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2. Faculty, Faculty Athletic Committees, and Reform Efforts
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Facult y, Facult y Athletic Committees, and Reform Efforts | 17 equity on the field of play. And then the individual institutions wanted to turn any reform to their competitive advantage. Meaningful reform, if it would ever occur, would not come from students who created intercollegiate athletics. The push for meaningful reform, however, might come from the actions of faculties. 2 Faculty, Faculty Athletic Committees, and Reform Efforts The Harvard Athletic Committee in 1889, with a strong faculty hand, stated: “We are entirely in accord with the effort made by the students of [Harvard] to reform college sports.” The Committee anticipated “that they shall hereafter be played under rules which will limit participation in them to bona fide members of the University.”1 This response to the Intercollegiate Football Association crisis following the Harvard-Princeton game was mostly wishful thinking, for there was little evidence that students were interested in their own athletes being bona fide students, only those of other institutions. Faculty members, on the other hand, were little interested in bona fide students in other institutions, but they wanted their own to be principally interested in academics, not athletics. This was generally true for at least a century at Harvard and elsewhere, beginning well before athletic committees were organized by faculties on nearly all university and college campuses across America to address growing problems created by intercollegiate athletics. Faculties traditionally promoted the policy of in loco parentis, for they were often acting as moral and religious guardians in the place of the students’ parents. From colonial times well into the nineteenth century, colleges had lists of things forbidden at each institution, so faculties were generally in command of refusing a variety of activities thought to be harmful to moral character, learning, or safety. These would include such activities as card playing, drinking, smoking , leaving the college campus without permission, and throwing snowballs and baseballs, or kicking footballs, on campus and thus endangering buildings.2 At Yale just prior to the American Revolution, students were prohibited from fishing or sailing unless permission was obtained from a tutor or president.3 Only a few years after the Americans defeated the British at Yorktown, ending the Revolutionary War battles, the Princeton faculty banned field hockey as “low and unbecoming 18 | Chapter 2 gentlemen and scholars.”4 At about the same time, a student at King’s College in New York (Columbia) was punished for swimming off campus and sentenced to confinement to his room and commanded to translate Latin for a week.5 In the South, a student at Virginia’s William and Mary in 1795 found the faculty lenient in allowing “a game of fives [handball] against the old House.” He said, “If a person comes here for improvement, he must study hard, but if pleasure be his object, it is a fine place for spending money as ever I saw.”6 In the intervening hundred years, faculty at most institutions were ready either to ban sport, and intercollegiate sports when they began, or to reform them to comply with what they considered educational and moral aims of the institutions. Well before intercollegiate sport began with a crew meet between Harvard and Yale, college faculties were banning sports, especially football. At a number of schools, the kicking game of soccer-like football was prohibited by faculty, including Brown, West Point Military Academy, Williams, Yale, and Harvard. At Harvard, students had a tradition of playing a freshman-sophomore football game dating back to at least the early 1800s. It was called “Bloody Monday” because it was played the first Monday of the fall term as a way to initiate freshmen into being subservient to upperclassmen. The hazing object was not so much for the sophomores to beat the freshmen, for that was nearly a foregone conclusion, but to physically punish the newcomers, who, new to the college, hardly knew their teammates. It was so brutal and unsavory that the Harvard faculty banned future contests in 1860.7 Football was not reintroduced at Harvard for a decade, and by then other colleges were playing the kicking game. Princeton and Rutgers began intercollegiate football when they played two soccer-type games in the fall of 1869, each under slightly different rules. Despite twenty-five Princeton players taking the train to New Brunswick for the first game and Rutgers making the trip to Princeton for a return game, neither faculty protested the team actions or banned future contests.8 By the early 1870s, a number...