Brought to you by the editors of the Core
 
 
 
 
 
 
May 2020
 
 
 
 
 
 
Jerry,

Ka Yee and I are in full agreement that you should be able to do this. And I fully sympathize with the view that they are not "just ducks." Please take care of them, "our ducks," as you have been. We are appreciative of this.

Stay well, and with best wishes,

Bob*
 
01 A guild of our own
02 Just a small town girl ...
03 Life online: Community or isolation?
04 Online conventicles
05 On Botany Pond
 
 
 
 
 
 
01
 
 
 
 
 
 
A guild of our own
 
How did early universities manage during times of plague? History professor Ada Palmer, who specializes in early modern European history, explains.
 
Universities in the distant past were a different creature from universities now. They functioned much more like guilds. Technically they still are guilds.
 
Early universities--and we're talking about the universities that existed at the time of the Black Death--were equivalent to a blacksmiths' guild, or a goldsmiths' guild, or a doctors' guild. Universities were largely about political representation and collective action. You can almost think of them as unions.
 
Students and teachers were protected by the guild, and when you graduated you became a master in the guild. You had certain rights carved out by legal arrangements between this guild and the local government, which protected you from being defrauded.
 
So when a university canceled classes in that era and sent its people far away to evade the plague, it was still operating in its most fundamental sense, as the social structure of protection for scholarship. A university represented its members legally. It looked into what its members needed to navigate a political world. Its protection was still there if its members fled to the countryside.
 
 
That's a useful way to think about what the University of Chicago is doing right now. We get bulletins every day about something the University is organizing. It's organized all the labs to donate their masks to the hospital. It's organized new funding for faculty to hire students, so if students and their families have been financially disrupted, there's a new avenue for students to earn money quickly.
 
Notice how this has nothing to do with actually learning or the content of courses. It's about being the place where people who want to pursue learning gather. It's about being the institution that these people look to for protection--legal protection, financial protection. The University is operating very much like a guild. It's defending our community from crisis.
 
Read more about Palmer in the Winter/18 Core.
 
 
 
 
 
 
02
 
 
 
 
 
 
… living in a lonely world
 
Last summer, Liva Pierce, Class of 2022, went viral with a Twitter spoof of Broadway musicals. This year she's back with her version of courses held on Zoom.
 
 
Read more about Pierce in the Winter/20 Core.
 
 
 
 
 
 
03
 
 
 
 
 
 
Life online: Community or isolation?
 
"I usually have to say 'Quiet, everyone!' at the beginning," philosophy professor Agnes Callard observes. Tonight it isn't necessary.
 
The discussion "Life Online: Community or Isolation?" marks the remote debut of Callard's popular series Night Owls. As Callard and English professor Patrick Jagoda pick over the topic, more than 500 viewers hold a parallel silent discussion in the chat box.
 
 
Jagoda, Callard, and event host Ashlyn Sparrow, assistant director of the University's Weston Game Lab.
 
Here's how the conversation starts off. (Dialogue has been edited for space and clarity.)
 
Agnes Callard: So, Patrick, you and I don't really know each other. We've seen each other on campus a couple times. Is it weird that we're getting to know one another online?
 
Patrick Jagoda: It's not weird for me. I grew up in the '90s being in way too many online chat rooms. This feels very normal.
 
Callard: I've been online a lot over the past few weeks as a way of not being lonely. I have this feeling that it's not quite community. It's like shared loneliness.
 
Jagoda: I sometimes feel a sense of ambient sociality, or "alone togetherness," which is a term that Sherry Turkle at MIT uses. Alone togetherness can be--I don't have to show up in the same way. I can be chill. There are fewer stresses put on me in terms of performance. But I can still be with people and get some of the benefits of togetherness.
 
Callard: I really love crowds. And I love being at coffee shops. I particularly love really crowded coffee shops--like in the Div School, you're squeezed between people, because there's not a lot of space. I love being with people that I'm not interacting with. That kind of alone togetherness is very different.
 
 
Chalkboard at Grounds of Being, the Div School coffee shop, showing the quarterly Battle of the Gods. Winners are determined by customers' tips.
 
Jagoda: In a coffee shop--which I really like too--you have the white noise. You have the capacity to turn off completely and focus on what each of you is doing independently. In a coffee shop, you don't have a shared text.
 
Callard: I think that's right. There's a shared physical space, but there's not a shared thing that it's about.
 
The discussion ends after three hours--and could have gone on much longer, if the speakers had answered every single viewer-submitted question. Watch a recording of the event.
 
Join a future Night Owls on Thursday nights at 5 p.m. CDT.
 
 
 
 
 
 
04
 
 
 
 
 
 
Online conventicles
 
 
   
  We are not estranged, but we are apart, and this hurts a great deal.  
 
I have always admired the seemingly endless curiosity and resilience and creativity of our students. While these coming weeks will test those virtues, I have the utmost confidence in you.
 
It would be good for you to continue to do things together, beyond your coursework, via online conventicles. I hope that you will stay in touch with your friends, hold virtual meetings of your RSOs and your houses, check in on the academic interests and the personal welfare of your colleagues and friends. If you have a great idea, share it as a common good. Throw an online dinner for some of your friends, and please, raise a toast to the Maroons.
 
--Excerpts from a video message from Dean John W. Boyer, AM'69, PhD'75, to College students at the beginning of Spring Quarter
 
Watch Boyer's full message.
 
Register for the webinar "UChicago in Times of Crisis: Historical Perspectives with Dean John W. Boyer" on Wednesday, May 6.
 
 
 
 
 
 
05
 
 
 
 
 
 
On Botany Pond
 
 
Botany Pond, built in 1903, in an undated cyanotype.
 
 
 
* An email from President Robert J. Zimmer (referencing Provost Ka Yee Lee) to Jerry Coyne, professor emeritus of ecology and evolution, granting Coyne's request to feed the Botany Pond ducks during the campus shutdown.
 
Read the full correspondence on Coyne's website, Why Evolution Is True.
 
Check out the new Botany Pond duck cam.
 
 
 
The College Review, edited by Carrie Golus, AB'91, AM'93, is brought to you by Alumni Relations and Development and the College. Image credits: Koninklijke Bibliotheek (National Library of the Netherlands), The Hague, MMW, 10 A 13 fol. 1r; UChicago illustration by Cape Horn Illustration; gif by Chloe Reibold, Twitter video courtesy Liva Pierce, Class of 2022; screenshot by Chloe Reibold; photo courtesy Grounds of Being; University of Chicago Library, Special Collections Research Center, apf2-01116.
 
What would you like to see in future issues? Send your suggestions to collegereview@uchicago.edu.