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The Cultural Campus

The new Center for Chicago Programs facilitates more city-related events at the College while helping students and faculty connect to downtown.

By Lindsay Beller

After Rami Levin moved to Chicago in 1980 to pursue a PhD in music at the University of Chicago, she joined an organization called American Women Composers and started planning concerts in the area. As Levin organized these events, she forged strong connections with local musicians, including many from the Chicago Symphony Orchestra.

When she arrived on campus in 1994 to chair the music department, Levin put some of those same skills to use at the College. With a desire to build the cultural scene and engage the surrounding community, Levin drew on her experience with the Chicago music world and created Lake Forest Lyrica, a series of chamber music concerts performed by some of Chicago’s finest ensembles, held in Lily Reid Holt Memorial Chapel. Now in its twelfth year, the success of the music series, which is open to the public, is evident by the fact that groups now ask her for a spot on the performance schedule. “The series offers the same high quality musical experience one would find in Chicago, but with the convenience of being on campus,” she says.

As the first director of the new Center for Chicago Programs, which opened this fall on Middle Campus, Levin will facilitate more on-campus cultural experiences like this while she also helps faculty and students learn about events, internships, and other opportunities downtown. Levin is working with her colleagues in various academic departments to bring Chicago artists, writers and performers, as well as experts in the social and natural sciences, to the College for events that are open to the public—solidifying the campus as a cultural destination. The Center’s inauguration, the week-long series of events in September held to kick off the opening, offered a glimpse of what is to come. All the events featured Chicago personalities, including a keynote speech by renowned writer Alex Kotlowitz, a panel of arts critics, a blues band, a rock band, and a classical music ensemble.

The move to increase Chicago-related programming underlines the belief that access to cultural activities benefits both the College and surrounding community. “Chicago affects us in a world of ways, and trying to be more conscious about that is a good thing for the College,” President Stephen D. Schutt says. “If we don’t do so, we’re simply missing a very large opportunity to enrich our lives and our programs and to make them more interesting and fun.”

Such events offer a taste of Chicago’s thriving cultural scene in the College’s own backyard. Increased exposure to culture also has intrinsic benefits, arts advocates say. Shared cultural experiences can create deeper social connections, foster a greater sense of community identity, and evoke emotions that open up new ways of seeing the world. Levin believes that culture is important for the reaction it may provoke. “The arts have the power to move people deeply,” she says. “They can excite, calm, engage, and affect peoples’ lives in meaningful ways.”

Chicago as a teaching tool

Levin’s work at the Center adds to ongoing efforts by other faculty and staff, who have long drawn on their Chicago connections as a way to enhance their curricula or plan events where the public is often invited to attend.

The Henry C. Durand Art Institute, for example, features about eight exhibitions each year, frequently showcasing artists from Chicago in the Sonnenschein and Albright Room galleries. When the artists visit campus during gallery openings to talk about their work and meet with students, this serves a dual purpose, says Karen Lebergott, associate professor of art. The artists become role models for students, who eventually make their own presentations about their theses in the classroom and for the student symposium. The interactions create networking opportunities, too. “Students often meet these people again,” says Lebergott, who, along with other professors in the department, draws on her extensive connections with the Chicago art world. “A lot of students settle in Chicago and meet these people at art openings or studios. These are wonderful contacts for them and they stay contacts.”

Dennis Mae, chair of the theater department, has seen such an interest in theater grow that the College decided to offer students the ability to major in theater for the first time this year. Six times a year he invites artists from Chicago theater companies and improvisational groups, including Second City, Chicago Shakespeare Theater, and Victory Gardens Theater, to hold workshops for students.

In 2005, the English department held the first annual three-day Lake Forest Literary Festival, which focused on writers from Chicago (the second annual event is scheduled for April 5-7, 2006 and will celebrate innovative writers and artists). The department’s On the Run lecture series routinely features Chicago writers and scholars, including poets Simone Muench and Michael Anania. Associate Professor of English Robert Archambeau has used Chicago as a resource in his classroom. He taught a course called Theater in Chicago, which required students to read and attend plays in Chicago before bringing the playwrights and directors to speak to the class.

Along with her duties as the Center’s director, Levin, who also serves as Associate Dean of Faculty, now wears a third hat as the first Composer-in-Residence. In this capacity she has named the award-winning Quintet Attacca, a Chicago woodwind quintet, the College’s first Ensemble-in-Residence. Last summer she wrote a piece for them called Danças Brasileiras, which they will premiere on the Lake Forest Lyrica Series in February. On February 2, a panel of experts from the Chicago Opera Theater will discuss the process of putting together an opera and two singers will perform excerpts from two operas. She is planning an April concert of music for woodwind quintets by Chicago area composers, to be performed by Quintet Attacca. In addition, she plans to write music for the College student ensembles.

