Protest Part 2

It was not insignificant that the schools we were renouncing at the protest were Harvard, Yale, and Brown. On the one hand we consider ourselves at a comparable level to the Ivies, even a higher level (we scoff at Harvard and its grade inflation!). Yet there is a joke on campus that people come to the U of C because they didn’t get in to any of the Ivies. It’s part of a collective inferiority complex.

When you say you go to Harvard, people know what you’re talking about. They look at you with raised eyebrows and, depending on the person, a mix of scorn and jealousy or admiration and esteem. When you say you go to the University of Chicago, people furrow their eyebrows and tilt their head. “Is that a state school?” they ask. Or, if they look at you with an expression of recognition, half the time they’re confusing the U of C with the University of Illinois at Chicago or the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign or worse, Northwestern. Among a certain group of people, people involved in academia mostly, there is a Harvard-like reaction, but you’re never sure if you’re going to have to explain yourself, to sort of justify your existence. “No, really, I am a college student. It’s a real university, I swear.” So we have a kind of Canadian tendency to self-deprecation.

At some point, all the articles I’ve read about the U of C mention the slogans we put on the t-shirts we sell to raise money for student groups. The most famous is “Where fun comes to die,” but that’s only because they can’t print the best ones. There’s “Where the only thing that goes down on you is your GPA”, and, "If it were easy, it'd be your mom". So the self-derision exhibited on that December day, the “I am uncommon” shirts and such, that was not at all unusual.

What was unusual was how vocally proud we were. And it wasn’t just the pride of people who feel their incredible intellects aren’t sufficiently appreciated by the World. The U of C is different, purposely, and we are here because of those differences. There is something in the weirdness of the school that is drawing us out here in the middle of crisp blue-grey winter.

I’ve been here for almost four years; in a few months I will leave and be glad to do so. But there is something I will miss. And, on holding that sign in my unwisely ungloved hands, I tried to think of what, precisely, I would miss. What is it that makes the U of C at once awful and amazing, my Hell and my home?

Protest Part 1

In spite of the midday December sun, it was cold. Not unusually cold, but it had been unusually warm so if felt unusually cold. Some two-dozen University of Chicago students (there had been more a bit earlier) were standing outside shouting wisps of fog at the administration building. The group was pretty freeform, but there were two or three leaders who were identifiable because they were asking questions, while the rest of us responded as we had been told to.

Who are we not?!
Harvard!

Most of the students were wearing maroon t-shirts, the school color, that said simply and succinctly: “I am uncommon”. Some wore them underneath their jackets, which had been opened after a good hour or so of shouting and marching, while others had cleverly put them over their outerwear. I was wearing nonrebellious clothes because I was coming from a meeting, which is also why I was an hour or so late to the noon rally. But when I arrived I promptly donned my own “I am uncommon” shirt, underneath my jacket.

Who are we not?!
Yale!

It felt good to be using my voice in the cold. I was holding a sign that said “Keep it uncommon!” and it felt like a real protest, like an infinitely smaller version of the RNC protests I went to in New York. Chants, signs, vague coordination, even a small counter-protest: a few people standing in a circle 50 feet away, talking amongst themselves and occasionally yelling at us with enough force for us to hear but not enough for us to understand what they were saying. I’d been feeling trapped lately, bottled up and pigeonholed, so I’d been looking for a good outlet for rage. Rage of any kind really. I believe in this issue, but in all honesty I was out there as much because it was a protest against anything as because it was a protest against switching to the Common Application.

Who are we not?!
Brown!

The whole thing started with our new president, Robert Zimmer, a former faculty member who had left Chicago to become the Provost at Brown. Only a month after his inauguration in October, Zimmer instituted a change in University policy: the University of Chicago would no longer require the UnCommon Application it had used since 1997 and would begin to accept the Common Application, a single form that can be used to apply to around 300 schools, including Harvard, Yale, and Brown. Using the bizarre and absurd calculus of today’s higher education industry, Zimmer argued that increasing applicants without increasing class size would increase the percentage of applicants who are rejected, which would in turn increase the ranking in the U.S. News and World Report annual college rankings, which then would increase the number of applications, which would increase the rejection percentage (the “selectivity”), and around we go again. Thus, the theory goes, getting people who are less qualified and less interested to apply will result in more qualified and more interested students.

