Carrie Golus, AB’91, AM’93

Experimental literature

rsmith — Wed, 09 Aug 2023 02:52:06 +0000

rsmith Tue, 08/08/2023 - 21:52

Courtesy Donna Tong, LAB’20, Class of 2024

Summer/23

An advanced poetry course explores the science of poetry and the poetry of science.

Creative writing lecturer Nathan Hoks often gets a particular kind of student in his classes: science majors who love poetry but can’t dedicate much time to it. Partly that’s because their studies are demanding. But partly, he says, science majors are stymied by “conventional social messages that treat poetry and science as total opposites, water and fire.”

Hoks’s interdisciplinary course, Advanced Poetry Writing: Weird Science, which he taught for the first time in Winter Quarter, takes a different view. “science and poetry,” reads the description of his opening lecture (lower case in original). “admixture? alchemy? frenemies?”

The syllabus encourages students to “use, misuse, and borrow from science” and to “approach poems like science experiments.” At the end of their quarter-long foray into experimentation, students’ final projects were to include a “lab report” (a one- to two-page writeup of their results).

In her lab report, third-year Donna Tong, LAB’20, wrote that she took inspiration from her developmental biology textbook, scribbling poems in the margins. A double major in biology and creative writing, Tong says that “Elegy Template” (below) was one of her “most concrete mini-experiments.” She asked herself, “Can science sound sad?” To create the poem, she looked up a template for an elegy (“The title is very self-explanatory,” she notes) and combined it with language from developmental biology.

Her broader experiment for the course focused on scientific language. The challenge, she says, is that its tone can be so strong, it can overpower the poem.

One of Tong’s portfolios of science-based writing, “Cells to Cells,” won the Margaret C. Annan Memorial Prize for poetry; the $1,000 award supports a summer writing project. After graduation, Tong plans to attend medical school. Hoks will teach Weird Science again next spring.

Elegy template

By Donna Tong, LAB’20, Class of 2024

It’s late, and it will always be late.
To me, the adult thoracic cavity has always been
dependable. But when we were
young, it wasn’t always so. The histoblasts were
dormant until the time came, riding
the wave of mighty proliferation. Those cells weren’t
ready, but it doesn’t matter because
there’s never been an epidermis quite like this. After
metamorphosis, there might never be
again. Again, it’s late, and it will always be late. That’s
how I know they’re practicing. There
are no beeping timers or alarms. They just always are.

Arts & Humanities

Poetry

College students

Making an example

rsmith — Wed, 09 Aug 2023 02:51:32 +0000

rsmith Tue, 08/08/2023 - 21:51

As part of the public art project Exemplary, student interns commissioned an original dance piece in honor of Katherine Dunham, PhB’36. They also organized an origami folding event, a cloud festival, and so much more. (Photography by Jason Smith)

Carrie Golus, AB’91, AM’93

The Core

Summer/23

An ambitious public art project. Five overstretched interns. What could go wrong?

On January 27, it seems like everything is going according to plan.

The five interns working on the Exemplary public art project—Juan Cardenas, William Hu, Suttyn Simon, Xueqi Sun, and Miki Yang, all Class of 2025—spent Autumn Quarter interviewing professors, polling students, and thinking deeply about what it means to be an exemplary UChicagoan. (Read part one of “Making an Example.”)

Now they’re ready to do something. And they have a generous budget—$40,000 from the College’s Curricular Innovation Fund—to do it with.

When Laura Steward, the University’s curator of public art, originally envisioned Exemplary, she thought the project would focus on writer Susan Sontag, AB’51. The students blew up that simple idea last quarter.

Instead, they want to honor three alumni: Sontag; dancer-anthropologist Katherine Dunham, PhB’36; and astronomer Carl Sagan, AB’54, SB’55, SM’56, PhD’60.

But also—a faculty member: meteorologist Tetsuya “Ted” Fujita, aka “Mr. Tornado,” who taught at UChicago from 1953 to 1990.

And also—a group of staff members: contracted workers, specifically dining services workers.

Not one project, but five.

It’s a daunting task to accomplish in just two nine-week quarters. But Steward and the interns seem entirely undaunted, and at the January 27 meeting—almost halfway through Winter Quarter—it seems difficult, but doable.

The Sontag project is well underway. Quotations from Sontag’s writings will be printed on large adhesive labels and installed among the portraits in Hutchinson Commons. This was Steward’s idea. She’s been plotting for years.

The interns have chosen the quotes. They have measured and remeasured the wall panels—which look identical but actually are all different sizes. Now they need to collaborate with a designer to make it happen.

Sitting under one of the few women’s portraits (Marion Talbot, dean of women in the early University), the group is going over the designer’s proposed budget. “He went big,” Steward says: $40,000 just for Sontag. But that amount has to cover all of their big ideas.

For Sagan, a “Cosmos watch-a-thon,” a mini-festival of his groundbreaking television show. Also origami star-crafting.

For Dunham, a dance performance. Suttyn has suggested working with the Ruth Page Civic Ballet Training Company, where she was a trainee dancer last year; she abandoned professional ballet to study at the College.

For the workers, a collection of short video interviews screened on monitors: “a Nam June Paik kind of vibe,” Steward says.

For Fujita … something. To be determined.

Steward walks the students through the line items of the Sontag bid, including “a contingency of $2,000,” she says.

“What’s a contingency?” Juan wants to know.

“A contingency is for things that happen that you didn’t plan for. The less you know, the more contingent the project is—the more ‘unknown unknowns,’” she says. “It’s just good to have a little padding in the budget.”

In case something should go wrong.

Exemplary project #1: Original dance performance honoring Katherine Dunham, PhB’36

Members of the Ruth Page Civic Ballet Training Company give a pop-up dance performance inspired by the work of dancer-anthropologist Katherine Dunham, PhB’36. (Photography by Jason Smith)

The interns wanted to honor Dunham during Black History Month, and they just make it. They meet with Victor Alexander of the Ruth Page Civic Ballet Training Company on February 3. His three-minute piece is staged February 28 in Hutchinson Commons.
At 11:30 a.m., 12:30 p.m., and 2 p.m., with no warning, drummer Victoria Boateng bursts loudly into rhythm. Six trainee dancers, dressed in street clothes, emerge from the lunchtime crowd and move among the tables, making their way to the platform at the west end of the room.
Alexander’s original choreography called for dancing on the tables as well as the floor, but the tables were too wobbly—something he discovered the day before. There are a few minor technical glitches, but the audience is too astonished to notice. They are not too astonished to applaud.

Exemplary project #2: Cosmos screening and origami star-folding in honor of Carl Sagan, AB’54, SB’55, SM’56, PhD’60

From left: Exemplary interns Suttyn, Xueqi, and Miki fold stars at an origami event in the lobby of the Smart Museum. (Photography by Jason Smith)

The Sagan event, for complicated reasons, takes place over two days in two venues across campus from each other.
On Saturday, April 8, there’s a full-day Cosmos watch-a-thon at the Logan Center.
On Sunday, April 9, members of CHAOS, the Chicago Area Origami Society, lead a two-hour workshop on folding origami stars in the lobby at the Smart. Attendance is small but enthusiastic: “This is a wonderful event,” second-year Sylvie Badur gushes. “You guys have done an amazing job.”

The Tuesday after the Sagan festival, the temperature is 78 degrees—a welcome treat in mid-April. The interns have gathered on the patio outside the Logan Center’s café: a calm, relaxing space for an anxiety-provoking conversation. The Sontag installation is not going well.

The original designer had to drop out for health reasons. Steward scrambled to find a replacement. Now there’s an issue with the adhesive: it pulls the varnish off the walls. “What’s a little varnish between friends?” Steward quips. The facilities department did not see it that way.

The stickers could be installed with tiny pins, which would leave just a pinhole behind. Facilities was not thrilled by that. Their suggestion: varnish the walls before applying the labels. The printer nixed that idea, since the varnish would need at least a week to dry.

Just five and a half weeks remain in the academic year. The workers have not been interviewed yet; the project on Fujita has not even been decided. The interns need to move on. But Steward’s contact in Facilities is being slow to respond.

“You could send one of us,” Juan says.

“I can cry on command,” Suttyn offers.

“We can’t change the site,” Juan says.

“We already did the measurements,” Miki says.

“This Spring Quarter has been so incredibly cursed,” Suttyn says.

Steward is remarkably sanguine—probably because she’s pulled off much riskier projects. In 2017, for the 75th anniversary of the first self-sustaining nuclear reaction, she commissioned a pyrotechnic piece by artist Cai Guo-Qiang, who detonated 500 pounds of explosives on the roof of Regenstein Library. “We had to stop helicopter traffic,” Steward says. “Everyone involved, up to [then University president Robert J.] Zimmer, was a little nervous.”

Time is running short in the meeting, too, so they turn to other projects. For the workers, Chartwells, the University’s catering contractor, has stepped in to help. Chartwells’ videographer will shoot and edit the videos for free. The interns just need to book a campus space and ask the questions.

That leaves Fujita, the tornado expert: how to celebrate him? At a previous meeting, the students had discussed doing something with cloudlike cotton candy.

“Hear me out,” says Suttyn. “I found a company that can make logos into clouds.” They could rent the company’s machine and make clouds on the Main Quad.

“During Summer Breeze,” Miki suggests.

Stress and exhaustion are making everyone a little punchy. “No one wants to wear a tornado costume? Tornado dress? Tornado cape?” Steward asks. She looks pointedly at William, the fashionista of the group. He shakes his head.

Suttyn is assigned to look into the cloud machine; Miki into a supplier of cotton candy.

Exemplary project #3: Exhibition of quotations from the writings of Susan Sontag, AB’51

Sontag quotations juxtaposed with portraits in Hutchinson Commons. The exhibition was on display from late April to late May. (Photography by Terren Wein)

The Sontag exhibition is finally up. The Sontag quotes have been printed on heavy blue card stock, rather than stickers, and installed with 22-gauge pins, “about half the size of a thumbtack,” explains Steward. She confirmed with her father, a retired second-generation hardware store owner in rural Arkansas, that the pins would hold.

