Back when the University of Chicago was being built, it wasn't hard to find a religionist on a campus that was, in the words of the university's first president, the Baptist educator William Rainey Harper, "bran splinter new." After all, the university was co-founded by the American Baptist Education Society (with John D. Rockefeller): religion was at the heart of the enterprise, and Swift Hall, home to the Divinity School, is at the heart of the campus.
Today's campus, however, has a much more secular feel and a different gravitational center. That would be the Charles M. Harper Center of the newly re-christened (if you'll pardon the expression) Booth School of Business. The Harper Center looks like a three-dimensional Excel spreadsheet, proclaiming itself as the Prophet of Profit with a soaring -- well, squatting, glass atrium
across the street from the "Prairie Gothic" spire of Rockefeller Chapel.
At Swift Hall, we squeeze into those horrid little chairs with the right-handed, comma-shaped tabletops attached, in this ornate and gloomy homage to Oxford, and the professors intone above the sighing of the old steam radiators. People dance that odd little dance of ducking and wandering throughout the building when they're on their cell phones; God is everywhere, yes, but here He only has one bar.
At the business school, students lounge in comfy leather chairs under the atrium, sipping lattes and eating fresh panini from the in-house cafe (the word "cafeteria" seems beneath the reality), working on their laptops and/or BlackBerries, because after all, the building is one huge wireless network.
Even though the contrast is a little ironic, it's exactly as it should be. As religion touts humility, so the study of religion should be a humble enterprise. I enjoy the basement student lounge in Swift Hall, with its donated 70s sofas that are literally crunchy with prehistoric sandwich crumbs, and its cast-off computers that Bill Gates may have built in his garage.
And I enjoy the hissing of radiators and the Gothic gloom of the buildings, and the trees with their sclerotic branches raised in prayer toward the spires, and the genteel shabbiness of the perpetual seekers who wander Swift's step-worn stairwells.
And if I occasionally want to mooch a good snack or a clear cell-phone call over at the business school, no one can say me nay.
--T.A.
All that light and air, that's transparency, isn't it? Is that good for business? I love Swift. Also like the ersatz medieval cloister of CTS and the pocket-size Hilton Chapel with its beautiful stained glass windows.
Posted by: Mom | November 19, 2008 at 10:26 PM