires
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“I think about growing old here, and I think about the Point a lot.”
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vulnerability,” she says. “There are all of these different people with different bodies, all in swimsuits. Wrinkles, big bodies, smaller bodies, older bodies, younger bodies.”
Veronica says her first year at UChicago was challenging, leaving her feeling “out of it” and needing “recentering.” She began going to the Point every morning to start her day, and, in July of 2023, began swimming with friends who were training for a triathlon.
Veronica didn’t become a part of the community of early morning swimmers immediately.
“No one really notices you until you have some form of consistency,” she says. But after a week of showing up daily, one of the older swimmers asked her for her name. Veronica says she was religious about learning the others’ names and soon became friends with them.
“If I didn’t swim for a couple of days, they were like, “Where are you?” Veronica says.
Alison and Veronica are both daily swimmers. Others, like Julia Scott, enjoy the Point whenever they can. Scott grew up in Hyde Park, before moving away for college. In her junior year, she studied abroad in Paris and decided to transfer to university there. She never left France, and has stayed to live, work, and raise a family there. For the past forty summers,
she tells me, she has returned to her family’s home in Hyde Park. She’s been swimming at the Point since childhood and now brings her own children there, too.
“When I do go back, I spend every day there. I cannot, actually, get enough of it. I think about it as soon as the weather starts getting nice, and I just need to get in that water,” she says. During her first, jet-lagged days back, Scott says that she swims at the sunrise. On those days, she often sees the early morning swimmers and says hello to them. She says that the first week home is “glorious.”
In Europe, Scott unsuccessfully searched for substitutes for Promontory Point. Even Marseille, which is a few hours from Paris by train, is “no Lake Michigan,” she explains.
“I think about growing old here, and I think about the Point a lot. I don’t know if I want to grow old in a place that’s landlocked and in a place where there’s no Point,” she says. “There’s something about the lake that feels so comforting and safe. I always feel so enveloped by it. When I’m in that lake, it feels really right. It’s almost like I can float there forever.”
At the Point, she says, “it feels like we are in on this secret.”
One of the later swimmers to arrive is Deirdre Hamill-Squiers, who David calls the “den mother” of the group. She slowly descends the uneven steps, wearing a bulky scarf draped around her neck and a
straw hat ringed with purple ribbon. I recognize her from “Swimming Through,” a short documentary about her and two other Point swimmers’ daily winter swims. In the film, Deirdre and her fellow swimmers delve into the icy water to find solace in the pandemic.
She tells me that she’s been driving down here from Edgewater since 2002. She knows all of the swimmers and is the convener of the group’s weekly coffee meetups.
She takes off her hat, switching it out for a rubber swim cap. The wind is gentle, and the lake is placid and impossibly blue, but Alison tells me that can change fast. Sometimes, the waves are choppy, but other times, you feel big “rollers,” like the ocean. She tells me about a time when the water went from choppy waves to feeling almost like “swimming in molasses,” turgid and thick.
“You really feel like you’re in something, and something’s going on in it, and it has nothing to do with you, and all you can do is respond to it and adapt to it,” she says.
Alison says that she likes the feeling of being immersed in something larger than herself. She swims for the sensual experiences: the rocks, the landscape, and the currents of the water.
“It’s kind of awe-inspiring because it’s such a force, that it can do all kinds of things that are scary in a way, but I feel very strong when I’m in the water,” she explains.
According to Veronica, the best lake swimmers are in tune with the lake.
“The lake dictates how you swim,” she says. “You learn how different waves feel on your body and when to turn up to breathe.”
On the paved path to the Point, by the 57th Street Beach, someone has spray-painted the words “Magic Protects This Space!” in large, looping black letters. The enchanted waters and the icy shock of the waves, the limestone carved with decades of messages and memories, and the fiery sunrises are all part of the magic that keeps Hyde Parkers (and Chicagoans from around the city) coming.
But it’s not just magic that protects the space; it’s the people, too. Swimmers, students, conservationists, dog-walkers, and so many more, have all found something worth fighting for.
The swimmers pack up, slipping flippers into handbags and shrugging on jackets. Alison folds up her towel, which has an illustration of the Great Lakes on it. Deirdre hangs her scarf around her neck.
It’s Thursday, so they’re off to Roux for coffee. When we leave the lake, it’s barely even 7:30 a.m.
As I walk along 55th Street, a car slows and honks. Deirdre is waving from the window, with Veronica at the wheel. They grin and I wave back.
The Case of the Checkerboard Blues
The now-defunct Checkerboard Lounge blues bar doubled as a hangout for past generations of UChicago students before it relocated to Harper Court.
By CELESTE ALCALAY | Deputy Grey City Editor
In Bronzeville on East 43rd Street, a blues-loving crowd of students mixed with locals at the Checkerboard Lounge blues bar. In 2003, the club was on the verge of shutting down. Aware of its popularity among students, the University of Chicago stepped in, offering to facilitate the relocation of the Checkerboard to Hyde Park, closer to the main student clientele.
A debate among the Bronzeville and UChicago communities, local businessmen, and musicians ensued. Can one export history? Transplant atmosphere? Relocated, the Checkerboard Lounge would not be in its original urban setting for all to discover, but instead would cater to students at Harper Court, the newest addition to the University’s curated Hyde
Park entertainment district.
In his book referencing the Checkerboard controversy, In the Shadow of the Ivory Tower: How Universities are Plundering Our Cities, historian Davarian L. Baldwin uncovers a larger trend of universities gaining control over urban governance, coining the phrase “the rise of UniverCities” to describe the process. Would this be the Checkerboard’s fate? First, its beginnings.
The Trip to the Original Checkerboard Lounge
“We immediately have to go past those red lines,” Ethan Michaeli (A.B. ’89) and his friends concluded at the beginning of their freshman year. The University police had drawn red boundary lines on a map to mark areas they deemed unsafe. But “the greatest music on the planet” was
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“The bartender just said, ‘U of C students?’ I was like, ‘What gave it away?’”
The Checkerboard Lounge is advertised in the m aroon 1984 O-Week edition.
a couple of glasses of water. “The bartender just said, ‘U of C students?’ I was like, ‘What gave it away?’”
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just a cab ride away, reminisced Michaeli, a professor at the Harris School of Public Policy, in an interview with the Maroon.
Author Frank Luby (A.B. ’85) conjures up the cityscape on the journey to the Checkerboard in Blues Flashbacks: “The once-elegant, abandoned buildings, we rode past on the cab ride; a parking lot across the street with a huge chain-link fence topped with concertina wire.” A man stood, offering to keep watch over clubgoers’ cars for a four-dollar fee.
An “urban authenticity” was part of the Checkerboard’s allure. Nights spent at the club became ethnographic research for sociologist David Grazian’s (A.M. ’89, Ph.D. ’00) Blue Chicago: The Search for Authenticity in Blues Clubs, which dissects the politics behind the consumption of blues music. He identifies the spatial proximity of South Side haunts to the Loop and the University as “a pull factor for many ‘slumming’ white artists, intellectuals, self-proclaimed socialists, graduate students, and pseudo-hipsters.”
At the Lounge, the motley crew gathered.
“What Gave It Away?”
One evening, Ethan Michaeli’s 16-year-
old brother, visiting from New York, was swept up in the music. Magic Slim and the Teardrops were playing. “[My brother] started dancing very expressionistically, let’s say…. He was taking up a lot of space on the dance floor.”
Michaeli continued: “The older African American adults who were there, in addition to the younger white folks like us, just clapped. Then Magic Slim noticed him and said, ‘This next one’s for my little friend,’ and he played the song, ‘Ain’t It Nice to Be Up?’”
African American youth spent nights at more fashionable places, listening to the 80s music in vogue, R&B, and hiphop, writer Max Grinnell (A.B. ’98, A.M. ’02) explained in a Maroon interview. A mix of older working-class African Americans and mostly white students from nearby universities grateful to catch glimpses of blues royalty frequented the Checkerboard. By 1989, UChicago students made up 60 to 70 percent of the clientele, according to then-manager Ben Hampton.
Grinnell wondered whether, as students unaware of the “unspoken rules” of the Checkerboard, they were easy to single out. When Grinnell and his friends arrived, unsure of what to do before the show began, he went up to the bar and ordered
“Somebody’s Living Room”
“Once we were in the door, a woman with an aluminum pan offered us some spaghetti,” Jay Jennings (A.M. ’81) recounts in an Oxford American article detailing his off-campus musical and cultural education.
The club interior had a long, low stage, sitting at the end of skinny bar tables covered in red and white checkerboard tablecloths, just wide enough for playing cards and setting down a drink; stuffing spilled out of cushion chairs; Christmas lights and tinsel hung year-round. A 1995 Chicago Tribune article notes that the homespun locale was more akin to “somebody’s living room or basement den than a bar. The walls are shiny, with a sparkle like angel dust, but you can also see hand-prints and smudges.”
Framed on the wall next to the door would have been a photo commemorating a November 22, 1981 performance when the Rolling Stones made an impromptu appearance during a night off from touring. The club’s founding overlapped with the tail end of the 1960s “British Invasion,” when British rock and roll artists heavily influenced by blues musicians took the U.S. by storm. In a live video recording, a gyrating Mick Jagger, clad in a red track-
suit, stands between Muddy Waters and Buddy Guy and wails the blues. The historic set was immortalized in 2012 as an album, Live at the Checkerboard Lounge, Chicago 1981
The Founders: Buddy Guy and L.C. Thurman
The Bronzeville mainstay’s fi rst act was esteemed bluesman and co-owner Buddy Guy. He met future co-owner L.C. Thurman while working at Peppers, a blues nightery on 43rd Street. Guy’s nighttime stint as a guitarist and singer was sustained by a day job as a tow truck driver. Thurman worked as a lab technician at a Veterinarian clinic at Northwestern.
In 1972, the two decided to start a club down the street from Peppers.
Twenty years earlier, Guy had arrived in Chicago, the last stop on the Illinois Central Railroad. Like many other Southern transplants, he came from a cotton-picking family in Louisiana. (Between 1910 and 1970, in waves of mass exodus termed the Great Migration, 6 million African Americans left the southern U.S., where oppressive Jim Crow laws remained in effect, and migrated to urban areas further north.)
Guy arrived penniless in the “Black Metropolis,” where he befriended bluesmen on the scene. The young musician honed his craft as a backup guitarist for CONTINUED ON PG. 17
A band plays at the Checkerboard Lounge. Published May 30, 1977. photo by jonas dovydenas courtesy of the chicago ethnic project collection , a m erican folklife center , library of congress
If his landlord wouldn’t agree to lower the rent by the planned March 23 festivities,
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Muddy Waters, moving up the ranks as part of a new Chicago blues sound. Chicago blues emphasizes the backbeat and uses electrical instruments easily heard over the chatter of noisy juke joints, instead of the acoustic instruments of Delta blues. (It is described as distinctly “industrial” because of the urban environment from which it grew.)
he would close his doors for good.
