Almost two years ago, President Paul Alivisatos and Provost Ka Yee Lee announced the creation of the Council on UChicago/Community Relations, an independent body intended to reevaluate how the University interacts with the surrounding South Side community.
“One of the University of Chicago’s most fundamental and critical relationships is with Chicago’s South Side,” Alivisatos and Lee wrote in a letter to the University community in December 2021. “This independent council will undertake the critically important work of exploring and addressing the University’s historical relationship with its surrounding neighborhoods, examining progress made in our partnership, and identifying ways in which the University and community can strengthen this partnership for the future.”
Since then, nearly half of the Council’s allotted timeline has passed, and co-chair professor Adam Green said it has been harder for the group to make progress than he had hoped. “Over the past two years, we have planned, we’ve worked with partners, we’ve identified priorities, we’ve done organizational work internally,” he said in an interview with The Maroon. “But we are not as far along in terms of the research as we would like to be.”
Green outlined three primary issues the Council hopes to investigate: residential displacement, public safety, and protests in the 2010s in favor of establishing a trauma center at the University.
“Residential displacement is a really important historical question, and for many people, continues to be an important question in the present day because of the likely impact of opening the [Obama] Presidential Center on the prices placed on real estate and new buildings and developments in Woodlawn and surrounding communities,” Green said.
Green added that public safety is a concern that South Side residents and the campus community share, emphasizing identifying and mitigating the root causes of violence to improve public safety.
“Depending on what parts of the South Side you’re looking at, people in these neighborhoods speak about … maintain[ing] a sense of security often as much as people within the campus community,” he said. “But until you address root causes, you’re not really going to be able to address the question of public safety adequately and comprehensively, in a way that is sustainable.”
Green also shared that investigating those root causes affecting safety in the South Side is a highly relevant point of inquiry for the Council. “We’re trying to find ways to get strong data and also qualitative testimony coming from community members,” Green said. “What are the availability of youth services? How do we talk about employment in relation to young people on the South Side? Are the plans that the University or the city or other entities have to try to attract employers likely to address that constituency?”
Green noted that there is a gap in the University’s capacity when it comes to the issue. “There are offices that deal with public safety, of course, within the University,” he said. “What doesn’t exist at this point is a way to step back and say, ‘Are we actually getting at the conditions that exist on the South Side that potentially make it difficult to change those dynamics where … we’re trying to police our way out of problems that relate to social disparities, divestment from communities, [and lack of] resources?”
Green sees building up that capacity, and the University’s capacity to investigate other issues, as part of the Council’s role. “The thinking of the Council is more toward, in essence, [that] we’re kind of a pilot project that would recommend, nudge maybe, the University to continue this kind of review work on its own, over a longer period of time,” he said.
A third area of focus for the Council, according to Green, will be examining high-profile protests from 2010 to 2015 advocating for the establishment of an adult trauma center at the University’s Medical Center. Green described the demonstrations as an “immediate instance of thinking about University–community relations.”
The Council, which has both University-affiliated and South Side community members, is supposed to complete its work and submit a final report by 2025, a deadline Green said it still tentatively hopes to meet. Its website appears not to have been updated since April 2022, when it says the group’s first formal meeting was held. Multiple people listed on the site as members told The Maroon that they were no longer involved with the group. Green said the Council is working with the Office of Civic Engagement to fill faculty vacancies, adding that the body was “interested in hearing suggestions or considering self-nominations” for a new student member.
The website also said the Council “will actively engage the campus and South Side communities with its work and will develop a work plan for such engagement, including convening public forums and organizing programs open to the public,” but the group has not released any information about its progress or held any public events since its creation.
Green said the Council was not yet prepared to engage meaningfully with the public, but that outreach could begin soon. “We need to be more advanced in relation to what it is that we have uncovered in [our] inquiries before we can really start to do that,” he said, adding that a “public update” about the Council’s plans could come as soon as this quarter, and public programs will likely begin after winter break.
Green highlighted the challenges of working with the community when many people in the area distrust the University—a result of the historically fraught relationship UChicago has had with the South Side that was a primary reason the Council was created.
“One of the things that was very important for the Council to do was establish that it was independent from the University, and autonomous,” Green said. “The more that this was seen as a representative of University operations, and perhaps implicitly or explicitly University interests and priorities, the more skeptical and suspicious people who are outside in the general community would be about whether or not this was trying to address community needs.”
Green also said that the Council has to keep questions of autonomy in mind as it considers how to “scale up” its research. “We’re going to reach the point where we’re going to have to decide, do we do this by going to the University and asking for additional funding…or do we try to find ways to create other sorts of partnerships that can enable us to increase our footprint?”
Green added that these questions may have unnecessarily delayed the Council’s work. “That was something that in retrospect, we probably should have thought through more extensively as we were launching in order to be able to hit the ground and run and immediately launch the investigations and inquiries that we had,” he said.
Green also pointed to “discontinuities in University leadership” as a challenge, noting that the University’s president, the provost, and the vice president for civic engagement—whom he said were the “principal people we were engaged with”—all transitioned in or out of their roles around the time that the Council was launched.
“There’s a lot of work that happens on the part of the University in terms of engaging [the] community,” Green said. “But whether it’s the right work, always, and whether it gets at the root cause, is really the charge that we have as a council.”
