On January 16th, 2025, in preparation for an upcoming recruitment weekend where prospective graduate students tour campus and interact with current students, the Graduate Recruitment Initiative Team (GRIT), a student-run graduate organization of the University of Chicago committed to enhancing “diversity, equity and inclusion” across 18 graduate programs, sent two guides to current graduate students encouraging them to tailor their language when addressing concerns around campus safety and underplay security concerns.
In their first guide titled Recruitment FAQs and Guidance, GRIT lists the question “Is Chicago safe?” as a common and difficult question to answer. Expanding on this, they first describe that safety “is a common question, both from applicants as well as the families of applicants,” but in the same breath, also declare the question to be “racially and politically loaded.” One answer to this question they suggest graduate students recite to prospective students is to frame campus crime as merely being a phenomenon of the University of Chicago’s urban setting, stating: “One way to answer this is to highlight the fact that Chicago is a large city, and, because of that, there are certain precautions that everyone should take while living here.”
Furthermore, the guide warns graduate students not to “racially dog whistle” by telling prospective students that “I’ve heard the south side is dangerous and you shouldn’t go past 60th street.” GRIT calls this remark “pretty racially driven.” Instead, GRIT tells students to “Be aware of the tendency to racially dog whistle, and try to catch yourself from saying things like this.”
In the second guide GRIT sent to graduate students called Advice on UChicago and Safety Questions for Recruitment 2025, they first tell graduate students to “recognize that your personal experience is not applicable to all applicants and feelings of safety can vary along many axes of identity.” The document then attempts to generalize the concerns and experiences several racial identities may have. For instance, when characterizing Black students, they say that “a Black student may see intense surveillance as a threat to themselves (and that is valid)” given that they also assert that “Black people and other dark skinned folks are often treated or seen as inherently threatening.”
GRIT also states that violence observed on campus against UChicago students by South Siders is a sign of “privilege” because: “When the violence that South Siders are subjected to bleeds into campus, it is a tragedy but also a painful reminder that we hold a lot of privilege compared to many of our neighbors and that this violence only rarely directly affects us.” Additionally, GRIT partially blames the mere existence of the University of Chicago as a wealthy university in an economically-averse neighborhood for why some South Side residents have committed violent crimes, saying: “the disparities created by our ultra-wealthy neighborhood with a heavy police presence abutting neglected neighborhoods contribute to the cycle of violence.”
Next, GRIT provides more examples of supposedly correct and incorrect remarks graduate students could give to prospective students. When asked about safety while walking alone at night in Hyde Park, they chastised the response: “I would never. It’s not safe at all. I’ve heard people get mugged. I only drive or take a Lyft to get around the neighborhood,” and instead pushed graduate students to say: “This really varies from person to person, so I encourage you to ask a few different people this question to see the range of responses. I avoid walking around alone at night. Personally, I don’t feel safe because the idea of being mugged is really scary to me…”
GRIT lastly provides another example of an imprudent remark: “It’s completely safe. Don’t worry about criminals, there are cops everywhere and they keep the campus safe from the rest of the South Side.” Their problem with this statement is specifically the use of the word “criminals” because, according to them, “it implies that all Black people are criminals.”
When GRIT was asked about their two thorough guides detailing what graduate student remarks are correct and incorrect to tell prospective students to not “racially dog whistle,” GRIT stated: “We can’t and don’t want to police what people say about their lived experiences here at UChicago.”