14
The Unkindest Cut

The once unbeatable Maroons had, by the early 1930s, achieved in football a grip on the Big Ten basement from which there was no prospect of their being dislodged. Scores were of basketball dimensions, and the weekly gate did not cover the cost of liniment—at Chicago the largest single item of athletic expense.

There was no mystery about this melancholy state of muscular affairs. Thirty—even twenty—years earlier Chicago had been a large university; in the course of the 1920s it had become a small one. It still had two thousand male undergraduates. (California had 7,500. Even Harvard had 3,700.) An ever increasing proportion of its students were transfers—young men who moved to Chicago for strictly scholarly reasons. The proportion of self-supporting students had increased steadily. The proportion of street-car students, with no interest in athletics, had increased steadily. And Chicago had—and was proud to have—no School of Physical Education as a shelter for broad-shouldered collegians who could not have remained collegians in any other department. (As early as the 1930s it was estimated that 50 percent of the Big Ten varsity players were phys-ed majors.)

It was possible—of course it was Hutchins who said it—to win twelve letters without learning how to write one. This was the inevitable consequence of the almost universal practice of subsidizing players through the generosity of football alumni; there was no point in buying high school stars on the hoof if they had to be able to read and write by the time they become eligible at the end of their freshman year in college. Big-time football corrupted the higher learning academically and financially.

Everybody everywhere knew it. Everybody everywhere mumbled it, including a Carnegie Foundation study. "The trouble with football," said

Hutchins right out in public, "is the money that is in it"—or was supposed to be in it. Football, like crime, didn't pay; the president of Oberlin College had just made a study of football costs in twenty-two typical colleges and learned that twenty of them lost money. Coaches' salaries ran as high as twenty-five thousand dollars, in an era when the salaries of full professors averaged five thousand. One university, which paid its president eight thousand a year in 1930, could not get the coach it wanted for less than fifteen thousand to maintain his dignity. Equipment, advertising, travel (including Pullman trains with accommodations for the sports writers) were enormously expensive. The construction of ever bigger stadiums was back-breaking.

Big-time football was supposed to attract more students, but every additional student cost the institution money—even including the privately endowed institutions, colleges and universities with high tuition fees. These last were in a position to resist the pressure to enlarge their enrollment; they did not want more but better students. Big-time football was supposed to bring in gifts too—another myth based on the hallucination that the kind of people who admired football would admire a university like Chicago if only it had a winning team. (There was a companion hallucination that a great team would make a university that wasn't great look like a great university.) Harvard, Yale, and Chicago led the list of the country's universities in terms of donations and bequests during the 1920s and 30s, and Williams, Wesleyan, and Bowdoin led the list of colleges—all of them with notably inconsequential, and some of them with positively bad, football teams.

Chicago's outlay was, by comparison with its sister schools in the Big Ten, minuscule. It did not buy players under or over the table. Its stadium (one of two in the Western Conference that wasn't mortgaged) was one of the country's lesser arenas. Its head coach had a modest salary, and it did not schedule cross-country games. Even so it was losing money on football—it was lucky to sell 5,700 of its 57,000 seats—and there was a depression.

But there was nothing to be done about it.

The reason why nothing could be done about it was the Grand Old Man. The Old Man was Chicago's oldest—and only indigenous—collegiate tradition except for the campus carillon rendition of the Alma Mater at 10:06 every night because the Old Man wanted his players to start for bed at 10:00 and to get there when the Alma Mater was finished at 10:06:45. The most reverent moment of the year was the moment at the Interfraternity Sing when the old grads of Psi Upsilon marched down the steps to the fountain in Hutchison Court with the Old Man at their head.

If ever there was a granite figure that bespoke the granite virtues, it was his.

