Social Issues
Eli Finkel started out thinking he was writing a requiem for marriage. His book was going to be called The Freighted Marriage, a bleak warning that we are demanding so much from our spouses — that they be everything from our best friends to our romantic ideals to our social networks — that the institution of marriage is buckling under the strain.
In the early morning of May 3, 1968, approximately 100 African American students entered Northwestern’s business office, chained the doors and posted a sign on the revolving door: “Closed for business ’til racism at NU is ended.” Prepared to occupy the building at 619 Clark St. until the University met their demands, the students wanted an African American studies course, a black student union and other measures meant “to counteract the physical, emotional and spiritual strains we have been subjugated to,” as they had written in a petition to University administrators nearly two weeks earlier. Against the backdrop of the civil rights movement, student activism was spreading on college campuses across the country.
Medill alumna Susan Page, the Washington, D.C., bureau chief for USA Today, remembers well the first time she interviewed candidate Donald Trump during the 2016 presidential election. “He said, ‘Susan, I so admire your work,’” Page ’73 recounted in a panel discussion at Medill late last year.
