Arrogance and Scheming in the Big Ten: Michigan State’s Quest for Membership and Michigan’s Powerful Opposition by David J. Young (review)

Some professional sport historians could use the obsession of a practicing medical doctor and vigilant amateur historian, searching archives in an effort to find truth about an important aspect of the history of big-time intercollegiate athletics. David Young (not the noted classicist of Greek sport, who recently passed away), a fifty-something internal medicine physician in Holland, Michigan, began a three-year quest to answer how, with Notre Dame’s help and the hindrance of the University of Michigan, Michigan State was voted into the Big Ten in 1949 after a number of failed attempts. Young’s journey to write Arrogance and Scheming in the Big Ten: Michigan State’s Quest for Membership and Michigan’s Powerful Opposition took him to over a dozen Midwestern archives, including the most important one, the Bentley Historical Library at the University of Michigan and the crucial Ralph W. Aigler Papers. Aigler was the law professor from Michigan who for nearly four decades led the dominant school in the Big Ten as its Conference faculty representative. He jealously guarded Michigan’s interests in opposing Michigan State’s entry into the Conference after the University of Chicago withdrew from football in 1939. Young’s significant volume tells of the politics of the Big Ten, which used cunning by the president of Michigan State’s, John Hannah, the skullduggery of Michigan’s Ralph Aigler, and involvement of a host of other university officials resulting in a close vote for Michigan State to enter the leading conference in the nation.

David Young begins Arrogance and Scheming with the decision by the University of Chicago Board of Trustees, at President Robert Maynard Hutchins’ urging, to drop football two years before America’s entry into World War II. While he notes that this was the first football program to be dropped “based on principle alone,” wider reading on his part would have shown that a half-century before, one of the Big Three, Harvard, dropped football several times based on principle, as did the Big Ten’s Northwestern and several other institutions, during the 1905-1906 football crisis. Nevertheless, Chicago’s decision left the Big Ten with nine institutions. Young then takes the reader back to the beginning of the Big Ten in the 1890s and how through vigilante justice and boycotts, individual institutions would attempt to keep in line rogue institutions with illegal recruitment and payment of players.

The role of John Hannah, president of Michigan State from 1941-1969, is of keen interest to Young, for the leader is considered a visionary of what started as The Agricultural College of the State of Michigan in the mid nineteenth century. Hannah was only thirty-nine when he took over at Michigan State, but he had already been giving out athlete loan awards guaranteed by Frederick Jenison. Jenison was in the insurance and surety bond business in Lansing, and he began by assuring loans given to athletes, loans often not repaid, a practice outlawed by the Big Ten and opposed by the National Collegiate Athletic Association and accrediting agencies. In 1940, the year before Hannah became president, Jenison bequeathed a large sum that was given for “the improvement of the university with particular emphasis on athletics,” (p. 130), the Jenison Awards. These illegal athletic aids would be a major reason for opposing Michigan State’s coming into the Big Ten by not only Michigan, but other institutions as well. By then, Michigan State had already applied for and was denied admission into the Conference in the thirties. It was again rejected during World War II, shortly after the war, and the following year, 1947. Soon after, Hannah dropped the Jenison Awards but was nevertheless rejected for a fifth time. Hannah, working through other Big Ten presidents, finally...