A shared appreciation for the music energized performers on kinetic nights. But by the 2000s, genres such as disco and R&B captured the zeitgeist, and interest in the blues dwindled. In 2003, paying venue rent he couldn’t afford and burdened with an unrepaired roof leak that had persisted for years, L.C. Thurman set a deadline.
Each year at the club, Thurman celebrated his birthday. If his landlord
May 12, 1989, Chicago Tribune article, “A taste of blues (and adventure).” courtesy of THE CHICAGO TRIBUNE
L.C. Thurman, described as a “private” man in a 2015 DNAInfo article, was not a performer and focused strictly on running the club. In 1985, when Buddy Guy broke off the partnership to establish his own blues bar closer to downtown, L.C. Thurman became the sole proprietor of the Checkerboard. (The split has not been written about in detail.)
The Lounge was the pair’s contribution to keeping the tradition alive in the South Side cradle where it had been shaped and nurtured, even as sleek, commercialized North Side and downtown digs were better designed to achieve financial success. “The pay might be better on the North Side,” a 1984 Chicago Tribune article quotes singer Lefty Dizz after a performance. “But it feels good to be back here with my friends.”
Exporting History
wouldn’t agree to lower the rent by the planned March 23 festivities, he would close his doors for good.
Then UChicago approached Thurman with an offer. For $7 per square foot or around half the market price, Thurman could relocate the club to Harper Court Mall as part of a “re-imagined” 53rd Street development, courtesy of the University.
Chairman of the Committee to Restore Jazz in Hyde Park James Wagner first put Thurman in touch with University representatives. As the University had recently begun investing in developing local cultural institutions, UChicago Vice President of Government and Community Affairs Hank Webber saw an opportunity to preserve a piece of American blues history. Community advocates asked why the University couldn’t fund a restoration project instead of facilitating the Checkerboard’s
relocation. In proposing to transplant the club, they felt the University had commodified the blues into a cultural export they wanted to claim for themselves.
Some, including founder of Alligator Records blues label Bruce Iglauer, wondered whether the essence of the Checkerboard—what he called “the slapped-together, casual, funky feel”—would be lost. He pointed to Peppers, which had lost its audience when it relocated to Michigan Avenue.
“I’d go to Winnetka if I could get my club open,” Thurman responded. Besides, most of his patrons were UChicago students, he reasoned in a 2003 Crain’s Business article.
In the months following the offer, a group of Bronzeville residents protested the move, accusing UChicago of making a sweetheart deal, or a contractual agreement that greatly benefits some parties while disadvantaging other parties, “stealing” a cultural institution.
The Maroon ’s editorial board argued that the move would help launch the Checkerboard into the modern landscape. Their op-ed, entitled “Checkerboard protesters misguided,” retorted that the “Home of the Blues” without a home was a “moment lost in time.” Michaeli agreed. “I think the University rescued the Checkerboard when it facilitated their move to 53rd Street. I think it would have shut down sooner had the University not done that,” he said.
The original location wasn’t ideal. “It had its charm, but it was, you know, a fairly dangerous part of the city, and got more so as other businesses in that little part of 43rd Street dwindled and then disappeared,” he continued.
Michaeli instead attributed the ultimate 2015 closing to a change in musical tastes and the lack of coordinated efforts by schools, local governments, and other players to invest in preserving the Chicago blues.
The New Checkerboard Lounge
The new Checkerboard Lounge opened in Harper Court two years later, on a Thursday night in November of 2005. Local blues singer-pianist Jo Jo Murray and
his Top Flight band performed a set of straight-ahead blues. But the new spot— tidy, spacious, chic—was unlike the old. Thurman prepared for a new chapter in the Checkerboard’s history. He warmed to new business practices, updating his performer lineup to more frequently incorporate acts other than blues. A 2006 Chicago Tribune article documents that, in the year following the move, the club was attracting a “good neighborhood audience,” but not the kind of turnout Thurman had expected from the university crowd.
Momentum didn’t build.
Paying musicians and turning a profit grew unfeasible. Grinnell once arrived at the club to find the doors locked when the schedule had advertised live music. “Even though they had a long and venerable history, given the kind of less than robust calendar performances, I don’t think people felt like they could count on them,” Grinnell said.
Some believed the club had been closed instead of relocated due to a lack of communication with the public. And when University real estate ambitions pivoted in November 2012, the conversion of part of the Harper Court retail center into an office tower began, which obstructed the entrance to the club. For those in the know, getting in, for a time, was nearly impossible. “The construction site was literally at the club’s doorstep, forcing the club to flip its entrance and marquee to the opposite side of the building,” Thurman’s brother Maloid Jones explained in a DNAInfo article.
The stress of keeping up the establishment took a toll on Thurman’s health. After a struggle with an unspecified illness, he passed away on July 22, 2015, and the Checkerboard Lounge shut down—permanently.
“Still Got A Hold On Us”
“The Checkerboard should be the University of Chicago of the blues, training people, new generations of musicians. It should be bringing in audiences,” Michaeli said. Its legacy continues, quietly. “The blues is the same story over and over again,” songwriter Willie Dixon philoso-
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However, the hole-in-the-wall joint flourished under conditions that
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phized. When one raconteur tires, another one takes over.
Storied blues bar Lee’s Unleaded Blues
no longer exist.
recently had its soft reopening on April 26 in Grand Crossing. Architect and professor Andrew Schachman (A.B. ’91) frequented the Checkerboard in his student days and mused that Lee’s has the potential to acquire a reputation among UChicago students similar to that of the defunct lounge. However, the hole-in-thewall joint flourished under conditions that no longer exist. Nightlife teemed with jazz and blues clubs, witnessing musical innovators at work was common, and the minimum drinking age was 18, before it was raised in 1984. ID checks also happened less frequently. Michaeli’s 16-year-old brother was easily granted admission to the Checkerboard.
Nowadays, the Logan Center Blues series provides on-campus entertainment. Owner of Lee’s Unleaded Blues Warren Berger observed a relatively small num-
ber of young blues fans and a mostly older local crowd attending a recent Logan Center Tuesday Blues performance. About his club Lee’s, he expressed: “I’m excited. Every time I talk to people, they’re excited by it… not so much young people, because I don’t talk to that many young people.”
Still, the 77-year-old welcomes the elusive demographic. “I’m hoping that U of C students will come out,” he told the Maroon South Side blues bars, Max Grinnell reflected, “have mostly disappeared.” But the Checkerboard isn’t exactly a moment lost in time. Like a phrase of a blues song that lands in the middle of another tune, slightly altered, relics reappear in modern settings. A photo of Mick Jagger standing behind Muddy Waters hangs on the wall at Lee’s, commemorating that serendipitous night in 1981 from the Checkerboard Lounge.
Whose Revival, Whose Former Glory?
As development finally comes to 63rd Street in Woodlawn, a look at its past shows how, ultimately, rebirth is in the eye of the beholder.
By NICK ROMMEL | Grey City Reporter Emeritus
So you’ve gotten your Elvis smoothie and veggie bagel at Robust on 63rd and Woodlawn, sent some emails to professors, and stepped back out onto the street. Half of your smoothie still waits for consumption on the way back to your dorm. But as you start walking, something catches your eye: possibly the largest vacant lot you’ve ever seen, stretching west along 63rd Street. There must have been buildings here once, you think, because this hole in the streetscape exposes the backsides of nearby apartments—brick, three stories high—like body parts that should never have seen the sun. Occasionally, other pedestrians pass, accompanied by the sound of crickets, which hide between the Styrofoam cups in the grass. The Obama Center’s bulldozers rumble at 63rd Street’s eastern terminus
in Jackson Park. The strongest feeling here is emptiness.
It’s a different story at Cottage Grove Avenue, half a mile west of Woodlawn. Here, 63rd Street comes alive, rumbling like the El tracks that start overhead. At a Mobil station, friends holler at each other from their cars. A relic of a man in wingtip shoes and a fedora leans into the street as if hailing a cab, while an odd youth who’s seen one too many horror movies walks by with stuffed monsters dangling from his belt. At Daley’s Restaurant—the oldest restaurant in Chicago—patrons hold summits about their sons and daughters and uncles and cousins over sweating cups of ice water, pork chops, and eggs over-easy. The faded neoclassical facade of Washington Park National Bank hides behind scaffolding and screeching train
tracks. Girls pull away from their boasting classmates at the crosswalks with winking I’ll-see-you-tomorrows and unspoken aw-don’t-go-yets. Two new buildings rise skyward, one complete and one in progress.
These two spots reveal something about 63rd Street. Ever since disinvestment, arson, and population decline gutted this onetime commercial artery of the Woodlawn neighborhood, it’s been mostly empty, lacking new development in its huge vacant lots. But its community has endured, clearly evident in the bustle of 63rd and Cottage Grove. Now, as the UChicago-sponsored Obama Center directs the attention of real estate developers to the area, 63rd is seeing new construction, a rebirth up and down the street. But who benefits? The resilient community, or the UChicago student walking from Robust? Only 63rd Street’s
past can tell us who the street belongs to. If you talk to anyone who grew up in the neighborhood before about 1970, 63rd will begin to glow with a child’s memories of a Black economic and cultural heyday. You didn’t need to go downtown, they say. On the street, you could find everything from pastry shops to curtain cleaners, pool halls to bookstores, flower shops, fishmongers, gilded department stores, one chop suey joint, a Greyhound bus station, and a whole lot of beauty salons. Movies flickered and music swelled at the Maryland Theater, on the site of today’s three-block-long vacant lot. A group of old ladies always sat outside the library at 62nd and Kimbark, watching, ready to tell on you to your parents. Sultan Mahmood, the barber, did natural haircuts in a shop plastered with Ebony and Jet magazine covers. One man remembers
Lefty Dizz and the Shock Treatment at the Checkerboard. Published May 30, 1977. photo by jonas dovydenas courtesy of the chicago ethnic project collection , a m erican folklife center , library of congress .
Buddy Guy stands in the doorway of the Checkerboard Lounge, Sept. 9, 1974. courtesy of don ’ s tunes facebook
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Where locals saw home, Levi saw a threat.
ogling Muhammad Ali’s car parked outside his training gym at 63rd and Cottage Grove and catching glances of Willie Mays and Minnie Miñoso at the Evans Hotel, where Black MLB players stayed during away games in a segregated city. Another recalls dancing for spare change with his friends outside the street’s taverns. One woman told me about her elementary school best friend, a member of 63rd’s tiny Chinese enclave between Woodlawn and Kimbark, who taught her to embroider. She still keeps her friend’s perfect exemplar at home, with her own, clumsier attempt beside it.
