Inspired leadership

As a history of religions student between fall 1960 and spring 1967, I can assure you that the real mover behind the Divinity School’s shift in vision (“Sacred Scholarship,” Spring/24) was Joseph Kitagawa, PhD’51, history of religions program head when Mircea Eliade was hired and Divinity School dean after Jerald Brauer, PhD’48. Kitagawa’s dedicated and untiring behind-the-scenes work was a major factor in transforming not just the Chicago Divinity School, but departments of religion throughout the United States. Kitagawa was a master of the fine art of planting creative ideas in others. He’d then make sure the recipients gained the credit for those ideas and would therefore join Kitagawa in his work to realize them. I learned more from Kitagawa regarding methods of effective leadership than I did about Japanese religions.

Nancy Auer Falk, AM’63, PhD’72
Kalamazoo, Michigan

Color perspectives

I read with interest Chandler Calderon’s article “Color Unearthed” in the Spring/24 issue of the University of Chicago Magazine. In 2016 I was fortunate to participate in a Road Scholar trip in Berlin that included a program in the Pergamonmuseum on recovering the colors of the ancient Greek sculptures housed there. Regrettably, I did not participate in the class presented by Tasha Vorderstrasse, AM’98, PhD’04, and Alison Whyte in Chicago to assess the degree to which the interaction of ancient language color terminology and color perception played a role in their work and presentation. Since my time at the U of C, the interplay of color perception and language has been of occasional interest, and it seemed to me that the theories and insights of this area of linguistics might enrich the work that Vorderstrasse and Whyte pursue, if they have not already incorporated research in this area in their work. The book Color Categories in Thought and Language is one such background source.

Chauncey J. “Jeff” Mellor, AB’65 (Class of 1964), AM’67, PhD’72
Knoxville, Tennessee

College icons

Thank you for so thoroughly introducing your readers to Dean Melina Hale, PhD’98 (“Committed to the Core,” Spring/24). She is such a well-rounded, grounded, thoughtful, educated, and interesting person. No one can “fill the shoes” of legendary dean John Boyer, AM’69, PhD’75. But Dean Hale seems well suited to follow in his footsteps and to lead the College into the uncharted future. But enough with the lame metaphors. She’s committed to the Core, and she’s already proved she’s a real Maroon.

And a note about best teachers (“Best in Class,” Editor’s Notes, Spring/24): During a class in the Philosophy of Discourse sequence, spring term 1974, Wayne C. Booth, AM’47, PhD’50, remarked something to the effect of, Jamie Redfield, LAB’50, AB’54, PhD’61, has more knowledge in his watch pocket than anyone on the faculty. What was so remarkable about James Redfield as a teacher was that he seemed to know something relevant to any topic that came up in the courses I took from him. It was like he knew everything a human brain could possibly contain.

I was thrilled to present him with the Norman Maclean Faculty Award when I was on the Alumni Board. In introducing him at the awards ceremony, I described the amazing vision of ancient Greek civilization he gave me to be as exhilarating as the lofty vision I had from the Himalayan peaks I’d recently climbed. Mr. Redfield remarked, with a grin, that he was glad my feet were back on the ground, as I usually seemed a few feet off of it as a student.

Jeff Rasley, AB’75
Indianapolis

Unforgettable teachers

I’ve got a story about the late UChicago philosophy professor Ted Cohen, AB’62.

One spring Cohen walked in 10 minutes late to his class on aesthetics. He had been smoking and chatting with students just outside our Harper classroom and had apparently lost track of time. Or had he?

Cohen, a longtime philosophy professor in his early 70s, suffering from respiratory illness, slowly shuffled up to the front of the room. His voice coarse and gruff, he barked, “You’ll have to forgive my voice, or lack thereof. The doctors say it’s ‘idiopathic,’ which is code for ‘we don’t know what the fuck is going on.’” The class burst into laughter.

