American History Reform

University Press of Kansas

Chapter Title: Academic Backlash in the Post—World War I Era

Book Title: The Rise of Gridiron University Book Subtitle: Higher Education's Uneasy Alliance with Big-Time Football Book Author(s): BRIAN M. INGRASSIA Published by: University Press of Kansas. (2012) Stable URL: https://www.jstor.org/stable/j.ctt1ch79ct.12

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C H A P T E R 7 Academic Backlash in the Post–World War I Era

G. T. W. Patrick, who published “The Psychology of Football” in the American Journal of Psychology in 1903, taught at the University of Iowa until 1922, when chronic neurasthenia prompted him to retire to Los Altos, California, near Stanford. During his long retirement, Patrick remained a perceptive, if cranky, observer of the academy and the American public. In October 1929, just five months after the Big Ten suspended Iowa for running an athletic slush fund, President Walter Jessup, later head of the Carnegie Foundation for the Advance- ment of Teaching, sent Patrick a copy of a new Carnegie report, Amer- ican College Athletics. In November, soon after the stock market crash, Patrick commented that the report suggested “sensible reforms.” Patrick recounted with dismay the recent Stanford-California game in Palo Alto, a spectacle that drew an overwhelming 89,000 spectators and $500,000 in gate receipts. He conceded, “The American people evidently must have sports . . . but I am wondering whether it is the function of our institutions of learning to furnish them.”1 Patrick and other Progressive Era scholars had once been optimistic that football might provide an accessible counterpoint to hyperspecialized research and help teach all Americans. But by the 1920s they were less san- guine. Consumerism, new communications technology, and militaris- tic nationalism had turned football into a hugely popular cultural spectacle located largely beyond academic control. Well-intentioned progressives had, in essence, made sport permanent by creating ath- letic departments, constructing concrete stadiums, and hiring a corps of professional athletic experts. This was at roughly the same time that university scholars had erected professional safeguards to protect themselves from the market and the society located outside the college walls—the same market within which big-time college athletics pros- pered. By the 1920s, although they did try, there was little that disaf- fected academics could do to abolish, or to reform significantly, big- time football.

While early 1900s coaches and players became skilled at producing

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a popular spectacle, the era’s scholars produced specialized knowledge that was not always appreciated by the larger public. As universities operated as industrial, knowledge-producing corporations and put professors on trial or fired them for making unpopular statements, some academics fought back by crafting reforms, including academic freedom and tenure. Scholars argued that they were credentialed, pro-

G. T. W. Patrick, early 1930s, around the time he was living near Stanford and openly questioning the place of big-time athletics in American universities. Frederick W. Kent Photograph Collection, University of Iowa Libraries, Iowa City, Iowa.

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fessional experts whose ideas resulted from careful study, training, and immersion within a community of specialists—not mere hired help. As a committee formed jointly in 1913 by several social science organizations contended, universities were inherently public institu- tions, and professors served a public role. But each new scholarly breakthrough could be a “shock to existing opinion.” In private uni- versities, harsh reactions might come from rich benefactors, while in state universities they might come from voters or politicians. Scholars had to be able to speak their minds freely in order to produce impar- tial, sound, and valuable knowledge. But they could not do so if they worked or lived in fear of untutored public opinion. Scholars needed academic freedom. Hoping to avoid comparisons to labor unions, aca- demic freedom’s proponents stressed that this was a public reform, not simply an occupational one.2 For academic freedom to work, scholars also needed job security, or permanent tenure. In University Control (1913), Columbia psychologist and public intellectual James McKeen Cattell argued that tenure was typically associated with public offices not performed as wage labor. He scorned domineering administrators as well as alumni who were more concerned with football victories than with scholarship. While Cattell acknowledged that professors should not totally control universities, he did insist that their posts should be secure enough that they could write and speak freely with- out making “dishonorable compromises.”3 Implemented together, aca- demic freedom and tenure could facilitate intellectuals’ public roles and allow them to enlighten society.

Progressives even founded an organization to protect academic free- dom and tenure, the American Association of University Professors (AAUP), in 1915. Faculty members throughout the nation had previ- ously called for a broad professional association like the American Medical Association (formed 1847) or American Bar Association (1878). The AAUP’s main goal was to ensure that universities followed academic standards and conventions. Early AAUP leaders included Columbia pragmatic philosopher John Dewey, as well as Arthur O. Lovejoy, a Johns Hopkins philosopher who had resigned from Stan- ford in 1900 to protest E. A. Ross’s firing. The AAUP’s founders saw themselves primarily as guardians of higher education, not just advo- cates for better academic working conditions. The new organization

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examined questionable dismissals of university scholars and urged the creation of guidelines and procedures regarding tenure and academic freedom.4 It intended to protect scholars from the thumbs-up or thumbs-down mentality of the unthinking mob. In this role, as we will see, during the 1920s the AAUP became a loud critic of the insti- tutional spirit that trumpeted athletics over academics, and some of its members portrayed football as an activity that, if unchecked, could corrupt universities.

Yet World War I proved that academic freedom, tenure, and the AAUP were not enough to protect professors. The range of acceptable faculty behavior, activities, and politics narrowed during the global conflict, when some universities punished professors for speaking out against American involvement in the war. Most notably, Nicholas Murray Butler tried to demonstrate Columbia’s patriotism in 1917 by ordering the faculty to stop criticizing national foreign policy. Butler subsequently fired several professors, including J. McKeen Cattell, for opposing the military draft. These dismissals were also, in part, a way for the university to settle old scores. Cattell had long grated on col- leagues, and his antiwar statements provided a convenient excuse to send him packing.5 In 1918, a Chicago court indicted W. I. Thomas— the anthropologist who envisioned football as a kind of university ex- tension in 1901—for violating the Mann Act (a Progressive Era mea- sure intended to stop underage prostitution rings but which, in practice, was often used to persecute controversial individuals). The charges were eventually dropped, but the indictment cost Thomas his job. His bohemian lifestyle certainly helped bring about the charges, but historians suspect that some Chicagoans and the Federal Bureau of Investigation may have been more concerned with Harriet Thomas’s antiwar activities than with her husband’s moral indiscretions. Thomas later taught at the New School for Social Research and at Har- vard, but he never again held a permanent faculty post.6

