By Ben Joravsky and Kari Lydersen
But the changes incited protests from students, faculty, and alumni, who accused Sonnenschein of dumbing down standards. “They made the curriculum easier to attract the gentleman C student,” says Stone. “They want to bring in more undergraduates, particularly in business, because studies show that undergrads in business donate more in the future.”
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Heresy, the protesters charged. “This university was founded or refounded in the 30s and 40s by Robert Maynard Hutchins, then our president, on a rigorous emphasis on the classics,” says Stone. “Hutchins emphasized a very rigorous reading of very difficult texts in a careful way, almost like Talmudic scholars. That’s difficult. It frightens most people. Other schools don’t do that. But that’s what gives this university its unique character as a serious place for serious people who want to work hard, a place where middle-class intelligent people from the midwest have gone to be serious students. And this present administration has decided that those types of people don’t pay much money, and so they must bring in the kinds who do.”
Past residents recall a fascinating mix of accents and ideologies. “There were always lively discussions and debates,” says Patricia Jobe, a member of International House’s board of governors who lived there 30 years ago. “It was an intensely political atmosphere. There were Ethiopian students, refugees from Prague Spring, and a lot of Southeast Asian students. There were a number of Cambodians. I wonder what happened to them after they went home. They were probably killed.”
That’s pretty much where the matter stood until March 6, during finals week, when residents got phone calls from the Maroon, the student newspaper. “The reporter said he had heard that International House was to be closed on June 30,” says Castle. “That’s how I was notified.”
Meanwhile Stone recruited Edward Berman, another U. of C. law-school grad, and on April 11 they filed a class action suit on behalf of 56 plaintiffs, including several International House residents. The suit charges that Sonnenschein and Geoffrey Stone “embarked upon a campaign to destroy International House by erecting a series of artificial and unreasonable administrative and financial hurdles which they intended that International House would fail to jump over.” Their purpose was to expel the foreign students, the suit charges, “transferring the Building and the Land to the Graduate School of Business–because ‘business’ is more profitable in the short run than is ‘promoting understanding and good will among the students of different nationalities and races’”–a quote from Rockefeller’s 1930 letter.
Art accompanying story in printed newspaper (not available in this archive): photos/Nathan Mandell.
