Returning Football to Chicago State Will Not Reverse the School’s Declining Fortunes
Chicago State University has failed at everything
“And I say to you gentlemen that this college is a failure. The trouble is we're neglecting football for education,” Groucho Marx’s character, Professor Wagstaff, said in the 1932 classic, Horse Feathers.
And the problem in Illinois, from kindergarten up to its public universities, is that we're neglecting education for politics.
In April, Chicago State University (CSU) named Bobby Rome II its first head football coach. Football introduced at CSU will not be a club-level endeavor, nor a non-scholarship Division III program along the lines of the University of Chicago Maroons.
The Chicago State football team begins play in 2026 in the Northeast Conference as a Division I Football Championship Subdivision (FCS) program. Western Illinois University in Macomb — another taxpayer supported college — is also an FCS school.
Chicago State was founded as teacher’s college, known as the Cook County Normal School, in 1867. It adopted Chicago State University as its official name in 1971, and a year later it moved to its current campus on the northern end of the Roseland neighborhood on Chicago's South Side.
Academically, CSU is a basket case: According to U.S. News and World Report, there are only 1,450 undergraduate students and 867 graduate students enrolled.
Worse, Chicago State’s four-year graduation rate is a meager 11 percent, again, according to U.S. News and World Report.
It could be worse — because it has been. In 2016, during a state budget stalemate between former Governor Bruce Rauner and Illinois House Speaker and Democratic Party boss Michael Madigan — who enjoyed supermajorities in both chambers of the General Assembly — there were only 86 freshman students enrolled at Chicago State.
To this day, Illinois Democrats point to that 2016 budget standoff as a contributing factor to the state's continuing fiscal instability, but in 2015 and 2016, Boss Madigan, who now is facing sentencing for corruption, had the votes in his pocket to override any Rauner veto. All Madigan had to do was snap his corrupt bony fingers to get a budget passed. Yet Madigan and the Democrats needed an issue to hang around the hapless Rauner's neck. As far as Madigan was concerned, the state could go to hell— and it did — where it remains.
In 2016, there was speculation that CSU's accreditation was in doubt. That was probably just talk, because most of its students are black, 78 percent of them, Judith Crown reported this week in Crain’s Chicago Business. According to College Factual, African Americans make up over 75 percent of its faculty. The administration at CSU likely has a similar racial breakdown.
Chicago State is a powerbase for the city’s black population and an accreditation battle would immediately turn into a high-pitched racial squabble.
But remember that 11 percent four-year graduation rate.
Back to sports
CSU currently fields 14 Division I sports teams for both men and women. You can be forgiven if you didn't know that, because few people are paying attention — or care. Known as the Cougars, CSU's most prominent athletic team is its men's basketball program. The men's hoops program is a perfect match for CSU. Those Cougars got off to a strong start. Their first two seasons, in the mid-1980s, brought winning records to the South Side. Since then, CSU men's basketball team has enjoyed just one winning season.
Calm down and be patient — any team can have a bad half-century.
Over the past six season, only twice has CSU recorded double-digit wins in a season, but in both seasons, the Cougars failed to surpass .500. In the 2020-21 season, shortened by COVID, the Cougars were winless.
Well, winning isn't everything. Particularly if attendance is strong at CSU games. But it’s not. If you browse the box scores for men's Cougar hoops home games, attendance ranges from 150-350 per matchup. The Cougars home court is the Patricia and Emil Jones Convocation Center, which has a capacity of 7,000.
Good seats are always available there. So are good rows. And entire sections.
Patricia, who died in 2001, was the wife of Emil Jones Jr. A South Side Chicago Democrat, Emil was a longtime member of the General Assembly, who served as president of the state Senate from 2003-09.
Jones is the father of Emil Jones III, who succeeded him in the state Senate. The younger Jones certainly has carved his own path. His recent federal bribery trial ended with a mistrial because jurors were unable to reach a unanimous verdict, but prosecutors revealed at a hearing this week that they plan to retry him. Jones III attended Chicago State University, but not surprisingly, like most of its students, he did not earn a degree.
The elder Jones was the sugar daddy for CSU, and therefore, he bears some responsibility for its failures.
"During his years in the legislature, Senate President Emil Jones has funneled millions of dollars in pork projects to his beloved Chicago State University," the Chicago Tribune's Clout Street reported in 2008.
“We learned a lot in Springfield, when they slice the pie," Jones remarked at that event. “It’s nice to be in the room when you slice the pie. And [sometimes] I get criticized for making sure that a piece of that pie comes back home here, but that’s your job as a lawmaker. To look out for your district, to look out for the young people that attend these institutions.”