Besides increasing our U.S. News ranking, Zimmer and the administration thought that making it “easier” to apply here would increase the racial, geographic, and socioeconomic diversity of the school. Apparently, the reason more African Americans weren’t applying to U of C had nothing to do lack of resources for minorities or the prevailing culture of racism created by the University’s blundering and disastrous relations with the surrounding, predominately African American neighborhoods of Hyde Park, Kenwood, and Woodlawn. And the reason more low-income families weren’t applying wasn’t the application fee itself or the paltry and poorly administered financial aid. No, for Zimmer, black kids and poor kids were too lazy, incompetent, or just plain stupid to fill out one more form. Solution: Common App. Done and done. Not a whit of student input necessary.

So here we were holding signs that said “Zimmer go back to Brown” and “I am uncommon. I like mustard.” I was excited to see so many people there. I’ve been involved in political groups on campus since my first year, and there has always been a depressing feeling of apathy. It is not an apathy of disinterest; indeed many students will talk politics till three in the morning, shirking their homework (a very big deal here) to do so. It is an apathy of surrender, an apathy of powerlessness. People don’t feel like anything they do will change anything. Zimmer won’t listen to us, King Daley won’t listen to us, Blagojevich won’t listen to us, and Bush certainly won’t listen to us. The media is still convinced that we are a generation of lazy, spoiled brats who don’t have the guts or the anger of our parents, and we’re starting to believe them. So I was glad people were standing out here in the cold, on the Friday of reading period, the two days without classes right before final exams. I was glad people were standing up for something at once concrete and abstract, something with real effects and something that threatens a bedrock principle: maintaining our own identity.

Who are we!?
Chicago!

Closerie Part Two

The bartender put ice in a martini glass to chill it. Then he put lime juice and tequila and Grand Marnier and more ice into a shaker and shook it with a certain showmanship and then emptied the glass of ice and poured the drink through the strainer. Whitman asked him what the drink was called.

« Une margharita, » he said. « C'est speciale. »

I didn't know there was Grand Marnier in a margarita.

***

I wanted to order a fine a l'eau, or brandy and water, because that was the drink that Ford Maddox Ford had ordered but didn't finish, so Hem had to finish it. I was too scared to, though, because I had never had it and I wasn't sure people still drank that kind of thing, and if the bartender didn't know what I was talking about, I didn't know how to explain it in French.

Also, I thought it was corny and I knew I wasn't Hemingway and I couldn't even grow a beard and I certainly didn't want to be Ford Maddox Ford who was an ass and used the same name twice. In the end I ordered an espresso, which was good because I was tired.

Aside from the pictures of Hemingway, there was a picture of how the place used to look. There was an American bar in the picture, so it must have been after Hemingway stopped going there. Indeed it looked very similar to the way it looked now, and it was only the sepia tones that made it look old. For all I knew, they could have taken the picture 5 years ago and photoshopped it to look antique. A lot of things were fake in Paris.

There were some men who, like me, were alone. But I didn't pay much attention to them. I was focused on the women, women with cigarettes held lightly in their fingers that were painted with dark nail polish.

There was a man who was sitting alone in a booth who I noticed as soon as his lover came in and put her coat on the chair across from him. She didn't sit in the chair, though. She sat next to him, on the booth, even though the table was narrow and was clearly meant to have two people sitting face to face.

Throughout the late afternoon and the early evening she caressed his face and he kissed her hand and they kissed as the French do, unapologetically. At one point she went to the bathroom and he sat there uncomfortably alone, tugging at his collar. I imagined he was wondering if she would ever return, even though she was only in the bathroom.

It ocurred to me that, though I was missing the kisses and the caresses, I was also missing the awkwardness of being alone. I had no choice but to sit alone at cafes and I was ok with that. This man could hardly sit still just moments after his date left.

When she returned from the bathroom they continued their gestures and murmurs and they smoked and she ate all of the olives that they put on the tables and on the bar.