Northwestern University

Northwestern University is the institution whose professorship offer uproots Cady Heron’s family from Africa and brings them to Evanston, Illinois. Though the university itself remains offstage, the offer marks the decisive break between Cady’s former life and the American high-school world she must learn to navigate.

The Offer and the Move

Cady recalls that she had a good life in Africa before her mother was offered a full professorship at Northwestern University. Two weeks later, the family had left Africa for Evanston. The move ends Cady’s familiar lessons about lion-cub behavior and her school science work with a lab-coated monkey, replacing them with a suburban setting where the animals she sees racing are morning commuters.

A New Social Environment

The relocation also places Cady in an American high school for the first time. On her first day, her unfamiliarity with the school’s social norms becomes painfully apparent: hoping to find something familiar, she greets a table of Black students with a Swahili greeting, then realizes that the gesture has come across as inappropriate. She leaves the cafeteria and eats alone in a bathroom stall. Northwestern’s offer thus stands at the beginning of a larger adjustment: the move changes not only where Cady lives, but the cultural and social assumptions she must reconsider.

Place in the Wider Story

The university is mentioned as the cause of the family’s move, not as a setting for later action. Cady’s account connects that change of place to her gradual participation in high-school life. At a school performance, she recognizes her parents in the audience and feels that she has become part of the experience of high school. The contrast between the life she left and the one she is beginning gives the move its narrative significance: it initiates the transition from familiar African surroundings to the social world in which Cady’s story unfolds.