And if you couldn’t see the stars at night for all the steel mill smoke, on 63rd, they came out at lounges, restaurants, and clubs. At the Pershing Hotel, steps from today’s Green Line terminus at Cottage Grove, Ahmad Jamal recorded his famous song “Poinciana,” twinkling like the audience’s champagne and crystal. Well-heeled couples could walk from their homes to jazz clubs like the Trianon and the 411, while anxious
fi rst-date lovers crowded into the peanut galleries meant for underage viewers. At 63rd and South Park (now King Drive), Sun Ra and his Arkestra accompanied drag shows at Queen’s Mansion while national touring acts like Sam Cooke performed at the fl ashy Roberts Motel. Up and down the street, cymbals skated along to horn-sharp punctures and walking bass, cabaret dancers kicked in unison, and electric blues snarled from the street’s rougher corners. It felt as if the night would never end. But closing time always came, with its staggering walks home, a few last notes hanging in the cigarette smoke, and upstairs lace curtains flapping in the breeze as the train rumbled overhead like a lullaby.
UChicago’s decision-makers wanted nothing to do with this scene. In a 1961 address to the Board of Trustees laying out his controversial urban renewal program, University administrator Julian Levi painted a different picture of 63rd Street and its surrounding Woodlawn neighborhood: “social disorganization, community collapse, and consequent
crime, utterly incompatible with the existence of a great university.”
Where locals saw home, Levi saw a threat. Once populated by professors and students, Woodlawn had experienced a transition from 85 percent white to 85 percent Black in the 11 years before Levi’s speech, according to documents from the University’s archives. Migrants from Southern states, many struggling to fi nd work, lived in crowded, substandard housing. The Blackstone Rangers street gang—famous for trading in both illegal drugs and Black nationalist ideology— grew stronger. To the leadership of the majority-white University, Woodlawn was a fate to be avoided. So when Levi proposed a slew of redevelopment projects aimed at making Hyde Park an “interracial community of high standards,” the Board assented, making our neighborhood a model for elite urban universities grappling with suburbanization and white fl ight.
a few resilient family businesses. Some people in Woodlawn maintain that UChicago used these conditions to buy up large swaths of vacant land for cheap. Another popular theory even claims that the University paid the Blackstone Rangers gang to engineer this process, setting fi res and roughing up 63rd. It’s near impossible to verify these claims in archives (this article’s author has tried), but their continued resonance points to the hostility with which UChicago’s leaders approached Woodlawn in those days. It’s a hostility that contributed to a level of racial segregation usually associated with the Jim Crow South, not with the backyard of an intellectual powerhouse and its supposedly enlightened inhabitants.
The University’s plans didn’t completely ignore Woodlawn. There had been a proposal to raze all housing north of 63rd for an enlarged South Campus and an idea by famous modernist architect Eero Saarinen to bury 63rd Street under a new interstate highway spur. Neither were carried out by University administrators or their allies in government; more than those scrapped plans, it was Levi’s attitude towards our southern neighbor that left a lasting legacy. For generations of UChicago students and faculty, Woodlawn came to be defi ned by Levi’s words—“social disorganization” and “community collapse”—words that negate a community entirely, making it into some shadowy morass that could never be someone’s home. Images of gang rule and dangerous crack addicts stuck in the minds of students hunched over books in faux Gothic cathedrals less than a mile away.
Meanwhile, drug dealing, a wave of arsons, and a declining population dealt a blow to the street’s small businesses in the ’70s and ’80s. Chicago’s aggressive demolition policy in the 1990s cleared the vacant storefronts for good. The city’s abrupt 1997 demolition of the Green Line east of Cottage Grove—it once stopped at University, Dorchester, and Jackson Park—depressed foot traffic, driving out
Today, UChicago’s attitude toward Woodlawn is changing. Recent University administrations have encouraged students to break the invisible wall between Hyde Park and Woodlawn with initiatives in the Office of Community Engagement. Students living in private apartments began to tiptoe south of the Midway, attracted by lower prices. Robust Coffee Lounge, popular with students, opened. UChicago built a charter school at 63rd and Greenwood, and the new Hyde Park Day School, a school for students with learning disabilities with ties to UChicago, opened across the street. When Jackson Park was announced as the site of the UChicago-backed Obama Presidential Center in 2016, housing prices in the neighborhood jumped. Since then, million-dollar homes explicitly marketed toward UChicago professors have gone up. Big glassy developments are replacing vacant lots and run-down storefronts, each one promising to bring back a street life vibrancy unseen in decades, with environmental sustainability and racial equity to boot. Unsurprisingly, according to census records, Woodlawn’s white population has grown by almost 50 percent in the last 14 years. Newspaper articles, UChicago spokespeople, and real estate marketing materials laud the neighborhood’s rebirth.
Living in our mixed-use, transit-oriented, walkable age, it’s only natural to dream of restoring 63rd Street to its former glory. Some UChicago circles genu-
This was a win for STOP, but only an ephemeral one.
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inely do so: A research team of students in the Chicago Studies program recently completed a yearlong project mapping the business history of 63rd Street, block by block. UChicago’s Arts & Public Life initiative does similar work, holding events like 2023’s “Body & Soul: Recovering Community Stories from South Side Music Venues.”
“Imagine this is a juke joint,” one of the event’s organizers said as veteran jazz guitarist George Freeman took the stage in the new Green Line Performing Arts Center on East 55th Street, which, like 63rd, has a history of Black nightlife and commercial activity.
Mapping and imagining is different from building, but it’s hard not to see the connection in last year’s Woodlawn Community Summit, a UChicago-hosted forum of local developers and political hopefuls that prophesied the rebirth of 63rd as a “full-fledged main street.” Already, 63rd and Cottage Grove is a node of condos and storefronts, not the open-air drug market people remember from only 20 years ago. Through the optimism of the city, UChicago, and the Obama Center, one big question is implied: could 63rd Street become a laboratory for a better kind of urban revitalization, one that’s people-focused, sustainable, and fair?
For a possible answer, go back to the intersection of 63rd and Woodlawn, to the row of suburban-style homes beside Robust. Officially named “Columbia Pointe,” these homes were built in the mid-2000s by the real estate arm of The Woodlawn Organization (TWO). Founded by Bishop Arthur Brazier in the 1960s to protest UChicago’s South Campus plans, TWO grew to be one of the first modern community organizations and operated under the credo of “Black self-determination.” Its legacy in the neighborhood is controversial— many fault Brazier’s church for lobbying the city to demolish the El’s eastern spur, and the federal government took over one of TWO’s low-income housing developments in 1986 after 17 years of embezzlement and neglected maintenance. But TWO’s later developments still provide affordable and market-rate housing today, complicating the narrative that
Woodlawn has been waiting for redevelopment until UChicago and its gaggle of allied developers came to save the day.
Saul Alinsky, the legendary community organizer, was one of TWO’s advisors when it was first founded. “For Alinsky, the first task is to beat down the mythologies which have maintained ghetto dependency,” John Hall Fish wrote in Black Power/White Control, his history of the period. “Specifically, to beat down the ‘medical’ interpretation of ghetto problems, an interpretation which legitimates outside control.” By “medical,” Alinsky meant the narrative that diagnoses Woodlawn with a social illness and prescribes a solution to be administered by an authority figure. He contrasted that narrative with a “political” interpretation, where the issue was not Woodlawn’s troubled condition, but its powerlessness in decision-making. Alinsky’s words are as relevant as ever: today’s “medical” narrative sees 63rd Street as a patient waiting to be helped by experts, like a neighboring university dreaming and prescribing new futures for it. In the political interpretation, 63rd is territory that Woodlawn’s watchful and organized residents have always owned and intend to keep for themselves.
A low-slung storefront a couple of blocks off 63rd is the headquarters of an organization called Southside Together Organizing for Power (STOP). I spoke to its interim director Alex Goldenberg while he sipped coffee on the sidewalk outside his office. He explained to me the group’s origins: in 2004, new UChicago plans for expanding South Campus raised fears that the Grove Parc housing project—located along South Cottage Grove Avenue—would be converted to new University facilities or unaffordable, market-rate condos. A group of Grove Parc tenants and University students organized together to avoid this fate. They wrangled with University and federal officials until they achieved a sale of the property to Preservation of Affordable Housing (POAH), a non-profit affordable housing developer.
By the mid-2010s, POAH had built new affordable housing all along the former Grove Parc strip, and the organization that emerged from the struggle, now called STOP, had moved on to another is-
sue: a binding community benefits agreement with the newly announced Obama Center, which would legally compel Obama’s foundation to ensure funding for community needs identified by STOP. The coalition led by STOP could not get the Obama Foundation to budge from its stance against an agreement, ironic for an ex-community organizer president. Instead, aided by friendly alderman Jeanette Taylor’s election to City Council in 2019, many of the proposed measures were made into law by the city’s Woodlawn Housing Preservation Ordinance the next year.
This was a win for STOP, but only an ephemeral one. Among other things, the new law required that a quarter of Woodlawn’s vacant land be “reserved” for affordable housing, defined as buildings where one third of units are affordable to households earning 30 percent to 50 percent of Chicago’s Area Median Income, or about $45,000 for a family of four. The trouble began when city officials had to choose these unspecified “reserved lots”: small lots in a side street counted equally to larger ones on 63rd. So while then mayor Lori Lightfoot praised the law for “ensuring that every neighborhood resident is able to stay in their homes and share the transformative promise by the Obama Presidential Center,” the city stalled and avoided “reserving” large lots on 63rd.
Fearing that without pressure, the city would only “reserve” small lots where a five-unit building yields one affordable apartment, STOP immediately started pressuring the city to reserve larger lots, where twenty-unit buildings could fit six affordable apartments. They used creative tactics, such as sending Lightfoot heart-shaped Valentine’s cards with captions like: “Be my Valentine and stop displacing Black families.” Gradually, the city acquiesced to STOP’s demands. Some of the new construction on the street is located on these affordable lots. But it’s an uphill battle at best. Even if STOP successfully wins affordable status for every large vacant lot on 63rd, they expect these developments to retain only about a fifth of the 10,000 people the city estimates will be displaced from Woodlawn in coming years by rising prices. On 63rd Street, it seems that development is
a deal with the devil, with thousands of priced-out Woodlawn natives bearing the cost. Indeed, there is a rebirth going on—but not for them.
One Saturday morning, I attended a canvassing day at STOP, aimed at convincing residents to attend an upcoming public forum with Alderman Desmon Yancy and hold him to his promise of designating one particularly large vacant lot near the Obama Center as affordable. In the tiny 61st Street office with orange walls, the phone bankers learn how to cold-call constituents effectively. They are all elderly Black women. Judging from their conversations over free scrambled eggs and pancakes, many seem to know each other already. They manage to kick the too-loud younger crowd, who have come to knock on doors and hand out flyers, out of the office. I head out in a trio led by housing organizer Savannah Brown, a calm, authoritative young woman who joined STOP after the George Floyd protests. She is joined by a no-nonsense retired schoolteacher and a soft-spoken younger woman whose t-shirt refers to Jesus. We go door-knocking at a co-op development so close to the Obama Center that workers’ shouts are audible. The canvassing sees success, and Brown’s group gets many residents to consider attending the forum.
