May 19, 1999

ON CAMPUS

In Chicago, Ph.D.'s Take a Back Seat to a Degree of Silliness

HICAGO -- "People think of the University of Chicago and they think the students are weird," says Tom Howe, a junior from Atlanta. Having taken off his chicken suit, he is wearing a cardboard crown from a Burger King Kid's Meal. "We want to show that intellectual doesn't necessarily mean stuffy."

It is this philosophy -- that Chicago students can have fun if they really put their minds to it -- that gave birth to the University of Chicago Scavenger Hunt, a yearly celebration of looniness at a campus far better known for its Nobel laureates. Putting aside term papers for a long weekend, hundreds of undergraduates in teams representing dormitories and student organizations range around the campus -- and, this year, the North American continent -- in search of items that will never be found in a course catalogue.

The grand prize is $500, but the goal, says Howe, is loftier: "to make the participants maximize their intellectual creativity."

These were among the 339 items on the list for this year's scavenger hunt, released at the stroke of midnight on May 6:

No. 123: A computer suffering a year 2000 problem.

No. 262: Five Mensa membership cards.

No. 167: A 15-foot-tall monument to Grimace, the McDonald's Happy Meal character.

No. 40: A tenured professor willing to recite profane lyrics from a gangsta rap song.

Each team works from an identical list; items are assigned points, based on difficulty, and the team with the most points by Sunday afternoon is the winner. The wording of certain clues often suggests a trip to a far-flung destination -- having a team member photographed with an Ontario police officer, for instance.

Teams are often elaborately organized, with "page masters" assigned to each page of the list and at least one person operating a computer long after midnight in search of Web sites that will lead the team to cubic zirconia (20 points) or Chicago Bulls season tickets (15 points) or an autographed photograph of the Food Network star Jacqui Malouf (30 points).

"One of the items on the list was the 'street value of Mount Everest,' " said Sam Hunt, a freshman competing for his dorm, Shoreland Hall. "So we posted it on Ebay, and made it look pretty, with a nice picture of the mountain and everything. The bidding got up to $180 before we got kicked off the site."

The Shoreland team is run out of sixth-floor dormitory room of its captain, Ryan Miller. By the end of the weekend, Thai food containers litter the floor and at least three trash cans are overflowing with empty soda cans. The members have slept little if at all, and the room is a nest of cables that wire no fewer than six personal computers.

When the phone rings, it is answered with a curt "Command central" and calls are kept short so that the line can be free for a check-in from the road-trip group, probably somewhere in Canada.

"From what we can gather, the road-trip team is doing really well," Miller says. "Except last time they checked in, they sounded drunk."

Other items on this year's list included building a nuclear reactor from scratch (one team was actually successful -- this is the University of Chicago, after all), an edible iMac computer and a ticket to a local theater for a certain movie opening May 19. (To these students, the date needs no further explanation.)

No one is really sure how or when the scavenger hunt began, but they do know it is a welcome break from economics exams and Shakespeare papers -- a way to demonstrate, in Howe's words, that "we actually can have fun on this campus."

And how do you say fun on a college campus better than a keg toss? As part of the Scavolympics, a string of a dozen events before the final judging that teams compete for points in, all 13 teams came together to recreate a battle of the Civil War, to demonstrate a fight between Aunt Jemima and Mrs. Butterworth, and, yes, to toss a keg.

Competing for his dorm, Hitchcock-Snell, 23-year-old Niyi Omojola, after minutes earlier winning the competition that called for contestants to eat an entire bottle of squeeze cheese, won the keg toss. While others had grabbed the kegs with two hands, taken a few steps and heaved, he held it with one hand, arm extended, and spun around like a discus thrower, propelling the keg beyond the other teams' markers.

"I was trying to get some torque," said Omojola, a junior. "If you can direct that torque in a straight line, you can throw it pretty far. People were trying to muscle it, and that's not going to work."

And if you can't say fun at the U. of C., with a little torque and a keg toss, certainly you can with a nuclear reactor.

Two physics majors, Justin Kasper and Fred Niell, gathered up some spare junk from their physics labs and dorm rooms and built a plutonium-producing reactor.

"It's kind of scary how easy it was to do," said Niell, assuring onlookers that there was only a trace of plutonium -- nothing harmful. "It only took us about a day to build it. We've been thinking about it for a few days and we gathered the parts, and last night we assembled it. In Justin's room -- he lost the coin toss."