We got a wonderful and much-needed night of sleep and took the train to DePaul University for our last college tour. In 2007, the year before Lucy was born, I interviewed for, and was offered, a tenure-track faculty job at DePaul. I didn't take it because I didn't want to live in Chicago, but I loved the physics department and the university and have always had a soft spot in my heart for DePaul and sometimes imagine an alternate universe in which I took that job. That's probably not a good enough reason for Lucy to go to college there, especially because she has no interest in studying physics, but almost all of the flights between Seattle and Eastern Canada stopped in Chicago, which seemed like a good option for a big city, and DePaul seemed like the Chicago college that most closely matched Lucy's criteria. I guess I didn't look carefully enough at the number of students there, which is about 20,000, so it's not a small school at all. Most of the schools we have visited have had only one or two other families on the tour, and in some we had a private tour with no other families. At DePaul they gave you colored wristbands to indicate which tour you were on, and there were about 5 simultaneous tours with 4 families on each tour.
DePaul feels like a small school even though it is not. The campus is not large, all the classes are small. We didn't see any classrooms on the tour, but when I asked the tour guide my standard question about what fraction of classes are discussion-based vs. lecture-based, she said that even the lecture classes involved a lot of discussion and they couldn't help turning every class into a discussion. Since the tour was on a Saturday, we didn't get a sense of what the campus was like when classes are in session, but there were still a lot of people out and about.
DePaul has 51% students of color, so more than Macalester but fewer than Augsburg. Looking around, it didn’t seem super diverse, but it was hard to tell because it was Saturday.
They talked a lot about the connection to Chicago, how you can get cheap tickets to shows and there are lots of ways they encourage you to get involved in stuff in the city. The school is right next to a train station and it seems super easy to get anywhere in the city quickly from there. At the same time, the campus is immaculately manicured and clean, and it does not feel very urban when you are actually on campus.
The tour guide seemed to really love DePaul and the people we saw there seemed happy, but neither the tour guide nor the person giving the information session presentation ever used the word “community” to describe the environment. I asked her if there was a sense of community among the students living in the dorms, and she said yes, and said all the right things about it, but it only came up after I asked. 70% of freshman live on campus but only 30% of non-freshman students live on campus.
DePaul is a Catholic Vincentian school, based on the philosophy of Saint Vicent DePaul, who was all about social justice, charity, tolerance, and helping the poor, not just by helping individuals but by challenging and changing unjust systems. It was founded at a time when the other universities in Chicago had quotas to prevent admission of too many Jews and Catholics, and in response DePaul had a very explicit policy of admitting everyone. When I interviewed there the dean who interviewed me told me he was a Buddhist and he had a Buddhist shrine in his office. The Vicentian mission of service feels very present and real there, and it feels very open and accepting of people of all religions, not in spite of, but almost because of, that mission.
I noticed that there are signs all over the main quad prohibiting demonstrations and tents without prior approval. I asked our tour guide if those had always been there or if they were put up in response to national protests. She said last year there were pro-Palestine encampments for about 2 months, and then at the end of the school year the signs went up. Later my friend who works there said that the administration had sent out an email about it and she expected to mad about it, but that she thought their response was thoughtful and reasonable even if she didn’t agree with all of it. She said reading between the lines it seemed like the administration had been trying to negotiate with the protesters, but it became clear that the people they were negotiating with weren’t really able to speak on behalf of the rest of the protesters because there wasn’t enough consensus among them, and a lot of their demands didn’t really make sense or weren’t possible to meet, so the administration finally decided to just shut it down. She also said DePaul was being sued for antisemitism because an Israeli student had set up an “ask me anything” booth on campus and gotten beat up by someone who wasn’t affiliated with the university.
Lucy and I were both so exhausted from our long week of touring colleges that we had a hard time focusing and it’s possible we missed some important points. At the end of the visit, we didn’t feel very strongly either way about DePaul. It seemed like a good place where Lucy could be perfectly happy going to school, but she also didn’t feel super excited about it. They bragged a lot about their business school and film school, but not about anything she was interested in studying. And it was too big. And Chicago is nice but it is not New York.
After our visit we walked around the neighborhood around DePaul, which had a nice college-town feel, and had lunch at a nice sandwich shop.
Then we met up with my friends Angie and Mel and went to a bird sanctuary with an amazing view overlooking Lake Michigan and the city. It was a windy day and there were huge waves, and we saw a guy doing a sport that involved a surfboard and a parachute that did not seem like it should be possible:
Lucy said that walking around DePaul, everyone seemed nice, but they just didn’t seem like her people. She couldn’t really articulate why. In 2007 when I visited Chicago, my friends who had moved there from Seattle said they didn’t like Chicago because it was hard to find their people. As an example they said if you listened to conversations on the L everyone was talking about sports, and if you listened to conversations on the bus in Seattle, people were talking about more interesting things. I asked Angie and Mel, who had both lived in Seattle, what they thought of this. They said Chicago did have kind of a midwest sensibility and for people like us it was harder to find your people here than in Seattle, but it was possible and they had.
After that we went to their neighborhood and they took us to the feminist bookstore that the bookstore in Portlandia was modeled on. It was started by two white women just like in Portlandia, but they had recently sold it to a younger more diverse generation so it was now more up to date. After we left the feminist bookstore, Lucy said “those were my people in there.” So they at least exist in Chicago.
Then Mel dropped us off downtown and we went on a 90-minute Chicago river architecture boat tour. This was fabulous mainly because we were so exhausted and it was luxurious to get to just sit still for 90 minutes and be entertained. Also the views were beautiful, the guide was funny, and we learned a lot.
Then we wandered around downtown Chicago and saw a bunch of cool sights. A book series Lucy likes called Divergent was set in Chicago and she found an interactive map that shows you where all the events in the book and movie take place and we visited a few of them. We saw the Art Institute of Chicago and the bean.
I didn’t like Chicago when I visited 18 years ago, but it is growing on me. The plants are green, the lake is a pretty good substitute for the ocean, there are lots of nice parks and interesting places, it feels like a real city, and the public transportation is good.
Then we met up with my friend Mary Bridget, who is a physics professor at DePaul, for dinner. We are staying in Chinatown, so I found a vegetarian Chinese restaurant for us to eat at. Mary Bridget was a very helpful source of information about DePaul. She was shocked when I told her they hadn’t shown us classrooms or talked much about academics, or how much the city is integrated into the academic experience. She told us all about the short courses about the city that they offer before classes start, as well as the many regular classes that incorporate experiential learning in the city into the class. She reaffirmed that it feels like a small school even though it is big, that all classes integrate discussion, and that it is both deeply Vincentian and deeply welcoming for non-Christians. She definitely made it sound very appealing, but Lucy said she probably wouldn’t apply because it’s too big.
We talked about the tension we Lucy is feeling about wanting to go to an economically diverse school, while wanting to go to a school where students are excited about learning for its own sake and not just as a means to a career, while also realizing that being able to want that is a result of economic privilege. Mary Bridget said DePaul definitely recognizes that tension and does its best to navigate it. She said a lot of students come in focused only college as a means to a career, and she thinks the university does a good job of facilitating helping them to get interested in learning for its own sake. This seems like a positive sign to me, that they are conscious of the tension and trying to address it, as opposed to schools that either don't care that they are accessible only to privileged students or that don't care about making learning fun (or worse, both)
We did a lot today, but it was mostly fun relaxing stuff, and it was so nice to have a day without travel where we could leave our heavy backpacks at the hotel. We had a wonderful Shabbat day enjoying Chicago and ignoring the news.
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