I quickly realized that canvassing has a deeper significance: it lets one collect the voices and feelings of a neighborhood. An elderly gentleman tells us he can’t spread the word about the forum because neighbors don’t talk to each other the way they used to; one girl says she would talk to us, but can’t, because she’s rushing to get her nails done for prom. A young woman tells us that co-op residents can’t barbecue in Jackson Park anymore because of policing around the construction site. Two men seem to have adapted; they barbecue on the street outside the co-op. A young man introduces us to his cat, and a grandmother speaks with us while her grandkids peek from behind her skirt. A high schooler, coincidentally a youth volunteer for STOP, bounces down the street on the way to an event he organized to keep his classmates out of trouble during the long Memorial Day weekend.
Some people clearly undergo an
Some people clearly undergo an emotional change when they hear about STOP’s work.
CONTINUED FROM PG. 20
emotional change when they hear about STOP’s work. When Brown approaches a young mother wearily dragging her unruly son down the street, the woman’s jaw is set and her eyes are narrowed, just listening to be polite. But as Brown explains what exactly STOP does, the woman’s fa-
cial features loosen, seemingly touched by the organization’s work on an issue that has worried her, too. When we return to the office, it seems that the emotional change is reciprocal: during the post-canvassing reflection, it’s hard to pinpoint exactly what made some conversations special, but most of the
volunteers try anyway. Maybe it’s somebody who was about to turn away but didn’t, somebody who did not believe in change, then suddenly did. They recount these meetings with a certain wonder in their voices, a wonder that, to me, seems like the main reward of the day. It’s the subtle clarity of stepping outside your -
Three years later, what have
we learned
self and the stories you inhabit to listen to somebody else. It’s claiming to know, then not knowing; it’s thinking you’re the only one, then seeing there are more. The feeling floats up to the ceiling of the little orange-walled office and lingers like a cloud above the volunteers as they begin to plan what’s next.
from the UChicago Common Data Set?
The admission rate continues to drop as campus demographics have shifted.
The number of students that applied and enrolled at UChicago from 2014 to 2023. source: integrated postsecondary education data system and co mm on data set austin steinhart
By AUSTIN STEINHART | Lead Developer
The 2023–2024 academic year marked the third Common Data Set (CDS) report that the University of Chicago has completed and released. The CDS, an annual survey jointly administered by the College Board, U.S. News and World Report, and educational services company Peterson’s, is meant to standardize data reporting among colleges and universities.
Before 2022, UChicago and Columbia were the only two schools in the nation’s top 20, ranked by U.S. News, not to complete the survey. Columbia also completed the CDS for the first time in 2022.
While much of UChicago’s CDS report contains previously available data reported by the Integrated Postsecondary Education Data System, the report
does give additional insight into admission numbers. The Maroon conducted an analysis of the last 10 years of publicly available admission data, including the additional data provided by the CDS report, and found that: the admission rate has decreased despite applications and enrollment increasing; women have a lower admission rate as compared to men, a gap that has been growing; and the University as a whole has seen a decrease in the white student population and an increase in the international student population.
The admission rate has continued to drop steadily.
Chicago’s admission rate has continued to fall each year, the CDS reports show. This follows a decreasing trend since at least 2006 when the admission rate was 38 percent. The admission rate for 2023 was 4.8 percent, a decrease of almost 50 percent from 2014 when it was 8.4 percent. This decrease is especially notable because, while other institutions have seen decreasing admissions rates as well, most of those other institutions have kept their undergraduate population sizes constant. UChicago, on the other hand, has seen both a decreasing admissions rate and an increase in its undergraduate population. While the undergraduate population
has increased by 25 percent in the last 10 years from 5,608 in 2014 to 7,489 in 2023, the number of applications increased by even more in the same period. UChicago is admitting more students than before—but not enough to keep pace with the rising number of applications, ultimately leading to a decreasing admission rate.
There is also a large gap in the acceptance rate between men and women, which has slowly grown over the last 10 years. In 2023, the acceptance rate for men was 5.7 percent and only 4.0 percent for women, a 35 percent difference which has grown from only an 8 percent difference in 2014. This current gap is higher than in every Ivy League school except Brown.
Most universities receive more women applicants than men, as does UChicago. Women applicants have outnumbered male applicants since at least the 2014–2015 academic year, and the gap has only grown since then. Universities often aim for a balanced number of admitted men and women, which paired with more women applicants, leads to a lower admission rate for women. However, at UChicago, there are both more women applicants and more men than women who have been admitted since 2017, leading to a particularly low admit
In the last three years, the CDS Report has shown a change in the role that racial/ethnic status plays in UChicago’s admission decision.
Note: While data on non-binary applicants was recorded, most data were incomplete, so we do not include them here. source: integrated postsecondary education data system and co mm on data set karen yi
CONTINUED FROM PG. 22
rate for women in recent years.
In 2022, the CDS began to ask schools to report non-binary gender data if collected. UChicago reported that 22 non-binary students applied but did not provide any data for how many of those applicants were admitted. In 2023, nine reported non-binary students applied but none were reported to be admitted. With the admission rate declining, the yield rate has continued to increase in the last three years from 83 percent to 88 percent.
UChicago has admitted an increasing share of international students across the last 10 years.
Accounting for both undergraduate and graduate students, there has been a remarkable decrease in white students, and a large increase in international students (categorized as “Nonresident aliens” in reporting). The share of white students decreased from 50 percent in 2012 to 33 percent in 2022, while the international student population increased from 22 percent to 31 percent in the same period. The share of Hispanic or Latino students also increased from 6 percent to 11 percent but all other race/ ethnic groups remained steady over this time.
As for the undergraduate student population, the makeup of the student body has not significantly changed in the last three years, according to the CDS reports. In the 2023–2024 academic year, the most recent reported year, 31 percent of students were white, 20 percent were Asian, 17 percent were Hispanic/Latino, 7 percent were Black or African American, 7 percent were two or more races, and less than 1 percent were American Indian, Alaska Native, Native Hawaiian or other Pacific Islander. 16 percent of students were international students.
In the last three years, the CDS Report has shown a change in the role that racial/ethnic status plays in UChicago’s admission decision. In the 2021–2022 report, racial/ethnic status was listed as “considered” in admission decisions. In the 2022–2023 report, racial/ethnic status was then listed as ‘not considered.’ In the 2023–2024 report, racial/ ethnic status is no longer a factor listed at all. Despite these changes, the race/ ethnic composition of undergraduate students has remained steady recently. This change in admission considerations is undoubtedly an impact of the Supreme Court’s 2023 decision to bar the use of affirmative action in college admissions.
source: integrated postsecondary education data system and co mm on data set karen yi
The long-term effects of this ruling on diversity on college campuses remain to be seen.
Notable exclusions from UChicago’s CDS report include the number of students who were waitlisted and ultimately enrolled as well as early decision numbers. Most other peer institutions report these numbers in their CDS report.
When asked about these findings, the University stated, “Our admissions process is holistic and each application
goes through a contextual review process.” The University declined to answer specific questions regarding the gender gap in admission rate, the changing use of race and ethnicity in admission decisions, and the omission of waitlist and early decision numbers.
An exact date for the release of the 2024–2025 Common Data Set was not provided. The University shared that “the CDS typically is posted in the first quarter of the calendar year.”
source: integrated postsecondary education data system and co mm on data set karen yi .
VIEWPOINTS
Queer at the Heteronormative Apex
What it means to be queer amidst hyper-femininity and hyper-heteronormativity in UChicago’s sororities.
By CAMILLE CYPHER
I don’t know much about sororities. A friend in Pi Phi tells me the group sings trademarked songs at every general body meeting, that in voting, pi means yes, beta means no, and that a queer woman guards the door—hired muscle, my dream job.
It never crossed my mind to join a sorority. As a Bay Area lesbian with no familial connection to sororities, the most I knew came from Bama Rush TikTok videos and the documentary those inspired, pastel dresses and high heels, and news of Artemis Langford, the first trans woman to join a sorority in the state of Wyoming; she faced a torrent of harassment and even a lawsuit. Even UChicago has its own sorority lore that felt heteronormative in an unapproachable way: champagne and shackles, Arrowfest, white dresses and tan heels on Founders’ Day.
But UChicago is in no way one of a kind with the schools that boast the stereotypical sorority. Here, Greek life is just one part of sisters’ lives. The campus’s four recognized sororities (as well as Oak) don’t have houses. There are no sororities dedicated to particular affinity groups. The UChicago student body tends to think less about Greek life than others. But even two years into my UChicago career, my spectator’s understanding was still that “queer” and “sorority” were contradictory. No matter the culture, no matter the campus, the word sorority meant something heteronormative. And maybe at UChi-
cago, it still does to an extent. Accordingly, I decided to interview members from UChicago sororities to see if my perceptions held up in a space I knew was unique to the national.
Over the course of two weeks, I reached out to a number of and ultimately spoke with six queer past and present members from Pi Beta Phi (Pi Phi), Delta Gamma (DG), Oak, and Kappa Alpha Theta (Theta). I found that UChicago sororities are accepting but still heavily heteronormative, leading to a feedback loop that projects and caters to femininity and attraction to men.
In my interviews, the overwhelming sentiment was that being queer had little overtly negative effect on sorority life, especially in queerer organizations like DG. Though it might be the norm, femininity and heterosexuality are in no way a prerequisite. Madeline Hopper, a third-year in DG who identifies as a lesbian, joked that she couldn’t “imagine any gayer sisterhood than watching a women’s softball game.” She also emphasized that there’s almost always a pants option for formals. “If you seek out sexuality, it can be your primary thing, but if you don’t want it to be, it doesn’t have to,” as Anika Khanna, a bisexual second-year in Pi Phi, noted. At UChicago, one doesn’t have to attend mixers, champagne and shackles, or other more heteronormative events to be integral to the sisterhood—though Oak disaffiliate Alyssa Manthi noted that the organization has recently started mandating a certain number of
attendances at mixers.
Though being a queer sister doesn’t come with overt adversity, it certainly comes with a different experience: one where sexuality is less significant. Interviewees cited talking about their sexuality less than others (if at all), attending fewer mixers, and many cases of ebbing or already severed involvement.
For the most part, sororities simply aren’t queer spaces. Both in their composition and activities, “[sororities are] catered toward heterosexuality because there are overwhelmingly more heterosexual people,” says Khanna, “so it wouldn’t even make sense to have something catered toward homosexuality.” And though that might be the logic of the world in general, sororities in particular lack queer pockets and queer spaces (though Hopper did note DG’s affinity groups). For the most part, from mixers to philanthropy events, events with a link to sexuality are predominantly in conjunction with frats and men.