Cohen’s brilliance shined brightest when he mixed his wonderful wit with his trademark cocktail of razor-sharp logic, knowledge of world literature, and surprising vulnerability. He could shift cleanly from debating the merits of the single-meaning interpretation of metaphors to a long story about playing tennis with a Supreme Court justice in Grant Park in the 1970s, then careen back into a heartfelt story about what it feels like when your young child understands a pun for the first time. By the end of your average class, you’d come out wondering how you learned so much about the assigned text that was never once mentioned.

I wrote a silly paper for Cohen about the use of metaphor in stand-up comedy. As a young, paranoid UChicago student, I could not imagine how anyone could both let me write such a thing and also agree to meet with me about it. Scaling the six floors to Cohen’s office in one of the towers of the Harper Library, I walked into a cavernous space with yellowed walls, smelling equally of decaying paper and cigarettes. From behind a huge desk, a small, smiling man waved and asked me to sit down. Nervous, I began to lay out my justification for what I thought would be a fight. I argued that one enduring facet of stand-up’s appeal is the unique way it invites intimacy between audience and performer. I thought this would be a contest, since the creation of intimacy between author and audience was one of Cohen’s seminal contributions to the philosophical literature on metaphor. In the middle of my soliloquy he stopped me abruptly: “I like your idea. It’s interesting, something I hadn’t thought of.” Really? A Harvard-educated philosophy professor with more than 50 years of experience teaching hadn’t thought of my idea? Me, a smarmy undergraduate philosophy student? “Do you like baseball? Have you ever thought about why there are no ties at first base?”

How is this related? That’s the challenge Cohen invited from his students; a lark he took very seriously. Cohen could make you feel like you matter, like your input is significant and helpful in this world, even while demonstrating that you have absolutely no idea what you’re talking about here and now.

Cohen died a few weeks after teaching his final class in the spring of 2014. Ten years on, as a philosophy professor myself, I try every day to make Cohen’s (in)famous teaching cocktail: a cup of rigor, a tablespoon of wonder, a tablespoon of warmth, and a dash of humor.

Stephen Marrone, AB’14
Matteson, Illinois

Eugene P. Northrop’s Math 1 and 2 were small classes in the early/mid-1940s. The newly developed curriculum contained, in retrospect, absolutely first-class thoughts and ideas about numbers, symbols, and their arrangements. He talked directly to us. The syllabus he wrote should be an example on how to do it right. Unforgettable even to this 96-year-old!

Martin Steindler, LAB’44, PhB’47, SB’48, SM’49, PhD’52
Downer’s Grove, Illinois

I’ll never forget my Oral Narratives course with Professor James “Jimmy” Fernandez. Day one he announced that we would be leaving the literati and living as people in oral societies do: we would not be allowed to take notes for the first three weeks of the class. We shared our knowledge (including knowledge of the readings, undertaken outside of class time) orally, as people have for all of human history. For the duration of the quarter, we started every session off with a tale, told by a classmate or by Professor Fernandez himself. The experience taught me not just about anthropology, but also about community. I’ll never forget it, even without notes.

Anna Whitney, AB’21
Ann Arbor, Michigan

Merton Miller. Best teacher I had for finance. Scared the daylights out of us with the final test in MBA school. He passed out a page of the Wall Street Journal to everyone and said we should evaluate an ad for Merrill Lynch. We were to use principles of his 363Finance course to give our analysis of the ad. “Calm down and think before you write your answer,” he said. I took my time, once over the shock, and did OK.

Carl Nemec, MBA’69
Oak Brook, Illinois

Karl Weintraub’s (AB’49, AM’52, PhD’57) Western Civ class was the best. You had better have read St. Augustine when he asked the question, “What was Augustine seeking?” or something to that effect. Because he did not wait for an answer, he called on someone, and it could always be you! The answer? “Peace,” or whatever that is in Latin.

As I recall, he won the Quantrell Award a time or two.

Western Civ was one of the few Core courses I placed out of during orientation, but I took it anyway my second year with utterly no regrets. My late father, John Anderson, chaired the Western Civ course at Lewis & Clark College in Portland, Oregon, which was inspired in part by the Core Curriculum at the U of C.

