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!