There are some thought-provoking juxtapositions.

Under Hanna Holborn Gray, the first, and only, woman president of the University (1978–93): “A woman’s face is potentially separate from her body … They establish her status as an ‘object.’”

Under Robert Maynard Hutchins, University president and then chancellor (1929–51), who was famous for his quips and bon mots: “To be a poet requires a mythology of the self … When the poet self dies, the person dies.”

But there’s no time to revel in the success of Sontag. There are video interviews with dining services workers to be done.

On a sunny morning in late April, the group has set up in the Reynolds Club South Lounge. Juan is interviewing Ana Valencia in Spanish while Suttyn looks on: “I’m not conversational enough to ask a question.”

Next up is Joanne Henderson, who has dressed for the occasion in a black blazer, black pearl-studded beret, leopard-print scarf, and chunky rhinestone earrings. “I love the entire ’fit,” says Suttyn. She explains the project as Henderson gets settled in front of the camera: “We want to highlight the exemplary parts of the University.”

“If you come from a working-class background,” Juan adds, “you know that without the workers, nothing gets done.”

“Wow,” Henderson says. “That’s awesome.” Steward fusses with the microphone pinned to Henderson’s scarf. “You guys make me feel so special.”

In the interview, Henderson explains she was born in Mobile, Alabama: “I’m a Southern belle.” She came to Chicago with her parents in 1968, at age 6, and “was raised in the projects.” She attended Reavis Elementary and King High School, has worked as a nurse and a school bus driver, and raised three children. “I love food and I love fashion,” she says. At the University, she enjoys setting up the tables, arranging the fruit: “I make it look beautiful for y’all.”

Exemplary project #4: Cloud festival honoring Tetsuya “Ted” Fujita

At the cloud festival honoring meteorologist Tetsuya “Ted” Fujita, Xueqi and Steward react to the first cloud. (Video courtesy Miki Yang; still by Laura Lorenz)

Clouds float past the Reg. (Video courtesy Miki Yang; still by Laura Lorenz)

Miki and Xueqi show off the cotton candy and informational flyers on Fujita. (Photo courtesy Miki Yang)

Outside Regenstein Library, foamy, cartoon-like clouds float through the air on Saturday, May 13 (the event had been planned for the day before, but had to be postponed due to rain). The clouds, made of “Flogo juice,” as Miki calls it, were “essentially baby shampoo.”
“It may have been the most successful project of all,” Steward says later. The students who stopped by “will never forget who Fujita is.”

By May 23, the interns’ final meeting, the video project is still not done. Unhappy with the quality of the interviews, the videographer wants to scrap them and do them over. “He may be imagining this project to be a marketing piece,” Steward says, rather than what the interns were aiming for: artsy videos focusing on the workers as individuals. “I have a feeling he has a very different end product in mind.”

“I’m willing to do it next fall,” Juan says. The Exemplary internship was paid, but he offers to work for free: “I want to see it finished.”

For last year’s pilot public art project, 100 Views of Lake Michigan, Steward held a capstone event where the interns spoke about what they had learned. But this year’s group, having created five separate projects of their own design—one of which remains incomplete—is bled dry.

So instead they’re informally hashing over Exemplary while enjoying a celebratory dinner at Nella on 55th Street. (Except for Xueqi, who has not been lured out even by the promise of carb-heavy Italian food. “She locks herself in her room when she’s studying,” Miki explains.)

Which project did they feel most invested in?

“Obvious answer for me,” says Suttyn: Katherine Dunham. She would have loved performing in a piece like that. Not just because of the “cool new choreography,” but because it was a learning experience for both dancers and audience.

“The Sontag project,” says Miki. She had read Sontag’s essay “Against Interpretation” before the internship, but “I wasn’t thinking ‘Oh, she’s such a snake.’ Laura was like, ‘She’s a snake.’” In watching interviews with Sontag, Miki enjoyed the way she would flip questions back on the interviewer: Why are you asking this question? What’s the point?

“In freshman year, I remember the first time I was in Hutch, I saw all the portraits up there, all male,” Miki says. She liked the decision to represent Sontag not with a generic portrait—like all the men in suits—but with her words, interrogating them.

“The problem with the Sagan day is that nobody came,” Steward says. (The date had to be changed and there wasn’t much time for promotion.) “Other than that, it was perfect. The man is exemplary—the physicist who writes poetry. And the series is amazing. His groovy three-piece suits, his hair, the sideburns.

“I just wish—you know, it was ten hours,” she says. “Ten hours of public television from the early 1970s.” The interns and a few other attendees were in and out. But Steward, like a captain whose honor requires going down with the ship, spent the entire day at Logan watching Cosmos—along with one other young man.

“That dude will do great things,” says Miki.

“In the movie version of this, he’ll rise up and lead the people,” says Steward.

“He was fasting as well,” Juan observes.

William chooses Sontag: “It had the most problems to solve, and I like solving problems.” After all the difficulty with the installation, on a “random Wednesday morning” the exhibition was up. “It was like a slap in the face,” he says. “A good slap in the face.”

Juan was most invested in the workers project, an idea he proposed and fought hard for, “but I really enjoyed the Katherine Dunham performance,” he says, especially the element of surprise. “We’re not asking for permission. She’s coming in whether you like it or not.”

“Xueqi would say it wasn’t a particular project,” Steward says. “She was most engaged by the research phase. Talking to professors, trying to understand what it was to be exemplary.”

By email from China after the quarter ends, Xueqi casts a third vote for Sontag. Although she was the main organizer of the Sagan festival, she felt more creatively invested in Sontag: she had compiled the quotes, assigned them to their panel positions, and written the exhibition description. “I saw people taking photos of the panels, sharing their personal thoughts on the quotes, or even just asking others what’s going on in Hutch.”

William had noticed that too: “I saw people post on Sidechat.”

“Making fun of it,” Suttyn points out.

“Doesn’t matter,” says Juan. “They’re paying attention.”

“As far as what I learned,” says Steward, “I think I did you a disservice in letting this thing be such a big, sprawling, all-singing, all-dancing project.” Next year, she could define the scope more narrowly. But should she? “You would lose the open thinking section. I also wanted you to have the opportunity to fail,” she says: learning how to fail, and get back up, is an important life skill. “You want dessert, right?”

They all do. William orders two—one for now and one for later, while studying. “I will have a spoon,” Steward tells the waiter.

“Also, we are undergrads,” says Suttyn. “As wonderful as giving us leeway is, all of us here are like, 20.”

“I wanted to give you permission, or to show you that you don’t need permission,” says Steward. “You give you permission.”

It’s been a warm, festive, somewhat nostalgic meal, despite the looming pressure of finals. As the discussion wraps up, Steward pays with a University credit card. A few minutes later, the waiter returns apologetically. There’s a glitch with the card. It’s been declined.

Steward doesn’t even blink, just whips out her own.

Arts & Humanities

Public art

College students

What’s new in the College

rsmith — Wed, 09 Aug 2023 02:51:32 +0000

rsmith Tue, 08/08/2023 - 21:51

The new Center in Paris will nearly triple the current capacity, allowing 100 more undergraduates to study abroad each year. (Rendering courtesy of Studio Gang)

Carrie Golus, AB’91, AM’93

The Core

Summer/23

A soupçon of College news.

New Paris Center named for John Boyer

UChicago alumni and parents have contributed $27 million to rename the University’s new Center in Paris and establish a new professorship in honor of John W. Boyer, AM’69, PhD’75, senior advisor to the president and the Martin A. Ryerson Distinguished Service Professor of History. Boyer served as dean of the College for 31 years and was instrumental in conceptualizing the first Center in Paris in 2003. The new Center, designed by Jeanne Gang, is scheduled to open in 2024.

2023 Quantrell winners announced

Five faculty members have been recognized with the Llewellyn John and Harriet Manchester Quantrell Award for Excellence in Undergraduate Teaching, which is based on letters of nomination from students. This year’s recipients are Leora Auslander, the Arthur and Joann Rasmussen Professor of Race, Diaspora, and Indigeneity and History; Michael Gladders, professor of astronomy and astrophysics; Robert L. Kendrick, the Robert O. Anderson Distinguished Service Professor of Music and Romance Languages and Literatures; Phoebe Rice, professor of biochemistry and molecular biology; and James Sparrow, associate professor of history. Established in 1938, the Quantrell is believed to be the nation’s oldest prize for undergraduate teaching.

Inaugural Sonnenschein award given to Ricky Holder, AB’23

During the Class Day ceremonies (see remarks from Class Day speaker Bret Stephens, AB’95), Ricky Holder, AB’23, was presented with the inaugural Hugo F. Sonnenschein Award of Excellence, the highest honor to be bestowed upon undergraduates in the College. Holder, a Navy veteran who spent nine years in foster care, will be a Marshall Scholar at the University of Oxford next year. He was one of three student speakers at Class Day, along with fellow graduates Daphne de Beistegui, AB’23, and Jeremy Huang, AB’23. Read more at mag.uchicago.edu/holder.

University News

The College

Scientific thinking

rsmith — Wed, 09 Aug 2023 02:51:32 +0000

rsmith Tue, 08/08/2023 - 21:51

Melina Hale, PhD’98, came to UChicago as a graduate student in 1992. She’s now an alum, a College parent, a named professor, and, as of July, dean of the College. (Photography by Jason Smith)

Carrie Golus, AB’91, AM’93

The Core

Summer/23

Meet Melina Hale, PhD’98, the College’s new dean.

Melina Hale, PhD’98, the William Rainey Harper Professor in the Department of Organismal Biology and Anatomy, became dean of the College on July 1. Hale, who previously served as a vice provost of the University, succeeds John W. Boyer, AM’69, PhD’75, the Martin A. Ryerson Distinguished Service Professor of History. The Core spoke with Hale in late June, as she was preparing to step into her new position.

What was your first impression of UChicago when you came here as a graduate student?