To fit in such a space, a necessary level of femininity allows queer sisters to fit within their sororities. It’s self-selecting, says Khanna: “If I were a woman who wasn’t openly feminine in my presentation, a sorority just may not appeal to me because that’s just not the people who are in a sorority.” Without piercings, dyed hair, and a light complexion, Khanna said of herself that she doesn’t “appear obviously gay.” This seems to be the norm, with most queer members from DG to Oak presenting feminine. One Theta member even admitted to
feminizing her outfits during the rush process and acknowledged that most girls fit the mold of the hyperfeminine, straight sorority sister. Another sister said that her ex-girlfriend had hated attending sorority events, “because she didn’t feel like her version of queerness was supported as much.” There’s something potentially alienating about explicit or visible queerness. And though that might not be externally enforced, a standard of femininity necessarily creates outliers.
And though queer sisters in DG and Pi Phi knew a significant number of other queer people— in contrast to those in Oak and Theta who believed themselves the only out queer people in their respective sororities—Manthi added that “there’s a really high chance that [queer sisters] are also [attracted to] men,” further allowing sisters to fit comfortably into conversations about men or attend “match-making” events at fraternities. An anonymous second-year in Pi Phi who identifies as bisexual echoed this sentiment: “I feel like there are a lot of queer people, but the vast majority are attracted to men… People are surprised when they learn that there are a lot of bisexual people because there’s no way to know.”
Even interviewees admitted to assuming heterosexuality upon meeting new sisters and being surprised when someone was queer. With minimal queer visibility, sororities might forget their queer members who exist in small and often invisible numbers. Manthi, who identifies as queer,
noted that “If [she] weren’t [also] into men, [she] would feel very outcasted or siloed,” with activities often “centered around men.”
The clear linkage to fraternities strengthens this heteronormativity through mixers that have a clear “hookup culture undertone” or “weddings” wherein a sister “marries” a fraternity brother, bridal party and groomsman to match in the quintessential symbol of heteronormativity. One DG interviewee recounted such an event, where an Alpha Epsilon Pi brother “welcomed the women’s rugby team” to their “first straight wedding,” the frat having to apologize after. A Pi Phi member also mentioned the annual—and mandatory for sisters—event Arrowfest, where the majority of performances are centered around the oddity of homosexuality in a heteronormative space: “A majority of the performances were guys taking their shirts off and pretending to kiss each other. Everyone in the audience would laugh, and I was like, ‘What’s funny about that?’” Consequently, with low queer visibility and high heteronormativity, sororities experience a feedback loop that caters and appeals to a certain level of femininity and attraction to men. As one queer Pi Phi sister put it, “Subconsciously, people gravitate towards those who look like them, which can lead to sort of homogenous femininity in a sense.” Gemma Lippman, a lesbian who was in Pi Phi for two quarters, echoed this statement, describing feeling like she didn’t fit “the vibe [the soror-
Greek life comes with implications of heteronormativity.
CONTINUED FROM PG. 24
ity] was looking for” and that it was no one’s fault, they were just “different people who cared about different things.”
Even DG experiences this self-selection, with queer people gravitating towards it for its outward discussions of queerness. Hopper, who was encouraged to join DG by members of her rugby team, praised the group for representing queer people on DG’s social media, who explicitly discussed their sexuality. Khanna recalled a friend who had heard there were lesbians in DG, consequently selecting the group alone during recruitment.
This feedback loop can be partially attributed to a national discourse of sororities as hyperfeminine and hyperheterosexual, causing even queerer, quirkier spaces like UChicago to fall into this cycle. When asked about their perceptions of sororities before entering UChicago, interviewees called sororities “not only straight but hyper-heteronormative,” “straight and white,” and “not the easiest place to be a queer person.” Predispositions of heteronormativity—even if they’re scaled back at UChicago—discourage queer people from joining sororities if they don’t see their identity reflected in the space. And the cycle repeats itself.
Though UChicago’s sororities are far from those that scream “We’re so glad you’re finally here,” hands reaching through the doorway toward potential recruits, they remain predominantly heteronormative and hyperfeminine. Pi Phi, Theta, DG, and Oak are far from queer “unfriendly,” but they aren’t queer spaces just yet (save for DG, which “attracts really cool people, and a lot of really cool people are queer,” as Hopper puts it), a phenomenon attributable to a feedback loop of visibility and projected femininity.
Finding a solution seems difficult. Greek life comes with implications of heteronormativity. To a certain extent, a sorority stripped of its heteronormativity might not fit within our social understanding of the category.
At a school like UChicago, without shared housing and where the group is just one extracurricular for members, a sorority that forwent mixers, Arrowfest, linkage to fraternities, and hyper-femininity would be hard to categorize between a sorority and a social group. And though there have been pushes at schools like UCLA to create sororities that are specifically for LGBTQ+ members, to make sororities true queer spaces—especially schools with more intense Greek life—would
mean dissolving the very boundaries that delineate sorority life. For one, the Oxford Dictionary defines a sorority as “a society for female students.”
But ultimately, queer people make spaces queer. Despite being predominantly heterosexual and partaking in the aforementioned activities, DG has a queer reputation that seems to attract LGBTQ+ people. They highlight inclusion and encourage queer members to join through word of mouth and marketing. And, when the national conversation on so
rorities might do well to emphasize their difference as DG has. For instance, one disaffiliate said that “there just aren’t a lot of gay people, which was probably one of the reasons I felt I didn’t really get along with anyone,” despite others in the same sorority noting a significant queer population.
Until these interviews, my perception of sororities’ heteronormativity overwhelmed the reality of sisterhood and belonging. As evidenced by interviews, queer sisters can have entirely fulfilling experiences. Sororities just need
Explicit inclusionary tactics and marketing towards queer populations might change the reputation of sororities and alter the composition of the current feedback loop. If queer people believe they can genuinely fit into sororities, there is true potential at UChicago for a growing body of—what I previously believed to be oxymoronic but now understand as heavily present and fulfilled—queer sorority sisters.
Camille Cypher is a third-year in the College.
No, Not That Kind of Clubbing
Columnist shares how to savor RSO experiences without losing your appetite.
By ANUSHKA BANSAL
When I first set foot on campus, I collected club brochures like pastry selections at a lavish breakfast buffet—I wanted a little bit of everything. After the social appetizers and academic entrees, there was always room
for a slice of volunteering, a bite of the pre-professional pie, and a sweet taste of dance.
I thrust myself into filling out over a dozen RSO applications, concocting quirky hot takes, and lining up for interviews at Pret. I approached joining clubs like a checklist: X
for the pre-professional development, Y for the community, and Z for the stepping out of my comfort zone. I wanted to be part of clubs that promised prestige and network; a UChicago bubble within the UChicago bubble.
As a sophomore transfer,
my haste and intentionality may have been rooted in a need to find familiarity. I yearned for communities that mirrored my previous engagements and believed that the most selective clubs would bring the most meaningful experiences. I believed that to be how I would
make the most of student life at UChicago, and I couldn’t be more wrong.
While my commitment to different RSOs has waxed and waned as my interests and priorities have shifted over the last two years, the truth is
SOFIA CAVALLONE.
Maybe if I’d left my high school self in high school, I would see more clearly how little I know and how much I have to learn.
CONTINUED FROM PG. 25
that you only get as much out of one as you put into it. I have interviewed freshmen for these clubs who, much like my younger self, often seem more eager to recount their high school feats than to truly engage with the club’s mission. Maybe if I’d left my high school self in high school, I would see more clearly how little I know and how much I have to learn.
I now look back on my RSOs with a fondness for the people I have learned from and worked with—those who have inspired me to invest not just my time and effort, but also genuine enthusiasm and intention. The true value of RSOs, for me, hasn’t been in the doors they have opened for life beyond college, but in the opportunities they have provid-
ed for self-reflection and friendship. As you begin your journey at UChicago, I hope the same for you, and even more. I hope that you can savor, equally, the moments that cultivate self-awareness and relationships that challenge or comfort you, just as you will savor the midnight grind of an RSO application in your Twin XL bed.
As a senior who is both resigned and eager to savor what’s left (and old enough for a different kind of clubbing), my advice to you is this: Don’t forget to make the most of yourself while you try to make the most of your time at UChicago; and most importantly, try not to try too hard!
Anushka Bansal is a fourthyear in the College.
SOFIA CAVALLONE
The Arts Staff’s Ten Can’t-Miss Arts and Culture Spots Across Chicago
So you’ve seen the Symphony, the Art Institute, and the Bean. Here’s what’s next.
By THE ARTS STAFF
You may not have come to Chicago for its piles of teeth. Its living-room-sized theaters. Its late-night cafe jazz concerts. Its sculpture designed by Yoko Ono. We certainly didn’t come for them— but we found them anyway, and now they’re some of our favorite art spots across the South Side and throughout the city of Chicago. Here are ten of the Maroon Arts staff’s favorite arts and culture spots across Chicago. From each spot, you’ll spot two more, and the journey into the heart of artness has begun.
They’re Just Making It Up As They Go Along: Chicago’s improv comedy legacy runs deep, with roots tracing back to the University of Chicago alumni who founded the influential Compass Players in 1955—a group that would evolve into the iconic Second City Theater. Although the Second City Theater may be the most famous improv venue in the country, second only to the Second City is the iO Theater. The International Olympic Theater, commonly referred to as the iO, is located in the Goose Island neighborhood on the North Side, just a five-minute walk from North/Clybourn on the Red Line. If you are looking to see improv for the first time or you’re a comedy geek, the iO’s a great place to learn about the art (and chaos) of improv without having to pay too much. The theater offers a wide array of shows, from Jane Austen–inspired sketches to Shakespearean parodies, American history reenactments to their signature longform improvisation, where they come up with a whole play on the spot. There are shows every night from Wednesday to Sunday, and student tickets are just $10. If you catch the 8 p.m. show, you can stick around for the 10 p.m. performance for free. —Adera Craig, Senior Arts Reporter
Free, Free, Free, Free: Free books!
If those two words catch your attention, check out Open Books, a nonprofit bookstore that uses its proceeds selling donated books to fund literacy programs across Chicago. Many of their titles are free, while some are sold for just a few dollars. Some of my favorite finds include a copy of Granta magazine and Michael Chabon’s Moonglow. They have two locations, one in Pilsen and one in the West Loop. —Miki Mukawa, Arts Editor
A Maroon’s Trusty Sidekick: Dora has the Map, Aladdin has the Genie, Iron Man has J.A.R.V.I.S, and the arts-inquisitive UChicago student has… the ArtsPass? Maybe it’s not the best analogy, but you get the point: ArtsPass is something you have to consult. On the ArtsPass website,
you’ll find a map with an array of partner institutions around the city, many of whom offer free or heavily discounted admissions to UChicago students. It’s a great place to start if you’re looking for a one-stop shop for all things arts related in Chicago. If you attend five organizations during the year and register on Canvas, you can get free merch and treats at Café Logan! —Nolan Shaffer, Arts Editor
Flight Club: After a few weeks in Hyde Park, you’re going to want a date night away from Nella or Small Cheval. It’s a good thing that one of Chicago’s buzziest restaurants, Bronzeville Winery, is just ten blocks north of campus in the South Side’s historic Bronzeville neighborhood. Classic new age bites—blood orange brussels sprouts and sea bass with salsa verde—complement a stellar wine list that features Black-owned vineyards from across the world. A wine flight will
carry you from Spain to South Africa to California. On the weekends, expect a live DJ set to fill the bright, wood-paneled dining room. Be sure to place a reservation in advance. The restaurant is an easy walk, bike, or Lyft from campus. —Noah Glasgow, Lead Arts Editor
Businéss School des Beaux Arts:
The Harper Center, home to the Booth School of Business, is the last place you’d expect to find a world-famous collection of contemporary art. And yet, thanks to generous donations and the work of a five-member collections committee including the president of the Art Institute of Chicago, the school has amassed 800 pieces by nearly 200 artists, making it one of the finest collections of contemporary art in the country. It is strange and extraordinarily intimate to walk through Booth on a quiet weekend or at night and
A museum for the curious and a gift shop for the depraved, Woolly Mammoth is not to be missed.