Although intellectual specialization had thrived in the Progressive Era, the final bars in the academic iron cage were cast during World War I. While some professors were dismissed for opposing the war, others found niches as producers of wartime knowledge in the new scholarly gridiron. First of all, industry and the federal government discovered additional practical applications for engineering and the

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sciences. In addition, psychology became particularly useful when the armed forces began using the Stanford-Binet intelligence test, devel- oped by Stanford’s Lewis Terman, to sort enlistees by mental aptitude. The government even tapped historians and political scientists to write propaganda. In turn, specialization increased as more ties were forged between universities, government, and industry. Yet although the war made some academics useful, it did not necessarily give them greater latitude to engage the public. Soon, many scholars found themselves addressing narrow audiences or beholden to funding agen- cies. Some also came to regret their former pro-war stance and re- treated into silence. Many academics subsequently became locked into a fragmented intellectual culture located in a world apart from the public sphere. This situation was diametrically opposed to the hopes of progressives, who had sought to make publicly useful knowledge.7

As disciplinary scholarship became increasingly narrow, however, football became even more important to the burgeoning consumer so- ciety. While college football suffered a brief setback at the beginning of the war, when many students entered the military, it was more pop- ular than ever by the early 1920s. The postwar athletic boom, fueled by media advances, allowed more Americans to enjoy the popular spectacle, even if they had no formal ties to the universities for which they rooted.8

Football’s growing popularity led to more criticism. Considering the progressive origins of football reform, it was only appropriate that one 1920s football critic was Upton Sinclair, the muckraker who had fa- mously taken on Chicago’s meat packers in The Jungle (1906). Sinclair turned his critical gaze toward the academy in The Goose-Step (1923). Using Progressive Era rhetoric, Sinclair lamented that too few students got too much exercise from the “gladiatorial combats” of football, while others merely exercised “vocal cords and the gambling in- stincts.” College sport, he implied, fostered the irrational, disorderly crowd—not the rational, educated public. It also represented the per- version of academic ideals and the cutthroat nature of industrial com- petition. To make matters worse, some men made a living by the vio- lent ritual. Rival colleges were carrying out “little wars” on the athletic field, which spawned “an elaborate cult of loyalties and hero- isms.” The recruiting, training, and exploitation of athletes had “be-

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come an enormous industry, absorbing the services not merely of stu- dents and alumni, but of a whole class of professional coaches, direc- tors, press agents and promoters,” who were quickly “coming to dom- inate college life and put the faculty on the shelf.” For Sinclair, a writer steeped in progressive reform, this turn of events was disgrace- ful. Faculty should be in the public eye, not hidden behind a flashy but empty spectacle that appealed to crass consumerism.9

At a time when many scholars produced useful knowledge, yet struggled to maintain professional identity and public relevance, foot- ball’s popularity and moneymaking potential also started upsetting academics. This backlash resulted, in part, from one of the most infa- mous scandals in the history of college football. In November 1921, two small southern Illinois towns—Carlinville and Taylorville, located east of St. Louis—hired ringers for an annual rivalry game played for both municipal pride and tens of thousands of dollars in wagers. Car- linville paid $2,700 to a group of athletes from Notre Dame. When the people of Taylorville discovered the plan, they hired University of Illi- nois players for their team. The latter town trotted out its ringers in the second half, winning the game (and $50,000 in bets) by a score of 16–7. Two months later, the Associated Press broke the story. The col- lege players were quickly disqualified and the tainted game became a rallying cry for opponents of professional football.10

This scandal resulted in a period of national soul-searching regard- ing the place of sport in America’s universities, and the AAUP asked its members to formulate suggestions for reform. A special committee of Northwestern University’s AAUP chapter, like many turn-of-the- century scholars, upheld sport’s many benefits but deplored the way universities conducted the spectacle and exploited athletes. Even though the performers were not paid outright, big-time college athlet- ics resembled show business. The committee lamented, “The public, having paid vast sums of money for this entertainment, rightly or wrongly assumes that colleges are obligated to put up great stadiums, to hire an army of coaches and trainers at prices comparable to those paid to other skillful directors of entertainment, and provide another army of officials for games who must receive fees on a similar scale.” Teams might advertise universities, said the Northwestern committee, but sport was more effective at publicizing itself than in disseminating

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the lessons of higher education. To correct this situation, they con- tended, universities should terminate paid coaches, shorten the foot- ball season, cut ticket prices, and cede control over athletics to stu- dents. Northwestern’s full AAUP chapter just barely voted down the resolution, which was not forwarded to the national organization. Nevertheless, the suggestions created a flurry of opinion. Some Chicagoans, echoing progressive ideals, thought the professors were right—the proposed reforms, if implemented, would keep “graft and gambling” out of colleges. Others disagreed. One observer thought the United States needed a “national board to uniformly regulate the ath- letic activities” of its member universities; this suggestion, essentially, described the NCAA, which had existed for almost seventeen years at that point. Another critic, who disdained regulation by anyone who was not an athletic expert, liked the “thrill” of football and credited “well paid coaches” for the stimulating level of play and for the valu- able publicity that they brought to universities.11

Hugh Fullerton of the Chicago Tribune placed the controversy in national perspective. While he overstated faculty opposition, Fuller- ton correctly noted that many anti-football professors were associated with the AAUP. He also observed that some traditional powers, such as Harvard, Yale, and Princeton, were looking to de-emphasize football. Soon, it seemed, colleges would cut the length of the season and “curb” professional coaches. Once this happened, universities would stop building 100,000-seat arenas and eliminate football as an “enter- taining enterprise” that funded physical education. Princeton coach Bill Roper was particularly alarmed. Even though just two years ear- lier (in Winning Football) he had recommended that athletics be sup- ported through undergraduate fees or endowment funds, he claimed in 1922 that Princeton’s football team annually brought in $400,000 that was necessary to fund physical culture in the athletic department. Major universities everywhere seemed to be plotting football’s demise. Harvard, said the Tribune, clearly favored laboratories over athletics, and administrators seemed willing to smother athletics “under the lava and ashes of scholasticism.” Closer to home, even the University of Chicago might dethrone King Football.12

While some big universities planned to mute sport, a few smaller New England colleges, like Amherst and Williams, considered cutting

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it altogether.13 Many small-college football critics did not merely op- pose commercialism. Rather, they opposed big-time intercollegiate athletics as part of a broader critique of modern, intellectually frag- mented universities focused on research. American higher education, they argued, had become stultifying and operated on an inhumane scale since the late 1800s. Academics—producing specialized knowl- edge in small fields at large universities—had become incapable of teaching students to think big thoughts. For education to regain social utility, colleges had to refocus attention on critical reflection. They had to abandon the idea that universities could expand indefinitely, or that any subject could be construed as a field deserving its own de- partment. These thinkers rejected the pragmatic, instrumentalist ori- entation of turn-of-the-century academics who had designed a univer- sity system to instruct a whole population and produce socially useful knowledge. Colleges should teach students as individuals, not as parts of a population. Higher education should be based on traditional ideals of discipline, character, mental acumen, and morality—and re- duce athletics to a subsidiary role.

