University of Chicago. Dept. of Physical Culture and Athletics

The University of Chicago’s Division of Physical Culture and Athletics was established in 1892. It was governed by one of the four original University Boards with authority over non-instructional areas of the University. It was later reorganized as the Department of Physical Culture and Athletics (1911-1933), the Office of Physical Education (1934-1937), Men's and Women's Divisions of Physical Education (1937-1974), and finally as the Department of Physical Education and Athletics.

Founding President William Rainey Harper envisioned a university that comprehended athletic training and competition. Under the directorship of Amos Alonzo Stagg (1892-1933), the University developed a strong intercollegiate, intramural, and class sports program. A founding member of the Intercollegiate Conference of Faculty Representatives in 1895, more commonly known as the “Big Ten Conference,” Chicago’s stadium at Stagg Field seated some 50,000 spectators by the end of 1920s. The Maroons’ football supremacy earned them the nickname “Monsters of the Midway,” later borrowed by the Chicago Bears in the 1940s and the 1980s. The Chicago-Michigan football game, held on Thanksgiving Day, was a major sporting and social event between 1893 and 1905; the competition was compounded by personal rivalry between Stagg and Fielding Yost, Michigan’s coach.

Chicago established a concurrent tradition in women’s athletics under Gertrude Dudley, Director of the Women’s Gymnasium and the Department of Women’s Athletics between 1898 and 1935. This program was the first of its kind at a major American university. The Women’s Athletic Association (WAA) was founded by Dudley in 1904, and remains the nation’s longest-running collegiate organization for supporting women’s athletics. In 1916 the University opened Ida Noyes Hall, designed as a clubhouse for women’s athletics and sociability. Ida Noyes housed a gymnasium, swimming pool, and trophy room, as well as a ballroom, theater, dining rooms, and club meeting spaces. Although intercollegiate competition was not allowed between women’s teams until the 1960s, Dudley and the WAA invited local colleges to participate in unofficial “Play Days” on the Midway during the 1920s.

The 1930s brought significant changes for University sports. Varsity football was eliminated in 1939 by President Robert Maynard Hutchins (1929-1951), who sought to focus on cementing the University’s reputation for intellectual rigor. The Maroons left the Big Ten in 1946. Chicago’s waning emphasis on athletics is perhaps best illustrated by the events of December 1942, when Manhattan Project scientists conducted the world’s first controlled and self-sustaining nuclear reaction under the west bleachers of Stagg Field. By 1970 Stagg Field had become the Joseph Regenstein Library.

The University of Chicago is now a Division III college and a sponsor of 19 intercollegiate sports. It is a charter member of the University Athletic Association (UAA), founded in 1986 to promote excellence in athletics without compromising academics. Stagg Field has been relocated to the northwest corner of the campus.

From the guide to the University of Chicago. Department of Physical Education and Athletics. Records, 1892-1999, (Special Collections Research Center University of Chicago Library 1100 East 57th Street Chicago, Illinois 60637 U.S.A.)