CONTINUED FROM PG 27
find works of art covering nearly every wall of the six-story, 415,000-squarefoot building. Plus, since it’s free and on campus, the econ bros would call it low opportunity cost. And if you’re a returning student, you’ve probably walked by Giuseppe Penone’s “Ideas of Stone” between the Harper Center and the back of Ida Noyes a dozen times without realizing what it is. The tree sculpture, unique and arguably the most notable piece of public art at UChicago (perhaps vying with the concrete car), is impressive, beautiful, and haunting.
—Nolan Shaffer, Arts Editor
At Wit’s Beginning: Just a short walk from the Green Line in the beautiful neighborhood of Lake View is the friendly and eclectic Theater Wit. The performing arts center, which has been a home for vibrant contemporary theatre for more than two decades, houses three intimate stages including a small proscenium and black box. Regardless of when you visit, you are bound to find an assortment of high quality, intelligent plays. The tickets are cheap—$10–20 for students—and if you’re having a light quarter, it’s just $25 a month for unlimited admission. Bonus: Theater Wit is located on Belmont Avenue, a bustling commercial street that
makes for a great afternoon of exploring.
If you’re a tea lover, check out Pedestrian Coffee. They sell high quality looseleaf teas by weight, and you can sit and brew them yourself with gooseneck kettles.
—Nolan Shaffer, Arts Editor
Bloomin’ Cherries: If you find yourself itching to explore Hyde Park on foot, Jackson Park’s Garden of the Phoenix is a great place to go. It’s a traditional Japanese garden in the heart of the South Side, originally established in 1893 for the Chicago World’s Fair. Just head west on the Midway to Jackson Park, and you’ll soon find this gem on Wooded Island. When
you arrive, you’ll discover koi ponds, quaint bridges, small trails, and even a Yoko Ono sculpture. The garden is especially busy in the spring, when the island’s many cherry blossom trees bloom. —Jake Zucker, Podcasts Editor
Memento Mortifying: Next to a dry cleaner and across the street from a terrific Middle Eastern grocer in northern Andersonville lies Woolly Mammoth, an oddities shop not much bigger than a shoebox. It’s packed with unforgettable curiosities: 19th-century hair sculptures woven from the locks of lost loved ones; more than one taxidermy two-headed calf; piles of teeth; antique pornography; and an actual drawing by John Wayne Gacy (at least the last time I paid a visit). A museum for the curious and a gift shop for the depraved, Woolly Mammoth is not to be missed. Get there by the Red Line; the stop is Argyle. —Noah Glasgow, Lead Arts Editor
Jazzed Up: You don’t need to pay a cover—or be twenty-one, for that matter—to experience great jazz in Chicago. Every third Tuesday of the month, the Hyde Park Jazz Society (HPJS) presents Third Tuesday Jazz in Café Logan. Local jazz musicians are selected by the HPJS for the expansion and cultivation of jazz appreciation in the neighborhood. Notable performers include the Miguel De La Cerna Trio, the Ben Paterson Trio, and Fred Jackson Jr. The evening performance is punctuated with commentary
from the highly experienced musicians and murmurs of appreciation from the audience—and the sense of community fostered by the highly intimate performances and friendly audience members is second to none. I heard the best live rendition of Ahmad Jamal’s “Poinciana” I’ve ever heard at Third Tuesday Jazz. Seats fill up quickly, so arrive early. —Elizabeth Eck, Senior Arts Reporter
Size Doesn’t Matter: Okay, this is kind of a cheat, but what makes Chicago’s theater scene so incredible is its breadth and depth. A ton of small companies—playing in their own 20–40 person venues or switching stages from show to show—put on great works by playwrights like Harold Pinter, Karl Čapek, and Sam Shepard alongside equally experimental contemporary fare. There’s a truly incredible range of shows going up in this city every night (I’ve had low schoolwork weeks where I reviewed three or four shows in a week) and these small, neighborhood theaters are where new artistic ideas develop. Plus, tickets are usually cheap, and the ambiance of a neighborhood theater lobby cannot be beat. In particular, check out City Lit Theater Company, Steep Theatre Company, Definition Theatre, Invictus Theater Company, Raven Theatre, and Three Crows Theatre Company, and keep your eyes peeled for Chicago Maroon reviews of great active shows! —Zachary Leiter, Maroon Deputy Managing Editor and former Arts Editor
Attendees at Logan Center’s Third Tuesday Jazz concert, featuring The Regulators. celeste alcalay
Catherine (Dana Muelchi) clutches the contentious proof centered in act 2 as her sister Claire (Taila Langman) looks on in Bluebird Arts’ Proof. nolan shaffer .
Crowning the Best Restaurant at Hutch
Arts Editor Lainey Gregory settles the debate: What’s the best restaurant at Hutchinson Commons?
By LAINEY GREGORY | Deputy Arts Editor
You’ve just gotten out of back-to-back classes and you are starving. It’s not an uncommon place to find yourself, gastrointestinally speaking. Many of us can rarely afford the time it takes to prepare ourselves lunch. As a result, Hutchinson Commons (lovingly referred to as “Hutch”) is a saving grace. Located in the center of campus, at the corner of East 57th Street and South Woodlawn Avenue, Hutch is a place where students and staff can take a break from the bustle and grab a quick bite. Hutch offers food that draws inspiration from culinary traditions around the world, including Mexican, Indian, and pan-Asian cuisines, to name a few. With so many options, the competition at Hutch is fierce—but only one restaurant can be the best. Here’s one editor’s guide to where to eat—and what to dodge—at Hutch.
6. Phoenix Grill
Lainey’s Pick: Smash Burger with Fries Phoenix Grill is the newest addition to Hutchinson Commons, recently replacing Wazwan, a South Asian/American fusion restaurant. Phoenix grill offers classic American comfort food including burgers, sandwiches, and fries. The burger was mediocre, and the quality wasn’t much different from the dining hall. The bun and meat were both very dry, and the fries were definitely frozen from a bag. Phoenix simply does not compare to the quality and variety that the other stalls offer. My suggestion is that UChicago dining should give the space back to a locally owned restaurant that isn’t so readily available on campus. My personal pick would be Nigerian food to spice things up a little!
5. Asada
Lainey’s Pick: Chicken Quesadilla
Asada is a Mexican-American style restaurant that offers burritos, tacos, and bowls to hungry patrons. Set against the wide variety of authentic Mexican food you can find throughout Chicago, Asada simply misses the mark. The meats are often a bit dry, and the seasonings are underwhelming—straight from the Old El Paso packet. Toppings are unlimited, but guacamole is priced at a steep $3.29. Additionally, their made-to-order workflow means that each order can take quite a long time to complete, compared to other, buffet-style restaurants in Hutch. One thing that Asada gets right are the generous portion sizes—a single order usually lasts me until dinner.
4. Saffron
Lainey’s Pick: Butter Chicken with Veg-
gies
and Rice
Saffron specializes in halal Indian cuisine and boasts a variety of traditional dishes. The entree changes based on the day of the week, which keeps things fresh, but unfortunately can limit the availability of your favorite dish. I’m a big fan of the veggie samosas, which can be ordered as a side or a snack between classes. Saffron’s butter chicken delivers bold flavors that can satisfy any cravings for Indian comfort food. However, I do feel like the recipes have changed slightly in the three years that I have attended UChicago, and the quality has slipped slightly. While Saffron is still a solid choice, the flavor of the chicken dishes has gotten, for lack of a better word, worse. While Saffron used to be my personal favorite, I now often find myself gravitating toward different Hutch spots.
I adore the lemon and berry salad vinaigrettes that they use, which add the perfect sweet finishing touch to the combo meal.
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3. Noodles Etc
Lainey’s Pick: Chicken Gyoza
Noodles Etc is a pan-Asian restaurant that offers all the carbohydrates that students need to fuel a good study session. For lunch, their location in Hutch serves a Vietnamese banh mi and an Asian-style noodle soup. But my favorite dish is a sweet and savory chicken gyoza, best eaten by the half-dozen. Other students also rave about their soup, with fresh-cooked noodles and toppings. The broth has a great umami flavor, but the meat options tend to be a bit dry. De -
spite this small critique, Noodles Etc is a great choice to warm up after a cold day.
2. Paks
Lainey’s Pick: Spicy Tuna Poke Bowl
Paks is perhaps the most popular spot at Hutch, as evidenced by the long lines that pile up at lunchtime. Paks’s sushi rolls and poke bowls are both great options for a refreshing lunch. The spicy tuna poke bowl with veggies and the house poke sauce is my personal favorite for a quick midday pick-me-up and comes in at a surprisingly reasonable price for a bowl of fresh fish. I’m also a big fan of
avocado in my bowl, which doesn’t cost extra! In recent months, I have noticed a slight decline in the quality of the salmon and tuna from Paks, which can really ruin a good poke bowl. Despite these few isolated incidents, I still adore Paks and frequent it for lunch.
1. Kabob-it
Lainey’s Pick: Chicken Kabob Combo
Kabob-it is a locally owned restaurant serving up delicious and nutritious Mediterranean food with a twist. Their commitment to clean eating comes across through their use of locally grown
herbs and veggies. The chicken kabobs are always fresh out of the oven, and the variety of sauces allows you to mix up your order. I adore the lemon and berry salad vinaigrettes that they use, which add the perfect sweet finishing touch to the combo meal. After traversing campus in the freezing cold weather, a warm, filling meal is just what I need to finish out the day or power me through afternoon studies. Because of their consistently fresh ingredients and well-rounded portions, Kabob-it edges out Paks for the title of “Best Restaurant at Hutch.”
Summer Breeze Heated Up Reynolds Quad
This year’s Summer Breeze featured wistful Indigo De Souza, bubbly COIN, and electric NLE Choppa.