Alexander Meiklejohn, who served as president of Amherst College from 1912 until his controversial 1923 dismissal, was one of these col- lege reformers. During his tenure, Meiklejohn kept Amherst’s enroll- ment small and alienated alumni by rejecting the applications of lightly qualified sons. He also hired some controversial young profes- sors and was a pacifist, not a popular stance in the early 1920s. To Meiklejohn, a small college that created disciplined minds by chal- lenging students to think was better than a larger institution that made old grads happy by teaching accepted facts to aspiring gentle- men. He used his position as a pulpit from which to expound a new kind of education. In The Liberal College (1920), Meiklejohn argued that athletics and other student activities were just one part of a resi- dential campus life that included chapel services and student-teacher interaction. Students should learn music, drama, literature, as well as “careful training of the body” and “strength of character.” Meikle- john rejected the apparent credo of most universities in his “prag- matic” era, which was to study any subject one pleased. By contrast, he wanted a college to serve its community by educating whole indi- viduals. While students should be able to play sports at college, too

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many extracurricular activities could prove a distraction from mental training. A liberal college had a duty to counteract the “trivial and vulgar amusements” of society. It was not true that all subjects were equally important. The elective system was fine if it generated student enthusiasm, but not if it merely led to the proliferation of depart- ments. The nation should resemble a single “mind,” not a “mob” or “crowd” whose speech was “an incoherent clash and clatter of unre- lated groans, and shouts and yells.” Meiklejohn also offered his own take on academic freedom. He supported the concept, yet believed

Alexander Meiklejohn—a proponent of the liberal arts curriculum and the Great Books, as well as a critic of big- time college athletics—in the early 1900s. Photo courtesy of UW Madison Archives.

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that the AAUP merely pitted faculty and administrators against one another (like laborers and management) rather than uniting them as coadjudicators in a common, educational enterprise.14

Meiklejohn, who resembled other mid-1920s anti-modernists by criticizing John Dewey’s pragmatic educational philosophy, employed rhetoric similar to that which antebellum Whig educators had used to promote manual labor education and gymnastics. He basically wanted colleges to return to a preindustrial educational ideal, to a time when educators shaped the morals of individuals instead of teaching special- ized knowledge to large groups. Though he conceded that experimen- tal psychology had proven Whig-style faculty psychology obsolete, Meiklejohn still defended a “gymnastic” theory of mind in a way that recalled the Yale Report. In both thought and sport, he asserted, one learned “best by practice in fast company.” For a mind to succeed in modern life’s economic, political, and educational tasks, it should pos- sess specialized knowledge, but must also be trained in “discipline.”15

Big-time intercollegiate sport, played by highly trained, semiprofes- sional players before thousands of paying spectators in a massive sta- dium, was antithetical to the liberal arts, even if it was conducive to relieving the mental stresses of modern society or contributing to the formation of communal bonds. There was no need to pay a profes- sional coach a large salary to orchestrate a spectacle that claimed to teach young men the ways of mental, moral, and physical self-control. All college teachers were engaged in the process of teaching such things, insisted Meiklejohn, so there was no need for a special ritual that sold this activity to the nonacademic community. Furthermore, there was no need to use sport to advertise a college—it was a public institution insofar as it trained young men (Amherst then had no fe- male students) to be moral citizens. His ideas sounded anachronistic in the 1920s because, to a certain extent, they were. Yet Meiklejohn was intentionally anachronistic. He and other interwar curricular innova- tors, like the Whigs a century earlier, advocated the liberal arts as a way to cope with the stress, fragmentation, and greed of a modern so- ciety that seemed to be falling apart at the seams as it expanded.

Meiklejohn was particularly critical of professional coaches. In 1922, when Harvard, Yale, and Princeton were starting to de-empha- size sport, he called on these institutions to eliminate professional

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coaches. He observed that many universities, by creating athletic de- partments, had given competitive sport institutional autonomy. Meik- lejohn warned Harvard’s President A. Lawrence Lowell about the ram- ifications of this shift in university structure:

The general effect of these changes has been to build up in each of our colleges an independent body responsible for the accomplish- ment of a definite task, in serious conflict with the other interests of the institution, and yet with no provision for keeping that body or its activities within proper limitation or control. Our games are no longer the play of undergraduates. The players tend to become pup- pets in the hands of coaches and boards of control who represent the “institutions” in their public contests for victory. These coaches and systems are, to say the best of them, highly specialized in point of view. In general they have very little understanding of the gen- uine purposes of a college. And yet they tend, more and more, to become independent bodies, responsible only to the public[,] which is interested in the winning of victories.16

An efficient, independent athletic department was no improvement over a less official structure. The new order represented the unwanted influence of commercial popular culture, which threatened liberal ed- ucation. The public was not always a rational, orderly body that held colleges’ best interests in mind. Sometimes, Meiklejohn implied, it just wanted to have fun.

