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4. Presidents: Promoters of Reformers?
- University of Illinois Press
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34 | Chapter 4 4 Presidents Promoters or Reformers? The satirist and playwright George Ade wrote a popular comic play in 1904, The College Widow, catching the spirit of college presidents as promoters of intercollegiate athletics. “Do you know, Mr. Bolton,” President Witherspoon of Atwater College said to the star Atwater football player, “this craze for pugilistic sports is demoralizing our institutions.” Replied Billy Bolton, “Oh I hardly think so. Do you know I never heard of Atwater until it scored against Cornell two years ago?” The president rejoined, “Oh, my dear young friend, you, too, are possessed of this madness. Well, come along, Mr. Larrabee [the football coach], I suppose we shall have to give the team whatever it wants.”1 College administrators, more than the faculties, appreciated the popularity of football and other sports among the students , alumni, and the general public and how the spectacles brought recognition to their institutions of higher learning. College presidents were constantly looking for both private and public support—scouring their regions on speaking tours, asking the state legislators to generate money, and allying themselves with the influential individuals, often members of the rising business class, who were being placed on governing boards. Presidents found that athletics lent them a vehicle for advertising their institutions with little cost. One keen observer noted this, believing that it was a “crude confusion of the methods of business with the aims of education that drove many a college president to justify professional sports by their advertising value.”2 College presidents were often athletic promoters, acting more like cheerleaders than reformers, and to this end contributed significantly to the failure of intercollegiate athletic reform. From that perspective, not much changed from the time of President Charles W. Eliot’s inaugural address at Harvard in 1869 to the twentieth-first century. When President Eliot spoke of Harvard’s “aristocracy which excels in manly sports,” he was setting a standard not only for the most important institution of higher education in America but also for other colleges that followed where Harvard led. Only months before his inauguration, Eliot could have (but did not) condemned the Harvard baseball team for playing against the first all-professional team, the Cincinnati Red Stockings; for scheduling an eleven-day Presidents: Promoters or Reformers? | 35 trip into New York to play Yale at a neutral site in Brooklyn; and for completing a lengthy thirty-three-game schedule.3 The Harvard president could have (but did not) bemoaned the decision of the Harvard crew to travel to London, England, in 1869 to row on the Thames River against Oxford University. The first international collegiate contest was held before a crowd estimated to be about one million spectators , the largest crowd ever to watch a university contest firsthand.4 Less than a week before Eliot’s famous inaugural address, the Harvard baseball team agreed to play what was traditionally considered the strongest team in New England, the Boston Lowell Club, in a fund-raising event for the Harvard University Boat Club.5 Eliot, at the beginning of his presidential career, was acting as a promoter and not a reformer. He would later change his mind, favoring many changes to intercollegiate sport, while many other presidents continued the cheerleading role as promoters. For more than a century, university presidents often have been singled out as having the greatest opportunity to reform any evils that may have entered the intercollegiate athletic scene. Presidents have also been criticized historically for seldom attempting to reform athletics. By 1905, in the midst of football’s major crisis, one individual remarked that President Charles Eliot of Harvard, probably the best-known educator in the history of American higher education, was the only president who was attempting to rid college athletics of abuses. The individual said that for the previous twenty years President Eliot “protested without the seconding voice of any other college president.”6 Though that was a slight exaggeration, most presidents were hesitant then, as today, to attempt to reform athletics. An important question is raised: Why have presidents traditionally been unwilling to reform or why have they been unsuccessful in reforming athletics? There are several reasons for this. First, in the second half of the nineteenth century, there was a perception that the virile features of American society were disappearing as the nation urbanized and the tough frontier mentality faded away. Theodore Roosevelt was the most visible individual in the pursuit of manliness in American society even before he became...