There are some decent faculty members at Chicago State. Two of them found themselves on the wrong side of their employer, so they sued, as The Fix explained in 2019:
“Professors Robert Bionaz and Philip Beverly filed the lawsuit in 2014, after several attempts by the university to take down their blog, CSU Faculty Voice."
The blog served as an outlet for faculty to criticize the school’s administration and decisions, on issues ranging from inflated salaries to alleged cronyism. Chicago State is paying professors $650,000 in legal fees and revising its cyberbullying and computer use policies, which the university accused them of violating. It used multiple legal strategies to try to shut down CSU Faculty Voice, including that it violated trademark law. Another university official testified that she was pressured to falsely accuse Beverly of sexual harassment in order to shut down the blog.” The CSU Faculty Blog, while inactive since 2019, is still online. The blog’s slogan is “Crony $tate University, where competent people are fired and our friends are hired.”
Contrarian contributor, Paul Vallas, who is not someone who backs down from a challenge, briefly served as the chief administration officer for CSU.
In 2009, the situation was so bad at Chicago State that even the New York Times, by way of the Chicago News Cooperative, took notice.
We’ve already established that Chicago State is an academic and administrative disaster. As for sports, there is only one instance when a Division I Cougar team — in this case the 2024 women's tennis team — won a conference championship and qualified for an NCAA post season tournament.
Does any sane person believe that CSU can succeed in football, which is by far the most expensive college sport to field? There are no major college football teams in Chicago. Loyola University folded its intercollegiate football program in 1930; DePaul benched its football team in 1939, the same year the University of Chicago fielded its last Big Ten Conference squad. The University of Illinois-Chicago’s gridiron team took its last snap in 1973. Another excuse for a school, Northeastern Illinois University, dumped all its athletic programs in 1998.
Money
College sports programs usually struggle to attract fans at commuter schools such as CSU.
Where does the money come from to field CSU’s teams?
Chicago State’s sports programs are partially funded — perhaps mainly — by student fees. That’s right, students are paying for athletic teams, for the most part, they never see in action. While there is no breakdown of how that money is spent, CSU students must kick in a lot of money, $117 per-credit-hour, for a slew of what are euphemistically described on the "Tuitions & Fees section" of the college's website as services, including athletics. “All students are assessed the mandatory fees on a per-credit hour basis whether or not they opt to take advantage of the services,” that page states. However, a major fundraising effort for the athletic department began in 2023.
Watching the Cougars on television isn’t an option. Unless the men's or women's basketball teams play a Power 4 conference team, TV isn't interested in Chicago State because no one else is.
As for that women’s basketball team, it’s a losing program too, they haven’t had a double-digit win season since 2010-11. But at least these CSU students can say they nibbled on Emil Jones' expensive “slice of the pie” when the time comes to make their monthly student loan payments.
WIU
Last month the Wall Street Journal traveled to Macomb and reported on the falling enrollment at Western Illinois University. That shrinking student body has brought tough times to Macomb.
The Journal explained why it is happening.
“More students are opting out of college after high school, calculating that tuition prices, as well as the opportunity cost of lost work years, aren’t worth it.”
It’s the same situation other colleges are confronted with, save for elite schools such as the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. Worse, the Journal reported that in 2007 the number of births in the United States peaked at 4.3 million. That number continues to fall. For years, Instapundit’s Glenn Reynolds, a University of Tennessee law professor, has been predicting a higher education bubble.
It’s here.
Colleges such as WIU, and of course, Chicago State University, should retool their mission. Or smash it. Transforming these institutions into large trade schools, to produce the next generation of mechanics, electricians, and plumbers, is a smart way to pivot. But common sense has never been a strong suit for Illinois public servants. Leaders in other states are almost as dumb.
As for the nearly always empty Patricia and Emil Jones Convocation Center, it's possible a megachurch would pay a generous price for it.
Speaking of dumb — I’ve never met a dumb electrician. America certainly needs more electricians, welders, and plumbers, as opposed to graduates with degrees in Women and Gender studies.
Chicago State University has failed at everything else; it will fail in FCS football too. At a time when most universities should at the very least be contracting, they're expanding. The overall problem is that taxpayers are funding this colossal producer of catastrophes, and no one complains. No one does anything about it. Instead, they keep ignoring that toxic pie. The Urbana-Champaign campus of the University of Illinois is often described at the state’s flagship college.
But if you know even a little bit about Illinois politics, Chicago State University richly deserves that title.