Not all, of course, agreed. Some saw athletics, led by professional coaches, as the meal ticket for an important university department. Big-time football, they said, bankrolled the other sports that devel- oped bodies and minds. Michigan’s Fielding Yost asked, “Is it a crime for athletics to pay [its] own costs?” Sport had become a “big busi- ness” only because such a “health-building program” that benefited thousands of college students required efficient methods. Where would the money come, if not from football? The game was the “back- bone” of collegiate physical culture; it just needed better supervision. Clarence Mendell, a Yale Latin professor and chair of that university’s Athletic Board of Control, adamantly opposed Meiklejohn’s call for eliminating coaches as well as his proposal for undergraduate control of athletics. Mendell argued that coaches taught football and directed

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the spectacle, the same way professors taught academic subjects and conducted research. Sport needed professional management. He wrote, “In the field of scholarship we try to give the undergraduate the very best that we have, and then we count on him to make use of it on his own initiative. Just so in football we should give the benefit of the best possible training to all the men who can be brought out to play one of the best games ever invented.” Mendell argued that the athletic department should be taken as seriously as other university departments. It had “become too important a factor in our college training of today to make it wise, or even possible,” he warned, “to re- turn to the haphazard methods of management which result from leav- ing its affairs entirely in the hands of the undergraduates.”17

Meiklejohn clearly held a minority opinion. And while his criticism of athletics may have been one reason Amherst’s trustees forced his resignation in June 1923, it was a small part of his larger curricular program. Like other academic refugees, including E. A. Ross, Meikle- john departed for Madison, where he established the University of Wisconsin’s Experimental College. In this college, students studied a liberal arts core curriculum for two years before beginning specialized studies. He saw this innovation as a way to return to pre–Civil War pedagogy, before science and industry had fragmented intellectual life and obliterated the central place of religion and morality in modern society.18 Meiklejohn believed that better teaching methods would benefit from the elimination of big-time sport. In 1925 he lamented that because thrilling football plays drove large crowds to insanity, coaches seemed like the world’s greatest teachers. By contrast, society would shun a young man inspired by a rigorous philosophy course to question the world around him. Meiklejohn thought that sport found a more receptive audience than philosophy because it was more easily understood by more people, but he thought the problem went even deeper. America’s colleges had lost their sense of purpose and relied too greatly upon lectures. The lecture method of teaching—a late 1800s educational innovation intended to replace dull recitations with exciting revelations of original, cutting-edge scholarship—just in- jected students with knowledge without making them ponder its meanings. Students thus learned facts without being inspired to en- gage critically history’s greatest minds. In 1926, at the National Stu-

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dent Federation meeting in Ann Arbor—at which there was great en- thusiasm for newly founded colleges like Bennington in Vermont and Claremont in Southern California—Meiklejohn contended that univer- sities had become too large to be effective. The elective system frac- tured knowledge “and sent fragments of each Faculty far adrift so that [intellectual] unity was impossible.”19

For some higher education critics, big-time football seemed appro- priate for universities with big-time research goals, but a more sub- dued program was a better fit for smaller colleges focused on under- graduate, liberal arts education. The world had moved on since the Progressive Era, a time when many professed faith in the social utility of specialized knowledge. Some professors in the 1920s and 1930s, rather than stressing the social utility of specialized research, empha- sized the broad meaning of timeless ideas and hoped to make the hu- manities relevant to the public. As historian Joan Shelley Rubin writes, John Erskine, Stringfellow Barr, Scott Buchanan, and Mor- timer Adler used radio or popular periodicals to craft a “middlebrow” culture located between the highbrow culture of social elites and the lowbrow culture of the masses. Through book-of-the-month clubs, book reviews, and popularization of the so-called Great Books— works by classical philosophers like Plato and Aristotle or modern thinkers like Darwin or Hobbes—twentieth-century intellectuals might appropriate the lowly means of popular culture for the high- minded ends of teaching scholarly ideals to American society.20 This was not an entirely new concept. After all, some Progressive Era schol- ars, especially in the social sciences and psychology, had seen football as a sort of middlebrow culture, a way of conveying modern truths to the public. Great Books proponents, in other words, were not invent- ing middlebrow culture in the interwar period. They were reshaping it for a new era.

Nevertheless, some aging progressives maintained that college sport, when carefully regulated, was a valuable social and cultural rit- ual. In 1925, an AAUP committee led by Thomas Moran, the Purdue economist who touted professional coaches sixteen years earlier, is- sued a report on athletics. The report, likely authored by Moran him- self, used language straight out of the Progressive Era. Colleges had to cultivate “a vigorous and enlightened public opinion” in order to

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keep athletics educationally useful. Even though the AAUP committee acknowledged that reform would be difficult, its progressive optimism shone through. University alumni—who seemed willing to “hire” ath- letes outright in an attempt to win football victories—might be harder to win over than students, but this was a challenge, not a roadblock. “If the pressure of a wholesome alumni public opinion can be made ef- fective in removing this rather widespread evil,” said the report, “a very great and positive good will have been accomplished for intercol- legiate athletics and for the boys who participate.”21

Not all educators, though, bought the 1925 AAUP report’s upbeat tone. Some colleges abandoned the idea that a few reforms and the right “public opinion” could make athletics safe for higher education. As early as the Progressive Era, the founders of Reed College in Port- land, Oregon, had banned intercollegiate athletics. In the 1920s, Swarthmore, once a burgeoning East Coast university with a mighty football team, began envisioning itself as a smaller, more scholarly in- stitution. Under President Frank Aydelotte, Swarthmore implemented an academic honors program and de-emphasized athletics by funding it through the regular budget. Some other, less well-endowed colleges felt obligated to eliminate football because they did not gain all the benefits sport supposedly provided and they could not compete in an athletic world ruled by large universities. In 1925, the University of Dubuque’s President Karl Wettstone explained his decision to ban football by blaming public universities for implementing an athletic arms race. Always seeking publicity and athletic victory, state-funded institutions had dictated policies to smaller, privately run schools, of- ten affiliated with Christian denominations (Dubuque was Presbyte- rian). Public universities built formidable teams by sending scouts to recruit the most talented high school students in the state. In turn, “the smaller schools of the land realized that they must follow suit or lose their hold on their young people.” By 1924, Dubuque had no chance of beating “the strong machines” that scoured the region, at- tracted players from all over, and paid coaches huge salaries. From 1925 to 1928 it stopped playing what had become a losing game. Simi- larly, Kentucky’s Centre College (whose “Praying Colonels” famously defeated Harvard in 1921) felt pressured to give up football or sacrifice accreditation.22