In 1892 William Rainey Harper, like most of his predecessors and successors among university presidents, denounced "the spectacular entertainment of enormous crowds of people." The difference between Harper and his predecessors and successors (prior to Hutchins) was that he thought he could do something about it. The new University of Chicago would provide a playing field for games—if there were students who wanted to play them. (Harper had never had any time for them, himself.) As his director of athletics, head coach, and captain of the football team, he hired a stern young man who had been a Bible student of his at Yale. Amos Alonzo Stagg was appointed as an associate professor (at $2,500 a year) with lifetime tenure—the first (and very probably the last) such appointment in history. His job would never depend upon his winning games. But he won them; in his heyday, all of them. As a stern middle-aged, and then old, man he continued to believe in the literalism of the Bible and the amateurism of sports. If (as untrackable rumor had it) some of his latter-day players were slipped a little something—even so much as priority in getting campus jobs—he never knew it. If their fraternity brothers selected their courses (with professors who liked football) and wrote their papers for them, if, in a word, they were intellectually needy, he never recognized it; apart from coaching football, he was not intellectually affluent himself.

The Old Man was sacred, sacred to a relatively small but ardent segment of the alumni, sacred to some of the old professors who had come with him in 1892, sacred to some of the trustees who, in their time, had had their picture taken on the Yale Fence, sacred to the students, who had nothing else to hold sacred, sacred to the local barbers and their customers, sacred, above all, to the local sports writers who, with the Cubs and the White Sox where they were, had nothing much else to write about. The first Marshall Field had given Harper a great tract adjoining the original campus for the student games that Harper spoke of. It was called, of course, Marshall Field, but it had long since become Stagg Field. The Old Man was untouchable—and so, therefore, was football.

Hutchins, who did not like to sit and watch anything, especially gladiators, attended the home games in his carefully battered and beer-stained football fedora, on the theory, it may be assumed, that it was good for a man to do the things he did not want to do. He was not violently opposed to exercise; to have been violently opposed would itself have been more exercise than he was impelled to. He was opposed to both violence and exercise.

He could not see why people had to hit, kick, or throw things around, why they could not keep in condition by getting up early, going to work, going home, going to work again, and going to bed; and eating and drinking enough to keep going. If other, and especially younger, people were so underworked and overfed that they thought they needed to disport themselves, he had no objection to letting them go somewhere and do it. Like Harper, he could not imagine where they got the time for it and held himself responsible, as an educator, for their having time on their hands.

Athleticism—the perversion of athletics to commercialism—he abominated. Most of all he abominated the myths that were fabricated to justify it. Far from its being good for the minds and morals of the students, it was not even good for their health. It injured—even killed—some of them in the name of that false morality which held that nothing is as important as winning, and it developed in some of them the "athlete's heart" that would kill them prematurely. It did not habituate them to the games that they could play in later life. It did not even provide college students with exercise, if exercise was what they wanted or needed. Chicago had six thousand students, three thousand of them undergraduates, two thousand of them males. Athleticism did nothing for the females except get them excited (a bad thing in a woman) and it exercised, or overexercised, eleven of the two thousand undergraduate males.

The local sports writers, football alumni, football professors, football trustees, football students, and football barbers, yes, and the Old Man himself, still coaching in his seventies, all suspected Hutchins from the first—and they were right. He assured and reassured them, via the sports writers, that football would always be an integral part of the Chicago program. They didn't believe him—but they were wrong. They should have asked him, "Intercollegiate or intramural?" and they didn't. But you can't fool the sports writers. That sixth sense they all had kept them from being reassured by his reassurances. It told them that he was some kind of an intellectual; and intellectuals, as everybody knows, think that they are too intellectual for athletics. The sports writers took note of his backhand jabs. They took note when he said that a university is not a bodybuilding institute. They took note when he said that the country needed brains almost as much as it did brawn. They took note when he told the YMCA that "the American public is overexercised and overbathed. The great resources of the YMCA should not be directed primarily at aggravating this great evil."^[1] They took note when he cited the Big Ten rules against subsidization. They took note when he embellished the proposal of the student editor—a Hutchins Plan boy—that instead of buying football players, the colleges should buy race horses: "Alumni could show their

