CHAPTER LXXIV

THE RAH-RAH BOYS

The most conspicuous of the activities of the alumni have, of course, to do with athletics; this is the part of college life which the students have made for themselves, and it is what college really means to the great bulk of them. Now, the sedentary life is one of the many evils invented by our civilization, and if college athletics meant that all the students in the institution, both men and women, were getting a thorough “work-out” three or four times a week, I should be willing to say that the athletics justified the colleges. But what college athletics really means is that two per cent of the students, or in small colleges probably ten per cent, get an excessive amount of exercise, sometimes to the permanent injury of their vital organs; while the great bulk of the students are surrendered to the mob-excitements of a series of gladiatorial combats and sporting events, which provide exercise only for the vocal cords and the gambling instincts.

College athletics, under the spur of commercialism, has become a monstrous cancer, which is rapidly eating out the moral and intellectual life of our educational institutions. College rivalries have been erected into the dignity of little wars, enlisting an elaborate cult of loyalties and heroisms. The securing of prize athletes, the training of them, the exploiting of them in mass combats, has become an enormous industry, absorbing the services not merely of students and alumni, but of a whole class of professional coaches, directors, press agents and promoters, who are rapidly coming to dominate college life and put the faculty on the shelf. “Drives” are instigated and funds raised for the building of “stadiums,” and these, being a source of income, are a continual stimulus to new activities. So this evil, also, is one which breeds itself. The athletic alumni bring in new students for athletic purposes, and these students increase the athletic excitement while they are undergraduates, and go out from the institution to multiply the athletic alumni.

I am only stating what every insider knows perfectly well, that our college athletics today is almost universally commercialized. All the big colleges have “alumni committees,” who are out scouting for the best athletic material; they are watching the athletic life of all the “prep” schools and other institutions where likely material is to be found—including steel-mills and lumber camps. They are offering husky men all sorts of inducements to come to the right college. The offering of money is supposed to be forbidden, but there are very few colleges today which do not regularly and systematically violate or evade this rule. There are many kinds of jobs in connection with the gladiatorial life which can be made available to the right persons, and which are or can be made into sinecures. There are tickets to be sold and accounts kept; there are duties as masseurs and attendants and janitors’ assistants. I know of one case, of a student who managed the Intercollegiate track meet not so very long ago, who received eight hundred dollars for this small service. The athletic budget of Harvard is considerably over a million dollars a year, and football pays for it. First-class coaches claim twenty thousand a year and get it, and graduate managers also receive high salaries. There is a careful pretense kept up that this gladiatorial industry is managed by students, but in all the big universities this is a farce; the student managers are puppets, the real masters of the industry being the alumni—business men who bring the business point of view into sport. Anything to win!

Consider, for example, the athletic developments at Stanford University, which have played their part in the demoralizing of that great institution. There is a noisy bunch of alumni who have been called upon to raise money on various occasions, and who have thus come to power, and know it. They have cast out the honest but unpopular Rugby game, and brought in the American game of batter and smash. They run the annual contests with the University of California, working in alliance with the railroads, the hotels, the restaurants, and the “sporting-houses,” which of course make millions out of the enormous crowds of free-spending people. The stadium at Stanford seats sixty thousand, at five dollars apiece, so you can see how much money there is at stake, and how quickly there grows up in the university a powerful group of students who are nothing but sporting promoters, with the point of view and the vices of the underworld.

Of course, everything depends upon victory, and to make certain of victory there are professional coaches—the alumni pay the Stanford coach ten thousand dollars a year, which is more than any professor has ever received in the history of Stanford, and twice the salary of the professor of clinical history. The alumni have raised a “yellow dog” fund, to bring in professional athletes, and of course these fellows know what they are there for, and do not waste much of their precious time upon studies. A Stanford professor assured me that many of them did not even bother to get text-books. The committee on scholarship was changed, because some professors had made themselves unpopular by refusing to lower the standards for these athletic idols.

Such was the story I was told at Stanford in April; and in July I read in my paper that Stanford’s Board of Athletic Control is beginning the construction of a four hundred and fifty thousand dollar men’s dormitory, to be built out of the receipts from athletic contests. This news appears on the “sporting” page of my newspaper, and is written by a “sporting” man, with a “sporting” point of view. Note the haughty tone in which the academic world is taught its place:

This would seem to be the correct answer to the row about taking in gate receipts by certain academic minded professors in the East, who charged “commercialism.” The stadium cost Stanford approximately two hundred and five thousand dollars, and approximately one hundred and ten thousand was realized by Stanford as her share of gate receipts from the big game alone. A certain sum of money had already been advanced by the trustees to build the stadium. The crowd at this year’s contests in the stadium is expected to be even larger.

And of course, if Stanford has a stadium, the University of California must have one. Her alumni and athletic boosters set to work to raise a million dollars, using the methods of intimidation they had learned during the war-time “drives.” One member of the faculty, full professor and dean, became especially truculent about the meaning of “California spirit”—to be proven by putting up money for the stadium. Students were compelled to subscribe, and in the fall, when some of them found that they had not been able to earn money to pay their full subscriptions, they were refused admission to the university; that is, the university refused to accept their registration fees, until their stadium pledges had been paid!