A cultural tradition

Indeed, Levin comes from a long line of faculty, staff, and friends who have drawn on Chicago, creating a tradition of taking advantage of the nearby city. Chicago-related cultural programming ebbed and flowed on campus throughout the College’s 148-year history amid the backdrop of political, social and economic changes in Chicago and on the national and international stage. For example, after its completion in 1892, the Durand Art Institute became a venue for lectures, exhibitions, programs, and parties used by many local residents as Chicago prepared for the 1893 World’s Columbian Expedition, a global event which drew hundreds of thousands to the city and stimulated a great interest in art and culture. The fair signified Chicago’s emergence as a major city and prompted a literary renaissance, according to 30 Miles North: A History of Lake Forest College, Its Town and Its City of Chicago, written by Franz Schulze, Rosemary Cowler, and Arthur H. Miller.

As Lake Forest became more involved in the downtown theater community, too, the Garrick Club, a student theater group that still flourishes today, formed in 1904. Professor John Mantel Clapp, who took over as director of the club in 1906, was known for his involvement with Chicago theater, and for nurturing theater on campus. Lake Forest residents also brought up groups from the city. Mary Aldis, the wife of Chicago developer Arthur Aldis, invited the amateur Hull House Players from Chicago to perform at the Durand Art Institute and established an influential community theater on her estate, where many students and faculty performed.

But with the end of World War I, the start of the Red scare, and the subsequent Great Depression, there were fewer activities on campus, reflecting the “chilled” cultural climate in Chicago. However, the late 1950s and 1960s ushered in a renewed interest in culture with frequent events and art exhibits at the Durand Art Institute. The College brought in more than 400 speakers from Chicago and beyond, including authors Studs Terkel, Nelson Algren, Ralph Ellison, and Kurt Vonnegut, poets Gwendolyn Brooks and e.e. cummings, as well as politicians Charles Percy, Donald Rumsfeld, Adlai Stevenson, and Jesse Jackson. Music performances included the Chicago Woodwind Quintet and other classical, jazz, and blues musicians; theater groups like the Chicago City Players also performed on campus; and art and photography shows included an exhibition of Old Master paintings from the 16th-19th centuries, which were borrowed from Chicago private collections.

In the 1970s, students staged plays, readings, and other forms of entertainment, as popular Chicago bands and theater groups, including Second City, came to campus. By the time Levin arrived in 1994, the College had begun to plan and foster new connections with Chicago, particularly in the classroom. A 2002 grant from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation allowed first-year students to visit Chicago institutions and neighborhoods in an initiative that created a “geographically extended classroom.” Another Mellon Foundation grant, received in July 2005, now funds the Center for Chicago Programs, which further enhances the initiative and encourages more cultural events on campus. 

What’s next for the Center

As Levin takes the helm, she has several goals. She wants to encourage departments to make use of Chicago’s vast riches, develop upper-class seminars which use Chicago as a resource, and convene a Student Advisory Council to give feedback and guidance on student needs in relation to Chicago. Charged with oversight of the Center’s goals is the Chicago Advisory Council, chaired by James D. Vail III Professor of History Michael Ebner. The council includes representatives of several Chicago institutions and faculty members Paul Fischer, professor of politics, Ann Roberts, professor of art, and Richard Pettengill, assistant professor of English and theater.

Most of all, Levin would like to see the Center help students become more familiar with the city by offering resources and support. “I hope the Center will help students discover the riches of Chicago, learn how to navigate the city, be inspired by experts we bring to campus, and be thirsty for more,” she says. 

Lindsay Beller is the editor of Spectrum.

Bridging the Gap

About 30 miles separates Lake Forest College from Chicago, but after the new Center for Chicago Programs opened this fall, it feels closer than ever. The new Center expands on the College’s efforts to connect with the city of Chicago and opened after Lake Forest College received a three-year $450,000 grant from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation.

At the Center, housed in the Johnson C Building on Middle Campus, students can learn about music, art, theater, and other events in the city, and sign up for organized trips to Chicago. Staff members offer guidance on transportation and suggestions of specific neighborhoods and other attractions to visit.  They will eventually help coordinate the internship program for students at businesses and social and cultural institutions in Chicago. The Center acts as a resource for professors who want to include the city in their curricula and facilitates more Chicago-related programming on campus.

This is the third grant of its kind from the Mellon Foundation to fund Chicago-related programming. In 2002, the Foundation granted $50,000 to enable four faculty members to write the proposal for the three-year $250,000 grant awarded later that year to create a “geographically extended classroom.” This allowed first-year students to take advantage of Chicago institutions and neighborhoods through day-long immersions, as well as shorter trips to the city in conjunction with their classwork.

“One of our high priorities at the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation is to support promising educational innovations at liberal arts colleges, and Lake Forest’s Center for Chicago Programs is a fine example,” says Pat McPherson, vice president of the Mellon Foundation. “It will extend the College’s classrooms to incorporate Chicago’s educational and cultural resources, and it will meaningfully enrich students’ undergraduate experience. As generations of Lake Forest students become actively connected to the city, moreover, they will develop a deeper appreciation for the metropolitan environment, its evolution, strengths, and current challenges.”