Martin Nguyen
Professor Stimpson
The University from Ancient Athens to Corporate Ethos
12 December 2018
The University of Chicago: A Study on Sociology and Intellectual Growth
The University of Chicago’s long history of intellectual and progressive social progress gives much credit to its extensive research and history with sociology and the study of Chicago. Sociology, which is the study of social development and culture, is one of the school’s most prized and prestigious programs spanning a history of over 120 years that has helped develop the University of Chicago as one of the most prized and intellectual schools in America. In this paper, I will explore how the university’s relationship with Chicago and its sociology department have come together and how the university and the city have become synonymous with each other.
Until the mid-late 1800s, Chicago was considered a small town. In 1830, the population was around 3,000 inhabitants, with many wooden structures (History). Within the next forty years, the population increased by over 300,000 residents with many factories and infrastructure being built in order to create an economy for the quickly growing city (History). The city itself had looked like every other Midwestern city, however, as the buildings were old, weak wooden structures for the most part. In 1871, as the population was seemingly growing exponentially, a fire broke out in a barn in a residential neighborhood, setting many houses ablaze (History). The wood that built up the streets, sidewalks, and houses caught on fire and the residential neighborhoods in central Chicago were destroyed (History). Despite the lives lost and the tragedy of a destroyed city, it became a blessing in disguise as the destruction of shanty houses that were built to accommodate the large influx of immigrants to Chicago made way to the construction of new skyscrapers and new steel buildings, propelling Chicago to become a more modern city. It was almost as if the fire was fate because the city’s new infrastructure helped support the ever-growing number of immigrants flowing into the city.
As Chicago began to enter the last decade of the nineteenth century, the city began to push itself further in becoming a world city with the creation of two different yet both successful institutions: the World’s Columbian Exposition in 1893 and the University of Chicago in 1890 (McNeill). The two institutions were built to mimic classically beautiful structures with their white plaster walls and grandiose details (McNeill). Both were successful in their own ways; the World’s Exposition brought millions of paying customers to its doors, offering cultural exhibitions and shows while the University of Chicago proclaimed itself to be a school of graduate studies that focuses on research and finding new ideas rather than teaching older, established principles.
Before the current institution’s establishment, it was founded as a Baptist university in 1856 and closed its doors in 1886 (Chicago). The university, founded by president William Rainey Harper, was radically different from the university’s reputation today (McNeill). There was a large emphasis on sports and a radical form of Christianity that contradicted its roots. Harper was dedicated to growing the faculty and within two years, he had a 120 faculty members that included eight former/current university presidents (McNeill). The university became a household name due to its football culture when the sport had began becoming a popular form of entertainment.
However, this was taken away during Robert Maynard Hutchins’ presidency in 1929, which lasted 24 years. Hutchins took away varsity football and implemented the “Common Core” system of liberal arts core curriculum in order to create a well-rounded, intellectual student that is knowledgeable in all subjects (McNeill). Bringing along many professors of high levels of intellect, Hutchins turned the University of Chicago into a breeding ground for intellectual growth and new ideas began flowing within the school. Research became more prevalent in the university and the great thinkers all worked together in order to study the city around them. During this age, the university focused an extensive amount of its research on its sociology program, which grew as more research was conducted within urban sociology and Chicago’s ever changing environment. The study of sociology in Chicago tended to focus on race relations through the urban areas, which drastically changed during the Progressive Era.
The Progressive Era, which was a period of social activism and political reform, greatly affected Chicago as it was one of one of the largest and most socially diverse cities in the United States. As the Industrial Revolution ended, there were many social issues that were magnified that the Progressive Era sought to resolve. The reformers in the city target the city’s corruption, high levels of poverty, poor working and living conditions, and the rising rate of immigrants and the issues that come with it. Many of these issues stemmed from the city’s push towards industrialization and the rapid growth in population. The issues focused on how different groups of people interacted with each other, creating conflict and rising crime rates in the city due to conflicts between different ethnic groups. Chicago’s cultural diversity and diverse urban life made it the perfect place to study urban sociology.
The University of Chicago’s location in Hyde Park is very interesting as the demographics in the city starkly contrasts with the demographics of the neighborhood. Hyde Park has historically been a very White neighborhood; the university’s location between 57th and 61st street is surrounded by a White dominant neighborhood with wealth but past 55th street, the neighborhood becomes predominantly Black (Rankin). Until the mid-20th century, the neighborhood has used “racially restrictive covenants” in order to keep itself predominantly White, which the University of Chicago had supported (Slevin). This made the study of urban sociology much more interesting because of the school’s support of a segregational law. It contradicts the university’s studies of other racial demographics because it casually pushes an underlying White narrative that the university holds.
