The ideal of the amateur student athlete competing for the sheer joy of sport, the authors point out, is, to a great extent, a myth. The first intercollegiate sporting event, an 1852 student-organized crew race between Harvard and Yale Universities, was funded by railroad executives eager for publicity and embraced by rowers excited for a free vacation.
During the next 60 years, students and then faculty lost control over college sports. In a “monumental shift in the structure and mission of higher education,” liberal arts colleges ceded ground to large universities with an “appetite for expansion,” to use Frederick Rudolph’s language, cited by Moyen and Thelin. Universities became bureaucratized and siloed, giving faculty greater authority over research and teaching but far less control over administrative decisions, including athletics, which became more specialized and resource-intensive.
More than a century ago, the historian Frederick Jackson Turner concluded that intercollegiate athletics had become “a business, carried on too often by professionals, supported by levies on the public, bringing in vast gate receipts, demoralizing student ethics, and confusing the ideals of sport, manliness, and decency.” By 1952, the president of the University of Oklahoma was able to tell state legislators with no hint of irony, “I hope to build a university of which our football team can be proud.”
Episodic reform efforts by colleges and universities, driven at different times by player injuries, recruiting and point-shaving scandals, and sometimes even concern over the impact of commercialization on the academic mission, made little headway. In its 1929 Bulletin No. 23 on American College Athletics, for example, the influential Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching highlighted what Moyen and Thelin describe as the “disregard for the rules of amateurism” permeating college athletics, the “deleterious impact of press coverage” and the lack of attention paid to players’ health and safety.
Although it emphasized the need to “diminish” the commercial influence on college sports, the report offered little in the way of specific recommendations, insisting instead that “happily, this task is now engaging the attention” of college leaders, including presidents, who would succeed if they possessed “the requisite ability and courage.”