Lenny Anderson, AB’68
Portland, Oregon

As a transfer student to the University of Chicago in January 1976, I was forced to take the History of Western Civilization again because my coursework at Gonzaga University was considered substandard—at least by Chicago’s standards. Although I was not happy about spending more time and money as an undergraduate, my disposition soon changed after encountering Arthur Williamson. He had such a refreshing approach to history. His approach was interactive with the students—almost Socratic in nature.

There was one time when I walked with him just to chat about life in general. Despite what conversations happened in the classroom, he revealed to me that he was a socialist in his thinking. He spent some time in the UK, and while there he had some health issues. He found that their health care system was much more compassionate than the for-profit system in America. I then told him that my father and grandfather were both medical doctors, to which he replied that I was part of the problem facing the American health care system. That was almost 50 years ago. Although we disagreed on which system was better, I still remember that interaction with him to this day.

George Cooper, AB’77
Denver

Arts on the rise

I always look forward to the University of Chicago Magazine’s articles on the humanities and especially any relating to the fine arts, so when “Earthbound” appeared in the Winter/24 issue, I turned right to it. Having done my graduate work at the U of C under Ruth Duckworth in the mid-1970s, I was quite familiar with both featured murals, Clouds Over Lake Michigan and Earth, Water, Sky.

Ruth’s pioneering work as a ceramicist and sculptor was on prominent display this past fall at the U of C with the Smart Museum’s retrospective exhibition Ruth Duckworth: Life as a Unity. It was a show I didn’t want to miss, so I traveled back to Chicago in November to take it in with my good friend Peter Hessemer, MFA’76. Of course we visited both of the murals, which truly are masterworks, but to get a better sense of Ruth’s overall body of work we headed over to the Smart Museum. There we enjoyed seeing a well-curated collection of stoneware and porcelain sculptures of varying sizes, including both figurative and nonfigurative themes. Also represented were about a dozen murals and wall sculptures, which were smaller and less representational than Earth, Water, Sky and Clouds.

Before leaving Hyde Park, we stopped in at the relatively new Logan Center for the Arts to have a look around. It’s a beautiful, towering building that houses the current Department of Visual Arts and other arts-related spaces. It’s also a far cry from the humble Midway Studios where, as graduate students, we spent most of our time. We did notice, though, with a bit of nostalgia, that the Midway Studios building still stands, albeit in Logan’s shadow, empty and locked.

At the end of the day, I had a good feeling about fine arts at the U of C and the increased status it has achieved. It now seems to be receiving the attention and resources it deserves. Your “Earthbound” article rekindled that feeling from my enjoyable visit, and I thank you for that.

Doug Broadfoot, MFA’75
Hillsborough, North Carolina

We hope it might ease the letter writer’s nostalgia to learn that Midway Studios remains a center for the arts at UChicago. It is home to the Creative Writing program, studios for faculty in the Department of Visual Arts, and the Gray Center for Arts and Inquiry’s public programming space, the Gray Lab.—Ed.

Art on the road

I was thrilled to read about Christine Mehring’s road trip to the land art installations of the American Southwest (“Art in the Middle of Nowhere,” the Core, Winter/24). Whether it’s Michael Heizer’s masterwork City or Caesar’s Palace in Vegas, there is no substitute for experiencing artwork in person. Bravo to Amy Gold, AM’90, and Brett Gorvy for supporting this endeavor to get students off campus and into the “real” world. Professor Mehring’s class reminds me of a similar field school that I participated in during my undergraduate years: Eric Larsen’s Natural History of American Deserts.

Temple Shipley, AB’13
Dallas

Opposing opinions

Meredith Ellsworth’s (AM’78, AM’81) letter (Winter/24) is a classic example of a stacking-the-deck fallacy, where any evidence that does not support one’s position is simply omitted. Ms. Ellsworth believes that the “‘woke’ dogma” is characterized by intolerance and racism. She takes this opinion and then states that the ACLU, American Library Association (ALA), and PEN America are “notoriously anti-free speech.” Her statement is belied by decades of evidence.

