by Joe King

IF YOU HAVE AN NIU DIPLOMA HANGING ON your wall (and if you are reading this magazine, chances are pretty good that you do) then we know a few things about you. Chances are that you and your spouse (if you have one) both work; you are probably feeling a little stressed out – particularly if you are a woman or single; we’re pretty sure that you are fed up with all the new homes and strip malls being built around you; and chances are better than ever that you work in the suburbs rather than the city.

How do we know these things? Don’t worry, your old roommate isn’t telling tales, and your old professors aren’t peeking over your fence, taking notes. Not literally, anyway. But they are paying very close attention to what is going on out in suburbia (where almost 80 percent of NIU grads choose to live) using that vast, sprawling network of cities, villages, and towns as their own personal laboratory.

The suburbs, that bastion of middle-class America that for decades has been flogged by city dwellers and comedians as ground zero for blandness, is providing fodder for some fascinating NIU research. By looking at what is going on in your backyard, NIU professors are helping to explain trends in modern society and shaping the agenda for the debate over where the ’burbs go from here.

“When you are studying the suburbs, in a sense you are studying cutting-edge trends in American society. The suburbs increasingly capture the big policy questions that concern us,” says Harvey Smith, director of NIU’s Social Science Research Institute, where much of NIU’s suburban-focused research takes place.

“More Americans now live in suburbs than cities – there are more voters there, more political clout. It’s just a more interesting social system,” says sociologist Charles Cappell, who studies the quality of life in the suburbs. Cappell is part of a small army of researchers at Northern who have staked a claim to suburban research in this region. Surprisingly, they are largely alone in prowling the urban edges of Chicago in search of knowledge.

“There aren’t many other schools studying the suburbs, which makes the work all the more important,” Smith says, explaining that researchers at many of the universities in Chicago prefer to remain focused on the city itself, which by some estimates has been the subject of more sociological studies than any other city on earth.