How passionate everyone was about their research—that was both exciting and intimidating. And I loved how we were all appreciated for being our own quirky selves.

What were the first classes you taught?

I had the good fortune of being a teaching assistant for Lorna Straus [LAB’49, X’53, SM’60, PhD’62, now professor emerita of organismal biology and anatomy] and Jim Hopson [PhD’65, now professor emeritus of organismal biology and anatomy], both such great role models.

At the time, Lorna was the only woman faculty member in my department. She asked me to teach Multicellular Organisms with her but ended up leading a trip to Antarctica during the quarter, leaving me with the class for a while. Being thrown in the deep end was scary, but that happens over and over again in academia. I had to learn quickly and develop my own teaching style and approach. The students were so great and taught me a lot about how to teach that year. [Hale received the Wayne C. Booth Graduate Student Prize for Excellence in Teaching in 1994.]

In Jim’s course, Chordate Biology, my favorite memory is from when we were dissecting sharks. The night before an exam a student wrote a long—very long, and pretty good—“Ode to the Shark” on the chalkboard in the dissection room. Humanities in the anatomy lab is so UChicago. And I was impressed that the student had time for poetry before an exam.

Will you teach as dean?

I hope so. I want to teach something interdisciplinary. My research is on the neurobiology and biomechanics of movement. I was thinking about something bridging science and art, such as dance or animation of movement. Or perhaps an interdisciplinary course related to scientific communications or a Big Problems course. I’d love to coteach with a colleague. I always learn so much when coteaching.

How would you describe your teaching style?

I love engaging with students in the classroom. But I will say, some of my favorite teaching moments are from my lab, working with undergrads on research projects. That’s been a very meaningful part of my career.

Working in research labs can be such a wonderful opportunity for the students, because they can be involved in a project from an early stage—developing experiments—through doing the experiments, analyzing them, and, in some cases, writing them up and having them published. Students learn how to think like a scientist, and of course they learn the subject matter deeply.

An important part of the experience is when things don’t go as planned. Maybe the results aren’t as straightforward as hypothesized or the experimental design or methods don’t work as planned. I’m excited that some of the Core Bio sections now incorporate projects with new research.

Do you have a favorite UChicago tradition?

Scav is so great. I am proud to be friends with a Scav cofounder, Diane Kelly [AB’90]. I am curious about Kuvia. We’ll see this winter …

I’ve really enjoyed going to College games and cheering on the Maroons. When my kids were little, they were so in awe of the players—for them it was better than the Bears or Bulls. Sometimes players would even take a picture with them or give them a high five. Family Weekend and Alumni Weekend are also really fun—I’ve met such interesting fellow alums.

How are you preparing for your new job?

There is a lot to do to prepare! The staff in the College are amazing, and I’ve loved learning about the work of the different offices. One little thing I did was to borrow my son’s Hum books to have as my summer reading. I’ve started out with St. Augustine’s Confessions. Wish me luck, because this summer has been pretty busy learning the ropes of the deanship.

You’ve mentioned a couple different Core sequences—a fan?

Absolutely. The Core is foundational to the UChicago experience. We often talk about students not learning “what to think” but “how to think,” and that happens in the Core. The depth of exposure to ideas across disciplines is important no matter what career path someone ends up taking. I’ve seen that directly with our students going into biosciences.

It is also important to study the humanities and other Core subjects to foster our own humanity. To equip ourselves to live in a community with other human beings, to be citizens.

Besides doing Hum Core readings, do you have any hobbies?

I love bouldering. I like that it combines movement with problem solving. I am always terrified on high walls at the bouldering gym but then can’t wait to climb again.

Are there any lessons from bouldering that might come in useful as dean?

So many. There are different ways to complete a “problem,” or climb a route. Different climbers have different strengths and are successful with different approaches. And rather than just attempting a climb over and over, spending time to think about it—and talk through it with others—is often more effective.

University News

The College

Space Age Whiz Kid

rsmith — Wed, 09 Aug 2023 02:51:32 +0000

rsmith Tue, 08/08/2023 - 21:51

Courtesy Neon Squid Books

Jessica Guo, AB’23

Carrie Golus, AB’91, AM’93

The University of Chicago Magazine

Summer/23

Meet Joalda Morancy, AB’22, children’s author and aerospace engineer.

The summer before Joalda Morancy, AB’22, started high school, they were clicking around on YouTube when a cooking video caught their attention. It explained how to make a peanut butter and honey sandwich … on the International Space Station.

“I remember being super confused yet very intrigued,” Morancy says. “The next thing I knew, I was falling down a spiral of research and discovery in the topic that would become my lifelong passion.”

During the pandemic Morancy had more free time than usual, so they started sharing their obsessive research about various scientific topics on Twitter, with obvious enthusiasm and plentiful exclamation points. There were threads about space elevators: “Many of us have been on a regular elevator, but imagine one that takes you from the surface of the Earth to the cosmos above. Cool, right?”

About time travel: “Every moment of our lives we are traveling through time, but how do we go about controlling where in the future or past we want to go?”

About wormholes: “One of the coolest concepts when it comes to high energy astrophysics, and I am here to tell you exactly why that is.”

And for fun, something “that absolutely no one asked for,” a thread on actor Donald Glover “as different planets in our solar system” (wearing a blue-and-green patterned shirt for Earth, a bright orange suit for Mars, etc.).

Their most popular thread was about terraforming Mars: “You may have heard about this in movies, but how would we really do it?”

The book’s cover and its author. (Photo courtesy Joalda Morancy, AB’22)

A few months after Morancy began tweeting, an editor from Neon Squid, an imprint of Macmillan, asked if they would be interested in writing a children’s book. Morancy drafted the book in about eight months—much of it during the academic year. “It was stressful,” they say, “but I still enjoyed it.”

The book, called simply Aliens, was published in the fall of 2022, when Morancy was a fourth-year. Aimed at readers ages 8 to 10, Aliens is “a well-constructed, fact-filled look at the ongoing search for outer-space life,” according to Kirkus Reviews.

The writing in Aliens is as concise and engaging as Morancy’s tweets: “How did our home planet transform from a hot ball of rock to the blue marble we know and love today?” reads the spread about Earth. “Let’s rewind to 4.5 billion years ago.” Morancy also contributed ideas for the illustrations, such as the dairy cow being abducted by aliens while the rest of the herd looks on in puzzlement (above).

Morancy, who graduated with a degree in astronomy and astrophysics, now works at Blue Origin, the aerospace company founded by Jeff Bezos. An aerospace engineer, they test avionics for Blue Origin’s lunar lander program.

In their spare time they are working on two science fiction projects. One, with the working title “Nordström’s Descendants,” is a dark academia novel about a struggling grad student forced to study with a professor who “may or may not be a little bit evil,” they say. In the book, Morancy hopes to “make theoretical astrophysics accessible to the average reader,” which means “I have to understand all the different theories and the math involved.”

A second project, nameless as yet, is a historical fantasy set toward the end of the Scientific Revolution, on the cusp of the Enlightenment. Morancy’s inspiration is the “women and people of color within and outside the sphere of the Western world,” they say, whose contributions to the Scientific Revolution have been overlooked.

Morancy still posts prolifically on Twitter to more than 13,000 followers. “I’m about to start doing deep dives into quantum field theory, general relativity, and the Scientific Revolution,” they wrote at the beginning of June, “so consider my account insufferable for the next ~6 months–1 year.”

Three-minute eggheads

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rsmith Tue, 08/08/2023 - 21:51

Simplicity is the key to getting your message across within the three-minute time limit. Jelena Momirov sums up her research on cancer cells: “I added the drug, cells were alive. I added the drug with the enzyme, cells died.” (Photography by Jason Smith)

Carrie Golus, AB’91, AM’93

The University of Chicago Magazine

Summer/23

Doctoral students sum up years of work in 180 seconds.

It all started with a drought in Australia.

To conserve water, residents of Queensland were encouraged to time their showers; many used a three-minute egg timer for this unhappy purpose. One day the dean of the University of Queensland’s graduate school had a brain wave: Could doctoral candidates summarize their research under the same time constraint?

The first 3MT—Three Minute Thesis—competition was held at the University of Queensland in 2008 with 160 competitors. Since then it has spread to more than 900 universities in over 85 countries. 3MT came to UChicago in 2018, organized by UChicagoGRAD, a career advising and support service for graduate students and postdocs. For the second year in a row, alumni were invited to watch.

It’s midday on May 19, the Friday of Alumni Weekend. Nearly every chair in UChicagoGRAD’s headquarters—on the third floor of the campus bookstore building—is taken.

At the podium, Kathrin Kranz, director of experiential learning and outreach at UChicagoGRAD, explains the rules: in addition to the three-minute time limit, speakers may use just a single slide. A surprised “ohhhh” arises from the audience.

Off to the side is the table of judges: Brooke Carrell, assistant provost and executive director of UChicagoGRAD; Vera Dragisich, PhD’90, senior instructional professor of chemistry; and Ella Karev, AM’18, PhD’22, postdoctoral teaching fellow in the humanities. Karev, an Egyptologist, won the 2022 competition with the presentation “Slavery in Ancient Egypt, c. 900 to 300 BC.”

Karev explains later by email: “Trying to condense my (600 page!) dissertation into one slide and three minutes forced me to think about not just the bigger picture but the biggest picture—why does this research matter to someone who isn’t an ancient historian?” As a second-year graduate student, she was advised to consider “translatability” when choosing a thesis topic: “I went with something that interested me, filled a gap in scholarship, and yes, was interesting to non-Egyptologists.”

First up is Giorgio Sarro (geophysical sciences) with the presentation “Will Climate Change Bring More Extreme Weather Events?” (The answer, at the bottom of his slide: “Yes.”) Dressed in a plaid shirt, plaid pants, and sneakers, Sarro speaks calmly, with big hand gestures and no notes.

