The University of Chicago isn’t an arts school, and no one pretends that it is. But this spring, the character of the arts on campus is changing. Starting on Saturday, May 8th, the week-long annual Festival of the Arts will celebrate student work in visual and performance mediums, followed on May 15th by Summer Breeze, the University’s yearly music festival. And this year, these instituted events are joined by new reasons to celebrate arts at the University. Recent initiatives like the UChicago Arts Pass, which gives University students free or discounted entrance into Chicago art institutions, and the May 12th groundbreaking for the Reva and David Logan Center for Creative and Performing Arts, are beginning to paint a new landscape for campus arts. Read the rest of this entry »

A homosexual, a Jew, a male nanny, a communist, an anthropologist, a mathematician, a parking attendant, and a pot head. I’m not listing my friends—I don’t personally know a male nanny or a parking attendant. These are people that can be checked out of the Human Library, a small youth organization turned international activist network with locations in the United States from Connecticut to California. The idea is simple: speak with someone with whom you wouldn’t otherwise speak. Some branches have selections that highlight local tensions; a popular check-out in the Istanbul Human Library is an Armenian, and in London, a Muslim. Participants in these face-to-face encounters work out their prejudices by speaking to people who would otherwise never cross paths. Read the rest of this entry »

Cindy Agustin is trying to get a bus-load of tired Chicago-area students, friends, and parents to share what made them decide to march. “Come on, guys,” says the University of Chicago fourth-year trip organizer, upbeat and timid as a substitute teacher enforcing a mandatory show-and-tell, “everyone will have to go at some point.” Before long, Monica steps up to the front of the bus and takes mic. After Monica comes Veronica, and about twenty people later comes Jesús, who says simply, “Hello, my name is Jesús, and God knows we need immigration reform.” Read the rest of this entry »

Stately and elegant, red brick with white trim, partly obscured by a row of trees, the house has nothing to set it apart from the other homes on this affluent residential block of Kenwood. Except that it is protected. In the driveway there is always a black SUV. At the end of the street, where University Avenue meets Hyde Park Boulevard, a black sedan is parked behind a long wall of waist-high concrete barriers and metal pipe fences. The blockade reaches along the street, across the sidewalks and back on the other side, enclosing half a city block in each direction. At every entrance, a blue metal sign covered with yellow and white letters declares in English and Spanish: ATTENTION: BY ENTERING THIS AREA YOU ARE CONSENTING TO A SEARCH OF YOUR PERSON AND BELONGINGS.

Barack Obama doesn’t live here anymore, but his presence does. Read the rest of this entry »

The journalism industry seems to be on its last legs these days, and everyone thinks they know why. Is it faulty business models? Corporate greed? An inevitable result of changing technology? Over the past year or so, as both the Tribune Company and the Sun-Times Media Group have filed for bankruptcy protection, fingers have been pointed and explanations advanced. Perhaps the debate is getting old, but here at the Weekly we thought we’d consult two groups whose opinions are often overlooked: the Revolutionary Communist Party, USA, a Maoist group based in Chicago, and the University of Chicago’s Objectivist Club, which advocates the individualist philosophy of Ayn Rand. Here are their thoughts on journalism’s future and problems. Read the rest of this entry »

Churches dot the Woodlawn like freckles and underlie it like foundations. Some of them are historically significant, some have architectural merit, and some stand out only for their typicality. This photo essay includes a little of each.

Founded in the second Fort Dearborn in 1833, First Presbyterian Church was a pioneer in the temperance and abolition movements in the mid-nineteenth century. The congregation had moved to its sixth and most lavish building when it was destroyed by the Great Fire in 1871. Several mergers and nearly six decades later, First Church moved into its present home at 6400 South Kimbark Avenue. Its membership grew in numbers and racial diversity throughout the ’40s, and in the late ’50s the church helped establish T.W.O., or The Woodlawn Organization, to fight the encroachment of the University of Chicago campus. Since then, First Church has housed organizations and efforts as diverse as the Blackstone Rangers, Head Start classes, a community garden, and today the Woodlawn Collaborative, which unites Woodlawn residents and UofC students in promoting arts, education, and community empowerment. Read the rest of this entry »

Across the street from the Lubyanka prison, in Moscow, there stood in 1937 a nondescript building with a specially sloped floor, for drainage, and a wooden wall to muffle the sound of bullets. It was here that the Soviet secret police, the NKVD, executed enemies of the Communist regime. Between 1937 and 1938 this amounted to the deaths of at least 700,000 people, according to the Russian Memorial society. Among the victims were Nikolai Bukharin, once one of the chief Soviet economists; Mikhail Tukhachevsky, a Marshal of the Soviet Union; Genrikh Yagoda, former head of the secret police; and hundreds of thousands of ordinary people. Those who were not murdered outright were frequently deported to the Gulag prison camps, based on the katorga system that had existed under the tsars. These were scattered throughout Siberia and in 1939 housed over a million people, slowly freezing or being worked to death in some of the most hostile environments on earth. Read the rest of this entry »

The University of Chicago is a bastion of resources and privilege in a largely underserved and segregated South Side. The University and many of its students regularly engage in outreach and volunteer programs aimed at bridging the gap between the University community and the broader South Side, and Hyde Park is often hailed as one of the most integrated neighborhoods in the United States. But there is an undeniable separation—an invisible wall—between the University and its surroundings. Read the rest of this entry »