devotion by giving their stables to alma mater. For the time being, Yale would be 'way out in front, for both Mr. Jock Whitney and Mr. Cornelius Vanderbilt Whitney graduated there. But by a judicious distribution of honorary degrees horse fanciers who never went to college might be induced to come to the assistance of institutions which had not attracted students who had become prosperous enough to indulge in the sport of kings. Chicago could, for instance, confer the doctorate of letters upon that prominent turfman, Alderman Bathhouse John Coughlin, and persuade The Bath to change the color of his silks from green to maroon. The alumni could place their money on Chicago across the board. The students could cheer. Most important of all, the horses would not have to pass examinations." And they took note when Hutchins told the unsubsidized Chicago eleven, before it went down to yet another 86-0 defeat, "Your strength is as the strength of ten because your hearts are pure."

They took note. And so did the Grand Old Man, whose squads grew fewer and smaller year after year and whose unbroken record of unbeaten seasons, season after season, was now an unbroken record of beatings.

It took almost ten years—nine, to be exact. The trustees were skittish. The university had a big-domed reputation, maybe too much so for its own good. Its public relations ranged from nonexistent (except for the regular announcement of Nobel Prize winners and such) to positively poor. Football was a drag—and it cost money—but maybe it had to be kept for public relations purposes. Besides, it sort of sustained internal morale, didn't it? The trustee who wanted to know was Albert Lasker, the advertising mogul who had once owned the Chicago Cubs and in sports matters was generally deferred to by most of the board members. According to his biographer, Lasker said to Hutchins, after many a board meeting on the subject, "Football is what unifies a university—what will take its place?" And Hutchins said, "Education."^[2] This (says the biographer) brought Lasker around, in 1937, and Hutchins' hand in the board was strengthened—and still further strengthened when trustee John Nuveen, a stockbroker weekdays (and a churchgoer Sundays) came to the settled conclusion that the subsidization of college athletes was positively immoral, and probably irreligious.

A year later the canny suspicions of all the sports writers were materialized when Hutchins turned sports writer. Proponent and practitioner of impatience, he had spent almost a decade talking it over (and over and over) with trustees, donors, faculty, students, and barbers. He had gone again and again to the sports writers and the football alumni beseeching their arguments for the retention of big-time football not by Notre Dame but by the University of Chicago. They had none that made sense in terms

of a center of independent thought and criticism. His presidential colleagues in the state universities explained that their budgets depended directly on football because it was the one activity of the institution that the legislators understood. None of them was willing, on the record, to reveal that darkest secret of the academic underworld, the cost of their stadiums, in spite of the plea of the American Association of University Professors that it be made public. All of them said that somebody ought to do something.

Somebody did something, but not until somebody else did something else. The somebody else was the Grand Old Man himself. The 1936 season was the Maroons' worst to date. At its close Hutchins and Stagg conferred—something they had never done before. Like many college graduates, these two graduates of Yale did not have much in common. At the close of the conference Stagg announced that after forty-four years as Chicago's coach he was leaving. Not retiring—leaving. It was a very bad day for the university in the local papers. It was a very bad day for Hutchins on the campus and off. It might not be his fault that the university could not play good football—though his sniping hadn't done any good—but it was certainly his fault that the Old Man was being let out. Another head coach was dutifully hired; Amos Alonzo Stagg took off into the sunset, and in his nineties was still coaching football at a small college in California. He lived to be a hundred, and if Hutchins had lived to be a hundred he would never have overcome the bitterness of the lovers of things-as-they-had-been, a bitterness aggravated by the sports writers and their full-page recapitulations of "the great days of Chicago"; when, some years later, President Truman recalled General MacArthur from Korea, one long-memoried Chicagoan recalled the similar awful agony that had accompanied the retirement of the Grand Old Man at Chicago. The football fans did not need to ask the question, but they asked it: could there be any doubt any longer that the Boy President meant to dismantle the university?

