Ajith: Evanston Evening bridge student-neighbor relations

Last Thursday evening, as twilight faded away into the cool night, two fellow students and I stood around a barbecue in an Evanston resident and NU alumnus's spacious backyard, sipping drinks and listening to our host wax nostalgic about his adventures on campus in the ‘80s.

Not exactly my average Thursday night, to say the least.

This wasn't a random dinner by any means; rather, it was one of 50 similar dinners happening all over Evanston that evening. Early in the quarter, Northwestern's Center for Civic Engagement collaborated with the PeaceAble Cities Initiative to sign up around 150 students (registration maxed out quickly) for "Evanston Evenings," with the simple purpose of bringing students and their neighbors — mine just happened to be an alumnus — together over dinner.

To be succinct: this was a great event.

To elaborate: this was a well-planned, well-executed way of showing students and their neighbors that it is possible for them to find common ground, have civil conversation and enjoy a dinner together.

The event came on the tail of two University-hosted, well-attended community ice cream socials and the always successful Big Bite Night the weekend before. Given that the centerpiece of the event was dinner, it was a more intimate interlude, before the students-only Town Hall and the city-campus Community Conversations later this month. Evanston Evenings had the backing of both Mayor Tisdahl and the University administration.

In my case, it was also a great opportunity to speak with an alumnus about his life story (Iran's 1979 revolution played a big part), experiences at Northwestern (hilarious, unbelievable, pretty darn cool), and his extensive career since graduation. As he enthralled us with tales of having alcohol delivered to frat houses and taking limos to Chicago bars every weekend, it became clear that his college-in-Evanston experiences were vastly different from ours. The party scene in the Evanston he described was mostly nonexistent — hence the limos — and there was no alcohol to be bought in town. The town was even quieter, somehow. Of course, we bonded over shared experiences in sub-par dorms and student-heavy apartments on Ridge — some things never change.

We as students rarely get to see firsthand the benefits of a Northwestern degree, and that night, my fellow guests and I also got see firsthand the staying power of a solid Northwestern experience. Our hosts — the husband is the alumnus — count among their close friends five of the husband's college classmates, all of whom settled within a few miles of Northwestern soon after graduating.

As they found jobs and settled into careers and family life, they considered criteria similar to those weighed by prospective freshman. NU is a great institution to live by and Evanston is a pleasant city, with all of the attendant benefits of having a world city right next door and very few of the drawbacks. The opportunities are greater, the environment fresh and changing, and for graduates, it's easier to indoctrinate children to go to NU from an early age.

Their sharp pre-teen daughter, a budding athlete and Wii extraordinaire, was supremely excited about the NU students coming over for dinner, and planned accordingly to have enough Wii remotes. Her mother, acutely aware of the influence three really cool college students could have on her impressionable daughter, refrained from serving us alcohol until she determined whom among us was of age (I stuck to freshly-made lemonade). While this wasn't a very big deal — the little one was used to seeing her parents enjoy a glass of wine or a beer over dinner — it reminded me of the reactions of parents elsewhere in Evanston to raucous partying and Gawker-worthy behavior of a few foolish bands of students. It gave me a new perspective on why the parents are sensitive to having their children exposed to the drunken yelling of Freshman Party Group #14. It's just not the scary, disturbing aspect; instead, the age and maturity gaps between the pre-teen looking out the window and the teenager peeing on her lawn is shockingly small, and the influence of the latter on the former is inversely huge.

Just a thought.

Our host family also invited a friend of theirs and her child for the dinner — the more the merrier. Their friend is a Northwestern employee, and also lives nearby in Evanston. The dinner, drinks and dessert became an opportunity for each of us to put a human face (or faces) on the Northwestern Student or Evanston Neighbor stock image in our heads, and of course, for all of us to bond over shared love for the Mediterranean dessert-from-paradise baklava.

Ani Ajith is a Weinberg sophomore.

He can be reached at ani.ajith@u.northwestern.edu.