The University of Chicago Magazine

1908 After Chicago defeated Minnesota in a November 1907 football game, Maroon fans returned to campus with “enthusiasm that a man over thirty never feels,” according to a January article. Deans repressed the students’impromptu pep rally. In the senior college chapel November 5, Dean Tufts admonished that “the University was willing there should be manifestations of enthusiasm after school hours or in the evenings, but that the forenoon was regarded as sacred to class work and therefore must be held inviolate.”

1958 “The proper treatment of Martians by space explorers from Earth, and ownership and trespassing rights in outer space” were debated by two international legal authorities at the Law School, reported the Magazine’s January issue. Among other observations, Andrew Haley and Welf Heinrich noted that “the Golden Rule has no application whatsoever. We must do unto others as they would have done unto them. To treat others as we would desire to be treated might well mean their destruction. This is the vastly significant premise of metalaw (the law of outer space).”

1983 Chicago was once home to “Mr. Tornado”—not a super-villain but Ted Fujita. Fujita, a professor in the department of geophysical sciences and the College, created the Fujita Scale used to classify tornadoes, much like the Richter Scale with earthquakes. “Tornadoes are like criminals who cannot get away without leaving their fingerprints,” he said in the Winter issue. The summer before, the Magazine reported, after 28 years of researching funnel clouds, Fujita finally saw his first live one. (See “High-pressure career” to read about Fujita’s extreme-weather heir.)

1998 The February Magazine reviewed changes to the University’s undergraduate concentration options. Although the five most popular concentrations were traditional—economics, biological sciences, English, psychology, and political science—many students had expanded into newer fields. Computer science, environmental studies, African and African American studies, and cinema and media studies were “hot” new majors.—E.D.F. and Seth Mayer, ‘08