Steven Schroeder | the Chicago School
The University of Chicago basically plucked me out of Kansas and put me on this trajectory... Sometimes I wonder, why me? But it happened.
-David Booth, in The Wall Street Journal, 7 November 2008
Signs of looting litter the streets: a chapel named for some Rockefeller; the second oldest graduate school of business in the country named now for an alum who makes me think of Toto and Dorothy and the tornado that put her in possession (if you read the book) of a pair of silver slippers and a circle of friends all of whom think they're missing something off to see a wizard who turns out to be a humbug in an emerald city that turns out not to be green; an old graduate school of theology now under new management that, in a lateral move, they've turned into an institute for research in economics (naturally) named for Milton Friedman. But that raised such a stink that they added Gary Becker's name for balance and gave him top billing. This is the See of the Chicago School. It lies just a few blocks from Henry Moore's bronze mushroom on the site of Chicago Pile-1, north of a line of new buildings rising, their backs to the neighbors. The developer says they asked for it. A boutique hotel and a wine bar is what the people have always wanted. In the expanse of grass that lies between, a mass of rough sleepers dream, going slowly critical.
Chicago
11 September 2020