Urban sociology, the study of human life and interaction in metropolitan areas, is a main focus of study at the University of Chicago. Sociologists from several universities in the Chicago area, most notably the University of Chicago, formed a group in order known as “Chicago School” to conduct sociological research on the city of Chicago (University of Chicago). As the city experienced a rapid growth in population, the researchers wanted to understand if urbanization and increased social mobility had created many of the social issues the city was experiencing at the time (Burgess). It was believed that the influx of European immigrants in Chicago was crucial for the development of the city but also created increased the amount of crime in the city (Burgess). Many of the sociologists in the group studied how different demographics expanded and interacted with others as time passed, using the city of Chicago as laboratory and a case study for the study of how humans interact in social contexts based on their environments and circumstances.
The Chicago School would not have been as influential as it was if it did not have the strong foundation and connections that founded it. In 1892, Albion Small was appointed the founding head professor of the University of Chicago’s sociology department (UChicago). Several of his colleagues, including W. I. Thomas, Robert Park, and Ernest Burgess were prominent names in sociology (UChicago). Thomas wrote one of the century’s most important pieces, The Polish Peasant in Europe and America, which had opened the doors to the study of sociology (UChicago). Thomas had successfully both theory and observational data, quantifying human interaction and behavior. By putting numbers to human behavior, it gave researchers a physical piece of evidence in order to track and calculate, giving it validity as a science if one defines science as something that can be tested through experimentation and the scientific method.
As a city, Chicago was the perfect laboratory for urban sociological studies. Migration had swelled rapidly as many unskilled workers that immigrated from Eastern and Southern European countries flocked to Chicago due to its rapid growth in industrialization and wealth (Holli and Jones). The Progressive Era’s new ideas of radical ideals in society’s structure and the city’s wealth disparity lead to the city’s rapid change in how different demographics interacted with each other. After the immigration legislation in 1924 that set a quota on the amount of immigrants coming into the United States, immigration into Chicago slowed down and the heavy influx of ethnic populations came to an end (Holli and Jones). This caused immigrant populations to begin stabilizing, each forming their own neighborhoods to reside in. They created ethnic enclaves and communities for each respective ethnic group.
As White Americans became wealthier due to industrialization, they tended to settle in other parts of the city further away from urban areas, creating suburban and residential areas that surrounded Chicago. Many of the White Americans came from rural areas where farming was the main economy and settled in the growing city of Chicago because it had becoming a growing city full of opportunities (Britannica). Unlike the White Americans, Black populations tended to settle near the city, particularly the South Side of the city, which became the first Black residential area in Chicago due to the older infrastructure and cheaper rent (Britannica). This was a result of Chicago being one of the largest and most prominent destinations in the Great Migration, which lead many Black people to migrate from the South in order to escape systematic racism and segregation that was a long-lasting result of slavery.
Due to the industrialization of Chicago, the Black community expanded despite the multitude of ethnic White groups that surrounded the South Side of Chicago, particularly the Irish. Despite the Progressive Era’s efforts for reform within racial relations, the White progressives had attempted to improve the White middle class by chasing out poorer Blacks (Woodword).The competition between the two ethnic groups created tension between the two ethnic groups and created a de facto segregation due to White intolerance of Black populations (Woodward). Despite no legal segregation in Chicago, racism within the city and these ethnic enclaves of Black populations created a rift between the two racial populations. This lead to racially charged violence and a major riot in 1919, known as the Chicago race riot of 1919 (Taylor and Cohen). That year, many Black populations were attacked by Whites and these riots became known as the Red Summer (Taylor and Cohen).
Many different ethnic groups competed for housing and space in the city as the population influx of immigrants and Blacks from the south was too rapid for the city to accommodate. It is also important to note that the city itself had become increasingly White in political structure, as rivaling Irish populations began to increase their political presence in Chicago (Cohen and Taylor). The city had many formal and informal political relationships with the Irish, and as ethnic White groups began to attack Black populations, little was done to stop it due to the political corruption and biasing between the two groups (Cohen and Taylor). This gave Irish populations having the upper hand. The riots lasted almost a week, ending as the State of Illinois sent in troops in order to stop the violence. The Chicago Race Riot of 1919 is just one of the many racially-charged events that happened during the Progressive Era that were pertinent to the study of race relations in the Chicago School.
The relationship between Blacks and ethnic White immigrants was a main focus in the Chicago School studies. Harold Foote Gosnell and Louis Wirth study this to a large extent with their works Negro Politics: The Rise of Negro Politics in Chicago and The Ghetto, which focus on the low-cost housing that many Black and immigrant populations often lived in (Gosnell and Wirth). The relations between the different groups and the conflicts were in part by the massive amounts of poverty in Chicago. Many different ethnic and racial groups were impoverished due to the effects of industrialization, which gave very low wages for unskilled workers that were too low to maintain livable conditions. Chicago’s ongoing issues made it the perfect place for urban sociology to be studied.
