Page:A History of the University of Chicago by Thomas Wakefield Goodspeed.djvu/432

 378 A HISTORY OF THE UNIVERSITY OF CHICAGO and by no means the least important one. The parent whose son has dis- tinguished himself in an athletic team has good reason to be proud of the son's achievement I congratulate the parent whose son is on the baseball team or the football field, as I shall congratulate myself if my son should be accorded the honor. [In 1915 Dr. Harper's youngest son became a member of the football team.] But here as elsewhere much depends on the attendant circumstances. If the work is not amateur work in the strictest sense nothing that I have said is true. If the life of the men is not of the highest char- acter, all the higher because of peculiar temptations resisted, nothing that I have said is true. If the intellectual work of the men in their various depart- ments is not of high order, nothing that I have said is true. That in the University of Chicago the first of these requirements will be observed we may well trust the Board of Physical Culture and Athletics, whose business it is to guard with jealous care the purity of college athletics. In the director of the work, Mr. Stagg, we have an example of earnest and conscientious manhood which exerts a powerful influence upon the men themselves toward right conduct and right living. In this statement the President unfolded the University's athletic policy. That policy, never deviated from, may be formu- lated as follows: 1. Athletics were under University, not student, control. All athletic work was under the immediate supervision of the Director. Associated with him in the oversight of the work was the Adminis- trative Board of the department, with the President of the Uni- versity as chairman, and twenty prominent University officers with a representative of the alumni as members. 2. The Director was not a professional coach, under a temporary appointment, who must manage to win games in order to hold his place, but a permanent member of the teaching staff, of pro- fessorial rank. 3. It was insisted that intercollegiate contests must be pure amateur sports untainted by professionalism. Like other institu- tions with high ideals, the University was sometimes deceived, but every effort was made through the entire quarter-century to keep intercollegiate athletics on a strictly amateur basis. 4. Members of athletic teams were held up to a high grade of scholarship. If they fell below it they lost their places on the teams. More than once, as the students fully believed, a championship was lost because the Deans disqualified a man for