The Maroons had a worse season in 1937 than they had had in 1936, and a worse season in 1938 than in 1937. It was at the close of the 1938 season that Hutchins turned sports writer and blew the whistle across the country. "Gate Receipts and Glory" appeared in the Saturday Evening Post .^[3] It began:

"The football season is about to release the nation's colleges to the pursuit of education, more or less. Soon the last nickel will be rung up at the gate, the last halfback will receive his check, and the last alumnus will try to pay off those bets he can recall. Most of the students have cheered themselves into insensibility long since.

"This has been going on for almost fifty years. It is called 'overemphasis on athletics,' and everybody deplores it. It has been the subject of scores of reports, all of them shocking. It has been held to be crass professionalism, all the more shameful because it masquerades as higher education. But nobody has done anything about it. Why? I think it is because nobody wants to. Nobody wants, or dares, to defy the public, dishearten the students, or deprive alma mater of the loyalty of the alumni. Most emphatically of all, nobody wants to give up the gate receipts. Every code of amateurism ever written has failed for this reason. . . .

"Athleticism is not athletics or physical education but sports promotion, and it is carried on for the monetary profit of the colleges through the entertainment of the public. . . ."

The sports writer—Robert M. Hutchins—then proceeded to an analysis of the cause of the symptoms:

"The apologists for athleticism have created a collection of myths to convince the public that biceps are a substitute for brains. Athletics, we are told, produces well-rounded men, filled with the spirit of free play. Athletics is good for the health of the players; it is also good for the morals of the spectators. Leadership in sports means leadership in life. Athletes are red-blooded Americans, and athletic colleges are bulwarks against Communism. Gate receipts are used to build laboratories and to pay for those sports which can't pay for themselves. Football is purely a supplement to study. And without a winning team a college can not hope to attract the students or the gifts which its work requires.

"These myths have a certain air of plausibility. They are widely accepted. But they are myths, designed, consciously or unconsciously, to conceal the color of money and to surround a financial enterprise with the rosy glow of Health, Manhood, Public Spirit, and Education."

Armed to the teeth with the vital statistics, he proceeded to strip the myths, one by one, of their plausibility, and to go on from the cause and the symptoms to the cure:

"We must reform ourselves. How?

"The committees which have studied the subject—and their name is legion—have suggested stricter eligibility rules, reduction of training periods, elimination of recruiting and subsidizing, easier schedules, limitation of each student's participation to one sport, and abandonment of the double scholastic standards for athletes. . . . These reforms will never achieve reform. They may serve to offset athleticism at those few institutions which are already trying to be colleges instead of football teams. But it is too much to hope that they will affect the colleges and universities at large.

"Since money is the cause of athleticism, the cure is to take the money out of athletics. This can be done only in defiance of the students, the alumni, the public, and, in many cases, the colleges themselves. . . . The task of taking the money out of athletics must be undertaken by those institutions which are leaders, institutions which can afford the loss of prestige and popularity involved. I suggest that a group of colleges and of universities composed, say, of Amherst, Williams, Dartmouth, Harvard, Yale, Chicago, Michigan, Stanford, and California agree to take the following steps, to take them in unison and to take them at once:

"1. Reduce admission to ten cents. This will cover the handling costs. For years prominent educators, all the way from Harper, of Chicago, to Butler, at Columbia, have insisted that college athletics should be supported from endowment like any other educational activity. Colleges should support athletics out of their budgets, or get out of athletics, or get out of education.

"2. Give the director of athletics and the major coaches some kind of academic tenure, so that their jobs depend on their ability as instructors and their character as men and not on the gates they draw.

"While these two steps are being taken, it might be well, for the sake of once more putting students instead of athletes on the college playing fields, to try to stimulate the urge to play for fun and health, instead of the urge to win at any cost. There are two ways to do this, and many colleges and universities are trying both with considerable satisfaction to their students:

"1. Broaden the base of athletic participation, so that all students, graduate and undergraduate, big fellows and little fellows, can play. The development of intramural athletics, which costs less than the maintenance of present programs, is a step in this direction. The English system of selecting a varsity from the intramural teams toward the end of the season and then playing a limited number of intercollegiate games suggests itself at this point.

