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88 | Chapter 10 While the Graham Plan was almost an immediate failure because there was divided sentiment in the South regarding financial aid to athletes, it stands out as a beacon of athletic reform efforts in the 1930s. It attempted to do what a few individual presidents had attempted in the period following the Carnegie Report on American College Athletics in 1929 and what no other conference was willing to take up in that decade. The reform discussions, which had been taking place in the faculty-controlled NCAA for three decades, were tried in one conference at a time when unofficial financial aid to athletes, especially in football, was growing throughout the nation. By the end of the decade, and just before U.S. entry into World War II, the NCAA decided to move toward restrictions on both financial aid and recruiting. What occurred next in reform was the creation of a national “Sanity Code,” created under the National Collegiate Athletic Association, the first attempt by the NCAA to legislate athletic reform. When the “Sanity Code” was passed shortly after World War II, Frank Porter Graham was still president of the University of North Carolina, though he had never again attempted to reform college athletics. 10 The NCAA and the Sanity Code A National Reform Gone Wrong The Sanity Code following World War II was to college athletic reform what President Woodrow Wilson’s “War to End All Wars” was to world peace following World War I. Neither worked. As the naïveté of the leaders of the National Collegiate Athletic Association (NCAA) led to the belief that all would be well with the passage of the Sanity Code in 1948, Wilson’s idealism fed the idea that fighting a war would end future conflicts. It wasn’t the first time that Wilson had been the idealist, for he once believed, when he was president of Princeton University, that if the presidents of the Big Three—Harvard, Yale, and Princeton—reformed athletics, all other institutions would follow.1 In a similar way, the leaders of the NCAA, many from the Big Ten Conference, were convinced that the NCAA’s first national legislation would bring purity to intercollegiate athletics across the nation. Unfortunately for successful reform, passing legislation did not mean that it would be followed or that those who did not conform to the legislation would be disciplined. One thing, The NCAA and the Sanit y Code | 89 however, may have been learned: Reform would not likely ever be successful on a large scale unless it was conducted on a national basis. Yet as the Graham Plan of the 1930s had not led to national reform, neither would the NCAA’s first attempt to do away with its longtime policy of Home Rule be a success in the 1940s. Unfortunately for reform, one president’s comments had more than a small amount of truth: “This Sanity Code,” he stated, “will make liars of us all.”2 From the creation of the NCAA in 1905 until World War II, the NCAA had never legislated on a national level, except for rules of the various sports, leaving reform legislation to individual institutions and conferences. The NCAA constitution of 1906 calling for Home Rule and the passage of the nine fundamental principles in 1922, including the freshman rule and absolute faculty control, prevented the NCAA from both legislation and enforcement. However, on the heels of the Carnegie Report of 1929, several failed reform efforts in the 1930s, and the growth of outright financial grants to athletes, stronger calls were heard for national reform through the NCAA. The principal driving force for reform was to create a level playing field, especially dealing with those who gave athletic scholarships and those who did not. As in the past, the question of the lack of academic integrity was not nearly as important as whether some institutions had athletic advantages over others. At nearly every NCAA convention in the 1930s, major concerns over the recruitment and payment of athletes were raised. In 1934, with the Great Depression in its fifth year, only a few NCAA members, such as Prof. B. F. Oakes of the University of Montana, favored granting “legitimate athletic scholarships.”3 Most were strongly opposed. The president of the NCAA and Big Ten commissioner, Maj. John L. Griffith, was one of those. He noted that university presidents believed recruiting and subsidizing athletes was the greatest problem in intercollegiate sports. Nevertheless, Griffith opposed giving a national...

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