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Even the AAUP could not maintain Moran’s optimism. In April 1926, a committee dedicated to improving undergraduate intellect, which consisted of faculty members drawn from a broad range of aca- demic disciplines and universities, issued a bulletin critiquing athlet- ics. Employing standard Progressive Era rhetoric, this report said that properly regulated football could aid college education through recre- ation. But at present, the sport was corrupted by drinking, gambling, and ticket scalping. The game had grown out of proportion and had become distracting, producing “hysteria” and perverting collegiate ideals. Coaches often earned larger salaries than professors or college presidents, and the stadium both literally and figuratively outshad- owed “the library, laboratory and lecture hall.” This AAUP committee made several recommendations. First, each student should be limited to one year of eligibility. Even though this innovation would reduce the level of play, it would also help football remain a way to stimulate “college spirit and alumni enthusiasm.” Second, the season should be limited to four games per year. Third, graduates, paid the same as pro- fessors, should replace professional coaches.23 The response was mixed. Some deans, like those at Princeton, Columbia, and Brown, saw virtually nothing wrong with football, or they noted that coaches were staff members who cooperated with administrators. President Walter Jessup of Iowa and Big Ten commissioner Major John Griffith simply noted that midwestern athletic conferences had purified sport long ago. Only a few, such as the president of small Coe College in Iowa—who endorsed the report and could not see why others did not—disagreed. But even then, most dissenters simply stressed moder- ation. The dean of New York’s City College, on the one hand, blamed alumni for commercialism, but on the other hand, he criticized faculty who wanted to regulate college sport to death. His solution was a “sane middle course” that did not go to either extreme. Others saw the case as closed. Columbia’s Nicholas Murray Butler, referring to Pro- gressive Era reforms, simply decreed, “We dealt with this situation twenty years ago.”24

At this time, the Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching, an organization founded in the same era as the NCAA, was conducting a study on college athletics. On October 24, 1929, “Black Thursday” of the stock market crash—less than two weeks after Geor-

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gia’s stunning defeat of Yale and a month before G. T. W. Patrick of- fered his ambivalent assessment of college sport—the Carnegie Foun- dation released its famous report, American College Athletics (“Bulletin Number Twenty-Three”). The national press widely cited and dis- cussed its findings. Written by a team of staffers led by Howard Sav- age, the Carnegie Report argued that universities should eliminate “commercialism” from sport, but it also conceded that athletics had become an essential part of America’s universities.25 The large tome’s preface, composed by Carnegie Foundation president Henry Pritchett, briefly summarized the underlying tension between the problems the investigators had observed and the solutions they suggested. Pritchett posed two main questions. First, “What relation has this astonishing athletic display to the work of an intellectual agency like a univer- sity?” While a university was certainly an academic institution, he said, it was “also a social, a commercial, and an athletic agency” whose nonacademic activities had recently eclipsed teaching and research in the public mind. Second, he asked how students had found “the time or the money to stage so costly a performance.” Pritchett answered that coaches, not students, were responsible for the entertaining spec- tacle that turned students into pawns who obeyed orders so that uni- versities could subsidize athletic programs or fund the construction of new facilities like football stadiums or academic buildings. He wrote that the academy’s intellectual and athletic components were con- nected, insofar as the administrators who oversaw scholarly research were also responsible for stadiums, coaches, and ticket sales.26

Such observations were correct, at least on the surface, but Pritch- ett’s allusion to institutional unity showed that he ignored a funda- mental truth of American universities. Each campus had common ad- ministrators, trustees, students, faculty, and teams, but often little else held a particular institution together. Individual universities were re- sponsible for producing intellectual knowledge as well as staging ath- letic spectacles, but by the 1920s most had become fragmented into a multitude of departments with different methodologies and profes- sional organizations. Each department held academic authority over one realm of knowledge—or, in the case of the athletic department, over one university activity. Administrators might speak for profes- sors, students, and coaches, but their main goal was to make the uni-

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versity function as a collection of successful, specialized entities. The captains of erudition did not necessarily have to ensure that each unit complemented others. In a modern academic landscape, each depart- ment had to engage in a Darwin-style struggle for existence. Profes- sors in the psychology department competed with experts in the soci- ology department for institutional resources, while research interests made them identify intellectually with psychology specialists at other universities, with whom they competed for academic prestige in their field. This was roughly analogous to the athletic department. The foot- ball team’s main job was to win games against other universities, not necessarily to uphold the research or teaching of the psychology or so- ciology departments.

By underemphasizing the fragmented nature of America’s universi- ties, the Carnegie Report’s authors posited less than adequate solu- tions. Pritchett and Savage contended that athletic commercialism sim- ply had to be scaled back. Americans, especially college presidents, could achieve this goal by ensuring that universities provided enough intellectual challenges for students who had become too enamored with the “pageantry of college life.”27 This was a watered-down ver- sion of Meiklejohn’s proposal to organize small colleges around the lib- eral arts. It also ignored the fact that universities rarely pursued a sin- gle intellectual or pedagogical purpose. By making a facile recommendation about the need to quell commercialism, the Carnegie Report disregarded essential truths of modern higher education. It was difficult for a big-time university to jettison big-time sport with- out damaging its reputation and shuttering a powerful publicity- and revenue-producing department. By recommending decommercializa- tion without proposing serious changes to academic structure or ath- letic supervision, the Carnegie Report also failed to address adequately the growing influence of the coaching profession. A passage buried deep within the report itself even hinted that coaches were gaining a professional autonomy that might limit the effectiveness of outside re- forms.28 Any university that fielded an intercollegiate team, built a stadium, and created an athletic department needed professional coaches. As Meiklejohn’s critics had observed in 1922, the days when big-time athletics could be managed by undergraduates or alumni had long since passed.

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Since the 1910s, the NCAA had urged its members to bring sport under faculty control, so it is not surprising that athletic departments developed autonomy in the 1920s and many coaches gained faculty status for supervising a cultural ritual played in permanent campus arenas. Yet this new order represented only a superficial form of insti- tutional control. First, not all coaches were tenured, so even honest, permanent coaches had to compete against corrupt journeymen (Moran noted this problem in 1909). Second, an athletic department had different goals from most other academic units. It, or at least the part of the department that supervised competitive athletics, was de- signed to provide publicity and earn revenue—not produce knowl- edge or teach students in credit-earning courses. The Carnegie Report pointed out that many times alumni groups, athletic associations, or athletic directors chose coaches. Since their services were perceived as being highly valuable, coaches often earned salaries higher than most professors; in some instances, their compensation equaled that of deans or university presidents. The Carnegie Report even commented that the greedy showmen (or “business men”) who comprised part of the coaching profession were “not above accepting or even demanding increases of salary.”29

The Carnegie Report overlooked the ways that coaches masked lu- crative cultural roles with pedagogical claims. But at least one coach openly stated that football should make more money, not less. Notre Dame’s Knute Rockne contended in 1930 that football was “not com- mercialized enough.” He admitted that even though only a few col- leges profited from football, if it were decommercialized, none would make money from it. As historian Murray Sperber notes, Rockne knew that big-time football’s decline would hurt coaches at the same time it cut into the athletic department’s ability to pay for its other ac- tivities.30 Here was the rub, and the market-savvy Rockne was among the few honest enough to discuss it openly. One of the game’s stated raisons d’être was to make money. Although coaches cast themselves as mentors skilled at teaching disciplined self-control to both players and spectators, they ultimately had to please the desires of paying spectators—regardless of whether or not those spectators wanted to learn to behave in a certain way. Coaches claimed they could do it all: teaching, publicity, community outreach, and fundraising. They even

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underwrote their own departmental budget. But, truth be told, they taught fewer students than the typical professor or physical education instructor and were paid much more to do so. And colleges could only measure coaches’ success through victories and ticket sales—not the lessons absorbed by the crowd or the student body.