The second presenter, Kelly Holob, AM’16 (Divinity School), is equally calm and polished (competitors attended a preparatory workshop and had one-on-one advising appointments, Kranz explains later). The slide for her talk, on “saints and other criminals” executed in antiquity, displays a rather distressing medieval painting. The bodies of the two thieves crucified next to Jesus are twisted and broken; one even has missing limbs. In contrast, Jesus’s body is “rational and beautiful.” This convention persists even today, she concludes: the media chooses menacing images of “justly” executed criminals, while people killed “unjustly” might be shown in a graduation photo.

Jelena Momirov (chemical biology), in a black sleeveless dress and a turquoise scarf, would win the best-dressed award if there were one. “The Golden Era of Cancer Research,” reads the title of her slide. Her presentation focuses on the development of targeted therapies. “I added the drug, cells were alive,” she says, describing her research on cancer cells. “I added the drug with the enzyme, cells died.” Her simple language and matter-of-fact delivery get a laugh out of a few audience members and one of the judges.

Over the next 30 years, Alzheimer’s deaths are projected to triple, says Nick Bayhi (biophysical sciences), a bearded man with long curly hair. “Thankfully, there’s an enzyme in your blood, that’s Pac-Man-shaped, called insulin-degrading enzyme or IDE.” He kindly offers to inject us all. “It would digest any amyloid beta in your brain, none of you would get Alzheimer’s disease, and I would get to graduate early.” Unfortunately, there’s a catch: “I would give you all uncurable diabetes and put you in a coma.” His work focuses on developing a mutated version of the enzyme.

Next up is “Lighter and Stronger?” by Adarsh Suresh (molecular engineering). Many industries—construction, packaging, automotive—want to cut the weight of their products without sacrificing performance. “We want lighter airplane parts,” Suresh says, “but we don’t want to plummet to our deaths.” Could a material be as light as Styrofoam but as strong as metal? Yes: “Nature has been doing it for millennia,” he says, showing a slide with photos of a honeycomb and a hollow bone.

In all there are 13 presentations on wildly diverse topics. Isabella Scott, SM’18, SM’20, and Pallav Goyal, SM’19, PhD’23, each gamely attempt to explain their mathematics research. Rachel Chery, AM’21 (music), speaks on the political importance of radios in Haiti: “Radios give us hope that democracy can prevail, one broadcast at a time.”

The final presentation: “Uncovering How Planets Formed.” Our solar system is full of dissimilar planets, says Adina Feinstein, SM’19, PhD’23 (astronomy and astrophysics); she’s wearing slim jeans with blown-out knees and Vans. “Earth does not look anything like Jupiter. And Jupiter doesn’t look anything like Uranus or Neptune. But all of these planets formed from the same material around the same star.” For her thesis research, Feinstein “had the absolute privilege” of using “NASA’s new $10 billion space telescope, the James Webb Space Telescope” to study exoplanet WASP–39 b. Exoplanets might have formed like our own planets, or maybe completely differently: “I would be very grateful for that option because it means long-term job security,” she concludes.

The judges confer as the audience loads up on wine, cheese, and other appetizers. Fifteen minutes later, the winners are announced: it’s a science sweep. Suresh wins first prize ($1,000) for light, strong materials. Bayhi wins second ($500) for the Pac-Man Alzheimer’s enzyme. Momirov comes in third ($200) for targeted cancer therapies.

Now it’s the audience’s turn to vote for their favorite on their phones. Keeping the science sweep going, Feinstein wins. Her first step toward exoplanet job security: a prize of $150.

University News

Three Minute Thesis

UChicagoGRAD

That chat was fire

rsmith — Mon, 05 Jun 2023 19:50:24 +0000

rsmith Mon, 06/05/2023 - 14:50

John W. Boyer, AM’69, PhD’75, onstage at the Institute for the Study of Ancient Culture’s Breasted Hall. (Photography by Anne Ryan)

Carrie Golus, AB’91, AM’93

The University of Chicago Magazine

06.12.2023

At his final Alumni Weekend as dean of the College, John W. Boyer, AM’69, PhD’75, has a few incendiary words.

On May 19, the Friday afternoon of Alumni Weekend, Dean John W. Boyer, AM’69, PhD’75, sat down with Lauren Henry, AB’05, executive director of UChicago Alumni, for a fireside chat about his 31-year legacy. During the discussion in Breasted Hall, Boyer was warm, witty, and so frank that at various points he felt obliged to apologize to older alumni; Yale alumni; “loyalists to the Shoreland and Broadview” residence halls; and anyone from Essen or Dortmund, Germany.

This interview has been edited and condensed.

What brought you to the University of Chicago?

Life is filled with accidents. I was a local Chicago kid, grew up on the South Side. I went to a local university—a very good Jesuit school.

So I didn’t go away for college, but I wanted to go away for graduate school. I applied to Columbia University to study German history and I won a scholarship. It was the middle of the Vietnam War and SDS, Students for a Democratic Society, occupied Columbia in the spring of 1968 and closed it down.

In those days, if you didn’t go to graduate school, you were going to take a Pacific trip. I was an Army officer, but I was opposed to the war. I didn’t want to go to Vietnam.

So I called up the history department at Columbia and said, “I’m a little concerned. Do you think you’ll be open in the fall?” I got this very frustrated secretary who said, “Young man, if I were you, I wouldn’t come here.”

I had applied to Chicago as a backup school. I got a scholarship there too. I called with the same question and got this somewhat miffed secretary who said, “We’re always open. We never close.” So I came to Chicago in September. The irony is in January 1969—as older alums will know—the students occupied the Ad building and shut our university down.

For my purposes it was a wonderful decision. I probably wouldn’t have done Austrian history if I hadn’t come to Chicago.

Boyer as a new faculty member in 1976. (UChicago Photographic Archive, apf3-00778, Hanna Holborn Gray Special Collections Research Center, University of Chicago Library)

Why Austrian history?

There were a couple of young people on the faculty who were studying Austria and they were both denied tenure. This wasn’t auspicious. But I was fascinated by what they were doing.

I ended up working with an outstanding historian named William McNeill [AB’38, AM’39], a world historian who knew very little about Austria. If your dissertation supervisor knows very little about what you’re doing, there are tremendous advantages.

I originally talked to Professor McNeill about going to Europe to study. He said, “Well if you do German history, you’ll end up in some little town like Essen or Dortmund”—if there are citizens of Essen or Dortmund here, apologies. “But,” he said, “if you study the Habsburg Empire, you end up in Vienna.”

I said, “That sounds pretty good.” So I applied to go to Vienna.

How did you join the faculty?

Universities recruit faculty in various ways. Some are obvious, some are more subterranean.

I had gone to this Jesuit college, and the Jesuits had a core curriculum. It’s called Latin and Greek. Theology. The Bible.

There was an opening in the Western Civ Core—somebody got sick. So the history department chairman called me up and said, “Do you want teach Western Civ?” My reaction was, “Me? What are you talking about?”

Back then there was no teacher training. They would just put people in the classrooms. So in the fall of ’73 I was teaching ancient Athens. I still remember Pericles and Thucydides. First time I ever read Thucydides. I’ve now read it a million times. I found I liked teaching. I didn’t screw it up.

The next year there was a job opening. They said, maybe we’ll consider you. So I applied and got some other offers—one from Cornell, one from Texas, one from Iowa. I went into the chairman’s office, and I said, “I don’t know which one I should choose,” and he said, “Don’t do anything for a week or two.” I didn’t know anything about how these things were done. But two weeks later I was offered an assistant professorship at the University of Chicago.

Boyer answers a question posed by Lauren Henry, AB’05. (Photography by Anne Ryan)

I’m a little nervous to ask this as a College alum, but what were your first impressions of College students?

Some of the students had been expelled as a result of the great sit-in of ’69. The students back then were very bright, very political—in the way one was political back then. I remember in the third quarter of the course we came to Marx, the Communist Manifesto. After about 20 minutes, I said, “Why don’t you take the book? You should teach me. You guys obviously know a lot more about the practicality of Marxism than I do.”

The students then, as now, were there to learn. You didn’t have to force them. It was a challenge to keep ahead of their capacity to learn.

How did you become dean?

I had been master of the Social Sciences Division for five years. I was sitting in my office one day and my secretary said, “Mrs. Gray [Hanna Holborn Gray, Harry Pratt Judson Distinguished Service Professor Emeritus, then president of the University] wants to see you. Right now.”

If you know Mrs. Gray, she’s a formidable figure. When you’re summoned to Mrs. Gray’s office, something is really wrong—or something is even wronger. So I went up there with some trepidation. It was like going to the principal’s office. And she asked me if I wanted to be dean of the College.

Hanna Holborn Gray, UChicago’s president from 1978 to 1993, with Jonathan Kleinbard (left) at the University's Centennial Celebration in 1991. (UChicago Photographic Archive, apf1-06516, Hanna Holborn Gray Special Collections Research Center, University of Chicago Library)

I would not be sitting here without the Metcalf Internship I did in 2004 with the Chicago Symphony—I found my field. The year I had a Metcalf, there were 108. Last year there were 4,200. So how has career support changed since you became dean?

When we began to look at student life—again, apologies to the more senior alums in the room—I noticed we didn’t have children of alums applying to the College. In other elite private schools, they had the opposite problem.

So I began to ask alums why not. And they said, “Well, I got a great education, but I don’t want to put them through that.” It was like a philosophical discussion in Human Being and Citizen: “Well, what’s that?”

One answer to that was the lack of career services. The first year I was dean, 40 percent of seniors had a job when they graduated. There was this huge gap between what was happening to our students and the claims we were making about the value of the liberal arts. You could paper the wall with Martin Luther–like statements about the importance of a liberal arts education.

This is where Byron Trott [AB’81, MBA’82] showed up. He was a Goldman Sachs guy. I was asked by Development to ask him for something—I don’t remember what it was. He said I won’t give you anything for that, but I’ll give you some money to create an internship program.

Frankly, I didn’t know what an internship program was, but I thought, I don’t have one, and he’s going to give me some money for one. Sounds pretty good. He said you have to name it after Jeff Metcalf [AM’53]. I didn’t know who Jeff Metcalf was either.

