Great metropolises increasingly define how people live, work, study, and engage in recreation. What is the significance of Chicago, one of the nation’s great urban centers, for the work of a preeminent liberal arts College?
Frank Lloyd Wright once exclaimed that "Chicago is the national capital of the essentially American spirit," by which he meant that the city was new enough, big enough, brash enough, and vital enough to create a new culture worthy of a "great new nation." Chicago is indeed a "big city with a big history," like none other in the United States. It is in many respects a microcosm of early 21st century America, just as it was a prime symbol of the recasting of American urban culture in the late 19th century. William Cronon has aptly called Chicago "Nature's Metropolis," referring to its protean expansion in the course of the last century, when the city asserted itself as the capital not only of the Middle West, but also the dynamic master of much of the American West. This unique character has had deep implications for the College of the University of Chicago. The diversity of cultural perspectives, the plurality of social views, and the rich fabric of cultural and artistic opportunities provided by the city have been crucial over the past century in enhancing the University’s capacity to assemble, to sustain, and to empower a diverse student body with a highly pragmatic outlook on life.
Given the energy with which our faculty and college students have engaged the City of Chicago in the last 15 years, one could be tempted to argue that the University “discovered” the opportunities of its urban setting quite recently, following a century of approaches marked by many ad hoc interventions involving research and graduate education. The current relationship with the city is expansive and touches most domains of the College: just a starter list of academic and para-curricular offerings in the College that consciously interact with the city would fill several pages. A 2018 study found that Chicago’s diversity of opportunities for personal, career and social development is critical to the expectations of our incoming students and parents, while an analysis of the 2017-18 academic year showed that over a quarter of undergraduates participated in some University-sponsored engagement with the city, from internships to volunteer work, tutoring, research groups and experiential learning. On the academic side, the College now features an Office of Chicago Studies to encourage curricular and civic projects that connect programs of study with the vast resources and public life of our city. College leaders see Chicago not only as our institutional home, but as a global city with immense possibilities for creative programming for faculty, graduate students and undergraduates, much like our global centers in Paris, Beijing or Hong Kong.
While Chicago is a foundational part of the College’s identity, these kinds of bridges are not new. William Rainey Harper, the first president of the University of Chicago, insisted that the University take heed of its broader surroundings, and interwove his commitments to human progress through research with his many points of public engagement, such as school reform and religious literacy, across the city. In the 1930s, as the College implemented the precursors to its Core sequences, the architects of these courses looked upon Chicago as a distinctive place to pursue an education. Classes with Louis Wirth or Harry Gideonse could include excursions to the stockyards, the unemployment office, the stock exchange, or the slums, among many other sites. At these places, students were meant to encounter in sober reality the phenomena discussed in the classroom, rendered all the more poignant by the disruptions of the Great Depression. These instructors saw Chicago as a social laboratory, where the problems of a diverse, urban and industrial society could be observed and studied in ways that were not possible elsewhere. Students, it was hoped, would approach problems differently because they learned to do so in Chicago.
Nearly a century later, the commitment to Chicago remained. During the 1970s, the University adopted a strategy for engaging the city that was focused on improving the quality of life in Hyde Park and surrounding neighborhoods. Efforts to prevent crime and improve access to transportation were joined by a number of outreach and service programs with touchpoints in the College. The Office of Community Affairs was established in 1974, and it soon founded the Neighborhood Schools Program, under which hundreds of College students would serve each year as volunteer tutors and teaching assistants in local public schools. A clutch of supplementary initiatives appeared under the aegis of the Office of Special Programs, founded in 1968, including Project Upward Bound, the summer youth programs, the pilot enrichment program, and the open tutorial program, helping youth from inner-city schools prepare for college. Other notable initiatives continued in the 1980s, such as Paul Sally’s Chicago Scholars Program in Mathematics, which brought dozens of Chicago high school students and teachers to campus during the summer for intensive math training.
Programs of this kind provided service opportunities that were anchored in the mission of the College and the abilities of students. They also emphasized public education, which became a critical point of contact with the city in the 1990s and early 2000s as the University created a system of charter schools in North Kenwood-Oakland and eventually Woodlawn that would sponsor more outward-looking forms of civic engagement.
A complementary intervention in the civic realm was the University Community Service Center, established in 1996-97 under the leadership of Michelle Obama. Focused on student volunteerism and service around the city, the UCSC initially sought to increase campus support for community service involvement beyond what had been possible through registered student organizations. It quickly accomplished this through an imaginative suite of paid summer internship programs in the city, including Summer Links, Chicago Bound, and Seeds of Justice, as well as a leadership development program, workshops and year-round programming to connect students with volunteer opportunities.
By the mid 2000s, students were participating in the civic life of Chicago in large numbers, and through avenues both University-sponsored and student-driven. What was missing was a framework to organize these experiences in a proactive way and connect them with the research and teaching interests of the faculty and the culture of undergraduate scholarship. At the time, discussions about colleges and urban engagement were taking place at many urban universities, including our peer institutions, but at Chicago, they took place in a broader context of para-curricular reform that furnished unique models for program building. One such model came from our Civilization Study Abroad programs, first introduced in 1997, which allowed students to pursue their required civilization sequence in a city that illuminated the content of the courses. Our faculty quickly saw the applicability of this model to courses in Chicago, where many had both research expertise and deep connections with civic institutions. Students could meaningfully integrate their civic activities with their programs of study, and apply their academic work to their development as citizens. This was the framework that led to the Chicago Studies Program, which launched in the 2007-08 academic year with generous funding from the Women’s Board.
