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Individual Presidential Reform | 71 8 Individual Presidential Reform Gates, Hutchins, and Bowman Though college presidents for eight decades had generally been unsuccessful in effecting reform that would reduce commercialism and professionalism in intercollegiate sport, some uncommon presidents attempted to do so at their own institutions . After all, with the prestige of the Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching advocating presidential direction in reform, it was not illogical for several brave presidents to do so, including Thomas S. Gates at the University of Pennsylvania, Robert Maynard Hutchins at the University of Chicago, and John Bowman at the University of Pittsburgh. While the 1929 Carnegie Report gave some hope to the few reformers, critics among the colleges who violated amateur ideals attempted to discredit the report. Because the Carnegie Report named individual colleges for their misdeeds, a number of those associated with colleges, including presidents, athletic officials, alumni, faculty, and students, protested the results. The Carnegie investigators had “no intention to be fair and accurate,” stated Ralph Aigler, a law professor and chair of the University of Michigan Board of Athletic Control. He was angered that a Carnegie investigator, Harold Bentley, had secretly removed letters from Coach Fielding H. Yost’s files, and when asked to return them, the head of the Carnegie investigation, Howard Savage, only returned photostatic copies of the originals.1 Norman Taber, head of the Brown Athletic Council, reacted, stating the report is “in part false and in toto . . . misleading.” Penn State’s Hugo Bezdek, president of the National Football Coaches Association , warned that the Carnegie Report “should not be taken too seriously.” This was evidently what many athletic leaders thought about the report. The Associated Press queried faculty advisors, athletic directors, and publicity directors in the South about a year after the report’s release and found little impact on rabid southern fans, even as the Great Depression was having its negative effect on the commercial side of sport. The New York Times headlined the AP findings “Carnegie Report Called Fruitless.”2 Reformers, by their very nature, were fighting the status quo and, in this case, not winning. College presidents were divided on the importance of the Carnegie Report, with a number of university heads rejecting the findings at their own institutions, 72 | Chapter 8 although often acknowledging the problems existing in other colleges. Yale had come through the investigation unscathed, surprisingly, and its president, only shortly after the report was released, gave a talk in which he joked that he would be happy to swap the purity credited to Yale by the report “for a couple of good running backs or a pair of great ends.”3 Many of the other presidents indicated that they would strive to take greater control of athletics, generally reducing the role of alumni, and place them under university control. A few even accomplished this. The most visible of the reformers who quickly made significant reforms was Thomas S. Gates, the new president of the University of Pennsylvania. Thomas Gates, a lawyer, partner with the banking firm J. P. Morgan, and longtime member of the Penn Board of Trustees, was elected president of the University of Pennsylvania only months after the Carnegie Report was released and during a period at Penn in which athletics were in turmoil. Gates had, a few years earlier, been on a committee of the Penn trustees to consider the relationship of intercollegiate athletics to intramurals and physical education.4 Now, with the backing of the trustees, he was secure in his position to achieve reform. Not only had the trustees elected one of their own, but he agreed to the presidency with no salary; he was beholden to no one, unusual for any college president. Almost as soon as he took office, he formed a small committee to recommend athletic policy changes. This committee of former Penn athletes visited a number of universities, including California, Stanford, and Southern California on the West Coast and Notre Dame, Michigan, and Wisconsin in the Midwest, to see how they controlled athletics.5 At the same time, the alumni of the University of Pennsylvania formed a committee on athletics. This group, surprisingly, also wanted to reform Penn athletics. Football, the alumni group charged, had become a “contest between professional coaches and their systems,” and the game threatened “to be a racket” for the financial advantage of the coaches.6 Together, the two groups sought reform at Penn, in line with President Gates’s belief that athletics would not “interfere...

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