Byron’s generosity was only exceeded by his wisdom: we should have internships in all fields, and he would pay for a lot of them. This coming June, two weeks from now, 98 percent of grads will have full-time jobs or be in graduate school.

Now that we had this internship program, we roped in some alums to do interviews. You can’t just give these things away. So this alum from the 1970s calls me up and says, “You got a problem. I just interviewed this kid for a business internship. I asked him, ‘What’s your favorite part of the Wall Street Journal?’ And the young man said, ‘Sir, I don’t read the Wall Street Journal.’” This alum said, “You gotta make them read the Wall Street Journal or teach them how to lie.”

I said, “I don’t know about teaching people to lie, and I don’t know about forcing people to read newspapers.” But we went to our visiting committee—there are a number of members in the room today—with the idea of creating the Chicago Careers In … programs, a series of training programs. Not for credit, so we’re protecting the liberal arts. The programs span all the professions, and students get interview training and coaching. And the ones who are interested in business learn they should read the Wall Street Journal.

The Center in Paris is going to be named in your honor. I’d love to hear more about your vision for study abroad.

When I was a young faculty member I was appointed to a committee by Jonathan Smith, one of my predecessors as dean of the College. Smith had been told we should have study abroad programs.

The committee had three full professors, whose names I will not mention, and myself. I was an assistant professor, so I didn’t have tenure. We had one meeting in the Quad Club over lunch. And the three professors told me they had already written the report: it was a bad idea, it was a desecration of the spirit of the University of Chicago, you would be nuts to go anyplace else.

When I became dean, I had the idea that since I had lived in Europe for a number of years—and learned something by living in Vienna and in Oxford—that other people could learn something too. In those days, the University did not believe in study abroad.

There was a group of younger faculty, like Philippe Desan [now Howard L. Willett Professor Emeritus in Romance Languages and the College], Françoise Meltzer [now Edward Carson Waller Distinguished Service Professor in the Divinity School, Comparative Literature, and the College] and Robert Morrissey [now Benjamin Franklin Professor of French Literature and the Committee on Interdisciplinary Studies in the Humanities and the College] who thought not having study abroad was ridiculous. Why wouldn’t you want to live in France? You can actually learn French in France. And the pastries, the cheese!

We took the model of Western Civ, which was always taught intensively in the summer. We sent 20 or 30 students and three faculty abroad for a quarter. We did it in Barcelona and it worked. We did it in Tours and then Paris and it worked. Pretty soon, other departments were asking, “Why does the Romance languages department get to send their faculty and students abroad?” I said, “Well, I didn’t say you couldn’t.”

But it wouldn’t have happened without younger faculty who were willing to rebel against their isolationist elders. Generational change is important.

Next we have some questions from the audience. This is kind of a tricky one. How have students changed over the last 30 years?

It’s like the grade inflation question. When people ask if we have grade inflation, I say, “What answer do you want, yes or no?”

The Core curriculum is more or less the same as that experienced by most of the people sitting in this room. When I teach Pericles and Thucydides—as I have done almost every year for the last 40 years—I’m using the same texts and I’m getting the same kinds of papers of the same kind of quality that I was getting 30 or 40 years ago. It’s a testament to the continuity of the place.

Robert Hutchins [University president, 1929–45; chancellor, 1945–51] used to say, “We’re not a kindergarten. We’re not a country club. We’re not a prison.” He attributed all those things to Yale, by the way.

Apologies if there are alums of Yale in the room.

From the academic perspective, students have not changed. You have social media, all kinds of things. The sense of time and place has changed—people think differently about time now. I’m told young people don’t date like we used to. They socialize in other ways.

But the big difference is, when I started as dean, the freshman dropout rate was 13 percent. They just left. They weren’t happy. Our freshman retention rate is now 99 percent.

Changes to housing were profoundly important. I know there may be loyalists to the Shoreland and Broadview. Apologies. But we didn’t want students riding these buses backward and forward.

In the pure academic sense, there’s been much more continuity than change. That’s my experience going back to the 1970s.

Boyer with students at the Heeresgeschichtliches Museum in Vienna, Austria. (Photography by Sebastian Freiler)

When you were asked to become dean of the College, what led you to accept that invitation?

Well, when Mrs. Gray summoned me to her office, it would be a very brave soul indeed who would not accept her invitation to become a dean.

I guess now, at the end of 31 years, I can reveal it. I was actually nominated for two deanships. The deanship of the social sciences was open as well. So I had a choice, which was unusual.

I talked to a lot of faculty who said, “Take the social sciences deanship.” It was a power deanship of this enormously famous Division of the Social Sciences—all these top five departments, including my own. Only a couple people—one of whom was Allen Sanderson [now senior lecturer in economics], the other was Norman Bradburn [now Tiffany and Margaret Blake Distinguished Service Professor Emeritus in the Social Sciences]—said, “You should do the College.”

I decided to take the College. At the time a lot of people thought I was nuts. I had taken the lesser of the two jobs. And I hope I put that to rest. It’s not the lesser of the two jobs—it’s a great job. And the person succeeding me, Melina Hale [PhD’98] is a great person, and she’s going to do a great job in this great job.

What role have alumni played in the transformation of the College?

They told me the truth in the 1990s about what they liked and didn’t like about their experience. I met fascinating people from all walks of life who were alums of the College of the University of Chicago. They talked with great eloquence about the power of the education they received. It encouraged me. It was worth trying to change some things, even though it might be controversial, to protect that.

With the support of Hugo Sonnenschein, University president from 1993 to 2000, Boyer was able to slim down the College’s Core curriculum, increase the size of the College, and more. (Copyright 2023, The Chicago Maroon. All rights reserved. Reprinted with permission.)

What are some of your favorite memories with students?

There’s a carnivalesque, playful atmosphere with our students. They’re very witty, much given to fun. Last night there was the awards ceremony, and a number of alums were talking about “Where fun comes to die.”

You may or may not know that began with a college rankings book in the 1990s, run by a group of young men—the gender is important—who were trying to figure out the most fun college. They had a whole bunch of questions: When does the weekend begin? How easy is it to get booze? And other more pointed questions which, in polite society, I’m not going to mention.

Jonathan Kleinbard, the vice president for communications, came to me when this thing was published and said, “We got a problem.” We had been ranked something like 300th out of 300, down there with Brigham Young and West Point.

I was pretty naïve at the time. I said, “They’re talking about booze, things that parents of young women wouldn’t like. Surely this will help us in admissions. We’ll be this shining … we’ll be virtuous.”

Jonathan Kleinbard was like a Chicago ward politician. He said, “We’re going to get killed. The headline is going to be ‘Where fun comes to die.’ Nobody’s going to care about the survey. That will be long forgotten. We’re going to be stigmatized.” And that’s exactly what happened.

So that became part of a campaign of transformation. You can deal with this in several ways. If the students make T-shirts, you can try to rip them out of their hands, or try to bribe them, but that would just encourage them to print more T-shirts.

Or you could be philosophical: What are the conditions of possibility that led to this situation? Which brings me back to talking to the alums about the that. There was a connection between the that and “where fun comes to die.”

It’s not that students don’t have fun. They have a lot of fun. But it’s Chicago-style fun. Scav Hunt is an example of that—building atomic reactors without the permission of the Atomic Energy Commission.

Boyer and the Kuvia Polar Bear at early-morning Sun Salutations on the Point in 2017. (Photography by Jean Lachat)

What would Dean Boyer from 1992 say to you today?

That’s a trick question. I’m having to admit I’m not young anymore.

Universities are complicated institutions. They have collective memories, traditions, folkways. Our colleagues in anthropology study this kind of thing for a living.

It is possible to change these institutions. They don’t change easily, and they shouldn’t be changed easily. A place like Chicago is fiercely protective of what it is.

The lesson I would tell my younger self is, with patience and a lot of luck, it’s possible to make change, but it has to be done in a careful, prudential way. You can’t just snap your fingers.

It’s good for people to stick around for a while and settle in. You need to think in decades, not in years, and think in years, not in months. That’s something I learned in the job. I didn’t know that in 1992.

Boyer signs copies of The University of Chicago: A History (University of Chicago Press, 2015) at the campus bookstore. (Photography by Joel Wintermantle)

What are you most optimistic about for the University’s future?

I do think the University is well-positioned now. It has a very successful College—it’s doubled in size. It’s now about the same size as Harvard and Stanford.

The other fascinating story—and I’m speaking more as the historian—is the transformation of our professional schools. If you look at Booth, Harris, Law, and Crown, there has been a tremendous arc of change. So the University is well situated with a strong, successful liberal arts college and strong, highly competitive professional schools.

But what has to be done is to rethink graduate education in the arts and sciences. There are profound changes to do with employment and the whole purpose of doctoral education. We became famous in the 20th century for churning out PhDs—like a PhD factory. I mean that in the complimentary sense.

But changes are coming. The mission of all the great universities is going to be to figure out the shape, the context, the future of graduate education.

How has the University changed you?

In some ways it comes back to this call that I got from the chair of the Department of History: “You want to teach Western Civ?” The training I got in graduate school was very conventional—teaching graduate students to learn more and more about less and less. Doctoral education, then and certainly now, was about specialization.

Teaching Western Civ and Soc II—way outside my comfort level, areas of knowledge that I had no familiarity with, that I had to teach myself—profoundly influenced the kind of history that I write. I’ve just finished this huge volume on the Habsburg Empire, 1,000 pages. Some would say it’s a monumental book. For some people that’s a compliment, for some people it’s not. I don’t think, without having taught students in the College, I would have been able to write that book.

Thank you for your candor this evening, and for all you’ve given to students, to alumni, to this institution. I promised Dean Boyer I wouldn’t get emotional [tearing up], but through your work you have changed each and every one of our lives. We’re all so grateful.

I’m delighted that all of you came out and sit here under Mr. Breasted’s portrait and listen to this.

(To Lauren Henry) And I’m really glad that we had the good sense to give you a Metcalf Internship.