In 1965 Mary Beth Tinker wore a black armband to junior high school to protest the Vietnam War. When she refused to remove it, she and four other students (including her brother John) were suspended. At the time, the Vietnam War was popular, and the students’ actions were not. Despite (or perhaps because of) that unpopularity, the ACLU represented them in a four-year odyssey that led to the landmark decision Tinker v. Des Moines, in which the Supreme Court stated students do not shed their First Amendment rights at the schoolhouse door.

In 1978 the ACLU supported the right of Nazi groups to march through Skokie, Illinois, which at the time had a large population of Holocaust survivors. Most (including many members of the ACLU) found the Nazis’ opinions abhorrent, but one of the ACLU’s bedrock principles is that perhaps especially when the speech is unpopular, the right to express those opinions must be upheld.

The ALA and PEN have been at the forefront of fighting the thousands of attempts to ban books at every level and in every state, from elementary schools to universities to public libraries. The ALA’s Freedom to Read Statement says that “there is no place in our society for efforts to coerce the taste of others, to confine adults to the reading matter deemed suitable for adolescents, or to inhibit the efforts of writers to achieve artistic expression.” The PEN Charter states that its “members pledge themselves to oppose any form of suppression of freedom of expression in the country and community to which they belong, as well as throughout the world wherever this is possible.”

I think what Ms. Ellsworth really means is not that the ACLU, ALA, and PEN America are “anti-free speech,” but rather that these organizations support the right to express opinions that she doesn’t agree with.

Victor S. Sloan, AB’80
Flemington, New Jersey

In the Winter/24 issue, I read the letter commenting on “Free Expression at the Fore” (Fall/23). A free exchange of ideas comes with responsibility. It is much more than civility. First, there is the requirement that you have an argument with real data, information, and ideas. More importantly, you agree to play fair. I spent years in business meetings (that seldom included lawyers and never included politicians) in which regulations and scientific data were at issue. Despite having agreed to abide by the regulations and to properly analyze data, one or more of the participants never intended to have a free exchange nor to abide by the rules. Instead, they brought all sorts of maneuvers and obfuscations in an attempt to achieve the result they wanted no matter what was presented in the meeting. This even extended to conceding defeat in one meeting and denying that they conceded it in the next. To paraphrase a quote attributed to Upton Sinclair: It is impossible to convince a person of something if his job depends on him not accepting it. This, of course, is the antithesis of a free exchange of ideas.

Raymond Franson, SM’83, PhD’89
Lee’s Summit, Missouri

I was dismayed by two letters in the Winter/24 issue of the Magazine. First there was the writer who called the American Library Association anti-free speech (they’re not the ones going in for book bans) and asserted somewhat ludicrously that equity and inclusion promote division and hatred, and then the writer who said people who disagree about climate change should be able to be heard. (Does he also like to disagree about the heliocentric model or the value of pi?)

Programs of diversity, equity, and inclusion are an imperfect attempt to correct the effects of long-standing injustices and multiple past wrongs. How anyone can call this hateful is beyond my comprehension, but unfortunately the first hypothesis that suggests itself is that such people are committed to preserving injustice for their own benefit. I would not expect this from anyone whose education had cultivated logic and objectivity, let alone a sense of fairness or empathy, and I am sorry for anyone who thinks that way.

As for climate change, at this point the only reasonable disagreement is over details. Since we are going merrily along like the Fool in the old tarot cards, dancing on the precipice—missing the goals that might have kept us from reaching tipping points—we can confidently expect more deadly storms and heat waves, floods, droughts, rising sea levels, collapsing ocean circulation patterns, failure of northern European agriculture, and more. I am old enough that I won’t see the worst of this, but people 30 to 50 years my junior, to say nothing of their children or grandchildren, are going to be facing some very hard times and should be doing what they can to limit and mitigate the damage, not wasting their abilities in frivolous denial.

