ATHLETICS

How The Growth Of College Athletics Has Impacted The History Of Higher Education

How The Growth Of College Athletics Has Impacted The History Of Higher Education

Intercollegiate athletics in the United States has come to be regarded as higher education's "peculiar institution." This somewhat critical characterization results from the fact that although intercollegiate athletics is seldom listed as part of the central mission of a college or university, athletics have come to command inordinate visibility, resources, influence, and attention both inside and outside many campuses. Analyzing, explaining, and dealing with this disparity between official philosophy and actual practice presents a complex analytic task. To truly understand the present situation requires a reconstruction of college athletics' unique historical evolution (Atwell, 1980).

Visitors to an American campus cannot help but be struck by the physical presence of the intercollegiate athletics enterprise. In the twenty-first century, it is not unusual for a major university campus to contain both a football stadium that seats 70,000 spectators and a basketball arena that accommodates audiences of 20,000. In the year 2000 many universities had annual operating budgets for athletics ranging between $30 million and $60 million. The success and pervasiveness of college sports described was not inevitable, but is the result of particular innovations and episodes over the past 150 years.

The Violent Birth of Intercollegiate Sports

Prior to 1850 intercollegiate sports played a marginal role in collegiate life. If there was a need for physical activity in the student regimen, college presidents and deans thought manual labor in the form of farming or clearing boulders from college lands fit the bill perfectly. Though admittedly both economical and expedient, students, not surprisingly, remained unconvinced that this was the type of physical release that their souls craved. Instead, collegiate student bodies increasingly devised their own elaborate (and often brutal) intramural contests known as "class rushes (Atwell, 1980)." These "rushes" usually involved some variation of football, which actually provided a pretext for a ritualistic and violent hazing of the incoming freshman by the sophomore class.

College officials struggled to curb these violent student traditions, but intramural sports persisted within the campus and eventually took a decisive turn toward sanctioned and refereed events in which a team representing one institution competed against its counterpart from another. Despite the increase in organization, administrators initially were not eager, generally speaking, to embrace such contests that they viewed as inappropriate distractions from serious scholarly work. Indicative of the administrative outrage at such elaborate contests was the telegram that the president of Cornell sent to officials at the University of Michigan in 1873 when he learned that student teams from the two institutions were planning to meet in Cleveland for a football game: "I will not permit thirty men to travel four hundred miles merely to agitate a bag of wind" (Rudolph, p. 374 - 375).

Whether or not Cornell's president won this particular battle, he and college presidents elsewhere lost the war of curbing intercollegiate athletic contests. With or without administrative blessings, college students formed athletic associations that included ...