Pay for Play: A History of Big-Time College Athletic Reform

Preface

Preface Woodrow Wilson, as an undergraduate at Princeton University in the 1880s, was an athletic “cheerleader” for his beloved Princeton Tigers. Later, when he was a professor of political economy at Wesleyan University, he helped coach the football team in its competition against the likes of Yale and Harvard. When he took a position in jurisprudence and politics at Princeton, he again assisted with the football team and was chair of the Committee on Outdoor Sports. Only a few years before he became president of the United States, he was president of Princeton University, where he tried unsuccessfully to help reform big-time college sport, against the wishes of his governing board and other universities. By then, Wilson believed, the students were preoccupied with nonacademic activities; or as he said, “The sideshow has swallowed up the circus.” Wilson was symbolic of the reformers and cheerleaders who have often been at variance on the direction that college sport has taken since Yale and Harvard inaugurated American intercollegiate sport nine years before the American Civil War. Others who have become university leaders repeatedly have been as conflicted as was Wilson. More often than not they have played the role of cheerleader for their own institutions while calling for reform of the system for all the others. Cheerleading has generally won the day, whereas reforming the system has generally been subscribed to by word but not by action. Pay for Play recounts the yin and yang (dark and cold, bright and hot) of the various players in the attempts to reform intercollegiate sports. It traces the history of those who have made attempts to reform big-time athletics that students unaided created and the institutions that took them over for a variety of reasons. The harmony sought by the balance of yin and yang of college athletics has been an elusive feature of big-time athletics. The writing of this volume was first suggested by Sandy Thatcher, then director of the Penn State University Press, while we were involved in a series of interdisciplinary discussions about sport sponsored by Stephen Ross, a professor of law at Penn State. I had circulated a timeline on the history of intercollegiate athletic reform to the group, and Thatcher proposed creating a history of athletic reform, something that he was deeply interested in since his competitive swimming days at Princeton University. I had personally been studying athletic reform x | Preface since writing my PhD dissertation in the 1960s at the University of Wisconsin– Madison on the history of the Wisconsin State University Athletic Conference, but not before. At my undergraduate institution, Northwestern University, I was a history major on an academic scholarship, but I was recruited for both the basketball and baseball teams. I did not know of scholarship athletes who were given special academic privileges, and I knew of only one particular course that some athletes took because it was supposed to be easy: The History of Greek Literature. I was probably naive, coming from a rather sheltered life on a dairy farm in southern Wisconsin and long before we could learn of all the problems in college athletics on ESPN. Later, when I was interviewed for a position in the prestigious department of Physical Education at Penn State University in 1968, I asked two important individuals in the interview process whether any pressure was ever placed upon university professors at Penn State to change or raise grades of athletes. Knowing that it was not unusual in institutions of higher education, I did not want to be placed in that situation. During the discussion, I was then told the story of Joe Paterno when he was an assistant football coach early in his coaching career. What was told to me is that Paterno had gone to see a professor about a football player’s grade in an effort to keep the player eligible. When Dean of the College Ernie McCoy was informed of this indiscretion, he called Paterno into his office. The straight-shooting McCoy told the coach that if he ever heard of him putting pressure on a professor in the future, Paterno would no longer be at Penn State. In my twenty-eight years at Penn State, with several all-Americans and a Heisman Trophy winner in my classes, I was never approached or called by any coach or member of the Athletic Department about grades. Penn State may not be pure in athletics or in any other area of higher education, but its...