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

3. Early Interinstitutional Reform Efforts

Early Interinstitutional Reform Efforts | 25 independence to a larger body could a semblance of order be brought to intercollegiate athletics. Individual colleges increasingly lost control of their individual autonomy over athletics to the collective action of groups of colleges. Early reform efforts came when interinstitutional control expanded. 3 Early Interinstitutional Reform Efforts Reform efforts by students, who created intercollegiate athletics, and those of athletic committees were not substantial in the latter years of the nineteenth century. The students who controlled athletics had a desire for equitable rules to create a level, competitive playing field, but they were little concerned with the influence athletics had on the quality of education for the student or the institution . Faculty athletic committees were much more concerned about athletics and education than were the students, but from an early period these committees were principally interested in only their own institutions and not how their decisions impacted the athletic relations with other schools. Athletic committees were reluctant to give up individual institutional autonomy over college sports in favor of greater outside control and the collective good. In this respect, colleges acted somewhat similarly to the larger America where the individual states knew what was best for them and resisted federal legislation. The nineteenth and early twentieth centuries could be considered the period of “states’ rights” for college athletics, and not until much later did individual colleges give up their rights to either regional or national authority. As could be expected, collective reform was generally unsuccessful at first, and only in a period of crisis did the laissez-faire attitudes of colleges give way to collective legislation.1 The first efforts of interinstitutional reform came through the work of President Charles W. Eliot of Harvard. Eliot had been active in the early 1880s in attempting to reduce the number of games being played and in eliminating professional coaching and participation against professionals. In 1882, he wrote letters to other New England college presidents to see if united action among colleges could help reform intercollegiate athletics. “Our Faculty,” Eliot wrote to other eastern college presidents, “wishes me to inquire if your Faculty would think it expedient first to prohibit your baseball nine from playing with professionals and secondly to 26 | Chapter 3 limit the number of matches.”2 Eliot’s concern over professionalism had evidently been sparked by Harvard’s hiring of a professional baseball coach in 1881 and the number of games Harvard was playing against professional players, whom he considered the lower-class elements competing on major-league teams. Eliot believed that his faculty was ready to take action against professionalism but felt that common action would be more effective than Harvard acting alone. The faculty of Harvard’s chief rival, Yale, considered Eliot’s proposal but refused to act.3 The Yale faculty inaction was the first of more than two decades of a hands-off policy in most aspects of athletics at Yale. Yale’s refusal to consider interinstitutional control of athletics was likely the result of Yale’s athletic superiority during the latter years of the nineteenth century and into the twentieth century under the leadership of Walter Camp, the dominant figure in intercollegiate athletics for a generation and more. Why should we reform, Yale reasoned, when we are successful in all the favored sports? The next year, the Harvard faculty Athletic Committee requested Yale’s faculty to call a meeting of leading colleges in a joint reform effort. The Yale faculty again declined. The Harvard Athletic Committee then called for a late December 1883 conference, principally to discuss professionalism, especially of professional coaches. The first faculty conference on athletic reform consisted of eight institutions meeting in New York City, where Yale was represented but soon withdrew. The remaining seven faculty members represented Harvard and Princeton and five lesser athletic institutions: Columbia, Penn, Trinity, Wesleyan, and Williams. Among the resolutions passed by the conference were the following: (1) no professional athletes should coach any team, (2) no team should compete against a professional team or noncollege team, (3) participation should only be on a college’s home grounds, (4) no student should participate more than four years, (5) all colleges should form faculty athletic committees to approve rules and regulations, and (6) colleges should compete only against others who passed the resolutions.4 Once passed, the resolutions were sent to twenty-one eastern institutions with the condition that when five colleges adopted them, they would become binding. Only two faculties adopted them: Harvard...