The University of Chicago’s location in Hyde Park offered a close look at income disparity in Chicago, as the area surrounding it was wealthy while close by, the area is riddled with poverty and crime. The Chicago School focused on how small interactions with different ethnic groups and communities affected how humans interacted in structural, cultural, and social conditions. The university’s history with the support of segregated communities separated the races, making the land around the university more valuable due to the perceived safety of living within a White community. The strict de facto boundaries that the city had set up shows income disparity at the doorstep of the university. The University of Chicago’s location in urban Chicago offered a view into the urban life, where the different ethnic groups interacted with each other while forming communities within themselves.
As the first Chicago School had opened the doors to the validity of research in sociology, the methods that many of the thinkers such as Park and Burgess established were used in order to develop new methods of research. Everett Hughes, Lloyd Warner, and Herbert Blumer, who had been professors at the University of Chicago, had trained new students such as William Ogburn, Phillip Hauser, and Leo Goodman (UChicago). They continued to study demography and ethnic groups within Chicago, where they began to survey the city as well as do fieldwork in order to include the voices of the demographics that were counted in the surveys (Fine). These voices offered an explanation as to why certain ethnic groups resided where they did, explaining the numbers from the surveys. Despite the Progressive Era’s efforts to solve the issues that were created through industrialization, these ethnic enclaves created conflicts with each other and no progress was made in order to fix the issue of poverty and wealth disparity within the city.
Instead of social reforms, some groups of people turned to settlement houses and public assistance in order to help themselves find success. The Second Chicago School worked with different organizations in its early history in order to study inner-city relations (Bulmer). One of the schools’ most influential partners was the Hull House, which was a settlement house founded by Jane Addams in order to improve the lives of residents by providing recreational services and education (Bulmer). This has influenced works such as Amos H. Hawley’s Human Ecology: A Theory of Community Structure. Hawley argued that humans deal with their problems through collective action rather than by how they are spatially placed (Hawley). These ideas that Hawley proposed were based off of the observations that he had made in communities similar to the Hull House where members would work together in order to help each other move upwards in society.
Both of the Chicago Schools’ wide range of ideas have created discourse within the field because of the groundbreaking research that they have done. This has brought more validity to the subject as a science, which Randall Collins discusses in “Sociology: Proscience or Antiscience?”. The science of sociology itself creates intellectual discourse, which Collins argues for because the works of the Chicago School have created controversy about moral issues within social structures in urban cities. Collins argues that “the core activity that gives the field of sociology its intellectual justification is the formulation of generalized explanatory principles, organized into models of the underlying processes that generalize the social world” (Collins). This is generally the format of the academic journals and books of the Chicago School. The beginning works of the School would generalize the study of sociology by defining the ethnic and racial relations within Chicago (such as Robert E. Park’s “The City: Suggestions for the Investigation of Behavior in the City Environment"), while later works within the Second Chicago School had gone into more specific issues that had been generalized in the first school with works like Crutchfield, R.D., M. Geerken, and W.R. Gove’s "Crime Rates and Social Integration: The Impact of Metropolitan Mobility”. The second School also redefined the meaning of sociology with Burgess’ Urban Sociology, showing the sociology is a subject that is always changing and should be studied seriously. The Chicago Schools had a large impact on sociological studies because it had constantly revolutionized how human interactions would affect human life.
Without Hutchins’ plan to expand the University of Chicago’s intellectual expanse, the sociology program would not be as big as or influential as it is today. His belief in the freedom of education and research helped scholars put dedicate their intellectual capacities to a subject that was not considered valid at the time. Hutchins believed that educators should have the freedom to teach or research whatever they wanted to in order to foster growth, debate, and to defeat communism (UChicago).Without someone who was able to encourage the freedom of discussion and research, the Chicago School of sociology would not have been as prominent as it was. The freedom of learning had allowed sociologists with different interests to study subjects that interested them and all of their ideas crossed over with each other in order to encompass urban sociology as a whole. The radical idea of systematic research of sociology and a hands on approach had yielded higher social than an “armchair” approach that had surrounded sociology years prior (Lutters and Ackerman). Many of the theories behind race relations and criminology have been utilized in order to help understand crime within urban areas and why lower-income areas had higher crime rates.
The University of Chicago’s past leaders and its philosophy of growth in knowledge had a great effect on the intellectual prowess of the university. Without the careful fostering of knowledge, many of the breakthroughs in sociology would not have been discovered. The school’s great thinkers, freedom of thought, and its location in the everchanging city of Chicago had lead to the growth and validation of sociology as a subject. While the Chicago Schools’ research was focused on the topics of their day, many of the concepts, methods, and common themes can be applied to today as the discourse revolving around today’s ever-changing society.
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