Never let it be said that Northwestern doesn't keep alumni on their toes. It's almost as if we have to be continually punished for whatever tattered shred of pride we try to retain from our association with the place by enduring a constant series of public humiliations perpetrated by an endless chain of privileged students and brain dead administrators who, well, to be kind, just aren't very good at this whole college thing.
I was reading the latest football hazing sex scandal in the Daily Northwestern and what one player term the "really abrasive and barbaric culture" that head coach Pat Fitzgerald, who has been suspended pending the obligatory slap on the wrist, apparently tolerated. After I collected my jaw off the floor and finished shaking my head — how could they have not gotten the memo? — I thought about the 40 plus years since graduation, and all the other hazing scandals, fraternity outrages, and academic humiliations that emanated from Evanston. From the two students killed while drunkenly doing pushups in Sheridan Road to the two students expelled for breaking into Alice Millar Chapel and defacing it with homophobic graffiti...
There are so many, it's hard to settle on a favorite. I've written about a number, and was looking for my column on NU's notorious fucksaw sex ed class. But maybe blushing Sun-Times librarians never archived it. Anyway, I ended up with this column, perhaps my first in the Sun-Times to nostalgically consider my old school, back in the days when the prime embarrassment associated with Northwestern was how much the place charges. Good times. (Oh, and tuition has almost tripled since then).
Someday Northwestern University will do something academically that makes big headlines. Research maybe. Until that day arrives, it has the yearly tuition jolt to keep the old purple and white in public view.
Say it out loud. "Twenty-two thousand, three hundred and ninety-two dollars." A lot of money. In a time of single-digit inflation, Northwestern is planning a 16.9 percent tuition increase for freshmen and transfer students. And they say greed is dead.
That doesn't even include room and board, which is about another $6,700.
I'd call NU and get the precise room and board figure. But my years of reporting have taught me that NU has the most sluggish media relations department in all of Chicago academia. The University of Chicago will send you a cake with the information you're looking for written on the top in frosting before NU calls you back. So say $6,700, for a yearly tab of about 30 grand.
That, of course, is the full sticker price and, like the sticker prices of automobiles, it is negotiable. Only the academically challenged spawn of wealthy families pony up the full fare. Everybody else hustles for financial relief.
When I enrolled at Northwestern, almost 20 years ago, tuition was nearly $5,400 - but it might as well have been $54,000 or $540,000 because my family could never pay it. Only by cobbling together a scanty fig leaf of scholarships, grants, work study, summer jobs and federal loans did we just manage to cover the obscene figure.
It wasn't worth it. If I seem somewhat testy about NU, it is because, in my four years there, I became unalterably convinced that the school is primarily not an educational institution, but a big money machine, designed to perpetuate itself, build more god-awful concrete campus structures, dandle rich alumni and leech capital from them.
Guilty about having such hard feelings toward my old alma mater, I phoned a former classmate and close friend from those days and asked if she would be disturbed to see NU cast in a bad light.
"I have no good feelings toward the school at all because they didn't do anything," she said. "I'm thinking particularly of Medill (the journalism school). They had no interest in the students. Just none."
Sounds right to me. I phoned another classmate, who surprised me by refusing to say anything about the school, as if it were a horror beyond words.
Maybe I hung out with the wrong crowd.
Also, the late 1970s and early 1980s weren't exactly the glory years for the school. Students were being housed in the gym. The football team won only one game in the four years I was there. When friends asked if I was going to the Rose Bowl to see NU, I told them that I hadn't attended any games while a student, and it was too late to start now.
Then there was the president, during my years a joyless businessman named Robert H. Strotz, whom I saw in person on precisely two occasions during my time there — the first day of school freshman year, when he spoke to the incoming class, and at graduation.
It's not that the NU education was bad. I had, in my four years, perhaps 10 teachers whom I really liked and admired and learned from.
Looking back at it from a distance, considering the enormous outlay of capital, considering the decade of loan payments that followed, I can't help but wonder if I would have been better off going to Ohio State free, or traveling the world, or starting a business, or doing almost anything else than attending Northwestern.
