Intercollegiate athletics

“ Athletic regulations should not debar a student from playing summer baseball.
15. No student in an American college should be eligible to compete in intercollegiate athletics until he has begun his second year's work. ”

“ These three—which are the controlling aims of intercollegiate athletics—are also the aims of horse-racing, prize-fighting, and professional baseball.
These two sets of aims are in sharp and almost complete conflict. Roughly speaking, success in attaining the aims of athletics as education is in inverse proportion to success in attaining the aims of athletics as business. Intercollegiate athletics to-day are for business. The question is pertinent whether schools and colleges should promote athletics as business. ”

“ There have been numerous attempts to prove that intercollegiate athletics are not detrimental to scholarship by showing that athletes receive higher marks than other students. Such arguments are beside the point. ”

“ The most obvious fact is that our system of intercollegiate athletics, after unbounded opportunity to show what it can do for the health, recreation, and character of all our students, has proved a failure. The ideal of the coach is excessive training of the few: he best attains the business ends for which he is hired by the neglect of those students in greatest need of physical training. Our present system encourages most students to take their athletics by proxy. ”

“ The history of fraternity houses at some colleges is a record of organized competition in luxury, usually maintained on borrowed money.
Another obstacle to intellectual enthusiasm is the dominance of intercollegiate athletics. Out-of-doors games should provide recreation as a preparation for study rather than as a substitute for study. But, intercollegiate athletics having won supremacy, students do not tolerate conflicting interests. ”

“ The facts are well known to many who are engaged in the work of college education, and there is no wish here to individualize. One of the worst causes of their existence has been the all-pervading pressure of intercollegiate athletics. An institution with few professors and many students, which has much ambition for athletic reputation and therefore has admitted athletes with little discrimination, is confronted with an embarrassing choice of alternatives. ”

“ If the objection arises that intercollegiate athletics have educational value, there is no one to deny it. 'Athletics for education' and 'athletics for business' are general terms, used throughout this discussion as already defined. ”

“ The educational effect of our exaggerated emphasis on intercollegiate athletics is shown in the attitude of alumni. It is difficult to arouse the interest of a large proportion of graduates in anything else. At one of the best of our small colleges, in the Mississippi Valley, I saw a massive concrete grandstand. This valiant emulation of the Harvard stadium seemed to me to typify the indifference of alumni to the crying needs of their alma mater. ”

“ Let our colleges first adopt whatever measures may be necessary to make athletics yield their educational values to all students and teachers. If intercollegiate athletics can then be conducted as incidental and contributory to the main purposes of athletics, well and good. But first of all the question must be decisively settled, which aims are to dominate—those of business or those of education. And it will be difficult for a college already in the clutches of commercialism to retain the system and at the same time cultivate a spirit antagonistic to it. ”

“ What athletics may achieve without the hindrance of intercollegiate games and business motives is suggested by the experience of Reed College. There the policy of athletics for everybody was adopted five years ago before there were any teachers, students, alumni, or traditions. Last year all but six of the students took part in athletics in the spirit of sport for the sake of health, recreation, and development. Sixty per cent of the men of the college, including the faculty, took part in a schedule of sixteen baseball games. ”

“ Their own publications, the country over, if distribution of space is a true criterion, indicate that they regard intercollegiate athletics as more important than the combined offerings of art, music, literature, social service, politics, philosophy, and religion. This excessive interest in athletics by proxy is antagonistic to scholarly ambitions and to the cultivation of habits of sustained thinking. ”

“ Of independent origin but hastened by the spread of the gymnasium is the vast athletic interest of undergraduates. Its earliest form, conducted on a considerable scale, was rowing. The first rowing club was formed at Yale in 1843, and the first intercollegiate race was rowed on Lake Winnepesaukee in 1852, Harvard defeating Yale. Rowing is now a form of athletics at every college where facilities permit. The first baseball nine was formed at Princeton in 1859, and the game spread rapidly to all the other colleges. ”

“ It is with pleasure that I take this opportunity to give you a glimpse of the work of the Junior Colleges of Missouri in Athletics.
In 1914, the organization known as the Junior College Athletic Association of Missouri was formed. Up until this time there were only a few of the colleges devoting much time to athletics. Howard Payne has for years been one of the strongest supporters of athletics for women, not only within her own college, but a strong advocate of intercollegiate sports. ”

“ Either the work of a given week in their courses is so substantial, and their own contribution to the work so great, that students cannot possibly miss it, and 'make it up' while meeting the equally great demands of the following week, or else the work of all the students is so easy that the athletes on a week's absence do not miss much. What actually happens, year in and year out, is that the standards of scholarship of the entire institution are lowered to meet the exigencies of intercollegiate athletics. ”

“ As early as 1840 an annual game was played at Yale between the freshmen and the sophomores, but the establishment of a regular football association dates from 1872, also at Yale. In the following year an intercollegiate organization was formed, and since then football has increased in popularity at the colleges to such an extent that just as baseball has become the great national game, so has football become the great American collegiate game. Track athletics is the most recent form of athletic sports to be introduced into the college, and most colleges now have their field days. ”

“ After five years of personal observation of no less than 100 universities and colleges, in thirty-eight states, Foster concludes that intercollegiate athletics have proved a failure, and that they are costly and injurious on account of an excessive physical training of a few students, and of such students as need training least, while healthful and moderate exercise at a small expense for all students is most needed. ”