The structure of Chicago Studies has allowed for continuous innovation. Since 2015, Chicago Studies has offered a locally-rooted curricular program that takes the Civilizations Abroad model quite literally by designing, each spring, a suite of three interwoven courses that allows students to dedicate an entire quarter of study to the history, policy debates, culture and public life that characterize Chicago. Available to 20 students by competitive application, this immersive program is taught by distinguished faculty and combines class meetings with weekly excursions and contact with residents and stakeholder groups as companion dimensions of learning. In the last five years, this Chicago Studies Quarter has become a curricular brand of its own, with strong appeal to our faculty and our students. The 2017 Quarter, for example, explored the theme of Housing and Memory in Chicago, and connected with sites and actors in the world of public housing as well as archives and literary and artistic events. Spring 2018 witnessed a merger with Environmental Studies and the Calumet Quarter, which enabled a deep dive into the theme of Sustainable Urbanism in the Chicago region, which the 2019 program treated the historical immigrant experience and storytelling in Chicago through the lens of communities from Southern and Eastern Europe.
As curricular programs, the Quarters have demonstrated the importance of Chicago as a resource for developing students’ civic literacy and capacity for engaging in the kind of cross-cultural dialogue that the world requires of graduates in the twenty-first century. They have also inspired major programs to create individual courses that build local engagements and knowledge into the syllabi. Students in Theater and Performance Studies, for instance, have explored the background of Saul Bellows’ novel The Adventures of Augie March, and assisted the Court Theater in producing the stage adaptation by alum and Pulitzer Prize winner David Auburn. This last autumn term featured a collaboration between Environmental and Urban Studies, Art History and the Chicago-based Sweetwater Foundation, which uses urban agriculture, art and education to transform and regenerate vacant lots and buildings into thriving community spaces.
In the last three years, under the leadership of Faculty Director Sabina Shaikh, Chicago Studies has sponsored a surge of initiatives that enrich activities taking place elsewhere on campus and in the city. Launched in 2017, the Chicago Studies Certificate allows students to earn a certificate and transcript designation for completing a multi-year program that integrates coursework and scholarship with 300-400 hours of direct and high-impact engagement with the city. The Certificate offers students paths to navigate the bewildering number of opportunities for service, mentoring and research in the city that they encounter today. In the area of research, Chicago Studies co-sponsors the Chicago Studies Undergraduate Research Prize, which draws 40-50 BA submissions each year, and concludes with a research colloquium at which the six, faculty-selected finalists present their work to an audience of peers and faculty. A Speaker Series has collaborated with instructors to bring respected urban scholars to campus, while a monthly roundtable dedicated to issues like immigration, incarceration, and climate change connects students with faculty to discuss how the city informs their research and advocacy.
These programs contribute deeply to the vitality of the College, and hold great promise to re-connect the life of the city to the broader process of curricular innovation and renewal. In 2018, College leaders moved to open an Office of Chicago Studies and Experiential Learning, recruiting as the founding Director Christopher Skrable, as well as additional staff support in the Social Sciences Collegiate Division and the Office of Civic Engagement. The mandate is to develop with the faculty new projects that engage Chicago as a classroom, partner and site for research and civic development. The Sweetwater collaboration and a multi-quarter project designed with the Department of Anthropology on Chicago Food Cultures, which will involve undergraduates in field work and exhibit design, are two examples of new efforts to enhance the scholarly and civic development of our students.
As we look to the future, Chicago Studies will be a powerful amplifier for the interests of our distinguished faculty and students, and a rich advantage for the College relative to peer institutions in less dynamic settings. Chicago Studies can facilitate new creative programs – bundling courses, research and civic engagement – in areas of the curriculum usually overlooked when one thinks of experiential opportunities, and thereby distribute the kind of enrichment first envisioned by faculty leaders. We are exploring projects in the Physical Sciences, for example, and several other disciplines offer natural but unarticulated links between Chicago and the expertise of our faculty: the domain of local politics in this most political of cities, and the world of artistic practice and theory, with all of its resonances with the humanities in particular. Second, Chicago Studies can unify the interest in all things urban across the College, giving it a center of organizational gravity and cross-promotion without imposing a disciplinary structure that would stifle departmental creativity. As programs in the Humanities and Social Sciences rediscover the commitment to Chicago that inspired them in the early 20th century, it is of great importance that there is a space for college-wide urban-curricular planning and discussion. Third, just as conditions in Chicago informed the design and instruction of the first Core sequences, there are plentiful opportunities to imbue today’s Core with the resources of the city, from ethnic museums and downtown protests to art exhibitions, events at the City Club or Lyric Opera, and open forums dedicated to community development or school closures. Many of the urban-global processes that characterize our century are evident within 10 miles of campus: why not open them up as living illustrations for our introductions to scholarly thinking? Lastly, Chicago Studies can identify and encourage student leaders in the first two years of study, who hope to anchor their civic advocacy in a rigorous program of study and may, as a result, show promise for action in public life. It can encourage future agents of change who are immersed in the scholarly traditions of the College.
Today, Chicago Studies is a primarily academic endeavor within the curriculum and the distinctive structures of the College. Its maturation has allowed it to evolve in concert with innovations in our curriculum and the needs of our faculty and students, which embrace civic development and service. In the future College, where urban issues loom even larger in our identity and interests, Chicago Studies will bring scholarly focus to a landscape of experience and learning that could only take place in a Midwestern metropolis such as Chicago.
To read Dean Boyer’s full white paper on the College and the City of Chicago, click here.