By HARMONIE RAMSDEN | Senior Arts Reporter
At 5:20 p.m. on May 11, Hull Gate faced a throng of college students dressed in shorts, bikini tops, and Hawaiian-print tees. Fresh from the darties across campus, students were ready for Summer Breeze. This year’s performance featured indie rock singer-songwriter Indigo De Souza, new wave band COIN, and rapper NLE Choppa. Their variety and talent brought the full spectrum of students to Hutchinson Courtyard for an exhilarating night of music.
Beginning her set around 5:45 p.m., Indigo De Souza played for a sparse crowd. However, her musical talent and stage presence enraptured the barricade holders and early arrivals that crowded around Hutchinson Courtyard for her set. De Souza introduced her performance as playing “sad songs for forty-five minutes,” and that description held true to the set’s character. The artist may have been soft-spoken, but her solo performance was packed with a depth of emotion that carried across the outdoor stage. De Souza’s music draws on deeply emotive themes of nature, mental health, and death. This set pulled at the heart-
strings of the early birds in attendance.
After De Souza’s set came a rush of students ready to watch COIN. The band’s 2017 album How Will You Know If You Never Try had been a hit for students during their middle school years. Since then, they’ve released three further albums. However, it was clear that their 2017 hits were what drew the crowd. Lead singer Chase Lawrence commanded the entire stage for the performance, dancing, singing from atop the drum set, and even climbing the stage’s support beams. Drummer Ryan Winnen, guitarist Joe Memmel, and touring bassist Matt Martin accompanied Lawrence. COIN taught the audience call-and-response lyrics and encouraged engagement from the crowd, an aid for past fans and those audience members just waiting for NLE Choppa.
The band has been playing together since 2012. Their songs are dance-worthy, high-energy jams that contain deep emotional complexity. From the rebuttal of materialism in “Cemetery” (“He had it all / but he couldn’t buy love”) to the themes of technology and disaffection in
2022’s Uncanny Valley album, the band inflects each song with deeper critiques of society. Lawrence clearly wrote stories true to his heart. At the culmination of “Youuu,” after pleading a partner to never move on from him, the singer stood still, his loud, ragged breaths the only sounds. Balancing intense lyrics with infectious rhythms, COIN’s set provided a perfect transition from the soulful music of De Souza to the fiery songs of NLE Choppa.
In the hour-long interlude between COIN and NLE Choppa’s performances, students entered in swarms, growing the crowd from a comfortable cluster to a mass of students pushing towards the barricade. After an extended wait, NLE Choppa came on to boisterous applause. In a matter of seconds, I was pushed from my barricade position to the sixth row by screaming students. At only 21 years old, the rapper is an instant sensation. In only a matter of years, he’s delivered hit after hit—from the danceable “Shotta Flow” to the viral “SLUT ME OUT.”
His performance can only be described as an out-of-body experience. Hundreds of bodies became one mass, hungrily responding to the rapper’s prompts to light up phone torches,
shoot middle fingers at other audience members, or throw bras on stage. NLE Choppa, as well as being a rising musical talent, has a unique Gen Z unseriousness. Mid-set, the rapper laid down on a mattress, tucking himself under the covers. “Wake him up!” his hype man yelled into a microphone. Only after the crowd exhausted their vocal cords yelling did he finally rise. The rapper brought his parents, known by fans as Momma and Poppa Choppa, to perform his iconic “slut walk” dance, threw his shirt into the crowd, and brought a security guard onstage to freestyle dance.
After an incredible hour of music and revelry, NLE Choppa danced offstage with the same swagger that permeated the entire set. The crowd rushed out of Hutchinson Courtyard with the same urgency that they streamed into it. As students returned home in the warm night, they could spot a group of girls running across the quad with NLE Choppa’s muscle tee, students sharing bagged tamales, and groups of frat brothers rapping, “School of hard knocks, let me take you to class,” a lyric from NLE Choppa’s song “Camelot.” Thus was the culmination of an unforgettable Summer Breeze.
Congrats Navya for starting college and working to make your dreams come true!
‘The woods are lovely dark and deep... and I have miles to go before I sleep...!!’ Best wishes for your lovely and healthy future!!
Love Sho, Mom and Papa
SPORTS
How Stagg Field has changed throughout UChicago’s history
Thousands of screaming fans, nuclear physicists, and a legendary coach all shared one thing in common: Stagg Field. Here’s the story of the turf where it all went down.
By SARAH HOPKINS | Sports Reporter
From 56th to 57th Street between Ellis and University Avenues sit many studying students, Ex Libris Café, and over four and a half million printed volumes. While the Joseph Regenstein and Joe and Rika Mansueto libraries currently house late study sessions, the block used to be home to the Maroons—the athletic ones, that is.
Sports at the University of Chicago have an eventful history, often going up against the academic focus of the College. Stagg Field, the heart of UChicago athletics, has its own colorful past of national champions, a very large bass drum, and physicists changing the course of history from the squash court.
The Old Man
In 1893, Marshall Field was built shortly after the opening of the University. Coincidentally, the field was the namesake of the man who donated the land, Marshall Field. Snell-Hitchcock Hall residents could peer out their dorm windows and breathe in school spirit right over the endzone. Possessing a maximum capacity of 58,000, fans flocked to the stadium to watch the Maroons play football. Games routinely sold out, the Maroons were a member of the Big Ten Conference, the marching band played the world’s largest bass drum, and the University of Chicago was celebrated for academics and athletics.
For decades Marshall Field experienced a roaring athletic scene, during which it was renamed Stagg Field, honoring the man responsible for much of the Maroons’ success: Amos Alonzo Stagg. Even as a Yale graduate, Stagg’s heart was maroon. Starting at the school in 1892, he would go on to become one of the nation’s most successful amateur sports coaches. As director of the Department of Physical Culture and coach of several teams for 40
years, Stagg led UChicago’s athletics to great heights on his turf.
While he also served as head coach of the basketball team from 1920–21 and the baseball team for 20 seasons, Stagg made his legacy in track and field and football. He even coached the U.S. Olympic Track
from an active role at the University in 1932—he was 70.
With only one Stagg left, football on Stagg Field faced new highs and lows. Jay Berwanger won the first-ever Heisman trophy in 1935, but with weakening support, football was discontinued shortly after in 1939. The University of Chicago left the Big Ten in 1946, but not before another
ry on a squash court.
Despite being unrelated to sports, the reaction was one of numerous firsts and beginnings achieved at Stagg. In 1957, the original field was demolished. In its place stands the Joseph Regenstein Library which, opened in 1970, fittingly containing the University’s athletic records of the achievements made there. Stagg Field
and Field team in the 1924 Paris Summer Olympics. Stagg Field hosted events like the USA Outdoor Track and Field Championships, NCAA Men’s Championships, and a regional qualifying meet for the U.S. Olympic Trials in 1936. However, it was the pigskin that brought the biggest crowds. By 1924, the Stagg-led football program had yielded the school seven Big Ten titles and two national championships.
Towards the end of his career at UChicago, Alonzo Stagg was known around campus as “the Old Man,” but he remained enthusiastic, vibrant, and athletic enough to play tennis daily. He was forced into what to him was premature retirement
first was achieved at the stadium. Under it, to be exact.
A New Era
Beneath the west stands at 3:25 p.m. on December 2, 1942, Enrico Fermi and other scientists from the Metallurgical Laboratory created the first controlled, self-sustaining nuclear chain reaction after 28 minutes. Unbeknownst to the students walking around on an ordinary Wednesday, the Manhattan Project and Chicago Pile-1—the world’s first artificial nuclear reactor—proved the possibility of creating the atomic bomb. They had effectively started the atomic era in a laborato-
was rebuilt from 55th to 56th Street between Cottage Grove and Ellis Avenues, an eight-minute walk away. With a modest capacity of 1,650, the field hosts several sports, including football, which returned as a varsity sport in 1969.
On the southwest corner of the new field, the looming concrete frame around the ornate, original wooden gate reads “Amos Alonzo Stagg Field.” One hundred years ago, they would have revealed a packed stadium of impassioned fans. Today, they lead to a smaller but dedicated crowd cheering on the Maroons. Let’s just hope there are no more labs under the bleachers.
1913 football game on Stagg Field. courtesy of university of chicago library, special collections research center
UChicago Tennis Reigns Over the Court
From humble beginnings to national championships, here’s a look back at how UChicago became the dominant force of Division III tennis.
By SHRIVAS RAGHAVAN | Sports Editor
When someone from the University of Chicago visits the White House, it’s usually for a few reasons. Perhaps a Nobel laureate is set to receive an award for a remarkable achievement. Maybe a world-renowned economist is invited to present their research. Whatever the reason may be, it’s rarely in association with athletics. For a school that once disbanded its football program in an effort to direct all focus toward academic excellence, UChicago’s reputation as one of the less athletic universities is one that’s hard to shake.
However, it was athletic ability that brought UChicago Tennis to the steps of the White House in July. The visit was the cherry on top of a historic season in which the program secured both the men’s and women’s National Championship—a feat that has been done only a handful of times in NCAA history.
The 2024 season was no fluke either. It came as the culmination of a dominant few years that have seen UChicago cement itself as the premier powerhouse of Division III tennis. With three National Championships, numerous UAA titles, two Division III No. 1 rankings, and now a White House visit under its belt, UChicago Tennis is entering 2025 on top of the world.
Three years and as many National Championships earlier, things were very different.
Heading into the 2022 season, UChicago Tennis had been defined by a sense of “nearly.” The program’s first real shot at a title came in 2012 when the women’s team made it to the NCAA Championship but fell short to a dynastic Williams team. Ten years later, that remained the closest both the men and women had gotten to championship pedigree. For the women, it had been four straight seasons of quarter-final exits. For the men, it was four semi-final appearances in the past five seasons.
Despite the lack of silverware, it would be unfair to label the program as poor or even underperforming. In fact, for a school that had not yet seen a National Champi-
onship, the tennis program was a breath of fresh air. It was a reminder that UChicago could compete athletically and that maybe, just maybe, a National Championship was on the horizon for the University.
Unfortunately, the Maroons were stagnating. They were a program that had become highly respected in Division III tennis, but one that often tripped at the final hurdle. By the time 2022 came along, the Maroons were tired of falling just short. It was time for change.
“We’d always had a talented team,” coach Jay Tee, who has spent the past twelve years coaching both the men’s and women’s teams, told the Maroon. “The level of players was never the problem. I think part of it was me evolving as a coach and understanding our student-athletes more.”
For Tee, understanding his players meant reframing the way he viewed collegiate tennis. He recalled a moment when one of his players told him that tennis was a “release” from the stress of school, to which Tee lost his mind. How could competitive athletics be a release? Winning took focus, discipline, and dedication. Tennis was no time for rest.
However, current fourth-year Sylwia Mikos, who was entering her first season at UChicago in 2022, saw college tennis as a much-needed break from the stress and intensity of youth tennis. “I think junior tennis and USTAs can be really cutthroat because you’re all fighting for the same college positions to some extent,” Mikos explained. “But with college tennis, everybody’s trying to win together. It’s either we’re all in or we’re all out, and it takes a lot of stress off.”
