Along South Ellis Avenue in the Southside Chicago neighborhood of Hyde Park stands a dark-hued, modernistic bronze sculpture, vertical in aspect, dome-shaped at the top and vaguely ominous in its imagery. It is by Henry Moore and is called "Nuclear Energy." It memorializes the spot where in 1942 the first controlled nuclear reaction was achieved, in an experiment led by physicist Enrico Fermi as part of the World War II Manhattan Project.
Fermi and his team built their reactor in secret. It was hidden under the stands of a hulking, abandoned football stadium on the campus of the University of Chicago. In a sense, then, the sculpture helps to mark another experiment as well - the university's dramatic 1939 decision to pull the plug on what had been one of the nation's most storied football programs.
This is not the only university to have done so, but Chicago remains the starkest example of a school that backed away from football's big time. It was a difficult road to go down, and it's unlikely that today, with all the money and momentum driving major-college football, any school might leave the arena as abruptly as Chicago did. Still, another symbol suggests where a university's priorities correctly lie. The footprint of demolished Stagg Field today encompasses the U. of C.'s imposing Regenstein Library, a true citadel of knowledge.
The Chicago Maroons were a charter member of the Big Ten and its predecessor conference. They were coached for 40 years by one of the most remarkable figures in American sports, Amos Alonzo Stagg.
As an end at Yale, Stagg was one of the first football players to be named an all-American. He also was a terrific college pitcher. Skull and Bones? Of course.
While coaching football in Springfield, Mass., he connected with James Naismith and was significant in the development of basketball. He was named to the College Football Hall of Fame as both coach and player, and was in the first group of inductees to the Basketball Hall of Fame. He also was an Olympic track coach.
The University of Chicago, bankrolled by John D. Rockefeller, opened its doors in 1892 and Stagg was recruited by the president, a former Yale professor of his, to become a professor and athletic director. That president, William Rainey Harper, concluded that a powerful football team would be an effective tool to raise the university's profile. Stagg was given unusual leeway to make it happen.
This was an era when amateur athletics were supposed to be "pure" - but reality often was a different matter. The businessmen in the Maroons' booster corps helped lure good players with job offers. A star might remain eligible despite abysmal grades. But Stagg's coaching brilliance and the university's backing paid off, as the U. of C. became the top "western" team. It twice was named national champion.
The sky seemed to be the limit, and the university sprang for stadium expansions that pushed capacity to 50,000. But fortunes began to shift as competitive programs, Notre Dame chief among them, arose in the Chicago orbit. By the time Stagg, then 70, was pushed out by President Robert Maynard Hutchins after the 1932 season, U. of C. football was clearly on the skids.
Stagg relocated to the University of the Pacific in Stockton, Calif. He continued to coach there and elsewhere into his 90s and lived to be 102. (As it happens, in 1995 Pacific became another school to drop its football program.)
With Stagg gone and the Maroons struggling, opponents of football at Chicago gained the upper hand. And Hutchins, another Yale export (he'd been dean of the law school while still in his 20s), was on their side.
The team had a brief resurgence during the hey-day of running back Jay Berwanger, first recipient of what became the Heisman Trophy and the very first NFL draftee, in 1936 (unable to agree on salary, he never played for the pros). But by then, game attendance had plummeted. The final season, 1939, included an 85-0 obliteration at Stagg Field by Michigan.
It could be said that Hutchins made a virtue of necessity. But he also wanted to turn away from big-time football and its entertainment culture and reaffirm the university's mission of scholarship.
There were repercussions. The endowment shrank, and academics for a time seemed to wobble. But the U. of C. in recent decades has solidified its standing in the uppermost ranks of higher ed. Football even made a comeback: The university these days fields a team in a Division III conference along with the likes of Emory, NYU and Carnegie-Mellon.
Robin Lester, author of the 1995 book "Stagg's University," observes that big-time college football has its benefits in terms of publicity and school spirit. But it also has "produced a subculture in American higher education that proved capable of creating and altering academic standards and values, indeed, of defining higher education for many Americans." North Carolinians today have good reason to ponder whether that subculture is one that it makes sense to continue to embrace.
