The University of Chicago Magazine

1911 “Future historians will look back with amazement and amusement upon a state of political affairs in which organized plunderers played so notorious and shameless a part,” predicted political-science professor Charles Edward Merriam in a July essay. However gloomy his view on contemporary politics seemed, Merriam retained an optimistic outlook. “I believe that the days when the unpunished criminal and crook can participate in the making of law are numbered,” he proclaimed. “And as patriotism slowly turns to the fields of civil rather than military conflict, and fights its battles there, new victories for social and political welfare will be won, and points now held by the enemies of order and progress gained and occupied for the general interest and the common good.”

photo: from our pages 1956 Legendary Chicago Sun-Times advice columnist Ann Landers spoke to a throng of Burton-Judson residents and their friends as a guest of Vincent House, the May issue reported. Citing one example of Landers’s advice—“Pre-marital relations are one kind of familiarity that breeds contempt, and sometimes just plain breeds”—the Magazine went on to note that although the columnist was in her late 30s, she looked “much younger.” Landers reassured her audience that “the younger generation is not going to hell in a handbasket”; college students were no better or worse than they’d ever been. She also said that common sense qualified her for the job more than three-and-a-half years in college as a psychology major.

1981 Hans Kung, a scholar stripped of his position at West Germany’s University of Tubingen by Pope John Paul II in 1979 for dissenting views on papal infallibility, birth control, and the right of women to hold church office, was named the U of C’s John Nuveen visiting professor for fall quarter, reported the spring issue. Kung was slated to teach two graduate courses at the Divinity School and to give a series of public lectures on campus as part of the Hiram W. Thomas lecture series.

1996 The Olympic torch made a stop at the University for an official June 3 ceremony en route to the summer games in Atlanta, the June issue reported. U of C students were the city’s first Olympians, competing in track and field at the 1900 games in Paris, according to John MacAloon, AM’74, PhD’80, a social sciences professor and Olympics expert who helped coordinate the torch’s campus visit.