Once upon a time in 1961, four thousand people traveled through a blizzard to sit in the University of Chicago’s Mandel Hall and listen to performers from all over the United States play at the first UofC Folk Festival. Organized by the UofC Folklore Society, the Festival received high praise and has continued as an annual event ever since. Now, as the Society prepares to hold the 50th incarnation of the festival this coming weekend, its members and audience have been called to remember its storied history and notable place in the tradition of folk music in the United States. Read the rest of this entry »

In his essay on civil disobedience, Henry David Thoreau wrote of the government to which he refused to pay taxes, “I saw that the State was half-witted…and that it did not know its friends from its foes, and I lost all my remaining respect for it, and pitied it.” Thoreau—followed by generations of non-violent protestors—argued that an essential part of civil disobedience was following one’s own ideals while accepting often hypocritical dictums imposed by the ruling order. The theory is that all punishment shows the problem with the system itself—which is why we cannot be quite sure of what we are watching when we see a video of students who claim to operate by “democratic consensus” milling around a cafeteria full of security guards, shouting vague phrases at one another, and refusing to hand over their identification in favor of reaching a communal decision about whether or not they are about to be arrested and disciplined (they are). Such actions make us question exactly what a protest is and what it can achieve. Read the rest of this entry »

To the list of great pairings of culture and snack food, including movies and popcorn and art galleries and cheese plates, we can now add Lectures and Fries. Hyde Park’s largest housing cooperative, Bowers House, located on 51st Street and University Avenue, has cooked up a new kind of home-schooling with its Lectures and Fries series. On Tuesday, February 17, Bowers House hosted the seventh installment, led by Sara Black, a founder of Backstory Café. Read the rest of this entry »

The Hyde Park-Kenwood Community Conference celebrated its 60th anniversary on Wednesday with “Challenging the Next Decade,” a forum devoted to discussing the future of the Hyde Park community. As Hyde Park was confronted by issues of integration and the community’s deteriorating infrastructure in the late 1940s, the HPKCC was formed to “confer and figure out a way to make integration work,” said HPKCC board member James W. Withrow in his opening speech. The main task of the Conference, according to Withrow, has been to set forth a vision for Hyde Park as “an interracial community of high standards.” Read the rest of this entry »

Reverend Jeremiah Wright’s February 10 appearance at Rockefeller Chapel was more of a sermon in three acts than the workshop it was billed as. He opened with a meandering anecdote loosely centered on University of Chicago professor Dwight Hopkins, who along with Wright was part of a coterie that coaxed Cuban dictator Fidel Castro back into a Christian church in the late 1980s after a two-decade absence. Next, Wright contextualized the topic of his talk, “Who Is My Neighbor?” with an extended retelling of the Good Samaritan parable. In his “update,” a UofC student (privileged member of the ruling class) is nursed back to health by a gay ex-gang member (despised minority). Wright included some more landmarks and local color, much to the delight of the audience, a mix of Wright loyalists (one man in a Graduate School of Business T-shirt explained that he’d been baptized by Wright) and curiosity-seekers primed for provocative sound bites, even if they had to provoke them themselves. Read the rest of this entry »

On Wednesday, February 11, Aleksandar Hemon, a Bosnian writer based in Chicago, read passages from his upcoming novel “Love and Obstacles.” The event, hosted by the Franke Institute for the Humanities at the University of Chicago’s Regenstein Library, was well attended and deservedly so: after reading for thirty minutes, Hemon spent more than an hour answering questions. Read the rest of this entry »

Scrawled in bold letters across the classroom’s blackboard was the evening’s topic of discussion: Wage Theft. Billed under the title “Thou Shall Not Steal: Putting an End to the National Epidemic of Wage Theft,” the event aimed to both define the phenomenon of wage theft and to recognize the various ways in which Chicago workers have mobilized to fight back. Organized by University of Chicago School of Social Service Administration doctoral student Jacob Lesniewski, speakers included members of several interfaith worker organizations and representatives from the United Electrical, Radio and Machine Workers of America (UE) Local 1110. Read the rest of this entry »

The Woodlawn Center, a mental health clinic that serves the low-income community of Woodlawn, offers its clients a quiet refuge from the harsh and often bewildering realities of the outside world. But on Thursday morning, this inconspicuous one-story building became the site of a heated political protest, as a group of about thirty patients, activists and community members rallied against the potential closure of the clinic. Read the rest of this entry »