The Rise of Gridiron University: Higher Education's Uneasy Alliance with Big-Time Football by Brian M. Ingrassia (review)

When played on the highest level, college football seems to contradict the fundamental principles of the institutions that sponsor it: Win at all costs. Bend or break rules. Welcome marginal students that display exceptional talent on the field. How did distinguished schools adopt such an activity? In The Rise of Gridiron University: Higher Education's Uneasy Alliance with Big-Time Football, Brian Ingrassia offers fresh insight into the extraordinary relationship between universities and America's autumn pastime.

Ingrassia debunks the myth that college administrators and faculty merely tolerated the rise of football on their campuses during the late nineteenth century. They embraced it enthusiastically. Scholars well versed in the old tenets of Muscular Christianity know of the belief that football could cultivate manly behavior and reduce the stress of college life. Participation in football could promote teamwork and discipline and thus prepare students for careers in modern industry. The benefits of football were not confined to shaping student character; the game would also provide tangible, valuable advantages to those schools that offered it. As campuses became increasingly fragmented into isolated academic departments, administrators expected that football would unite all segments of the university behind a common purpose. Operating a successful football program might also make universities relevant to a general public that did not understand nor appreciate the esoteric knowledge that flowed from the confines of the ivory tower.

Ingrassia then suggests that the academic community could not control the game it had nurtured. By the turn of the twentieth century, football was tainted by cheating and excessive violence and commercialism. Moved by the spirit of the Progressive Era, college authorities believed that they could impose order upon football and restore their lofty ideals to the game. To curtail violence, they changed the rules. They formed the first athletic conferences and the NCAA. They separated sports from physical culture by creating special athletic departments whose well-qualified personnel would suppress football abuses. They hired professional coaches, experts who would restore discipline to the football field just as faculty members controlled their classrooms.

The reforms failed. Football games became well-attended sports spectacles that generated income and publicity for the universities that played the game at a high level. Athletic departments became semiautonomous, with interests that often diverged from those of the faculty. Coaches became celebrities who demanded and received exorbitant compensation. During the 1920s, protests from critics were drowned out as universities built gigantic concrete stadiums to accommodate the growing legions of fans, many of whom had no connection to the colleges for which they rooted. In Ingrassia's view, the construction of these facilities, some with seating capacities in excess of eighty thousand, guaranteed that big-time football would become a permanent institution in American college life. Little has changed over the past nine decades. As Ingrassia so eloquently states, "Sport and the academy are two sides of a currency minted in a society with an immense, relatively unregulated higher education system that has tried to play many diverse roles" (206).

Ingrassia's research is impressive, and he documents his theories with copious notes that comprise one-third of the book. He mined deeply the papers of college presidents whose institutions played central roles in the evolution of sports, including Harvard's Charles W. Eliot, Stanford's David Starr Jordan, and Chicago's William Rainey Harper. He also sifted through the papers of many of football's famous pioneer coaches, including Yale's Walter Camp, Michigan's Fielding Yost, Chicago's Amos Alonzo Stagg, and Illinois's Bob Zuppke. Ingrassia did not confine his research to high-profile celebrities, however. He examined committee minutes, faculty correspondence, alumni newsletters, and athletic department records at Yale, Harvard, Georgia Tech, Illinois, Ohio State, and other institutions that were in the forefront of football's evolution. Nor did he ignore...