Editing Saul Alinsky (section)

===College studies===
In 1926, Alinsky entered the [[University of Chicago]]. He studied in America's first sociology department under [[Ernest Burgess]] and [[Robert E. Park]]. Overturning the propositions of a still ascendant [[eugenics]] movement, Burgess and Park argued that social disorganization, not [[heredity]], was the cause of [[disease]], [[crime]], and other characteristics of [[slum]] life. As the passage of successive waves of immigrants through such districts had demonstrated, it is the slum area itself, and not the particular group living there, with which social pathologies were associated.{{sfnp|Horwitt|1989|pp=11–13}} Yet Alinsky claimed to be "astounded by all the horse manure [sociologists] were handing out about poverty and slums, playing down the suffering and deprivation, glossing over the misery and despair. I mean, Christ, I’d lived in a slum, I could see through all their complacent academic jargon to the realities."<ref>{{cite conference|title=Inconvenient Data and "the Problem of Politics"|conference=ESRC Seminar Series: Activism, Volunteering and Citizenship Seminar 5: Biographies of Activism and Social Change|last=Andrews|first=Molly|publisher=Centre for Narrative Research|url=https://slideplayer.com/slide/10398434/|access-date=18 August 2024}}</ref>{{sfnp|Norden|1972|p=62}}

The [[Great Depression]] put an end to an interest in archaeology: after the stock-market crash "all the guys who funded the field trips were being scraped off [[Wall Street]] sidewalks." A chance graduate fellowship moved Alinsky on to [[criminology]]. For two years, as a "nonparticipant observer", he claims to have hung out with Chicago's [[Al Capone]] mob (he explains that, as they "owned the city", they felt they had little to hide from a "college kid"). Among other things about the exercise of power, he says they taught him was "the terrific importance of personal relationships".<ref name="Sanders">{{cite book |last1=Sanders |first1=Marion K |title=The Professional Radical: Conversations with Saul Alinsky |date=1965 |publisher=Harper and Row |location=New York |pages=19–21, 26–27 |url=https://historyofsocialwork.org/1946_Alinsky/1965%20the%20professional%20radical%20consersations%20with%20Saul%20Alinsky%20OCR.pdf |access-date=9 December 2020}}</ref> Alinsky took a job in the Illinois, Division of the State Criminologist, working with juvenile delinquents and at the [[Joliet Correctional Center]]. He recalls it as a dispiriting experience: if he dwelt on the contributing causes of crime, such as poor housing, [[racial discrimination]], or unemployment, he was labelled a "[[Red (political adjective)|red]]."{{sfnp|Norden|1972|pp=62–64}}