My alma mater and football

There was a time once when the University of Chicago was known for something other than economics and eggheads.

A century ago, Chicago was one of the kings of college football. Legendary coach Amos Alonzo Stagg prowled its sidelines. Seldom did Chicago even play road games. Foes came to the South Side because the paycheck was too good.
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But 70 years ago this winter, the school disbanded its football team. The stadium became the birthplace of the atomic bomb, when the first controlled nuclear chain reaction was performed under its stands in 1942. Now a library stands there, which is exactly how Robert Hutchins would've liked it. "When I am minded to take exercise," said Mr. Hutchins, the school president who led the push to ax the team, "I sit down and wait until the mood has passed."

On a few campuses across the country, ghosts now reside where packed football stadiums once stood. At these schools, the autumn Saturday experience cherished at so many other colleges—a big game against a hated rival, with a championship possibly at stake—is gone, or is a shadow of what it used to be. The reasons run the gamut from high-minded academic standards, low-minded rule-breaking, changing times and just plain bad decisions...
But even the Ivies didn't go as far to demonstrate their commitment to education as Chicago. Mr. Hutchins, the school's president from 1929 to 1951, was convinced that football had the same relation to education that "bullfighting has to agriculture."

Mr. Hutchins never would've had enough support to ax the football team in 1939, historians say, if Chicago's teams had still been the mighty Monsters of the Midway. (That nickname, now associated with the NFL's Chicago Bears, originated with Mr. Stagg's Maroons; "Midway" refers to a park that runs through campus.) Aiding Mr. Hutchins's cause was Chicago's massive decline on the field—due in part to Chicago's higher academic standards. In 1939, Chicago's final major-college season, the Maroons lost 85-0 to Michigan and 61-0 to Ohio State and Harvard.

Dropping football helped build Chicago's image as a top destination for serious-minded graduate students and faculty. Over 80 Nobel Prize winners have studied, taught or researched at Chicago. "That's part of the magic of Chicago," says Robin Lester, who wrote a book about Mr. Stagg and Chicago football. "That's their thing. It's still a serious place for kids to get an education."

Today, Chicago is once again embracing athletics as part of a larger push to invest in campus life beyond the classroom. Last week, the school celebrated the 40-year anniversary of the return of varsity football; Chicago now plays on the non-athletic-scholarship Division III level. "We're still being true to the notion that it's not in the interest of universities to create mass-entertainment spectacles," says John Boyer, dean of Chicago's undergraduate college. "I always tell people that those games in '39 were the best thing that ever happened to us."