Fall Travel Plans

Labor Day is just around the corner, which means that our fall travel season is upon us. Many of us have been in touch with many of you to arrange ASC dinners, coffees, and other kinds of meet-ups, and I want to encourage all of you to get in touch with all of us while we're on the road. At the very least, we'd love to be able to say hi (even if it's from our cars as we swoop from school to school).

Here, for example, are my current travel plans:
September 18-20: Northern and Central New Jersey, Princeton
September 24-26: Pittsburgh
October 9-20: New York City, Westchester, Princeton, Philadelphia, Connecticut
October 22-26: Suburban Maryland, Annapolis, Baltimore

It's a pretty full schedule, but one that I'm excited about, as I'm a big fan of traveling. I've already made contact with most of the ASC chairs in the above areas to start conversations about visits with all of you, so stay tuned and you'll hear from us.

Meanwhile, Pittsburgh volunteers, I will see most of you on Sunday, September 24 at 7 PM at Lucca, 314 Craig St., for our fall ASC dinner. Non-Pittsburghers (is that the right phrase?), read more about the restaurant here.

Enjoy your holiday weekends! Mine will be spent catching up on our book club reading (I am WAY behind), getting started on a new book for my own reading pleasure, and finishing out the first season of House, which is waiting at home on Netflix. I'll probably try to catch in a set or two at this weekend's Chicago Jazz Festival.

More on Rankings

You all probably got my email from a few days ago about rankings. Well, another one has come out, and this time we're at the top. The Princeton Review has ranked Chicago the school with the best academic experience.

If you follow this link to the university's news site, you can watch an interview Diane Sawyer conducted with the Review about the news. (It's funny, you know, because she's married to Mike Nichols)

In other news, if any of you are followers of the arts on campus, Atom Egoyan and Anne Bogart will be two of the 06-07 Presidential Fellows in the Arts. Read the press release here.

Hi folks!

A few of us in the office have started a book club to read works about the college admissions process. Our first selection is Jerome Karabel's history of admissions at Princeton, Yale, and Harvard, The Chosen.

Have any of you read it? Use the comments section below to tell us what you thought. To what extent (do you think) has our process been affected by this history?

And also: do you have other suggestions for the next chapter of the book club?

Westchester Send-Off Party: August 20, 2006

This past weekend I attended the send-off party for incoming students in Westchester County, NY. It took place at the home of Ari (AB ’96) and Michelle (MBA ’01) Weinberger in Scarsdale. I had a really great time meeting incoming students and their parents.

I left on Sunday, August 20, the day of the party, on a 9 AM flight out of O’Hare (which meant that I had to wake up at 6 AM just like a regular work day), and arrived in New York at around noon. I took a cab to my hotel, the Cosmopolitan in Tribeca - not a great hotel, but cheap and close to public transportation and the Brooklyn Bridge. Companions on my journey included a number of CDs (Sufjan Stevens, Matmos, and Owen Pallet, among others) and Raymond Chandler’s The Little Sister.



One of my favorite things to do in New York is to walk around, and I always love to spend a big part of my first day walking around the city, usually listening to a good album. To kill some time before my train up to Westchester, and to find some lunch, I set off towards Canal Street, always a-bustle on a Sunday in New York. I crowd-wove for a few blocks and then stopped in and grabbed a sandwich at Dean & Deluca, after which I jumped on the subway and headed up to Grand Central. Caught the 2:23 train up to Scarsdale and spent a considerable amount of time being distracted from my reading by watching Harlem, the Bronx, and Westchester pass me by. One of the things I’m continually amazed by during my travel (professionally and personally) to New York is the plethora of hulking brick buildings built to accommodate the post-war population boom – a phenomenon that, given Chicago’s ample space, we didn’t really experience. Also, bridges. But more on that later.



