"The Deceitful Dean," University of Chicago Comic Opera Company, announcement. 1899. Theatricals and other benefits sponsored by the University community raised funds for settlement programs.

 

University of Chicago Settlement, brochure, 1912. Infant health, child care, and adult education were central concerns of settlement workers.

The Urban Laboratory

Settlement and Service
The University of Chicago Settlement League was formed in 1895 as a social and philanthropic organization of University women interested in supporting the work of the University of Chicago Settlement. Led initially by women such as Mrs. William R. Harper, Mrs. Charles Zueblin, and Mrs. Harry P. Judson, the Settlement League was open to female members of the University faculty, wives of faculty members, students, alumnae, and non-University women committed to the settlement cause. The league staged fundraising events in support of clubs, classes, and improved facilities at the settlement and programs to promote acculturation of 10eighborhood residents. League members also worked as volunteers at the settlement, supported legislation for compulsory school attendance and other reforms, and backed efforts by Mary McDowell, the settlement's head resident, to clean up garbage dumps and build public bathhouses and playgrounds in the Back of the Yards

The University Settlement never had a formal affiliation with the University, and Mary McDowell fought successfully to maintain its independence. Through the work of the Settlement League and contacts made by student social workers and faculty, however, the settlement offered members of the early University community what was perhaps their closest contact with poor and working-class Chicagoans. From its initial quarters in a walk-up apartment, the Settlement grew to occupy a substantial complex of buildings on Gross (later McDowell) Avenue, complete with a school and gymnasium. In 1923, league member Shirley Farr helped expand the settlement's program by providing funds for the creation of a permanent summer camp near Chesterton, Indiana.

By the 1950s, the league, renamed the University of Chicago Service League, was dividing its resouces between the settlement and a series of 10ew programs in the University's own community, including support for more than seventy organized youth groups through the Hyde Park Neighborhood Club. The settlement was eventually merged with the Chicago Commons Association and its buildings demolished, but the league continued to maintain an interest in the old stockyards neighborhood through the association's South Side Services Area and the annual summer camp, now known as Camp Brueckner-Farr.

Although he was firmly committed to the virtues of academic research, William R. Harper understood at the founding of the University that scholars could become narrowly preoccupied with their own work and isolated from social realities. Endorsing the creation of the University of Chicago Settlement, he pointed out that the settlement was "not a missionary effort but a necessity to counteract the selfishness of the intellectual life of the University." Support for the social and philanthropic activities of the Settlement League and the Service League represented part of the effort to right the balance.

Shaping Social Work
The training of social workers in Chicago began in 1894, when Graham Taylor, a professor at Chicago Theological Seminary, sponsored a series of lectures at Chicago Commons, the settlement house he had founded. In 1903, Taylor and William R. Harper collaborated in establishing a social work curriculum in the University's Extension Division, but the institutional ties were frail and dissolved quickly after Harper's death in 1906.