Introduction

Few issues in American higher education have captured the public imagination and attention as sports. Sports competition has accompanied the growth and development of American colleges and universities since at least the beginning of the twentieth-century with such consistency and intensity that we cannot understand higher education in America without recognizing the role of intercollegiate athletics. In colleges of every type, large or small, public or private, distinguished or mediocre, a center of advanced research or a community college, sports have a substantial presence.

Some colleges, to be sure, avoid sports. A few prosper without intense intercollegiate competition, but they are rare exceptions. When we follow the history of America's great research universities we find most rising to preeminence accompanied by a major commitment to intercollegiate athletics: Michigan, Illinois, Berkeley, UCLA, Florida, Ohio State, Harvard, Yale, Princeton, or Stanford. In these universities, sports remain closely aligned with the institutional brand for growth, achievement, and identity. Their commitment to the college sports enterprise is carried outward to other colleges and universities of varying size and academic distinction, but most share the common values and controversies so visibly presented by the major research universities.

Over the decades of the twentieth century and continuing into the twenty-first, America has become ever more sports-minded. Television and other forms of media from print to radio to the Internet enable media vehicles have greatly expanded public consumption of sports entertainment, especially at the levels of big time college sports such as football and basketball and for most professional sports. This, in turn, has increased the commitment of parents and their children to organized sports competitions associated with elementary and secondary schools as well as private sports-coaching clubs and organized youth sports programs. As sports have become ever more significant in the public consciousness, key issues of national concern, whether related to race, class, and gender; associated with values and standards of behavior; focused on health and safety; or related to financial rewards have been translated into sports issues.

These games offer a context for the discussion and on occasion the partial resolution of fundamental social conflicts. Intercollegiate sports serve as a venue for testing values about competition, amateurism, personal risk, human and social justice, the place of education in American life, individual compensation, and personal morality. Concerns about payment, corruption, competition, and finance in college sports capture public enthusiasm and put colleges and universities in the middle of debates that extend well beyond the educational functions of the institutions or the rules of the playing field.

Yet with all the focus on American intercollegiate sports, much remains poorly understood about the development of the historical relationships between sports, society, colleges and universities, and the academic enterprise. We address some of these issues within a historical context, and while we may not resolve the question of values, whether intercollegiate sports are appropriately managed and projected into the larger world by our institutions, we can approach an understanding of the historical development of college sports competition, focusing primarily on America's major public and private universities.

Course Thesis

Every historical inquiry needs a thesis to create boundaries around complex subjects. The following statement offers a premise for this discussion, open to refinement, disagreement, or rejection:

In America, since at least the beginning of the twentieth century, intercollegiate sports competition has been an essential element in creating support for America's public and private colleges and universities. Absent a national higher education system, inspired by the local, political, or sectarian origins of many of America's most prestigious colleges and universities, and driven by the need to develop substantial coalitions of support for public and private academic enterprises, America's colleges and universities turned to athletic competition as one significant mechanism to build constituencies to sustain their financial base. Almost all of today's comprehensive American research universities, for example, developed high profile and expensive intercollegiate athletic programs as integral components of their endless search for adequate institutional financial support. 

The issues of governance, integrity, quality, and purpose that these sports programs brought with them challenged institutional governance as an unavoidable side effect of the necessary investment in college athletics. At the same time, the ever-growing public enthusiasm for sports made intercollegiate athletics a focus for general American social issues of poverty, race, class, and gender, and for the institutional issues of values and purpose. The stable structural organization of American college sports comes under frequent challenge, and it may be that a major reorientation of college sports organization will emerge from the current intense interest in a market-based compensation opportunity for student-athletes.

An exploration of college sports offers some challenges because most Americans believe they understand both sports and universities. We have many preconceptions about sports and about the role of sports in universities because we think we know more than we do. By exploring this topic as historians, we learn to separate our opinion from our analysis, read controversy with a critical eye, examine original documents, and seek the data that can inform our understanding. When we have concluded our work, we may still love or hate our sports and their organizations, but the analysis we develop and the understanding we achieve will provide us with a basis for our opinions.

One of the tasks of this course is to learn how to guard against the analytical confusion that comes from projecting today's attitudes and circumstances into the past or imagining that what we experience today is altogether new and different from past behavior. The sports enterprise that we see around us at American colleges and universities has a rich historical tradition. Things we see as today's urgent business often have long historical antecedents. The actions reflected in the headlines may not come from a new idea or crisis but rather reflect and respond to fundamental traditions guiding the operation of American collegiate sports.

In this course we search for the structure and enduring organization of college sports. We look for the development of college athletics that produced yesterday and today highly paid coaches, great fan enthusiasm, endless national media attention, controversy about social values, and the opportunity for scandal and corruption. We search for the organic link that has bound intercollegiate sports to American higher education for over a century. This requires knowledge about what we were and what we have become. It is much easier to learn about what we have become than it is to learn about what we were. In this class we do both.

The Course

his course is in a constant state of development. While I have given this course before, it remains a work in progress. You have the obligation to read, ask questions or comment online in our discussions as appropriate, participate frequently in the online discussion based on our readings and the weekly introduction and slides, and communicate with me when useful by email. I have the obligation to provide a basis for each week's conversation and topic, engage with you in the online discussions, and evaluate your work. Together we will shape the context of this course, seeking ways to enhance its value for the next class of students.

This semester's course reflects the experience and contributions of previous semesters' classes. This is what historians do, of course. We read, talk, and write, each generation leaving a record for future generations of historians who will improve on the research and the explanations we provide. We will not solve all the issues related to the history of intercollegiate sports in America, but we will understand college sports programs much better.

Material for the Course

In addition to the extensive electronic library of materials provided in our online reading list, you will have no difficulty finding additional material on the topics of this course in books, articles, dissertations, news magazines, newspapers, congressional and state legislative hearings and testimony, interviews, autobiographies, music, television, movies, online videos, and official reports of all kinds from universities, conferences, the NCAA, and other organizations. You will have the resources of the library and the Internet at your disposal. The Internet has a wide range of materials available, although sometimes they appear poorly or idiosyncratically organized. Nonetheless, with persistence there is much to be found.

Internet resources have another defect for historians. Much information available on the Internet about intercollegiate sports refers to the events of yesterday, today, and tomorrow. While this serves those of us interested in the current events of sports, it tends to distort our understanding of the historical development of intercollegiate athletics because so much of the information comes from our own moment in history. As you find sites with important information for historians on the Internet, you can share those sites with the rest of us through our discussion forum. The university library also has extensive information on sports topics, and students will find many references in the readings that can lead them to useful material. The library catalog and other research resources are easily available online.

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Since the integrity of the academic enterprise of any institution of higher education requires honesty in scholarship and research, academic honesty is required of all students at the University of Massachusetts Amherst. Academic dishonesty is prohibited in all programs of the University. Academic dishonesty includes but is not limited to: cheating, fabrication, plagiarism, and facilitating dishonesty. Appropriate sanctions may be imposed on any student who has committed an act of academic dishonesty. Instructors should take reasonable steps to address academic misconduct. Any person who has reason to believe that a student has committed academic dishonesty should bring such information to the attention of the appropriate course instructor as soon as possible. Instances of academic dishonesty not related to a specific course should be brought to the attention of the appropriate department Head or Chair. Since students are expected to be familiar with this policy and the commonly accepted standards of academic integrity, ignorance of such standards is not normally sufficient evidence of lack of intent. (http://www.umass.edu/dean_students/codeofconduct/acadhonesty/).

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