Colonial American colleges adhered to a strict policy of in loco parentis, which encouraged administrators and professors, acting in the place of parents, to take charge of the moral as well as the academic growth of students. This authoritarian approach to education severely constrained campus life, and students gradually developed extracurricular activities, including literary societies, fraternities, and sports, to channel their energies.
The first campus athletic events grew out of hazing rituals pitting sophomores against freshmen in often violent wrestling or football contests (which at first looked more like soccer than modern American football), but when students started to identify more with their school than their class, they initiated competition with rival colleges. The first intercollegiate sporting event took place in 1852, when a railroad official inspired by the English Cambridge-Oxford rivalry sponsored a crew race between Harvard and Yale, two schools that dominated college athletics for the rest of the nineteenth century.
The race established a pattern of commercialism that many modern observers mistakenly consider a recent trend in college sports. Though schools claimed (and still claim) to follow the ideals of amateurism, they very quickly turned to professionalism in practice. Many of the first intercollegiate sporting events were organized by promoters who paid athletes with perks and prizes. In addition, as early as the 1860s, the desire to win led a number of college teams to hire professional coaches and aggressively recruit student athletes without regard for their academic qualifications.
Throughout the nineteenth century, four sports—crew, baseball, football, and track and field—dominated college athletics. The most popular sporting events of the period were the 1870s regattas and the New York Thanksgiving Day football games of the 1890s, each of which drew between thirty and forty thousand spectators. Professional baseball and Olympic track and field eventually diminished the popularity of their college predecessors. But football and basketball did not achieve professional popularity until the 1940s, and they became (and remain) the two big-time college sports. The NCAA basketball tournament, known as March Madness, and the college football bowl games epitomize modern college athletics.
Institutionalization
College sports were for several decades controlled by students, not administrators. Occasionally, the faculty or the president would assert their power—for example, by refusing permission for weekday away games—but students organized practices, drew up schedules, and raised money for equipment and travel. Soon, however, college athletics became centralized and institutionalized. Students themselves took the first step in limiting their autonomy by hiring professional coaches to do a job once filled by student captains. They were willing to submit to outside authority if it meant victory. At Yale, alumnus Walter Camp ran every aspect of the football program from the 1880s to 1911, and his teams won eleven national championships.
Though students formed the first governing bodies, such as the Rowing Association of American Colleges and the American College Baseball Association, administrators got involved in athletic programming when they started to suspect that sports interfered with their academic and moral interests. Harvard, Yale, and Princeton formed faculty athletic committees in the early 1880s, and most schools quickly followed suit. Simultaneously, alumni associations who believed sports enhanced the reputation of their alma maters pushed for greater rationalization of athletics. In the 1890s, the Dartmouth College Board of Trustees took over a struggling athletic program, and with better funding and organization it thrived.
Finally, the 1880s and 1890s also saw several movements for interinstitutional control of athletics, led by administrators worried that athletic abuses were tarnishing the image of higher education. In 1895 leading Midwestern schools organized the first athletic conference, the powerful Big Ten. Three years later, leading eastern colleges met unsuccessfully to straighten out the mess of eligibility rules, which had grown so lax that many teams fielded players with no affiliation to the sponsoring college. The most important decision on intercollegiate organization came in 1905, in the aftermath of a heated controversy about brutality in football. Many schools considered banning the sport, especially after a Union College player died from injuries sustained in a pile-up, but finally they decided to create what became the National Collegiate Athletic Association. In the early 2000s, the NCAA, a colossal and well-funded bureaucracy of athletic directors, had more than 1,000 member institutions.
Women and Title IX
Though women played college sports for much of the twentieth century, the generally held conviction that competition was unfeminine kept their contests mostly informal until the 1960s and 1970s. When a number of previously all-male schools decided to accept women, they also began to field women's teams. More importantly, however, Title IX of the Education Amendments of 1972 outlawed sex discrimination in higher education, which in practice meant that schools had to provide equal facilities and coaching staffs for women athletes and, more controversially, that they had to strive for a ratio of female to male athletes roughly equal to the ratio of women to men in the student body as a whole. Many critics of Title IX argued that in practice it require dcuts in athletic programs for men (departments could not afford to expand, so they contracted), but after it went into effect, women's sports exploded in popularity.
The Association for Intercollegiate Athletics for Women (AIAW), formed in 1971, was the first successful governing body for women's college sports. It tended to approach athletics with a less competitive attitude than the NCAA. For instance, the AIAW invited all teams, not just winners, to participate in national championships. In 1980, however, the NCAA decided to offer its own women's championships, and the AIAW shut down two years later. Under the leadership of the NCAA, women's college sports steadily if slowly gained main stream acceptance, but some women argue that the NCAA squeezed the unique qualities out of women's athletics, turning it into the men's version writ small.
Crisis
Since the 1980s, critics have been claiming that college athletics in its present form is inconsistent with the values of higher education. They argue that athletic programs (which, contrary to popular opinion, almost always run at a deficit) siphon off millions of dollars that should go to a wider range of student activities, that gambling and lucrative licensing and television contracts taint the educational missions of nonprofit and public institutions, and that student athletes often fail to meet academic standards and are unable to get a proper education because their sports require all their time and effort. On the other side, defenders respond that sports teaches students skills they cannot learn in a classroom and that it helps create a sense of community pride on campus.
These problems are not new. In 1939 the president of the University of Chicago abolished its very successful football program on the grounds that the point of education was to make the curriculum "rational and intelligible," not to provide extracurricular escapes from it. Another serious controversy erupted in 1951, when seven leading college basketball teams, including the City College of New York national champions, were implicated in a point-shaving scandal (gamblers paid them not to cover the spread).
Concerns about the corrupting influence of money in college sports prompted the NCAA to regularize athletic scholarships in 1956, but the eight schools that had formed the Ivy League in 1954 refused to accept the new rules. In 1985 the NCAA forced the Southern Methodist University football team to disband for a year (the so called death penalty) because boosters had paid players $60,000. The next year, the NCAA instituted Proposition 48, later Proposition 16, which established minimum academic requirements for incoming student athletes.
Despite the rule changes and strict sanctions, many observers saw college athletics getting worse, not better. The influential book The Game of Life, published in 2001, analyzed a huge amount of data to argue that athletes had a distinct admissions advantage over other applicants, did worse than nonathletes in the classroom, and tended to create their own athlete culture that had little to do with the rest of campus life. In addition, almost all schools lost money on sports, and athletic success did not translate into alumni giving. In short, the book made the case that college sports were becoming increasingly segregated from both the day-to-day lives of most students and psychic identity of colleges. Even so, reformers were unlikely to remake college sports in the near future. Regardless of possible incommensurability of big-time athletics and higher education, intercollegiate sports are an extremely lucrative and popular part of the sports industry in general.
Bibliography
Rosen, Charles. Scandals of '51: How the Gamblers Almost Killed College Basketball. New York: Hold, Rinehart, and Winston, 1978.
Shulman, James L., and William G. Bowen. The Game of Life: College Sports and Educational Values. Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 2001.
Smith, Ronald A. Sports and Freedom: The Rise of Big-Time College Athletics. New York: Oxford University Press, 1988.
Sperber, Murray. College Sports Inc.: The Athletic Department vs. the University. New York: Holt, 1990.
Watterson, John Sayle. College Football: History, Spectacle, Controversy. Baltimore, Md.: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2000.
Welch, Paula. Silver Era, Golden Moments: A Celebration of Ivy League Women's Athletics. Lanham, Md.: Madison, 1999.
—Jeremy Derfner