Considered in this light, the Carnegie Foundation’s proposal to limit commercialism was a legitimate goal for athletic reform, and its wide- spread implementation may have changed college sport. But the re- port’s assumption of the ease with which decommercialization could happen demonstrated its own naïveté. This was no longer the Progres- sive Era, and it would have been difficult to make such changes in the late 1920s. True, intercollegiate athletics had become part of the uni- versity, but that truth cut both ways. Administrators had some control over sport, but it would not be easy to eliminate an established de- partment with its own experts (some of them tenured) and potential monetary value. Cutting ticket sales would only make things worse, since colleges would then have to find another way to fund the ath- letic department, such as endowments or student fees. In addition, athletics had become an integral part of popular culture, as well as of the academy. Americans loved college sport, in large part, because it rendered universities—if not academic research itself—visible and legible. By the 1920s, most disciplinary intellectuals could not main- tain a connection to commercial culture like that which coaches had developed. Moreover, agencies such as the NCAA helped to institu- tionalize big-time athletics, eventually (by the 1950s) creating a busi- ness monopoly, or cartel, that essentially shunned amateurism in favor of semi-professional sport.31

Most universities were hesitant to meddle with a semi-academic unit that provided publicity and revenue, but the Great Depression prompted a few institutions to make dramatic changes in the 1930s. Johns Hopkins, for one, dropped ticket sales and let the public attend games for free. More famously, the University of Chicago—led by the precocious Great Books proponent Robert Maynard Hutchins—abol- ished football altogether in 1939. Chicago’s elimination of big-time sport originated in the same back-to-basics, anti-pragmatist movement that spawned Meiklejohn’s 1920s critiques. One historian has percep- tively portrayed Hutchins as an educator who resembled Jeremiah

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Day, primary author of the 1828 Yale Report. Hutchins openly cri- tiqued, in his biting, witty style, his early 1900s education at Oberlin and Yale, where professors forced him to read boring textbooks, attend stultifying lectures, and conduct meaningless experiments. He com- plained that modern professors worked in “narrow fields” that made sense to other scholars, but were often incomprehensible to the mod- ern student, who had to navigate a “multifarious collection of discon- nected courses” that actually became less comprehensible over time. Like Meiklejohn, Hutchins said that America’s “intellectual tradition” had become unintelligible at universities, where “its scattered and dis- jointed fragments [were] strewn from one end of the campus to the other.” Hutchins hoped to put the modern mind back together. Rather than trying to strengthen Chicago by building more academic depart- ments and using football to publicize them, as Harper had done forty years earlier, Hutchins wanted to make the university relevant to un- dergraduates by making its curriculum practically irrelevant. Stu- dents would recover timeless truth by reading thousands of years of Western intellectual thought—not construct timely, pragmatic truths by sorting through the minutiae of the latest, cutting-edge research. Hutchins and his intellectual sidekick, Mortimer Adler, built a liberal arts curriculum upon the Great Books canon. They stopped short, however, at dismantling Chicago’s famous graduate research programs and specialized departments.32

Football, needless to say, was not a Great Book. It was a Progressive Era spectacle intended to strengthen individual nervous systems while advertising and disseminating the lessons of the collective, pragmatic mind that the academic gridiron of disciplinary scholarship was creating at big universities in places like Chicago and Madison. Even though sport was not necessarily academic, early-1900s profes- sors and administrators had seen it as essential because athletics might make disciplinary universities relevant to industrial society. For Hutchins, who infuriated his critics by claiming that whenever he felt the urge to exercise he would lie down until it passed, physical activ- ity was just a distraction from more serious mental endeavors.33 In this way, even though Hutchins rejected the pragmatic orientation of William Rainey Harper, he only superficially resembled antebellum educators who viewed gymnastics as essential to college education

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Robert Maynard Hutchins, president of the University of Chicago, in the early 1950s. Here he is pictured with promotional “dummies” of Encyclopedia Britannica’s “Great Books of the Western World” series. Special Collections Research Center, University of Chicago Library.

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(and even Alexander Meiklejohn, who was less critical of physical ac- tivity). Hutchins did, however, share antebellum educators’ distaste for intercollegiate athletics, and by the late 1930s, Chicago was at a point where it could seriously consider eliminating big-time football.

Since 1925, Chicago’s athletic luster had faded. Stagg regularly lost recruits to other midwestern football powers, causing Chicago to win fewer victories and lose many fans. He was also unable to convince the university to construct a massive new arena. Moreover, Chicago’s 1931 “New Plan” of study yielded a more academic-minded student body and fewer football players, while it also led to the enrollment of a greater number of transfer students who could not play varsity foot- ball after moving to a new campus (the result of a Big Ten reform in- tended to thwart tramp athletes). When the university forced Stagg to retire at age seventy in 1932, the “Grand Old Man” went to the Uni- versity of the Pacific and Chicago replaced him with Thomas Nelson Metcalf, who sympathized with Hutchins’s intellectual goals and did not produce winning teams. The university fielded its last team with a winning record in 1935, when the Maroons’ Jay Berwanger won the first Heisman Trophy (then the Downtown Athletic Club Trophy). From 1936 to 1939, Big Ten opponents frequently shut out Chicago’s overmatched squad, and it won only six games, mostly against small colleges like Beloit and Wabash. Most of Stagg Field’s seats went un- filled, and Maroons football had become an embarrassment. Few en- dorsed Hutchins’s plan to eliminate football, but by the late 1930s he had surrounded himself with supportive trustees and administrators and helped his own cause by letting sport decline through poor man- agement. Endorsing the idea that football competition indicated aca- demic rank, Hutchins refused to shift from the Big Ten to a smaller conference, which was one of the few options remaining. Finally, in December 1939, the trustees voted to eliminate football.34