Boyer rides to his office in Harper Memorial Library in 2023—as he has done for the past 31 years. (Photography by Jason Smith)

University News

The College

Picture this

rsmith — Tue, 02 May 2023 22:14:07 +0000

rsmith Tue, 05/02/2023 - 17:14

Colin Kaepernick talks with students following his book launch event with coauthor Eve L. Ewing, AB’08, at Kenwood Academy. (Photography by Tarji Michelle)

Carrie Golus, AB’91, AM’93

The University of Chicago Magazine

Spring/23

My Very Own Library brings an author and icon to a neighborhood school.

“During this event we are not allowing any pictures,” Karen Calloway, principal of Hyde Park’s Kenwood Academy, announces to the middle schoolers gathered in the auditorium. “I know. I’m sorry.” Calloway, who’s wearing a Kenwood Broncos sweatshirt, manages to sound firm, warm, and enthusiastic at the same time. “We expect that you-all will listen with your ears and your eyes,” she says, and be respectful, “as you have been already this morning.”

This is no ordinary assembly. It’s a book launch event with activist and former NFL quarterback Colin Kaepernick and his coauthor Eve L. Ewing, AB’08, associate professor in the Department of Race, Diaspora, and Indigeneity. Colin Kaepernick: Change the Game (Graphix, an imprint of Scholastic, 2023), their graphic novel with art by Orlando Caicedo, is aimed at readers 12 and up. It focuses on Kaepernick’s senior year in high school, when he felt pressured to play baseball—and to fit in with his adoptive White family.

Change the Game is Kaepernick’s second autobiographical children’s book. Last year he published a picture book, I Color Myself Different (Scholastic, 2022), which became a New York Times bestseller. Ewing’s many publishing credits—setting aside her academic work—include a middle-grade novel and the Ironheart and Champions series for Marvel Comics.

As well as students from Kenwood Academy’s middle school, the audience includes groups from Chicago’s Kozminski Elementary, Shoesmith Elementary, and the UChicago Charter Woodlawn Campus, with other students watching via Zoom from around the country. The in-person attendees all received a copy of Change the Game courtesy of Scholastic and My Very Own Library, UChicago’s literacy initiative, which provides books to students in public elementary schools.

UChicago assumed leadership of My Very Own Library in 2019. Since the program’s 2011 founding, it has given more than two million books to students in Chicago and other American cities as well as in the Dominican Republic. My Very Own Library also has a YouTube channel with authors, including Ewing, reading their work.

Calloway introduces the two emcees: ninth grader Josie Singleton and senior Isaac Saffold—a football player and future presidential scholar at Drake University, Calloway notes with pride.

Singleton’s first question, directed at both Kaepernick and Ewing, is about “your hair journey from when you were younger.”

In the book, hair is an important signifier of culture and belonging. The cover illustration, for example, shows a short-haired teenage Kaepernick holding a baseball and a catcher’s mitt. But the shadow he casts is of a grown man in bulky shoulder pads, holding a football and a helmet, with natural hair: “the magnificent ’fro,” Ewing describes it, as Kaepernick laughs.

The first chapter centers on Kaepernick’s desire to grow his hair, to his parents’ frustration. “And I’m getting cornrows,” 15-year-old Kaepernick asserts as he storms out of the kitchen. His mother turns to his father: “He’s getting what rolls?”

Wearing his hair the way he wanted “was part of embracing my culture,” Kaepernick tells his young listeners. “Embracing our culture.” In Change the Game, he and Ewing wanted to underscore that “we don’t have to subscribe to Eurocentric or White beauty standards,” he says. “How your hair grows out of your head is beautiful.”

Saffold has a few sports questions. How did it feel to get your first Division I offer? he asks. “I don’t remember,” Kaepernick answers, smiling. He was heavily recruited for baseball but had no interest.

Two weeks before final signing day, he was called out of class. It was the University of Nevada’s head football coach on the school phone: “We want you to come play football, … but you have to commit to not playing baseball,” Kaepernick recalls. “And I was like, ‘Done.’” Ewing has heard this story before—it’s how the final chapter ends—but breaks into laughter anyway.

After Singleton and Saffold have asked all their questions, a screen at the back of the stage lights up: students attending remotely have questions too. What was your first experience with racial inequality? a young man from Newark, New Jersey, wants to know.

“This is me putting my professor hat on,” Ewing says, gesturing as if she is putting on an invisible hat. “Our first experiences with racial inequality happen before we’re born.” The design of cities, the availability of jobs and transportation, the quality of schools and health care—all are defined by inequality. “When we say ‘systemic racism,’ that’s what that means.

“But in terms of what I actually remember,” she continues, “I was called the N-word for the first time when I was maybe 6.” She was riding her bike; a White woman “who was struggling with mental illness” yelled at her. Ewing didn’t know what the word meant. Decades later, as a doctoral student, she had a near-identical experience in Harvard Square. A woman “called me the N-word, and she called me a cockroach,” Ewing says matter-of-factly. “It’s not fair that we should have to deal with that.”

Perhaps because of his upbringing as a transracial adoptee—Change the Game chronicles numerous painful moments of unintended parental cluelessness—Kaepernick can’t remember a first moment. “Oftentimes when we’re younger, we might not even know,” he says. “But we know it feels wrong.”

“How many of y’all have faced racism?” he asks the audience. Around the auditorium, children raise their hands. “And to Eve’s point,” he says, “those of you who don’t have your hands up, you’ve faced racism. You just may not exactly know how it’s affected you yet.”

What inspires you to create books that empower Black people? a young man from UChicago Charter Woodlawn asks. “Because I love us,” Kaepernick says, to thunderous applause.

“In education we say a book can be a mirror or a window,” Ewing says: it can reflect your own experience or show you someone else’s. While Change the Game tells Kaepernick’s story—being an athlete and an adoptee—many parts are universal, like having a first crush and standing up to your parents. “The things that bring us together are so much more powerful than the things that tear us apart,” Ewing says.

At the end, Calloway returns to the stage to talk up Kenwood’s basketball champions and its spelling bee winner—and, to the audience’s amazement, relents on the picture ban.

Kaepernick makes his way to the edge of the stage. He shakes the hands of middle schoolers and middle-aged schoolteachers alike. He smiles in selfie after selfie.

Love letters from Paris

rsmith — Tue, 02 May 2023 22:14:07 +0000

rsmith Tue, 05/02/2023 - 17:14

Flanner and Hemingway enjoy a drink—one for him, two for her—circa 1944. Both served as US Army war correspondents during the liberation of Paris. (Glasshouse Images/Everett Collection)

Carrie Golus, AB’91, AM’93

The University of Chicago Magazine

Spring/23

For 50 years Janet Flanner, EX 1914 (1892–1978), shared her witty, sharp observations of Europe with New Yorker readers.

Janet Flanner, EX 1914, longed to write fiction. An Indiana girl, well brought up, she had abandoned her husband in New York and fled to Europe with her lover, the writer Solita Solano.

The couple settled in Paris, where they lived in a modest hotel on the Left Bank (apartments were so scarce that hotels were cheaper, and both women detested housework). In the morning they breakfasted at the café Les Deux Magots; in the afternoon they worked on their novels; in the evening they drank and chatted with expatriate American friends, among them Ernest Hemingway, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Djuna Barnes, and Gertrude Stein and Alice B. Toklas.

Flanner described her glamorous new life in letters to friends back in America. One friend, Jane Grant, showed the witty, gossipy letters to her husband, Harold Ross. Flanner, she suggested, should be the Paris correspondent for their new, struggling humor magazine. Ross agreed, offering Flanner $35 (about $600 today) for a letter every two weeks—a generous sum in Paris between the wars. Ross specified he had no interest in what Flanner thought. He wanted to know what the French were thinking.

Flanner’s first letter from Paris appeared in the October 10, 1925, New Yorker with the byline Genêt; at the time, everything in the magazine ran under pseudonyms. She had thought Ross might choose “Flâneuse,” the feminine form of flâneur. “Genêt” was probably based on her first name and intended to obscure her gender; she never knew exactly why Ross chose it.

A breezy digest of current happenings—a bank clerk strike, a lecture series by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, a popular new nightclub called the Florida—Flanner’s first letter set the tone for her regular dispatches over the next five decades. Her writing was defined by her wit and sharp observations, as well as the lack of the first-person pronoun: “You’re safer with one or it,” she once said. “I is like a fortissimo. It’s too loud.”

Beginning in the 1950s, as more and more of Flanner’s New Yorker pieces were published in book form, the literary world took notice of her as a writer, not just a foreign correspondent. An anthology of her postwar writing, Paris Journal, 1944–1965 (Gollancz, 1966), won the 1966 National Book Award in arts and letters.

With the exception of the war years and occasional travel, Flanner remained in Paris, always living in hotels, always writing for the New Yorker, for the next 50 years. She considered Ross to be her inventor; in return, her arch, knowing, witty tone came to define that of the New Yorker.

Flanner, the second of three daughters, was born March 13, 1892, in Indianapolis. As an adult, she claimed her father was in real estate; he had investments, but his primary occupation was co-owner of the mortuary Flanner and Buchanan.

The Flanners were an artsy, cultured family. Her mother had hoped to be an actress, and she continued to write and produce plays after her marriage. She wanted Janet to become an actress as well, “but of course I was peculiar-looking,” Flanner recalled in an interview with her friend Mary McCarthy. “I suffered so at the sight of my nose. … I just shuddered at this beak.” In 1910 the entire family went to live in Germany for several months. Janet Flanner, then 17, fell in love with Europe and dreamed of returning.

At 20, when she entered the University of Chicago, Flanner already had a gray streak in her hair. She embraced the social whirl wholeheartedly, keeping schoolwork at arm’s length; only the writing courses taught by novelist Robert Morss Lovett held her interest. “I was a very poor student. Such a pity,” she told McCarthy. At her dormitory, Green Hall, “they did object to my coming in so often at 3 in the morning. I was mad on dancing.” Flanner lasted two years until, as she told McCarthy, “I was requested to leave.” (A passionate affair with a woman gym teacher may have had something to do with it.)

