EDMUND BURKEIn my last post I implored my alma mater to give up Division I football and men’s basketball. I argued that it is impossible to compete at the highest level in those sports by recruiting only students who are prepared for college, and therefore the system has an inherent imperative for academic fraud.
But is giving up those programs feasible?
Well, it has been done. The best known example occurred in 1939, when, under the leadership of Robert Maynard Hutchings, the University of Chicago dropped varsity football.
Hutchings was a larger-than-life figure. The son of a Presbyterian minister who himself became a college president, Hutchings had a deeply ingrained sense of morality. After serving in the Army ambulance corps during World War I, Hutchings graduated from Yale University and then, first in his class, from Yale Law School. He became a law professor at Yale and a leader of the Legal Realist Movement, which looked to the social sciences to better understand and improve the law. By age 29, Hutchings became dean of Yale Law School. By 30, he was named president of the University of Chicago.
Chicago was then a member of the Big Ten but had a dreadful football team that consistently placed at the bottom in the conference. The problem was that it suffered a competitive disadvantage. Even then, universities with good football programs recruited players unprepared for their normal programs. About half of Big Ten varsity athletes majored in physical education. But the University of Chicago did not offer a phys-ed major. Hutchins mocked the system by saying that it was possible to earn twelve letters in college athletics without knowing how to write one.
According to his biographer, Hutchins abominated both the “perversion of athletics to commercialism,” and even more, “the myths that were fabricated to justify it.”* In direct expenses and revenues, football cost the university money; but football was said to more than make up for that in alumni enthusiasm and donations. Hutchins didn’t buy it. Some of the universities and colleges with the largest fundraising had the worst football teams. And while presidents at state universities said that football generated financial support from the state legislatures, the universities concealed the costs of their football stadiums.
At a meeting of Chicago’s board of trustees, one member asked: “Football is what unifies a university – what will take its place?” Hutchins answered: “Education.”
After laying the groundwork with nine years of internal advocacy, Hutchins made his move at the conclusion of the football season by publishing an article titled “Gate Receipts and Glory” in the December 3, 1938 issue of the Saturday Evening Post. College athletics had become crass professionalism “masquerading as higher education,” he wrote, but “nobody has done anything about it.” “Why?” he asked.
“Nobody wants, or dares, to defy the public, dishearten the students, or deprive alma mater of the loyalty of the alumni. Most emphatically of all, nobody wants to give up gate receipts. …Gate receipts are used to build laboratories and to pay for those sports that can’t pay for themselves.”
Hutchins denounced those justifications as myths. But if money was corroding truth and morality in universities, then “the cure is to take the money out of [college] athletics.” It was up to universities with leaders and prestige to walk away from the money, he argued. “The substitute is light and learning. The colleges and universities that taught the country football, can teach the country that the effort to discover truth, to transmit the wisdom of the race, and to preserve civilization is exciting and perhaps important too.”
A year later, despite considerable opposition, the board of trustees of the University of Chicago decided to stop playing Big Ten athletics and have intramural sports instead.
A more modern – and in some ways even more interesting – example occurred at the University of San Francisco.
USF used to be a basketball power. It won two national championships and another Final Four appearance in the 1950s. It reached the Elite Eight four times in the 1960s and 1970s. Its players who went on to great careers in the NBA include Bill Russell and K.C. Jones. But scandals – including academic integrity issues – erupted at USF. Tutors took tests and wrote papers for players. There were other issues too, including accusations that the university tried to cover up an assault by a basketball player on a nursing student who feared she would be raped.
As the New York Times put it, in 1982 USF's president, Rev. John Lo Schiavo, decided “to forgo the revenue, publicity and acclaim of the university’s successful men’s basketball program and instead stand up for institutional rectitude.”** He eliminated the basketball program.
Here’s the most interesting part of the story. Father Lo Schiavo reinstituted basketball beginning in 1985. Recruiting, however, was radically reformed. “The real question,” Lo Schiavo said, “is, ‘Can an athletic program based on the right principles survive and thrive in this stressful environment?’ I think so.”
It appears he was wrong. USF has made the NCAA tournament only once since pledging itself to “the right principles,” and on that one occasion (in 1998) it was eliminated in the first round.
But USF has seemed to do just fine without a highly-successful basketball program. Not only did Father Lo Schiavo eliminate the university debt and balance its budgets, by the time he stepped down as president in 1991 he had increased the university’s endowment eightfold to $38.7 million. USF’s endowment today stands at $289 million.
I’ve heard the University of Chicago has been doing well too.
Sources
* Milton Mayer, Robert Maynard Hutchins: A Memoir (U. Chicago Press 1993), Chpt. 14.
** Bruce Weber, Rev. John Lo Schiavo, 90, Who Barred a Sport, Dies, N.Y. Times, May 20, 2015, A18.