According to historian Robin Lester, Hutchins imagined an intellec- tual, “utopian” higher education institution “unaffected by the needs and tastes of the public.” Hutchins, unlike Harper, was not attuned to the voice of the city. Yet the elimination of big-time college athletics had a drawback that Hutchins would barely acknowledge. He noted, albeit condescendingly, that alumni who conceded the logic of his football critiques made an argument with its own, nonintellectual

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logic: their sons would not want to attend Chicago if it abolished foot- ball.35 Publicity and visibility were major reasons Harper had adopted football in the 1890s, and Stagg had claimed in the 1920s that success- ful athletic teams would increase both Chicago’s enrollment and en- dowment. Such claims, while perhaps extravagant, may have held a grain of truth. Although the educated public’s reaction to Chicago’s decision to abolish football was fairly positive, fans and sportswriters lambasted it. Lester suggests that this move limited Chicago’s post- 1940 fundraising, and some observers argued that the university needed new ways to gain publicity. William McNeil, a 1930s student and Daily Maroon editor, later critiqued Hutchins for failing to affili- ate with the NFL’s Chicago Bears, which might have maintained the university’s ties to popular sport without turning students into celebrity-athletes. This, wrote McNeil, was a “lost opportunity” to maintain Harper’s desire to exploit the public’s interest in football. McNeil made an interesting point, but he missed a more significant one. Hutchins did not crave publicity. He wanted to build Chicago’s reputation as a place for serious, intellectual pursuits, not return to the gridiron circus that Harper, the academy’s own P. T. Barnum, had pioneered in the 1890s.36

One of the few major universities to eliminate big-time football, Chicago’s undergraduate college eventually developed an exclusive reputation as a place focused on the life of the mind. It was no longer a destination for intellectually unambitious sons and daughters of mid- dle-class Chicagoans. Ironically, though, Hutchins did not carry his athletic reforms to their apparent, logical conclusion. He did not raze Stagg Field’s stands and convert the city block into the site of an ex- perimental college like the one Meiklejohn founded at Wisconsin, nor did he construct a center for study and popular dissemination of the Great Books. The stadium lay empty and the field sprouted weeds un- til the Manhattan Project, the secret federal program to create nuclear weapons, turned it into an atomic laboratory during World War II. Under the stands, a research team led by Enrico Fermi initiated the world’s first controlled nuclear reaction in 1942. Subsequently, the stands were torn down in the 1960s and the massive Regenstein Li- brary, with space for 3.5 million volumes, opened on the site in 1970. The ground where the Maroons once played football had come full cir-

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cle. The huge, reinforced-concrete and limestone library was very dif- ferent from Stagg Field, yet the structures might once have comple- mented each other. Harper had envisioned a modern university that produced specialized research and used football to publicize academic work. By the mid-1900s, researchers still created specialized knowl- edge at the University of Chicago, but without big-time college sports, the campus seemed inaccessible to many Americans. The gothic quad- rangles were cloisters for geniuses, not playgrounds for average peo- ple. No doubt, great books occupied the shelves, yet Regenstein’s col- lection was intended primarily for faculty and graduate students (with undergraduates also allowed access). As problematic as football turned out to be, Harper and others had meant for sport to balance the uni- versity. Hutchins, by eliminating the quasi-lowbrow popular specta- cle, may have been mostly successful in securing Chicago’s identity as an elite, highbrow research institution.37

By the 1930s, some university intellectuals, especially those in the humanities and social sciences, had become conscious of their alien- ation from the public sphere. While the Carnegie Report cited the vast amounts of money that sports garnered during the 1920s, many pro-

Regenstein Library, University of Chicago, constructed on the former site of Stagg Field and the secret Manhattan Project laboratory that initiated the first controlled nuclear reaction in 1942. Special Collections Research Center, University of Chicago Library.

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fessors occupied a world located far from the crowded stadium. The Great Depression did revive progressive notions of scholars’ utility, yet at least some professors thought that their fellow academics, abet- ted by the trappings of professionalism, were out of touch. Columbia sociologist Robert Lynd lamented that a scholar worked “in a long, leisurely world in which the hands of the clock crawl slowly over a vast dial . . . and one simply works ahead within study walls relatively sound-proofed against the clamorous urgencies of the world outside.” Lynd, like Progressive Era professors who fought for tenure and founded the AAUP, saw that younger scholars, “hired by businessmen trustees,” often received small salaries and had to produce cutting- edge scholarship, while maintaining a patina of disinterested objectiv- ity. He called upon older scholars with permanent tenure and job se- curity to craft socially significant scholarship.38 Lynd’s call to action, though, implied a paradox. By the time most scholars were in a posi- tion to produce riskier scholarship that took advantage of tenure and academic freedom, they had grown accustomed to secure jobs in soundproof offices. Although he did not make this comparison, Lynd’s portrait of academic intellectuals offered a striking contrast with the coaches or players who raced against the clock to secure victory and bowed to the cheers of the crowd.

Professors could (and did) register their distaste for big-time college athletics. But there was only so much they could do. On the one hand, sport seemed indispensable. It was widely perceived as a way to gain publicity, and ticket sales supposedly subsidized everything from physical education to academic facilities. On the other hand, academ- ics could hardly compete with football. The creation of departments at increasingly large universities turned many scholars into cogs in the machinery of the erudition industry. They had gained some control over their labor through progressive reforms, but at the cost of alienat- ing themselves from society. The climate of research and professional advancement first cultivated in the late 1800s had bred a kind of spe- cialized academic laborer who produced knowledge that was often both scientifically accurate and socially useful, yet occupied a world located on the margins of the public sphere. Robert Herrick noted this irony in Chimes (1926), a parody of the William Rainey Harper–era University of Chicago. At fictional Eureka University, football was a

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central ring of “Barnum’s Show,” but professors seemed to occupy an academic sideshow. At the faculty club, intellectual fragmentation and alienation were palpable. Young professors gathered to “play billiards, read the magazines, and write letters”—but the club was a space dis- connected from the public, and it did not foster wide-ranging intellec- tual discourse:

Around the billiard tables they gossiped a little, talked shop: they were too tired or bored to discuss much else. With the increasing degree of specialization they were cut off from each other in little provinces of thought and interest: knowledge had become an archi- pelago of small islands instead of a single continent. One popular idea about university life,—that there were “stimulating contacts” among so many exceptional men,—was largely an illusion. Either they were too busy or too narrow in their culture and their interest to give much in general conversation.39

Academic knowledge was narrow and fragmented. Even when pro- fessional intellectuals participated in leisure activities or consumed popular writings, they were still located on an academic shop floor, its fatiguing specialization stifling their lives and limiting the scope of in- tellectual endeavor. The university was a workplace and, as in other industries, its laborers had specific jobs. Academic labor held the po- tential to facilitate discourse beyond a narrow field of specialists, but wearisome duties, professional decorum, and the dangerous currents of the market ensured that many intellectuals operated outside the cultural mainstream. In sports arenas and the popular media, though, athletic amusements provided a cultural space focused on physical spectacle, a space where meaning was not mediated by academics or produced via mental labor. Herrick’s analogy to work was not coinci- dental. Modern intellectual culture’s fragmentation resulted when late 1800s universities applied industrial methods to education and intel- lectual life. Unlike other early 1900s workers—especially those located on more physically taxing or dangerous shop floors and be- holden to demanding foremen—intellectuals benefited from profes- sional status and safeguards they invented in the Progressive Era. Rea- sonable and necessary innovations like tenure and academic freedom protected academics from the same market forces that had elevated

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college sport to a popular-culture ritual. Ironically, though, at the same time scholars sought safe professional spaces to ply their meticu- lous crafts, athletic specialists had also created university departments of athletics devoted to a popular-culture spectacle that exploited Americans’ desire for consumer entertainment.

Football’s 1920s commercialization left such a bad taste in the mouths of academics that some tried to rewrite their opinions of col- lege sports. Recall that in 1893, Stanford’s E. A. Ross promoted sport as a way for college men to strengthen themselves for social reform; fifteen years later, in Madison, he touted it as a way for students to learn to resist the crowd and the “mob mind.” However, in his 1936 memoir, Seventy Years of It, Ross changed his tune drastically. He claimed that over thirty years earlier, while teaching at Nebraska, he had become disillusioned with football and decided it was a “farce.” Yet Ross left Lincoln in 1906, at a time when he was still touting sport’s progressive, educational value.40 This was revisionism, not reminiscence. But it was a kind of revisionism that made sense, con- sidering the change in historical context. In the 1930s, many academ- ics lamented the fact that athletic programs had raked in football prof- its during the so-called Roaring Twenties, when coaches signed rich contracts or endorsement deals, and players were subsidized under the table. With the loss of income during the Great Depression, stadi- ums were no longer filled, yet universities, beginning in the South, le- gitimized athletic scholarships, which had long been attacked by crit- ics as a form of blatant athletic commercialism and professionalism.41

Ross was not alone. G. T. W. Patrick also became more cynical about sport over the years, and he also became more critical of universities as he revised his opinions. A football apologist who promoted sport in the Progressive Era, by 1929 Patrick questioned his former stance. When he neared his ninetieth birthday in 1946, at the dawn of the post–World War II nuclear age, he became even more bitter. The re- tired philosophy professor lamented the modern academy’s focus on science, especially atomic physics, at the expense of other important subjects, including psychology. He also posited sport’s apparent rela- tionship to America’s declining morals, noting with disfavor that foot- ball gambling had recently reached an annual figure of $100 million. It is not surprising that Patrick reacted this way in the late 1940s. This

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was a time when a multitude of veterans returning to college on the GI Bill muddied eligibility requirements. Soon, elite colleges in the Northeast would create the Ivy League athletic conference. By 1951, basketball recruiting fiascos and point-shaving wagering scandals dominated the headlines and led to new national regulations. In com- parison to such rampant corruption, the half-million-dollar Stanford- Cal Big Game payday that Patrick had critiqued in 1929 seemed like petty cash.42

While Upton Sinclair exaggerated when he complained that the fac- ulty had been replaced by sport in the 1920s, he had a point. By the interwar decades, faculty members produced practical and useful knowledge, but they were much less culturally visible than intercolle- giate football heroes. Scholarship was mostly located beyond the mod- ern public’s consumerist grasp, while football was a popular, enter- taining commodity. Big-time sport had become so successful because it was one of the few popular aspects of America’s ivory tower. Its pur- pose had once been (according to some) a way to represent and com- plement the ideas crafted in academic scholarship, but it had come to flout many aspects of academic life. Although some Progressive Era ac- ademics had seen football as a kind of middlebrow culture, sport actu- ally fulfilled a very different role. It was the seemingly irrational anti- structure that reinforced academic structure—a lowbrow cultural activity that helped highbrow intellectual culture stay elevated.43

Modern academic scholars had become precise observers of narrow natural or social phenomena who produced technically accurate schol- arship with useful applications, but they were not flashy celebrities in a society that valued entertainment and strenuous sport. In some cases, like the Ross controversy in 1900, they were forced to defend themselves and even vow alienation from the public sphere. While progressive inventions like tenure, academic freedom, and the AAUP helped make life easier for some scholars—and allowed them to keep creating accurate, useful knowledge—these reforms did not necessar- ily help professors reach out to the public. Football players and coaches more easily found a public audience, and they could make lots of money doing it.

Big-time college sport, while seemingly at odds with academics, was a product of modern culture. As educators, lawmakers, and phi-

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lanthropists crafted modern American higher education, academics established a framework for creating knowledge and dispensing pro- fessional rewards. Football games, carried out on fields called gridirons, emulated the logic of interinstitutional competition and pro- vided publicity for a virtual gridiron of interconnected universities. Athletic departments, based in commercial popular culture in a way that increasingly specialized academic departments were not, made the academy seem relevant. Sport gained a permanent place in Amer- ica’s academic ivory tower because the goals of higher education had shifted in the 1800s. Once a cloistered world of philosophical deduc- tion where teachers instructed students in moral, mental, and physical discipline, universities became practical realms of scientific rigor where scholars produced and disseminated knowledge in cloistered academic disciplines, graduating a mass of students versed in a wide range of practical subjects. Although some 1920s educators and critics challenged both football and the narrowness of academic fields, even strenuous athletic sport—present at the creation of modern intellec- tual culture—had gained its own special place in the university. Once considered a sideshow to the academic circus, it had become, for many Americans, the main event.

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