Back in Indiana, she reviewed vaudeville and burlesque shows for the Indianapolis Star; within a year she had her own bylined column. She kept in touch with college friends, including William Lane Rehm, PhB 1914, who occasionally came to Indianapolis to see her. During a visit in 1918, Rehm and Flanner suddenly decided to marry. At a time when young men were being sent to fight in the Great War, last-minute marriages were not uncommon—and Flanner, despite her newspaper job, was desperate to get out of Indianapolis.

The couple settled into a small apartment in Greenwich Village and quickly made friends in literary and artistic circles. She wrote satirical poems and occasionally published articles and stories; he worked as a bank clerk and painted in the evenings. But the marriage was not a success: Flanner felt “so at sea in my disappointment in not being in love as I had been with women.”

Less than a year into her marriage, she met Solita Solano, drama editor of the New York Tribune. Solano had lived in China, Japan, and the Philippines, and spoke Spanish and Italian. When National Geographic sent her on assignment to Europe, she asked Flanner to come too. Flanner was torn; Solano insisted. They departed in the summer of 1921.

The two traveled throughout Greece, then visited Constantinople, Rome, Florence, Dresden, and Berlin, searching for somewhere to call home. By 1923 they had arrived in Paris—“I wanted Beauty, with a capital B,” Flanner explained—settling in an oddly shaped room on the fourth floor of the Hôtel Saint-Germain-des-Prés. They remained there for 16 years.

Flanner took twice-weekly lessons to polish her schoolbook French; in a few months, she spoke fluently with a Parisian accent. She had her graying hair bobbed with bangs.

In cosmopolitan Paris, Flanner and Solano could live together without social censure. Although Flanner was dedicated to Solano, the relationship was nonmonogamous from the start. When asked, Solano once observed that Janet still lived with her—when she remembered to come home.

For half a century, New Yorker readers got their Paris news via dispatches from Genêt, the pen name of Janet Flanner, EX 1914. (Everett Collection/Newscom)

In the autumn of 1925 Flanner submitted her first letter to the New Yorker. She quickly established a routine: she read the daily Paris newspapers—at least eight when she first began—clipping items that caught her interest, which she would then follow up on. She credited the French papers, as well as Ross, for teaching her how to write.

When composing her letter—a process she often found painful—she remained in her hotel room for up to 48 hours at a time, pecking out her copy with two fingers, always with cigarettes nearby. She took her finished copy to the Gare Saint-Lazare, where the French post office had a special desk that sent mail on the fast ship to New York. Often, she heard nothing until her letter was in print.

Like the other aspiring American novelists and artists who crowded into Paris, Flanner and Solano wanted to become famous as quickly as possible. In 1926 Flanner published her first (and only) novel, The Cubical City (G. P. Putnam’s Sons), a roman à clef about her family and her struggle to love a man the way she loved women. Reviews were mixed. She was amused by one that compared her to John Dos Passos and Sherwood Anderson, calling her writing “too masculine” to be measured against that of women writers.

Flanner started a second family-centric novel with the working title “A State of Bliss,” calculating she could finish it in months if she wrote 4,000 words a day—but she didn’t. She had thought the New Yorker job would underwrite her career as a novelist, but she increasingly realized that her New Yorker writing was her career. When The Cubical City was reissued decades later as a “lost” work of American fiction, Flanner added a blunt afterword: “I am not a first-class fiction writer as this reprinted first novel shows. Writing fiction is not my gift.”

Instead, Flanner began contributing profiles. A New Yorker profile, a 3,600-word essay on an individual, was usually assigned to a writer who knew the subject personally. Flanner published her first—signed “Hippolyta,” after the queen of the Amazons—on modern dancer Isadora Duncan in 1927. Despite the new byline, the copy, with its wry, cosmopolitan tone, was indisputably Flanner: “The clergy, hearing of (though supposedly without ever seeing) her bare calf, denounced it as violently as if it had been golden.”

Even more successful was her 1935 profile of England’s Queen Mary, grandmother of Princess Elizabeth (later Queen Elizabeth II). Denied any official information, Flanner patched together a deeply personal article based on information from English journalists, royal dressmakers, and other tradespeople. Ross’s opinion: “Superb.”

Not all readers appreciated Flanner’s obsessive attention to quotidian detail. Hemingway, a close friend, was appalled by her 1937 article on bullfighting, which included a long description of a matador’s complicated clothing and noted that after the fight bull meat was available at the local butcher. “Listen, Jan,” he told her over drinks at the Deux Magots, “if a journalistic prize is ever given for the worst sports writer of the western world, I’m going to see you get it, pal.”

In the 1930s, as the mood in Europe darkened, Flanner’s letters grew more serious. The New Yorker had been born apolitical, but politics was unavoidable.

Flanner produced a three-part profile of Hitler in 1936, based on sources close to him, as her Queen Mary profile had been. She read Mein Kampf in French—although the book was illegal in France—and skewered its ideas in print. As was typical, her piece poked fun at the Führer’s quirks: he was a teetotaler and vegetarian in a country of beer and sausages, she pointed out. When the story was collected in An American in Paris: Profile of an Interlude Between Two Wars (Hamish Hamilton, 1940), Flanner added a note that its only value was as a period piece from a time when Europe, at its peril, considered Hitler a joke.

Flanner and Solano departed for New York soon after the Nazis invaded Poland. Flanner had no interest in war reporting: send “a writer who is male, young, fighting-minded,” she advised the New Yorker. For five years, as war decimated Europe, Flanner did not return to her beloved Paris.

When the war in Europe was nearly over, Flanner did go to England as a war correspondent. She traveled the continent wherever she could, heartbroken at the extent of the devastation. The full horrors of the Nazi concentration camps were first beginning to be known: “This is beyond imagination,” she wrote to Solano, after she toured Buchenwald with a man who had survived it.

Her first postwar Paris letter ran in December 1944 under her usual pseudonym. Its tone was so angry, editor William Shawn rewrote the letter to soften it and changed her “we” to “I.” Flanner was not sure whether she wanted to stay or leave; in middle age, she had lost faith in the world. Paris was no longer her Paris.

She covered the Nuremberg trials for the New Yorker, describing stomach-turning films and snapshots, taken by the Nazis themselves, of what they had done to other human beings. Almost as astonishing to Flanner: the defendants’ cowardice and disloyalty to their cause. The 22 Nazis on trial, she observed, “helped put millions of people to death, quickly or slowly, by torture, murder, or starvation. But not one of them seemed to want to die for the thing they killed the millions for.” In 1948 Flanner was named a knight of the Légion d’Honneur, a token of gratitude for her writing since her return to France.

After the war, Flanner’s personal life was complicated. In New York she had Natalia Murray, an Italian broadcaster, whose partnership had become the central relationship in her life. In France she had another American woman, Noel Murphy, a friend and lover since before the war. Flanner also remained close with Solita Solano.

Murray pleaded with her to give up her Paris post so they could be together in New York, away from her old attachments and independent way of life. Flanner seriously considered it, even tendering—but then rescinding—her resignation. “You complain that I have three wives,” she wrote to Murray, “and the truth is, as you know, that I also have a husband, The New Yorker.”

In 1949 Flanner moved into the Hôtel Continental, on the rue de Castiglione near the Tuileries gardens; from her small balcony, she could look out over the city. Here she lived alone, “like a monk,” as she described it, for the next 20 years. She loved her writer’s life, with no distractions, no responsibilities, and room service. In the afternoons, she often held court in the hotel’s cocktail bar.

At times Flanner was nostalgic for the Paris of the Lost Generation. “The uglification of Paris,” she wrote in the New Yorker, “the most famously beautiful city of relatively modern Europe, goes on apace, and more is being carefully planned.” Even its beautiful language was being corrupted by American slang. Flanner detested all slang, including “okay.”

In one of her final Paris letters, which ran in September 1975, Flanner reminisced about the long-ago days of her youth, sitting “on the broad, hospitable terrace of the Deux Magots café.” From there she had watched the brides and grooms outside the church opposite “with vagrant curiosity”—the same way she observed everything in Paris.

Peerless

rsmith — Tue, 02 May 2023 22:14:07 +0000

rsmith Tue, 05/02/2023 - 17:14

John W. Boyer, AM’69, PhD’75, the Martin A. Ryerson Distinguished Service Professor of History, has served an unprecedented six terms as dean of the College. (Photography by Matt Marton)

Carrie Golus, AB’91, AM’93

The University of Chicago Magazine

Spring/23

Reflections from John W. Boyer, AM’69, PhD’75, on three decades leading the College.

In July John W. Boyer, AM’69, PhD’75, the College’s longest-serving dean, will become senior advisor to UChicago president Paul Alivisatos, AB’81. Boyer’s responsibilities will include advising on the University’s international strategy, global education and fundraising, and the support of programs involving public discourse, academic freedom, and the history of higher education. Boyer will continue to teach in the College.

In a conversation with the Magazine, Boyer discussed his 31-year tenure as dean, his 1,100-page book on the Habsburg Empire, and how it feels to be UChicago famous.

This interview has been edited and condensed.

When you became dean, what was the best advice you received?

Mrs. Gray¹ said, “I’m offering you the deanship, but it’s really like a college presidency.” That was an explanation but also a piece of advice. The College deanship is more public facing than a typical deanship, involving a huge amount of work with the community, a lot of fundraising, a focus on student life, and, you could say, public intellectual work. These are not things that academic deans normally do.

Candidly, I’ve been offered other college presidencies over the years, and I’ve said, thank you very much, but I’m already president of a college.

What was the worst advice?

In the 1990s we were engaged in a complicated attempt to reimagine the curriculum—basically to reduce the size of the Common Core to make room for free electives and eventually double majors and minors. The goal was not to degrade or weaken the Core, but it was very controversial.

I started with a series of faculty retreats in 1994 and ’95. The final vote took place in ’98. Five long years. Faculty saying, over my dead body. Well, you’re still alive.

