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The new Bauhaus school of architecture looms large of the Illinois Institute of Technology. In the 1930s, it merged with the Institute of Design, which is founded and run by László Moholy-Nagy, a force within the Bauhaus movement who came to Chicago by way of London after fleeing the Nazis. The campus was designed by Ludwig Mies van der Rohe, and his S. R. Crown Hall that houses the architecture department is a masterpiece in glass, concrete, and steel. Every bench and building seem to communicate that this is a serious place where serious people come to study their craft.
Besides the intimidating minimalism of IIT’s structures and grounds, there are the students. They walk briskly from class to class, sporting crew cuts, slide rules hanging from their belts, and picket protectors nestled into their button-down shirts. Almost all of them are what we would call “white ethnics”: Polish, Italian, Jewish, Greek, and Slavic. Many of those who are Chicago natives came up through Lane or Tilden, renowned and specialized technical high schools that had prepared generations of working-class Chicago kids for the rigors of engineering, mathematics, and physics.
At this time, IIT is not about the shaping of young people into free-thinking citizens or the cultivation of aesthetic sensibilities or the Socratic method. This is a science boot camp. In the first year, everyone takes calculus, physics, chemistry, and biology. Sit, pay attention, learn your equations, and God help you if you fall behind in your coursework. I’ve got a natural aptitude for these subjects, but natural aptitude is not enough in this environment. Success here requires long hours of disciplined study, hunched over notes and textbooks. It requires unwavering focus.
Before my first semester at IIT, my father presented me with a gift of $1,000, a considerable sum of money in 1965, and especially considerable because he was probably only making around $10,000 a year. Scraping together that much cash could not have been easy, and despite his obvious eagerness to see me out on my own and off his expense book, he wanted to make sure that I had a little something extra to transition into adult life.
That transition is not going well. I do okay for the first part of my first semester, but things quickly go to pieces. I start spending most of my time hanging out with Woody, who had enrolled at IIT along with me, and with my new friend John, a transplant from New York with a taste for vodka and reefer. John is one of the few other black people on campus. He’s light-skinned, from a well-to-do family, and he carries himself with a certain swagger and braggadocio. He tells me he plays chess, but after I decimate him in game after game, it’s clear he’s barely a novice. As an amateur boxer, he’s much more formidable. For some reason, I think he’ll be as easy to take in the ring as he is on the chessboard, but I abandon that notion, along with boxing itself, after John pops me in the face a few times with his wicked left jabs and I see stars.
I rarely make it to class now, and when I do, I sit and stare at the calculus lessons on the board, utterly lost in a moth class, the place where I often felt most comfortable in high school. I’m three assignments behind in chemistry, and I’ve stopped bothering to tell myself that I’ll catch up eventually. The more I fall behind, the more attending class becomes a psychologically fraught experience. I had been the brightest kid in any grade at every school I’d attended up to now. I know I have the ability to understand this material. Why am I failing while my cohorts seem ready to meet the challenge? As the missed classes, missed assignments, and flunked exams pile up, so does the guilt. Sitting through lectures that I barely understand only amplifies the awful feeling that I’m embarrassing both myself and my family, so I often skip them rather than endure the suffering.
I know this is a losing strategy, that I can’t continue in this way and expect to graduate. Things will change next week, I tell myself. I’ll buckle down and put all this angst behind me.