Katharine W. Rylaarsdam, SM’74
Baltimore

Educational losses

To keep the record straight on Stephen Heyneman’s (AM’71, PhD’75) letter (Spring/24) about the Comparative Education Center, the center was located in the Department of Education, which closed c. 2000, not in the Graduate School of Education, which closed c. 1975. The center punched far above its weight, as Stephen indicates, as did the department itself. Only a blinkered administration could fail to recognize the contributions of both the department and the center.

Robert Dreeben
UChicago Professor Emeritus and Department of Education Chair, 1991–97
Chicago

Arthur Wise’s (MBA’65, PhD’67) letter in the Winter/24 issue of the Magazine brought back memories of how sad and angry the four U of C doctoral graduates in my Canadian faculty of education were when in 1997 we heard the news of the Department of Education’s impending closure. The story was that the University allowed the department to deteriorate by not hiring new faculty and then claiming existing faculty were getting old—not surprisingly.

However, Chicago was not unique. Historians of higher education have documented the tensions elite universities often display regarding their education faculties. These issues are rooted in the historically low status of education schools when linked to competing objectives of producing exemplary research and educating teachers, the modest income of graduates compared to professional schools like law and medicine (and thus smaller donations), the difficulties of defining an education discipline, and other such factors (see, for example, Ed School: A Brief for Professional Education and The Trouble with Ed Schools). Chicago had already closed its Graduate School of Education (training teachers at the master’s level), which sat uneasily with the research and doctoral studies focus of the Department of Education.

I entered the department with a bachelor’s degree in 1966, thinking I would get a master’s degree and go home to teach, with an object of improving schooling for underprivileged children. I soon found that there was only marginal interest in school practice (at the time), and it was assumed I would continue to a PhD, perhaps studying organizations or higher education (which I did). In my sociology of education program, headed by Professor Charles E. Bidwell, LAB’46, AB’50, AM’53, PhD’56, we were encouraged to think of ourselves as social scientists, and our preliminary examinations were the same as those taken by sociology students, plus exams in a series of education courses and the special field of sociology of education. My program was very small (four to six people entered each year), and we received a good amount of individual attention; a number of graduates went on to prestigious academic positions across the world.

There is an interesting contrast to be made with the University of Toronto, which was also faced with the prospect of dismantling its Faculty of Education after years of scorn and resource deprivation but decided to invigorate it instead. It is a shame that Chicago failed to blaze a similar trail.

Sandra Acker, AM’68, PhD’78
Toronto

Cooler by the lake

I would like to add to the tales of dorms that are no longer (“The Dorms of Yesteryear,” the Core, Winter/24).

I first came to the U of C in the spring of 1979 as a prospie. I stayed with my hosts in the Shoreland and fell in love. In love with the possibility of living in this “dorm,” which was like no other dorm I had ever heard of. Expired hotel, rooms with kitchens, no classic cinder blocks, a mile from campus, on the lake. Wow. My decision to attend the U of C was highly influenced by this.

The first night of O-Week I met not only my two roommates but also the three guys next door. As this had been a hotel, our rooms had doors between them. We opened them that night, and they remained open for the whole year. One of us, Jim Reedy, AB’84, brought with him his family tradition of answering the phone with “Wang’s Chowhouse,” and our place quickly became known as “Wang’s.” Jim led us in painting those five letters on the windows of our rooms in large font, easily visible from the circular driveway below. We became known for “Party at Wang’s.”

One of the beauties of living on the seventh floor, facing the lake, is that in winter you could tell how cold it was out there by seeing how much of the lake was frozen.

Jean-Pierre Cavigelli, AB’83
Casper, Wyoming

Circus Maroonus

The Winter/24 Magazine brought back fond memories—of the Kazoo Marching Band and the return of football to the University. I still have a prized relic of that era: a red fez decorated with yellow letters saying, “Chicago Marching Kazoo Band Fez Faction.”