A number of people told me, this is going on for too long. There was pressure to do something. A dean is powerful, but not that powerful. And sometimes one has to go slowly and carefully and deliberately—I’d say cunningly. A lot of people along the way either said it was hopeless or do it right away and be done with it. And both were unwise advice that I didn’t follow.

Robert Hutchins² used to say, a lot of people can start things; the question is how to make them last. If you do things in a reckless way, it can damage the institution. The irony is that Hutchins was pretty reckless, but there was a side of him that was reflective.

Looking back on the Sturm und Drang of the ’90s, it was great fun, but I wouldn’t want to do it again.

What did alumni think about changing the Core?

After we had announced some of the changes, I was told there were some New York alumni who wanted to meet. I got to the Hilton at eight in the morning. I thought I was going to some small room. It was the ballroom. I walk in and there are 200 people glaring.

Then it began: Dean Boyer, is it true you’re going to ruin the University? Is it true you’re going to destroy the Core? It was like being in a 12-foot hole and I had to climb out of it, using whatever rhetorical skills I had. At the end—well, I was able to leave the room.

I talked about my experiences as a young faculty member joining the Western Civ staff, working with Jock Weintraub, AB’49, AM’52, PhD’57, and Eric Cochrane and Keith Baker.³ These were great teachers, many of whom had won the Quantrell Award.⁴ I had even met Christian Mackauer,⁵ who was revered by older alums. I told the alumni I learned much more going to Western Civ staff meetings than I had in graduate school.

So by invoking history—and this was long before I ever started to write the history of the University⁶—I was able to persuade them that I understood the special quality of the place. Which is somewhat mythic, but universities need myths. They need stories about themselves. This is a place that is replete with a proud self-identity. By invoking my own humble personal history, I was able to reassure people.

What did students think?

In 1999, after we passed the new curriculum, we told current students they could choose to opt in to the new or keep the old. The new curriculum had more electives and a smaller Core, and 96 percent of students opted in. It was like a Roosevelt landslide. We didn’t do it to make the students happy, but it did.

What sacrifices or compromises did you make as dean?

For any dean, department chair, or provost, the days are filled with compromises, and that’s probably a good thing. The to and fro of negotiations sharpens things.

In your 31-year tenure, what accomplishments are you most proud of?

The first decade of my deanship was preoccupied with curricular reforms. Without the changes we made to consolidate the Core, the other changes could not have happened. The vote we took in March 1998 on the new curriculum—which had taken five years of my life—was enormously important. If I had just stopped there, I would feel I had made a contribution.

Once that happened, we wanted to have a large, thriving College—returning to the size of the College in the 1920s and ’30s. There had been a collapse of enrollment, which I wrote about in my book.

The next two decades I devoted to other issues: rebuilding admissions, changing the conditions of housing, creating career services and study abroad programs, establishing the Paris center. This all began in ’98 and ’99. But I couldn’t move on any of these other things when the curriculum reforms were so big.

What were the biggest surprises of your deanship?

I’m not sure it was a surprise—as an historian, I know how difficult it is to engineer and sustain institutional change—but this is a tough place. Larry Kimpton⁷ once said, all kinds of people have tried to monkey around with this place, and it’s defeated all of them. In fact, it didn’t happen to Kimpton. He effected a lot of change.

What have you enjoyed the most?

The opportunity to meet different kinds of people. It’s like being mayor of a small town. You get up in the morning, you don’t quite know what’s going to happen, but something’s going to happen. It’s a series of Henry Jamesian moments. The vast panorama of human nature unfolding.

Do you keep a journal about all this?

No. I just published a big book,⁸ and I used many different diaries, for which I’m very grateful. But diaries are complicated. They purport to be an accurate record of the events of the individual writing the diary, but often they are not. They can also be rewritten later. Diaries are like autobiographies—complicated literary documents. So I never wanted to do that.

When you were growing up, did you ever imagine you would become a dean?

I don’t think anybody—my gosh, I hope not—is born to become a university administrator.

It started because Mrs. Gray asked me to become collegiate master of the Social Sciences Division after I had been involved with some administrative work in the history department. I guess I didn’t screw that up too badly, because she asked me to be dean.

How did you get interested in history?

That’s a wonderful question. How does anybody become what they grow up to be?

In the grocery store there used to be encyclopedias you could buy, one volume at a time, for 50 cents. My mother would buy them, and I would read them—open up “A” and start reading about anthropology or ants or aggression.

This is not Diderot and the Encyclopédie—but it is. It’s a way of entering into the world of the Enlightenment, understanding humanity through the accomplishments of previous generations. The great books for working-class people, next to the frozen foods and the potato chips.

I grew up in the old Pullman neighborhood,⁹ where George Pullman had created a public library—now part of the Chicago Public Library. It was a wonderful building that looked and smelled and felt like a 19th-century library. I remember going there as a kid and just wanting to stay.

What are your thoughts on liberal arts education, at a time when its value is being called into question?

I understand that students—and especially parents—are worried about career outcomes. Those pressures are real. A degree in economics or computer science does lead to very happy outcomes, defined in material terms. Whether it leads to happiness in general is a different question.

Because so much of the Core is humanistically oriented, we have not had to sacrifice a commitment to the humanities. We have reaffirmed it. And again, because of the reforms, we opened up space for minors and double majors. Students might major in computer science, but they can minor in German or art history.

Universities must resist the pressure to professionalize and vocationalize their curricula—falling prey to the winds of public culture. And they must protect themselves against political pressures, such as the notion that people who are studying certain subjects are a threat.

The adverse winds are strong against knowledge for its own sake. But the nation needs people who can think for themselves, and who understand that knowledge for its own sake is also knowledge for the sake of others.

I remain a guarded optimist. Certainly UChicago and other universities in our peer group are determined to defend the liberal arts, come what may.

How does it feel to have finished the Habsburg book?

My editor at Oxford would very patiently, every few years, write me an email: “John, how’s the book coming?” I agreed to do it in 1989 or ’90. But I was sidelined by my monographs and my book on University history.

I got into Austrian history because I originally wanted to do American history. If you’re going to do European history, the closest thing to America is the world of the Habsburgs: this multinational, multireligious, multiethnic, multiracial empire.

There are also parallels between what the Habsburg leaders were trying to do and what UChicago leaders were trying to do. In some ways, my two books share a logic: How do you sustain a complex institution with deep, self-regarding values and identities?

Here’s some advice for Magazine readers: If you ever have the idea of writing two books at once, forget it. Give it up.

How did you keep the enormous amount of material in your histories straight in your mind?

I tell my students, when you’re writing a book, you’re like a sculptor working with clay. You start with a huge pile of clay on the table and take stuff away.

As the author of a 700-page book¹⁰ and a 1,100-page book,¹¹ you could say, that’s someone who didn’t follow his own advice. Both of those books could have been twice as long, though.

Do you have a set writing practice?

I come into my own late at night. I’m a 9 p.m. to 2 a.m. person. When I’m totally exhausted and can’t think anymore, it’s time to sleep.

What’s your next 1,000-page book?

First I’ll be revising the University of Chicago history to take it through the Robert J. Zimmer¹² administration.

I also have a contract with Princeton University Press to write a book on religion and politics in modern Europe from the French Revolution to the present that will take in Britain, France, Italy, Germany, and Austria-Hungary.

You’re a familiar figure on campus and in Hyde Park. How did you become UChicago famous?

When I started as dean, I didn’t know anything about housing. So I began to visit the dorms. I think the students wondered, who is this guy asking about the food, or why the elevators in the Shoreland ¹³ don’t work, or why there’s this particular odor in Broadview¹⁴ that never goes away? And then I was also the guy who rides a bike everywhere, like something out of a 1930s British novel.

(Photography by Avi Schwab [CC BY-NC-SA 2.0])

You are very tolerant of student culture. When you were flash mobbed, you danced along. You posed with a paper mustache on Dean Boyer Appreciation Day.

This comes back to the Habsburgs. The world of the Habsburgs was a world of pronounced, intense visuality. When I was elected to the Academy of Sciences in Vienna some years ago, there was a great ceremony with flowers, a Mozart quartet, speeches in a baroque hall. A friend had been elected to one of the German academies, and he said, in Germany, they send you a letter.

I’ve always thought that the Austrian way of visual culture, theatrical culture, serves the University well. University leaders should be public figures. It softens the boundaries and creates a unified culture.

Sometimes it seems like you have 7,000 grandchildren.

It’s better to have 7,000 grandchildren than 7,000 children. It’s a nice analogy, because I’m not their parent. I’ve never viewed the College as being in loco parentis. A grandparent doesn’t offer strangulating control, but genial and sympathetic support.

Notes

Hanna Holborn Gray, the Harry Pratt Judson Distinguished Service Professor Emeritus of History, was the first and so far the only woman to serve as president of the University (1978–93). Her preferred form of address as president was Mrs. Gray.
Robert Maynard Hutchins served as president (1929–45) and later chancellor of the University (1945–51). He established the New Plan, which admitted students without a high school diploma, and popularized the study of the great books.
Karl Joachim “Jock” Weintraub, Eric Cochrane, and Keith Baker, legendary history professors.
The Llewellyn John and Harriet Manchester Quantrell Award for Excellence in Undergraduate Teaching, given annually since 1938.
Christian Mackauer, one of the architects of the Western Civilization sequence.
The University of Chicago: A History (University of Chicago Press, 2015).
Lawrence Kimpton, president of the University (1951–60).
Austria 1867–1955 (Oxford University Press, 2022).
A neighborhood on the far South Side of Chicago, founded as a company town by George Pullman, who designed and manufactured the Pullman sleeping car.
The University of Chicago: A History.
Austria 1867–1955.
Robert J. Zimmer, president of the University (2006–21) and chancellor of the University (2021–22).
Shoreland Hall, 5454 South Shore Drive, built as the Shoreland Hotel in 1926, was converted into a residence hall in 1976; President Paul Alivisatos lived there as an undergrad. It closed in 2009.
Broadview Hall, 5540 South Hyde Park Boulevard, was another converted hotel. It closed in 2016.

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