Scout can't help but raise an eyebrow at the nondescript white guy who will be kicking his legs a lot on the football field at Saturday's homecoming game.

Scout has long wondered why the University avoids mention of the Chief tradition anywhere — not in buildings, sporting arenas, on uniforms or even stationery.

The only place Scout usually sees the Chief is on students' clothes, ESPN and the field and court, flailing.

An anonymous, knowledgable University administrator gave Scout the skinny.

"The Chief had been used by many people in unauthorized ways on things like toilet paper and underwear and other things (that) were not dignified."

So the University slyly pushed it away to avoid attention. That's a bureacratic tradition.

As it turned out Scout's source was right; former alumni said the Chief used to litter everything: carvings, toilet paper, beer mugs, garbage cans, even beer itself, if one alum remembered correctly. And as tradition goes, those items are now keepsakes.

Scout's source basically said that the Chief is an "honored and revered symbol." Scout's source said it's blatantly not a mascot.

Scout questions the "honored and revered" but if he's not a mascot then what?

Thomas Hardy, the official University spokesman on the issue, rehearsed a line on the subject: "The Chief is considered a symbol of the athletic teams for the Urbana-Champaign campus."

Hardy said it a couple times, apparently to make sure Scout got the point.

"The decision on that goes back to policy that's been established by the Board of Trustees to have the Chief as an honored symbol of the athletic teams for the campus," Hardy said. "The appropriate place for the Chief to appear for that honor would be at half time events for football and basketball where the Chief does his dance and leaves."

The bureaucratic speech sounds pretty traditional for the administration. And it was the Board of Trustees who created the broken-record-sounding official statement on the Chief.

The Board also had the "Dialogue on Chief Illiniwek" (http://www.uiuc.edu/dialogue/), an exhaustive compilation of opinions on the Chief.

Scout sifted through reports and letters and then got nowhere. Scout believes the University wasted $315,134 on the dialogue (the figure comes from a January 2001 progress report to the North Central Association).

That, too, is a tradition. Spend money. The problem might go away.

But Scout also remembers being present when then-board chairman Gerald Shea created the infamous "committee of one." Trustee Roger Plummer was to be the one-man show to find a solution.

Plummer's final answer: Keep or get rid of the Chief. That was right in line with a productive tradition: Pay lip service and the problem will go away.

Of course, Sports Illustrated conducted a survey of 351 American Indians (apparently they're hard to find) and discovered a majority either don't care or don't object to their culture in sporting nicknames and mascots.

That March 4, 2002 publication is now the oft-quoted record showing why American Indians feel honored by the "white man dances around" show.

Or maybe it shows that American Indians already feel apathetic and disinterested in this segement of a long history of cultural abuse.

Scout leans toward the second option.

But Scout still searched on for an answer to the debate. The National Collegiate Athletic Association recommended against using American Indian imagery in athletics in October 2002, but no action came.

And the board hasn't brought it up since Plummer's one-man determination. Chancellor Nancy "Diversity" Cantor hasn't uttered an opinion.

And that, too, is tradition: Don't talk about it and it'll go away.

And that brings Scout back to the weak Columbus Day protest of the Chief on the Quad more than a week ago that had both sides in attendance. Students rehearsed the same phrases and beat the same tired drums.

Sounds like tradition: Say the same thing again and again until it goes away.

And the Chief tradtion (the dancing white kid, the ignorant supporters, the educated supporters, the whiny protesters, the passionate activists, the stodgy board and the standoffish administration) will likely continue, too.

Why? It's tradition.