Bill Savage is a senior lecturer in English at Northwestern University, a bartender, and brother of Dan.
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In 1980 the area around St. Ignatius College Prep wasn’t yet gentrified. Taylor Street hadn’t recovered from the construction of UIC; to the west was the Chicago Housing Authority’s ABLA public housing project. Tensions between the largely Italian-American population east of Racine, the African-Americans in the projects, and the mostly white students at Ignatius were palpable. Ignatius students were not allowed to leave campus for any reason during the school day. It wasn’t quite a war zone, but the shortcut that led north from campus, along an overgrown vacant lot, we called the Ho Chi Minh Trail. The Jesuit priests who ran Ignatius emphasized stern discipline to go with the demanding academics, and early on, you just went along with the program.
JUG was what every other school called “detention.” The origin of the term was murky, but one theory held that it stood for “Judgment Under God.” At a school that then graded everything on a scale of 0-99, with no possibility of scoring 100—because, we were told, only God was perfect—well, this etymology seemed plausible.
That moment, though, was pivotal to my high school education: I finally understood what my father and grandfather meant when they used the adjective “jesuitical” to describe a certain kind of serpentine moral reasoning.
