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Chicago: How the Second City Became Lake Forest College’s Second Classroom

By Michael H. Ebner

The link between Lake Forest College and Chicago was not first forged in September of 2002, when the College received a $250,000 grant from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation for “Creating a Geographically Extended Classroom.” In fact, this connection is as old as the College itself.

The narrative of this Lake Forest–Chicago connection dates to the late 1840s, when Chicago first progressed toward its role as “the center of the Republic,” as the city was described then by Frederick Jackson Turner. Over the ten years from 1850 to 1860, Chicago’s population surpassed the 100,000 mark and multiple railroad lines were established. This transformed the sparsely populated landscape of northeastern Illinois into a prospering metropolis. Correspondingly far-flung inter-regional systems tied Chicago to distant states like North Dakota and Nebraska and to vastly expanded streams of human and economic capital.

One railway, completed in 1855, followed a northerly path parallel to the shoreline of Lake Michigan. (Today this same path is plied by the double-decked commuter trains on METRA’s North Line). This metropolitan corridor resulted in the founding of Lake Forest, one node along the suburban network known as the North Shore of Chicago. The same impulse to push forward and expand created the seat of higher learning chartered in 1857 that became Lake Forest College. Notably, from the start, the people responsible for establishing our community, our College, and the vast railroad system possessed strong cultural and economic connections to Chicago.

For numerous Lake Forest students in recent years, however, the original connections between the College and the City were attenuated. Too many students graduated having barely scratched the surface of Chicago’s rich and extensive educational offerings. Too many know this world-class city, if at all, as a recreational playground—not as a vital element in the curriculum they studied or as a “geographically extended” classroom. Consequently, in preparing its proposal to the Mellon Foundation to create an “extended classroom” in Chicago, the College presented a case steeped in its own historical geography that simultaneously expressed a compelling curricular aspiration for its future. The proposal was written by a faculty work group consisting of professors Michael Ebner, Cynthia Hahn, Rami Levin, and Scott Schappe, and outlined the ways in which the Lake Forest College founders appreciated and encouraged links to Chicago. The proposal also noted that the College’s current mission statement aims to prepare students to become responsible citizens of the global community.

James R. Grossman, vice president for research and education at the Newberry Library, recently praised the College’s distinct approach to this aim. Addressing a gathering in Lily Reid Holt Memorial Chapel that inaugurated the College’s three-year Mellon initiative, he pointedly observed: “It is common for colleges to claim that they tap into their surrounding resources, but Lake Forest College has gone well beyond the norm. Its faculty seek out and actively engage the cultural resources of the great city of Chicago. The partnerships and collaboration between the College and area institutions are mutually beneficial.”

At the center of “Creating a Geographically Extended Classroom” is the First-Year Studies Program. In place since 1992, this program is given high ratings by students, alumni, and faculty alike. Preparation of the Mellon Foundation proposal afforded an opportunity to think afresh about reinforcing the central place of First-Year Studies in the curriculum.

The outcome entailed the creation of eleven First-Year Studies courses. This task was sensibly and sensitively guided by Benjamin Goluboff, director of the Learning and Teaching Center and associate professor of English. Each small seminar course was launched in the fall semester of 2003, tied together by drawing significantly upon the advantages of the College’s proximity to Chicago.

Courses offered in the First-Year Studies program reflect the breadth and depth of the College’s commitment to utilizing its Chicago connection. Course titles include “Music in Chicago”; “Richard Wright and the Chicago Renaissance”; “Cultivating Ancient Worlds: How Texts and Museums Represent Civilizations”; “Natural History of the Chicago Region”; “America and the War on Terrorism”; “Performing Gender”; “Chicago Labor History”; “Sociology of Chicago”; “Musical Acoustics”; “Literature, Art, and Rebellious Consumers”; and “Roots Music in American Society”.

As these intriguing topics suggest, first-year students have experienced varied and unique opportunities during their initial semester at Lake Forest College. Judy Dozier, associate professor of English, visited the Harold Washington Library Center in Chicago’s South Loop with the students enrolled in her seminar, “Richard Wright and the Chicago Renaissance.” She gave each student a list of artworks and exhibitions in the library’s collections and enjoyed observing what transpired. “It was a ‘treasure hunt’ of sorts, since I gave them no clue about where to find the items on the list,” she says. “I passed them on the library floors now and then, floating up the escalators or closeted on the elevators. There were many students on the ninth floor marveling at a fabulous mural of Chicago neighborhoods, including Harold Washington’s Hyde Park.”

Caleb Gordon, assistant professor of biology, launched his course, “Natural History of the Chicago Region,” with a journey to the city’s South Side, using the Green Line of the Chicago Transit Authority. He says, “We passed through the Loop on the elevated track, seeing the big buildings. Many of my students were in awe looking out the window.” The class’s destination was the wooded isle in Jackson Park immediately south of the Museum of Science and Industry, where they viewed migratory birds in one of Chicago’s “green oases.”

James Marquardt, assistant professor of politics, organized for his “America and the War on Terrorism” class a special “debriefing” in Chicago by the Midwest regional director of the Department of Homeland Security (DHS), who discussed the mock bio-weapons attack on Chicago conducted in May 2003. Marquardt says, “The event gave my students the rare opportunity to interact with Homeland Security and the men and women from a variety of federal offices and agencies who are responsible for implementing policies to protect the American people in emergency situations like a terrorist attack in Chicago.” Marquardt and his students, as a semester-long project, are also devising a model emergency plan for Lake Forest College that might be implemented as a consequence of such an attack on Chicago.

Jason Cody, associate professor of chemistry, directed his “General Chemistry I” students to the Museum of Science and Industry, where they met with an exhibition designer and a museum educator. Shubik DebBurman, assistant professor of biology, accompanied his “Medical Mysteries” students to Northwestern University Medical School to learn about Alzheimer’s disease from the director of neuropathology.

Janet McCracken, associate professor of philosophy, organized a behind-the-scenes tour at the Field Museum for her “Labor, Property, and Value” students, conducted by a collections manager in the department of anthropology. As a follow-up exercise, each of Professor McCracken’s students was asked to choose a single-culture subset of either the Pacific Islander, African, Egyptian, or Native American exhibits, and study it carefully, taking notes about natural resources, valued items, technology, transportation, trade, distribution of goods, and distribution of labor.

Each time a train rolls out of Lake Forest bound for Chicago with Lake Forest students aboard, it will be, for all of them, a return visit to the country’s third largest city, a complex, layered, and exciting classroom. It is my hope that by the time they graduate, they will know some of its lessons very well.

Michael H. Ebner, A. B. Dick Professor of History, is the project director for “Creating a Geographically Extended Classroom.” His online autobiographical essay about Chicago was recently issued as a laboratory entitled "Nurturing Romance Between Now and Then." It is available at www.common-place.org/vol-03/no-04/school/ and also appeared in Common-Place, The Interactive Journal of Early American Life (July 2003), a publication of the American Antiquarian Society and the Gilder Lehrman Institute for American History.