I made it up to Scarsdale safe and sound and cabbed it over to the Weinbergers. I didn’t catch any pictures of the event because I was having such a good time talking to incoming students, their parents, and even a fellow alum or two. Parents wanted to know about what their kids would do after graduation, and what I thought of our new rank in the US News and World Report; students wanted to know what I thought of their dorms. I was pleased that the incoming students in attendance enjoyed talking to each other, and their excitement at their upcoming journey was infectious (and made me a little nostalgic). A representative from the Newberger Hillel Center was on hand, and he and I spent some time talking about the ways our offices can talk to each other more. All told, it was a really great party, and I can’t say enough how much it meant for me, and for our office, to be a part of this transition period where prospies become students (and eventually, very active alums!).

After I came back into the city I went for a run, since I’d skipped my usual Saturday run. Being something of a creature of habit, I’m very used to my route here in Chicago, and I was a little nervous when I started out from my hotel, especially because blocks in NYC are comparatively shorter. Then I realized that I was close to the Brooklyn Bridge, which I’d never walked across. I ran on over to the bridge and managed, with a little bit of stopping and starting, to get across and back. It was a gorgeous day, about sunset, and the bridge was full of people, and it was one of the coolest jogs I’ve taken in some time. I wish now that I'd taken my camera.



Of course I never visit New York without taking a trip to the Strand, and after I’d recovered from my run I took the train there and picked up Cormac McCarthy’s The Crossing and Richard Yates’s Revolutionary Road, the latter of which was recommended to me by a colleague here in the office. After that I walked over to the East Village for dinner at Three of Cups, a favorite Italian restaurant of mine. I definitely recommend it to any of you who are in the area. The service is a little spotty, but the quality of the food definitely makes it worth a trip. A quick cab ride later, I was back in my hotel and settled in for the night.

I grabbed this shot as I was on my way to LaGuardia in a cab. It’s the sun rising over Brooklyn as I crossed the bridge:



Stay tuned! I’ll update with more travel stories as fall progresses.

Argonne National Laboratory Contract

Yesterday morning, faculty and staff got an email from our new president, Robert Zimmer announcing that we have won our bid to continue to manage Argonne National Laboratory! Here is Bob's letter:

Re: Argonne contract

I am delighted to report that the U.S. Department of Energy announced today that the University's company, UChicago Argonne, LLC, has been selected to manage Argonne National Laboratory for a five-year period beginning October 1, 2006. The contract can be extended, based on performance, for up to twenty years without competition.

The University of Chicago has managed Argonne National Laboratory since 1946, when the Laboratory was established to build on work originally done at the University. Several years ago, Congress mandated that the Department of Energy put contracts for several national laboratories up for competitive bid, and the University has been involved for well over a year in the competition for the contract to manage Argonne. We are very pleased to be able to continue our management role.

The University is fully committed to the stewardship of the extraordinary national resource that Argonne represents. In recent years, the scientific partnership of the University and Argonne has deepened, contributing to both the strength of the Laboratory and to science and technology development at the University. We anticipate that this relationship will continue to strengthen and evolve productively in the years ahead. The award of this contract is a basic component of our capacity to contribute to the development of science and technology at the highest levels, and through it to enhancing the well-being of the nation.

The University will manage Argonne through a new entity, UChicago Argonne, LLC. The University is the sole member of the LLC, which will bring together the expertise and experience of the University of Chicago with Jacobs Engineering Group, Inc. and BWX Technologies, Inc., both high-quality industrial firms with proven experience in science and technology management. We also benefit greatly from our partnerships with Northwestern University and the University of Illinois, which are represented on both the Argonne Board of Governors and the Board's Science Policy Council.

I would like to take this opportunity to thank those at the University and Argonne who worked tirelessly to achieve this success, including Vice Presidents Thomas Rosenbaum, Hank Webber and Beth Harris, Argonne National Laboratory Director Robert Rosner, Argonne National Laboratory Deputy Director Don Joyce, and Assistant Vice President Diana Jergovic.

As members of the University of Chicago community, we can all be proud of this achievement. The University has a 60-year record of success in stewardship of Argonne, and I anticipate a future of lasting scientific and technical contributions for generations to come.