“ It may be replied that disorders consequent upon victories are not confined to the college campus. Indeed, to the minds of many candid men, the great disorders which bring dangerous disgrace to the present system of college athletics, and reflect upon college government as well, occur at the intercollegiate contests, when the athletes meet on neutral ground. Such men admit the advantages of the system. ”

“ These, in general, show a slow but steady advance in this country since 1876, when athletics were established here. In that year there was not a single world's best record held by an American amateur, and high-school boys of to-day could in most, though not in all lines, have won the American championship twenty-five years ago. Of course, in a strict sense, intercollegiate contests do not show the real advance in athletics, because it is not necessary for a man in order to win a championship to do his best ”

“ That university continued the traditional dual contest of coaches and physical directors with their conflicting ideals. Recently I received a letter from the professor of physical education who did accept the position, himself one of the ablest athletes among its graduates, declaring that he would no longer attempt the impossible, in an institution which deliberately prostituted athletics for commercial ends.
We hear much about the value of intercollegiate games for the 'tired business man' who needs to get out of doors and watch a sport that will make him forget his troubles. ”

“ But a distinctively American attitude towards sport is also manifested in the intense personal and university rivalries developed, the very rock upon which the modern system of inter-collegiate athletics rests, no less than in the genius for organization and systemization which has, within the last twenty-five years, made organized athletics such a tremendous factor in the life of all American universities. ”

“ Nowadays the Varsity team too often is far from being the apex of a pyramid whose foundations lie in a widely distributed and wholesome interest in sports for their own sake. Too often we have the spectacle of high-school students coming to our universities with their careers all made for them, because of their ability in athletics, bringing with them a spirit of professionalism utterly foreign to university ideals. ”

“ Naturally athletics was selected as one of the chief fields of effort. Her managers knew that athletic supremacy would give the college the greatest prestige. Championships in the different branches of sport would attract students, and with a full roster of students, year after year, it was thought to be only a question of time when all the rest would come to her. ”

“ They fail to see that there is more in the annual "big game" than nine or eleven supreme athletes brought together to "represent" the University. Fortunately there are many more who view the whole question in its proper perspective, men who are no less thrilled by the contagious enthusiasm of the annual big games, and who recognize them as an inevitable and not undesirable factor in our college life, but who seek to bring athletics into a sane and wholesome relationship with the academic life of our universities. ”

“ For some years prior to 1906 no student of an American university was allowed to represent his university in any sport for longer than four years. Early in that year, however, many of the most important institutions, including Harvard, Yale, Princeton and Pennsylvania, entered upon a new agreement, that only students who have been in residence one year should play in ’varsity teams in any branch of athletics and that no student should play longer than three years. ”

“ Each institution has its well-equipped gymnasium, under the instruction of an efficient instructor, and during the unseasonable days of winter every student of the system is required to go through an hour's drill in the gymnasium three afternoons in the week.
The average man gets his idea of college athletics from the base-ball and foot-ball teams, which generally tour the State annually. ”

“ Recreational activities and athletics
Competitive athletics are typical of the American college. Theoretically, athletics are open to all students. Practically, in many of our colleges athletics are made available only to the student with leisure time and exceptional physique. Consistent effort is being made today by college authorities to provide opportunities for intramural (interclass, intergroup, and mass) athletics for the whole student body ”

“ Though informal running, jumping, and hurdling matches as well as wrestling and boxing always had a certain degree of popularity among the students, track athletics, as a form of inter-collegiate sport, was not organized until football and baseball had been recognized for some time. A University Athletic Club was organized in 1874, with the captains of the running and jumping squads among the officers, though no public contests were held, apparently, until 1876 when the first "athletic tournament" took place on the Fair Grounds. ”

“ The athletic alumni bring in new students for athletic purposes, and these students increase the athletic excitement while they are undergraduates, and go out from the institution to multiply the athletic alumni.
I am only stating what every insider knows perfectly well, that our college athletics today is almost universally commercialized. All the big colleges have “alumni committees,” who are out scouting for the best athletic material ”

“ The students in many schools, as we shall see later, have taken their own physical education in hand. The present passion for athletic sports seems wellnigh universal and has gained such headway that it is evident that it must be taken very seriously. Over $1,000,000 are annually spent on college athletics in the United States, an increase of five-fold in the past ten or twelve years, and some young men, at least, unquestionably go to college for the specific purpose of playing upon the university teams. ”

“ Is it not an anomaly that those in charge of higher institutions of learning should leave athletic activities, which are of such great potential educational value for all students, chiefly under the control of students, alumni, coaches, newspapers, and spectators? Usually the coach is engaged by the students, paid for by the students, and responsible only to them. He is not a member of the faculty or responsible to the faculty. The faculty have charge of the college as an educational institution; athletics is for business and therefore separately controlled. ”

“ If every schoolboy, whether an athlete or a grind, and every college man would sign it and stick to it, we’d never hear of one school’s having ‘severed athletic relations’ with another; there’d be no brawling in football games, and we’d never see the charge of professionalism brought against a college. And it is a pledge that we need not leave behind us when we graduate; it’s a good pledge to stick to right through life.
“I have no fault to find with Hillton athletes on the score of unfairness. I earnestly believe that athletics are pure here ”