And who can forget the cheers, jeers, and some unforgettable—and utterly unimaginable—moments.

The cheers: “Themistocles, Thucydides, the Peloponnesian Wars, H_₂SO_₄, who ya gonna yell for?”

The jeers: A lighthearted antifootball faction that carried loaves of Wonder Bread into the stands, throwing out slices with cries echoing ancient Rome, “We give you bread,” and pointing to the field, “They give you circuses.”

And circus-like moments: The Maroons’ kicker, punting from about our 20-yard line into a gale-force wind from the north, found the football blown back over his head into our end zone—recovered by our opponent for a touchdown.

Then glory becoming tragedy: A Maroons’ kickoff returner about to finish close to a 100-yard kickoff return, only to have the ball fall mysteriously from his hands near the goal line. And, of course, our opponent did recover on about the 3-yard line.

All witnessed. And I will return for Homecoming 2024.

Jim Przystup, AM’68, PhD’75
Oakton, Virginia

Brrr … Chicago style

I saw the photograph (“Snow Day”) in Alumni News in the Winter/24 University of Chicago Magazine and wanted to mention my unforgettable experience.

During my two years at Booth working toward my MBA, I lived in the MBA student residence at 55th and Blackstone. I drove my 1969 Pontiac GTO to campus from Kansas City and usually parked on Blackstone when I could find a parking spot. During the winter of 1977–78, we had so much snow and ice that my car was frozen in place for two or three days, my tires encased in ice. Several of my fellow MBA students were finally able to push me out by rocking the car back and forth several times.

Our residence building was a converted old hotel with radiators and drafty windows. We had to stuff towels around the windows to help keep warm. (That building was knocked down several years ago.)

I wish I still had that car!

Mark Schlicht, MBA’78
Lenexa, Kansas

Vyto excolatur

Re: Chez James, aka Woodlawn Tap (“Jimmy’s Woodlawn Tap: An Oral History,” Summer/23).

Perhaps understandably, fellow bartender Vyto Baltrukenas, AB’74, fails to mention what was, to my mind, his most entertaining interaction with the late Frank Kinahan. Early one evening, Frank was sitting alone in the middle of the bar (important for the story, if you know the bar) when Vyto passed him by. Frank looked up happily from his beer and quietly intoned, “Crescat scientia; Vyto Baltrukenas.” Vyto’s response is best left unrecorded.

John Tomas, PhD’91
Chicago

Electric conductor

Below are my memories of Barbara Schubert, EX’79, who has conducted the University Symphony Orchestra (USO) for many years (“Laser Focus,” Alumni News, Fall/23).

I played trumpet in the USO in the early 1980s. I doubt that Ms. Schubert remembers me, but she had a big impact on me. Up to then I had played only in bands. The USO was my introduction to playing orchestral music. I fell in love with that music, and I played joyfully in orchestras for the next 35 years. Ms. Schubert was superb. She clearly loved the music; she was well prepared for every rehearsal; she held us to high standards but didn’t belittle us when we fell short. She had a sense of humor. I vividly remember how astounded I was at the beauty of pieces like the German Requiem by Brahms, the Symphony No. 4 by Tchaikovsky, and the Symphony No. 1 by Mahler. I give Ms. Schubert tremendous credit for having faith that the USO could handle such challenging pieces. I only wish I could have played under her for many more years!

For what it’s worth, I remember two of my fellow trumpeters: Norman Birge, PhD’86, and Mark Olson, AB’84, PhD’90. I would be tickled to read their memories if they respond.

Tom Shields, SM’82
West Fork, Arkansas

The University of Chicago Magazine welcomes letters about its contents or about the life of the University. Letters for publication must be signed and may be edited for space, clarity, civility, and style. To provide a range of views and voices, we ask letter writers to limit themselves to 300 words or fewer. Write: Editor, The University of Chicago Magazine, 5235 South Harper Court, Chicago, IL 60615. Or email: uchicago-magazine@uchicago.edu.