Brought to you by the editors of the Core
 
 
 
 
 
 
September 2018
 
 
 
 
 
 
01 An American in Dakar
02 100,000 NUMTOTs and counting
03 What's new in the Core curriculum?
04 Hooray, it's almost fall quarter!
 
 
 
 
 
 
01
 
 
 
 
 
 
An American in Dakar
 
 
Last academic year, Emily Lynn Osborn, associate professor of African history, led the College's first quarter-long study abroad program in West Africa. Twenty UChicago undergrads in the African Civilizations program traveled to Dakar, Senegal, where they lived with host families, studied French or Wolof, and learned about Senegalese culture firsthand.
 
Twenty-five years earlier, as a junior majoring in history at the University of California, Berkeley, Osborn had her own study abroad experience in Dakar. Osborn spent a year at the Université Cheikh Anta Diop, Senegal's flagship university, living in a communal home with other study abroad students.
 
There were so many strikes at the university that year, it was nearly considered an année blanche, a year off. "I did a fair bit of traveling," Osborn says, "visited the families and homes of Senegalese friends, and ate lots of Senegalese food, such as yassa and cebb u jenn." She got to know the owner of the local boutique (corner store) and sometimes helped out behind the counter--an experience "that was great for my Wolof."
 
Senegal, a country of rich cultural traditions, is known for its music, food, and beautiful handmade clothing, Osborn says. Even if none of the students in the Dakar program (shown below in a class taught by anthropologist François Richard) embark on a career involving Africa, "studying abroad in West Africa imparts important, life-long lessons."
 
 
Read more about the African Civilizations program in Dakar in the Core.
 
 
 
 
 
 
02
 
 
 
 
 
 
100,000 NUMTOTs and counting
 
 
You might imagine that the appeal of a joke Facebook group about new urbanism--a design movement that promotes mixed-use, walkable neighborhoods and public transit--would be somewhat limited. And you would be wrong.
 
Juliet Eldred, AB'17 (geographical studies and visual arts), started New Urbanist Memes for Transit-Oriented Teens (NUMTOT) in March 2017, during finals week. Eldred is now an analyst at a transportation consulting firm in Boston and NUMTOT has more than 100,000 members. There are three administrators, including Emily Orenstein, Class of 2019, and nine moderators. The group had to add moderators in Australia because discussions got heated while the American moderators were asleep.
 
NUMTOT has been written about in Chicago magazine, the Atlantic's Citylab blog ("The Transit-Oriented Teens Are Coming to Save Your City"), the Guardian, and the New York Times.
 
It's inspired more than 60 spinoff groups, including Two Wheeled Memes for Bicycle Oriented Teens, Transit Focused Snaps for Composition Minded Chaps, Teutonische Städtebau-Meme für verkehrinteressierte junge Erwachsene, and NUMTinder.
 
One day this summer Eldred took time during her lunch hour to explain the NUMTOT phenomenon.
 
First, you're not actually a teen.
No. It's a ridiculous Facebook meme group naming convention, Blank Memes for Blank Teens.
 
How did NUMTOT get so famous?
It struck a nerve in a way I don't think any of us were expecting. Things you would think are niche--street design and trains and planning--are actually relevant to everybody and affect our day-to-day lives.
 
 
Do your parents understand the memes?
My mom is in the group. She's very supportive. Sometimes she'll call me a NUMTOT and I'm like, "Mother, please don't." She does occasionally ask me to explain things. It's weird and sort of cringey to have to explain.
 
It's not just a meme group though.
I sometimes wish people were less serious. We started it as a joke group. It was never intended to be a serious discussion group.
 
Back in November 2016, I had started the Facebook group I Feel Personally Attacked by This Relatable Map, mostly about maps and stuff. In March 2017 there was a thread about highway planning. It ended up devolving into joking about Robert Moses [the urban planner who wanted to drop a highway on Greenwich Village] and Jane Jacobs [author of The Death and Life of American Cities (Random House, 1961) and Moses's archenemy]. That led to the idea of starting a new urbanist shitposting Facebook group.
 
Is there a long-term plan?
Usually Facebook groups burn out on their own. This group hasn't shown any signs of doing that. The broader mission, which has sort of become a reality, is to connect people to real-life organizing and activism opportunities.
 
I actually went to a NUMTOT Meetup group in Somerville [Massachusetts] that I had no part in organizing. There were 20 people there. I was really surprised.
 
 
 
 
 
 
03
 
 
 
 
 
 
What's new in the Core curriculum?
 
The Core may seem eternal and immutable, but in fact it's always changing, at a rate slightly faster than the geologic time scale. "There was never one Core curriculum," says Dean John W. Boyer, AM'69, AM'75, historian and author of The University of Chicago: A History (UChicago Press, 2015). "There were probably 13 or 14 different iterations, each of which came about after a great deal of struggle and turmoil. And that's a good thing, because it means we take curricula seriously."
 
 
Five new Core courses will be offered this fall. Among them:
 
1   Physics for Future Presidents: Fundamental Concepts and Applications. The title comes from the book that physics professor Scott Wakely uses for the course, written by physicist Richard A. Muller (W. W. Norton, 2008). "Most of the policy makers in this country, including presidents, are nonscientists," says Wakely. But they have to make decisions requiring scientific knowledge anyway. "The classic example is radiation, a very important subject about which most people know nothing, except that it is vaguely scary."
 
    Although the course is for nonscience majors, it's not a "baby physics class," Wakely says. It covers "advanced and interesting topics, some of which our own physics majors don't get to see."
 
2   Global Society. This new Social Science sequence focuses on the globalized world, covering social thought in fall quarter, population in winter, and social change in spring. Readings include Letters of a Javanese Princess by Raden Adjeng Kartini (1911) and texts by Leopold Sédar Senghor, poet and first president of Senegal. Most of Senghor's work is available only in French, so sociologist Andrew Abbott, AM'75, PhD'82, who teaches in the fall, translated the essay "Eléments constitutifs d'une civilisation d'inspiration négro-africaine" himself.
 
    The breakthrough in designing the course was the realization that "we could teach social theory with texts that were written for completely different purposes--like correspondences," says sociologist Jenny Trinitapoli, who teaches in winter. After reading social theory around the globe, students will study global society using data and "a population lens," she says. "Everybody already knows Malthus and the phrase 'demography is destiny.' We're going deeper than that--all the way to life tables."
 
3   Poetry and the Human (piloted last year). "What is poetry and why do we do it?" asks the description for the course, the first-ever Humanities Core sequence on poetry. "How is poetry as language and action different from other forms of activity?" Students will read Homer, Sappho, Catullus, poets from China's T'ang period, Rumi, Ki no Tsurayuki, John Donne, Louis Zukofsky, Dahlia Ravikovitch, Anne Carson, N. Scott Momaday, Claudia Rankine, and others.
 
    Unique among HUM sequences, in spring quarter students can choose to take either a third humanities course or creative writing.
 
 
 
 
 
 
04
 
 
 
 
 
 
Hooray, it's almost fall quarter!
 
 
Students play intramural football on the Midway in an undated photo.
 
More extracurriculars from the archives: WHPK ("We don't deal with MP3. We're not into it"), the Chicago Maroon ("We were trying to stir the pot"), Off Off Campus ("Mission Accomplished 2: Mission Still Accomplished"), varsity football ("It's not to put it on our resume, and it's not because of the girls, I'll tell you that"), UChicago Actuarial Initiative ("What's the difference between an accountant and an actuary? An accountant will look at your feet when he's talking to you, and an actuary will look at his own").