On Oct. 18, DePaul sponsored a stage program titled "The Court of Popular Opinion: How the Supreme Court Rules" during Chicago Ideas Week 2018. (Jeff Carrion/DePaul University) For the second year in a row, DePaul’s sponsorship of Chicago Ideas Week encouraged civic-minded faculty, staff and students to be vehicles of change inside and outside of their communities. The sponsorship also provided an opportunity to showcase the School of Music’s new Holtschneider Performance Center.
Organized by the nonprofit Chicago Ideas, the week of programming is billed as "the world's most accessible ideas festival" for its nominal cost to attend. Each year, Chicago Ideas attracts nearly 30,000 attendees and 200 speakers who are engaged and passionate about the future of Chicago. Each of the 150 events that happened during the week, which occurred Oct. 15-21, provided a platform to educate, inspire creativity and allow for new ideas to be discovered.
DePaul served as one of the sponsors of this year's Chicago Ideas Week to encourage critical discussions as well as to offer a way for the university community to connect with issues that are important to them.
Approximately 120 students and 80 faculty and staff used the DePaul discount to attend Chicago Ideas events with speakers such as the leader of the Time’s Up Legal Defense Fund and former White House staff member Tina Tchen, former Secretary of Housing and Urban Development Julian Castro, Parkland shooting survivor and March for Our Lives co-founder David Hogg, and author and digital strategist Luvvie Ajayi. In addition, more than 50 faculty, staff and students also were able to attend events through ticket giveaways organized by Student Affairs and the Office of Public Relations and Communications.
Joseph Myers, president of Kirkegaard Associates and designer of the acoustics in Holtschneider Performance Center led a tour of the new School of Music building during the university's Chicago Ideas Week lab. (Jamie Moncrief/DePaul University)
On Thursday, DePaul sponsored a Chicago Ideas panel discussion titled “The Court of Popular Opinion: How the Supreme Court Rules.” DePaul College of Law Dean, Jennifer Rosato Perea, gave an introduction to the panel explaining the significance of the conversation and reaffirming the university’s long-standing commitment to the City of Chicago. The panel featured the University of Chicago’s Edward H. Levi Distinguished Professor of Law, Geoffrey Stone; professor and co-director of the Floersheimer Center for Constitutional Democracy at the Cardozo School of Law, Kate Shaw; Georgetown University professor and Partner at Hogan Lovells, Neal Katyal; and United States District Judge of Northern Illinois, Manish Shah, served as moderator. The panel discussed how public opinion affects the court’s rulings and ruminated on the future of the Supreme Court.
Later that evening, DePaul hosted its own Chicago Ideas Week Lab: a hands-on, immersive experience of the School of Music’s new Holtschneider Performance Center. Joseph Myers, president of Kirkegaard Associates and acoustic designer of the building, led the evening event that was part tour, part conversation, and part learning experience about the design of the acoustics for the building’s concert halls. With the help of student musicians, attendees were able to hear how sounds varied in each hall. The audience learned how acoustic experts engineered the halls specifically for particular types of music by using wall shape and thickness, draping, and other acoustical elements.
Although Chicago Ideas Week ended on Sunday, Chicago Ideas stages events throughout the year. Check the
Chicago Ideas website to sign up for updates.