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?