But Ohio State seemed a grim gulag, with its giant, Stalinesque dorms, and I felt I deserved better. In that sense, private schools such as NU are like luxury cars. They emphasize their amenities, their powerful engines, burled walnut dashboards, and such. But the fact is that a car is a car, basically, and a $15,000 one will get you there the same way a $50,000 one will.
The difference is that luxury cars cost more, and everybody knows it. Prestige always costs money. Drivers of Jaguars and holders of NU diplomas have proved that they can pay the piper.
In that sense, I guess, why not grab for the luxury if you can somehow swing it? Just as the parking valet doesn't know if you're leasing that Mercedes or own it outright, so the prospective employers won't know if you paid full fare for NU or got a scholarship, whether you sat around your frat sipping morning beers or actually studied hard.
And who knows? Maybe NU has gotten better in the last 15 years. It better have. They're charging enough for it.
That doesn't even include room and board, which is about another $6,700.
I'd call NU and get the precise room and board figure. But my years of reporting have taught me that NU has the most sluggish media relations department in all of Chicago academia. The University of Chicago will send you a cake with the information you're looking for written on the top in frosting before NU calls you back. So say $6,700, for a yearly tab of about 30 grand.
That, of course, is the full sticker price and, like the sticker prices of automobiles, it is negotiable. Only the academically challenged spawn of wealthy families pony up the full fare. Everybody else hustles for financial relief.
When I enrolled at Northwestern, almost 20 years ago, tuition was nearly $5,400 - but it might as well have been $54,000 or $540,000 because my family could never pay it. Only by cobbling together a scanty fig leaf of scholarships, grants, work study, summer jobs and federal loans did we just manage to cover the obscene figure.
It wasn't worth it. If I seem somewhat testy about NU, it is because, in my four years there, I became unalterably convinced that the school is primarily not an educational institution, but a big money machine, designed to perpetuate itself, build more god-awful concrete campus structures, dandle rich alumni and leech capital from them.
Guilty about having such hard feelings toward my old alma mater, I phoned a former classmate and close friend from those days and asked if she would be disturbed to see NU cast in a bad light.
"I have no good feelings toward the school at all because they didn't do anything," she said. "I'm thinking particularly of Medill (the journalism school). They had no interest in the students. Just none."
Sounds right to me. I phoned another classmate, who surprised me by refusing to say anything about the school, as if it were a horror beyond words.
Maybe I hung out with the wrong crowd.
Also, the late 1970s and early 1980s weren't exactly the glory years for the school. Students were being housed in the gym. The football team won only one game in the four years I was there. When friends asked if I was going to the Rose Bowl to see NU, I told them that I hadn't attended any games while a student, and it was too late to start now.
Then there was the president, during my years a joyless businessman named Robert H. Strotz, whom I saw in person on precisely two occasions during my time there — the first day of school freshman year, when he spoke to the incoming class, and at graduation.
It's not that the NU education was bad. I had, in my four years, perhaps 10 teachers whom I really liked and admired and learned from.
Looking back at it from a distance, considering the enormous outlay of capital, considering the decade of loan payments that followed, I can't help but wonder if I would have been better off going to Ohio State free, or traveling the world, or starting a business, or doing almost anything else than attending Northwestern.
But Ohio State seemed a grim gulag, with its giant, Stalinesque dorms, and I felt I deserved better. In that sense, private schools such as NU are like luxury cars. They emphasize their amenities, their powerful engines, burled walnut dashboards, and such. But the fact is that a car is a car, basically, and a $15,000 one will get you there the same way a $50,000 one will.
The difference is that luxury cars cost more, and everybody knows it. Prestige always costs money. Drivers of Jaguars and holders of NU diplomas have proved that they can pay the piper.
In that sense, I guess, why not grab for the luxury if you can somehow swing it? Just as the parking valet doesn't know if you're leasing that Mercedes or own it outright, so the prospective employers won't know if you paid full fare for NU or got a scholarship, whether you sat around your frat sipping morning beers or actually studied hard.
And who knows? Maybe NU has gotten better in the last 15 years. It better have. They're charging enough for it.
— Originally published in the Sun-Times, July 6, 1997
