Chicago Journal

Lap of luxury
College kids nationwide—including Chicago students—are richer than they used to be.
If laptops, iPods, cell phones, and luxury cars seem more prevalent on campus lately, there may be a reason: college students nationwide, from public schools to elite private institutions, come from wealthier families than they did six years ago.
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Art of Spiegelman
In the Quad Club lobby five students wait for Art Spiegelman, the creative-writing program’s 2004 Kestnbaum writer in residence. Fifteen minutes into the scheduled start of their small workshop with the graphic novelist, third-year Iana Dikidjieva passes around her surreal sketches and writing snippets. First-year Sophie Hunter scans them and asks, “Have you ever seen that book Insanely Twisted Rabbits? This reminds me of it.” Dikidjieva claps her hands, smiles, and blows Hunter kisses for the compliment.
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Paris Center opens
As they traveled up the escalators in a cinema multiplex near Paris’s National Library, more than 200 people saw the purpose of their visit flashing on the electronic message board directing them to the appropriate theater: l’Université de Chicago. The group—University trustees, visiting committee members, and other friends—was there to mark the launch of the new University Center in Paris.
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Higher grounds
New Age music plays on a boom box. A chalkboard lists coffee and snacks under categories such as Dark Night of Soul, Last Temptations, and Diet of Vorms. Regulars’ mugs hang on wooden pegs. An espresso machine prepares shots for two-buck lattes.
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Bird watching
In May Provost Richard Saller, along with his counterparts at eight other schools, cosigned letters to the Ford and Rockefeller foundations protesting antiterrorism language added to their grant guidelines. The universities—Chicago, Harvard, Yale, Princeton, Cornell, Columbia, Stanford, Penn, and MIT—argued that the language, meant to prevent foundation money from aiding terrorist groups, could stifle protected speech. The letters, the Wall Street Journal reported, “implicitly raise the prospect that the universities might cease applying for Ford and Rockefeller grants if the language isn’t altered.” Both Chicago and Columbia “have refrained from signing off on any Ford Foundation grants they were negotiating.”
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