"2. Emphasize games which students will play in later life, when they need recreation and physical fitness as much as in college. Such sports are tennis, handball, skating, swimming, softball, bowling, rackets, golf, and touch football. Few college graduates are able to use football, baseball, or basketball, except as topics of conversation.

"I think that after the steps I have suggested have been taken by the colleges and universities I have named, the rest of the country's educational institutions will not long be able to ignore their example. Nor will the public, once the break has been made, attempt for long to prevent reform. The public, in the last analysis, pays for the colleges and the univer-

sities. It wants something for its money. It has been taught to accept football. It can, I am confident, be taught to accept education.

"The public will not like ten-cent football, because ten-cent football will not be great football. The task of the colleges and the universities, then, is to show the country a substitute for athleticism. That substitute is light and learning. The colleges and universities which taught the country football, can teach the country that the effort to discover truth, to transmit the wisdom of the race, and to preserve civilization is exciting and perhaps important too."

Going public did it. It didn't do it anywhere else—there was no Hutchins at the colleges and universities he listed—but it did it at Chicago. The row, at Chicago, was out in the open at last—and high time. It took exactly one more year of pushing, hard now, in the board of trustees—this time in the face of a student poll overwhelmingly for football and "legitimate subsidization."

At the end of December 1939, the Chicago board decided in a series of special meetings to get out of intercollegiate football and develop an elaborate program of intramural football—the answer Hutchins would have given down the years if his fellow sports writers, when he told them that football would always be an integral part of the Chicago program, had thought to ask him, "What kind of football?" The announcement, made during the Christmas student holiday, was published on the front pages, not of the sports sections but of the news sections, across the country. As soon as the students got back, Hutchins called a special convocation, in which he said he hoped it was not necessary to tell them that a university was an educational institution, that "education is primarily concerned with the training of the mind, and athletics and social life, though they may contribute to education, are not the heart of it and can not be permitted to interfere with it. All questions of management are questions of emphasis. Even so variegated an institution as a department store, which may teach skiing or distribute Christmas baskets, must be tested at the last by its success as a department store. An educational institution can do one thing uniquely: it can educate. It is by its success in performing this one function that it must be judged. The object of the University of Chicago, therefore, is to help you get the finest education that its resources and intelligence can supply. It is your responsibility to make the most of your opportunities, to cooperate with the University in the achievement of its aims—and to go forth and preach the gospel."^[4]

It was by all odds the most spectacular and most durable educational reform of Hutchins' whole career. The irony, a Hutchins kind of irony,

was that it was not an educational reform at all but merely the elimination of one obstacle to education.

The abolition of football did not save all that much money—not at Chicago—and it didn't save it until the worst of the Depression was past. In the first years after Hutchins' departure from Chicago and the succession of a "community oriented" president, there was talk of reviving intercollegiate football on the Midway, but it would never be done. The empty stands at Stagg Field looked blindly down on students playing the intramural games that William Rainey Harper and every other educator thought were good for students. Underneath the abandoned stands, on December 2, 1942, at 3:25 P.M. , Enrico Fermi told a young physicist to go ahead and pull a cadmium rod out of a metal "pile"—and the Atomic Age began. And then the stands were torn down, and the Regenstein Library was erected where they'd stood.

In a sense, nobody would ever forgive Hutchins football—nobody, including the opponents of football. He had done what the opponents thought ought to be done—and the proponents agreed could not be done. The proponents were righter than they were wrong: nobody who was anybody followed Chicago's example, and big-time football went from more to more at the colleges and universities Hutchins had named (and at all the others), its progress unimpeded by the popular rise of avowed professionalism. (In 1982 Texas A & M University agreed to pay its head coach $275,000 a year.)