Recently-graduated Arjun Asokumar, who was also entering his first season at UChicago, shared a similar sentiment. “I think instead of putting too much pressure on ourselves in 2022, we were just trying to enjoy the moment, enjoy the platform.”
Finding enjoyment in tennis was crucial, and Tee soon began to see its signif-
icance on the court. “Once I was able to make some changes on how I approach them and talk to them, they started playing better, and a lot of that had to do with making sure they had fun when they came to practice.”
Tee’s revamped approach instilled new energy into the program, and with it, esprit de corps came to the fore as they approached the 2022 season. Where the desperate desire for individual achievement once existed, the motivation to play for one another took its place. “We were really, really tight that year,” Asokumar explained. “It just made playing for each other a lot easier, and I think that’s what you need to win.”
The drudgery and individuality that once defined competitive tennis was replaced with zeal and camaraderie. They were playing for each other, and they were playing well. When the 2022 season finally arrived, the Maroons were ready.
The 2022 UChicago men’s team was a force to be reckoned with. A formidable regular season saw the Maroons enter the NCAA tournament, with a 17–1 record and a No. 1 ranking. After steamrolling their way through the playoffs, they found themselves matched up with Case Western Reserve in the NCAA Championship—the only team to beat the Maroons that season. For the first time in the program’s history, the UChicago men’s team was one win away from a National Championship. Despite being strangers to the occasion, the Maroons showed no signs of nerves. The National Championship was UChicago’s.
Like their male counterparts, the 2022 season brought the women’s team their most successful season in a decade. After dropping their first match to Eastern Michigan, the Maroons went on a dominant 22-match winning streak, booking a place in the NCAA Championship Match. Unfortunately, the Division III sweep was not meant to be, and the top-seeded Maroons fell just short to Claremont-Mudd-Scripps. A tough ending, but nonetheless, an improvement. UChicago women were back within punching distance of a title.
After the best season in the program’s history, both teams were hungry for more in 2023. There was still much left to prove, and UChicago was on its way to establishing itself as the top dog of Division III tennis—this was no time to take the foot off the gas.
Unfortunately for the men’s team, the 2023 season was one marred by bad luck. Asokumar along with some other key starters were forced to miss time through various injuries, and the Maroons were never quite able to hit their stride like they did in 2022. They stumbled their way to a 15–5 record before crashing out of the NCAA tournament in the Sweet Sixteen. “We were pretty banged up, which just led to a lot more struggle, and I don’t think we were as tough as we wanted to be,” Asokumar admitted.
Meanwhile, the UChicago women’s team entered the 2023 season laden with vengeance. After losing just once in the regular season the year prior, they oneupped themselves in 2023, rattling off 23 unanswered wins en route to their second consecutive NCAA Championship appearance. The stage was set. Just a year after a heartbreaking finals loss, they had made it back and were set to face a familiar foe in Claremont-Mudd-Scripps. One win away from an undefeated season. One win away from a National Championship. But once again, their season ended in heartbreak. Despite the season’s bitter end, the women’s team did not let their despondence linger. All eyes quickly shifted toward preparations for the 2024 season. “We knew that we had a strong team, so we had the ability to win. It was just a matter of if we were all mentally there. We needed the energy and the atmosphere, both on and off the court, to set us apart and to drive that momentum going into the season,” Mikos explained.
For the men, the slight blip in 2023 had lit a fire under the players. A Sweet Sixteen victory was far from poor, especially given the season’s circumstances, but they knew what they were capable of. Following their
Both teams had a lot to prove in the 2024 season.
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success in 2022, many players left the 2023 season feeling unsatisfied. Another year of underperformance was not an option.
Both teams had a lot to prove in the 2024 season. The expectations were high, and the pressure was even higher, but so was the program’s confidence. The unwavering belief remained that if they stayed true to their identity, if they fought for each other and played their game, they could not lose.
Three months into the season and that identity hadn’t gone anywhere. Entering the 2024 NCAA Tournament with a combined record of 38–2, both the men and women were playing the best tennis of their lives.
The men’s team cruised their way through the NCAA tournament, responding to any hiccups with a confident display of the free-flowing tennis they had played all season. The real test awaited them in the National Championship against Claremont-Mudd-Scripps, the bane of UChicago tennis.
While the women’s team started their playoff run with continued dominance, winning their first three matchups 5–0, 5–1, and 5–0, their Final Four matchup against Pomona-Pitzer proved to be a different beast.
The Maroons got off to the worst possible start, dropping all three of their doubles matches. Not ideal, but the Maroons were no strangers to adversity. They had faced brick walls before, and they had pushed through them. A singles loss later and the 3–0 deficit became 4–0. In a first-to-five situation, it was all but over. Barring the most improbable of comebacks, it would be a third straight season of defeat in the most excruciating of manners. Then lightning struck.
With weather conditions forcing the remainder of the semi-final to take place indoors, the Maroons were handed a lifeline. While Pomona-Pitzer, a Californian team, thrived outdoors, the Maroons now had the advantage.
With the season on the line, the pressure was on Mikos to win her singles match and wrench the momentum back from the Sagehens. “Our team’s really gritty, and we don’t give up,” Mikos said. “You might win against us, but you’ll have to rip it from our hands… we’re not going to go down without
a fight.”
And fight they did. Mikos quickly took care of business in her match before graduate student Rena Lin and third-year Nika Vesely earned big wins as well. With the score 4–3, it was up to first-year Sarena Biria and third-year Shianna Guo to pull a rabbit out of the hat. Two swift victories later and history had been made. One of the greatest comebacks in NCAA history belonged to UChicago women’s tennis.
Thankfully for the Maroons, the NCAA Championship against Wesleyan did not require quite as historic of a performance. After taking a 2–1 lead following doubles play, the Maroons showed their composure in their singles matches, earning a 5–3 victory and securing the National Championship that had eluded them for so long.
Like the women in the Final Four, the UChicago men’s team was forced to display their own show of resilience in the NCAA Championship Match against Claremont-Mudd-Scripps. After jumping out
to a quick 2–1 lead after doubles play, the momentum was with the Maroons. Things quickly unraveled after three straight Stag victories put the Maroons against the ropes.
Then, in an eerie display of déjà vu, a weather delay gave the Maroons a chance to turn the tide. “We all just sat there, looked at each other, and talked about a few things. Then we started making jokes,” Asokumar recalled. “There was a pretty strong understanding across the team that we were playing for each other. If things worked, they worked, and if they didn’t, we could be proud of what we did. That just relieved the pressure and allowed us to enjoy the moment.”
Forgetting the grandiosity of the affair, the Maroons fell back on the ethos of UChicago Tennis and what had gotten them to this point. After two quick victories from fourth-year Derek Hsieh and first-year Ajer Sher, the score was back to even. Then it was Asokumar’s turn. After finding himself just
four points from defeat, Asokumar dazzled, winning nine of the final ten games. The Maroons had reached the pinnacle. The sweep of Division III tennis was complete.
With the 2025 season on the horizon, UChicago Tennis has little left to prove. Both the men’s and women’s teams can call themselves champions, and there is no Division III tennis program that can hold a candle to what the University of Chicago has achieved in the past three years. So what’s next for the Maroons?
For Mikos, who is now entering her final year at UChicago, her hunger for silverware has not waned. However, at the core of her motivation remain the pillars that have come to define UChicago tennis. “Having that cycle of winning nationals is really important. I think it drives a lot of the motivation and momentum we have going into the beginning of the season. But to that same extent, we always want to have fun and playing for each other is always something that we emphasize during matches.”
In recognition of their NCAA national championships, the UChicago men’s and women’s tennis teams were invited to the White House this summer. courtesy of uchicago athletics instagram .
1 Item for a baby or a marathoner
Ought to
Turn a 92.5 into a 93, maybe
One who takes orders
(Former) location of the Chicago rat hole 16 “Please give me some milk, human!”
18 Nicholas II was the last one
Binged thing
20 So-called “Black Metropolis” of Chicago just northwest of Hyde Park
Invites to enter
Second-most visited city in the U.S., after New York
Changemakers?: Abbr.
3-ring school supply
Mont Blanc is the tallest one
Hipstery Chicago West Side area known for its thrifting scene
Alternative to foil and sabre
“Opticks” author Newton
Sheepskin boot brand
Near-downtown Chicago area that’s a hub for art galleries and nightlife
Casual top
Singer/actress Steinfeld
G-men, with “the”
Wishfully forget about, colloquially
Classes you don’t have to try very hard for
Home to Chicago’s largest designated greenspace, as well as a popular zoo
Band with such hits as “Gimme! Gimme! Gimme!”, “Money, Money, Money”, and “I Do, I Do, I Do, I Do, I Do” 63 Seven ___ 64 One of 84 won by “Saturday Night Live”
65 Divisions of Chicago, such as 14-, 20-, 37-, 42-, and 54-Across
CROSSWORDS
78. Hello, Windy City
By PRAVAN CHAKRAVARTHY | Head Crossword Editor
69 Accept, as a challenge or client
70 Southern African language family that includes Swahili and Zulu
71 Eats away at, as a rock
72 So-called “sixth sense”: Abbr.
DOWN
1 NFL team with a 30.2 percent win rate since 1999
2 Nuts and bolts behind Siri
3 ___-ee’s (famous Texan chain)
4 Frozen yogurt combo word
5 Villain names in “2001: A Space Odyssey” and “Megamind”
6 Makes slippery, maybe
7 U.S. state that looks like the blocks in the corners of this grid
8 World’s best-selling toy brand
9 Stalemated, as a chess match
11 Parent’s command to a screen-addicted child
12 Indian-American, for example
14 Chess piece that goes in straight lines
15 “Top Gun” actor Kilmer
16 Booth deg. offering
17 Hosp. locales
21 Muhammad ___-ul-Haq (polarizing Pakistani politician)
22 Make knotty
23 Arab top brass
26 HDMI, for one
27 “Better safe than sorry,” e.g.
28 Highway directive
29 Annoys
31 One of the two basic Japanese soups, along with suimono
32 Article of clothing that would be especially useless for a giraffe
33 Author Alison who came up
with a cinematic “test”
Bee-related
Jean brand 36 Horror movie director (and notable Barack Obama impersonator) Jordan 38 Spade in fashion 39 Two-stringed Chinese instrument
43 Instagram video
47 The S in SFO or SJC
50 Changed to 2x, as a boring
lecture video
51 Staple foods in many West African diets
52 Bodypart used to shoot and to get shots
53 Chicago WNBA team
55 Library IDs
56 Prefix meaning “new”
57 Oligosaccharide, e.g., for short
58 Workplace safety org.
59 Initial poker bet
60 Mascot of WashU, Baylor, Brown, Cornell, and four of the UC schools
61 Anti-apartheid activist Steve
62 Like many cheeses and wines
66 Soil mover
67 “The loneliest number that you’ll ever do,” according to a Harry Nilsson song