Ex-President Jordan talked to me very emphatically about the athletic evil at Stanford and at other institutions. There was a famous coach at Stanford, who was taken to a university of the Middle West many years ago; he gathered in among his gladiators men who were too ignorant to speak English correctly, and some one paid them with cash, and with promises of college promotions, which the faculty duly delivered. Thus a certain famous football champion published in his home paper in California the statement that he had been offered fifteen hundred dollars and an education, to play football at this university. He went to the Law School, with less than a high school education, and he was graduated from the Law School the year he would only have entered Stanford. There was a gathering of college heads in Chicago, to consider the problem of professional athletics, and President Jordan was invited by a professor of the university in question to tell about his experiences with this coach. The result was that the alumni organized to demand the resignation of this professor. Concerning one of these gladiators President Jordan writes me: “After leaving college, he used to stand in a San Francisco saloon where he collected small sums for letting men feel of his muscles. He is not now living.” It would seem that one needs more than muscle to secure survival in modern society!

That was ten or fifteen years ago, and the exploiting of muscle has grown like all other kinds of American big business. At Princeton, which is especially notorious for the purchasing of athletes, President Hibben called a conference with the presidents of Yale and Harvard, to see what could be done about it; they solemnly passed a series of resolutions to the effect that the athletic managers must obey the amateur rules—which they knew all about and laughed at; they laughed none the less after this conference. I talked with a student at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, who saw at first-hand the process whereby Princeton bought a champion hammer thrower and shot putter from that institution. It fell to my friend to answer the telephone in the athletic association office while the Princeton alumni were trying to get this man. The students at Tech are bitter about the way their athletes are bought or stolen—they haven’t as much money as Princeton. Another all-around athlete was not allowed to run by Tech, but this did not worry him very much—because he had such a handsome offer from Bowdoin!

To get a famous athlete is the only way these little colleges know to “put themselves on the map.” They make desperate efforts, and sometimes the results are comical. For example, in Kentucky is a little religious institution known as Center College. No one had ever heard of it before, but a couple of years ago it turned up with a carefully selected assortment of gladiators, and beat Harvard at football. I happen to know about one of the leading athletic lights who achieved this triumph; he was a pool-room hanger-on before he was brought to the college, and now that his brief day of glory is past, he is a farm-hand!

Everywhere these mighty men of muscle and money are coming to feel their power. Speaking at an alumni meeting of the University of Pennsylvania, a British rowing coach laid down the law to the vice-provost of the university:

You, Mr. Vice-provost, as representing the faculty, have told us that the university has added from eight buildings in ’76 to eighty now; that the students have grown from one thousand to seven thousand, but what has made your university? Why, athletics. Athletics are the biggest advertisement for any university, and athletics have made Pennsylvania. What has the faculty ever done for athletics? Nothing.... Get busy and alter it all.... Pressure on the faculty quick, and you can do it.

Thorstein Veblen, in his book, “The Higher Learning in America,” gives an amusing illustration of the methods used to get these professional gladiators “by” in their classes. The athletic committee, casting around for “snap” courses, selected Italian as a likely one, and when examination time came round the gladiators were required to read a passage in Italian—the passage submitted being the Lord’s Prayer! Professor Veblen does not name the university at which this happened, but I have ascertained that it was Mr. Rockefeller’s University of Chicago.

A curious illustration of the operation of the athletic system in our smaller colleges is found in the January, 1922, bulletin of the American Association of University Professors, dealing with the affairs of Washington and Jefferson College, a religious institution located at Washington, Pennsylvania. All these little toadstools are trying to turn into big mushrooms, and there are two essentials to the procedure; one is—if you will pardon the mixed metaphor—the harpooning of whales, and the other is the winning of football victories. At Washington and Jefferson there was one member of the faculty, a professor of chemistry by the name of H. E. Wells, who failed to appreciate the supreme importance of football victories in college life. He had his mind set on the upholding of academic standards, and he ruthlessly “flunked” some prominent athletes, who had failed to make good in their class work.

Naturally, this roused the indignation of the athletic alumni, who were putting up their good money to pay the tuition and college fees, board and room rent of members of the football team. (This was proved by a committee of the trustees appointed to investigate the athletic situation.) The athletic alumni set out to “get” the cantankerous professor of chemistry, using for their purpose a man who was listed as “general secretary” of the college, but had been energetic and successful as a “field agent,” recruiting students for athletics. This man, backed by the alumni, caused the publication in their interlocking newspaper, the Washington “Reporter,” of an article attacking Professor Wells’ record as a teacher, and presenting statistics as to the number of students he had “flunked.” These statistics were entirely false, and Professor Wells sent in a correction—which correction was, as usual, buried in an obscure part of the paper. The American Association of University Professors points out the important fact that the college administration made no move to protect Professor Wells against these false charges; on the contrary, says the report, “the administration permitted a professor to be struck below the belt in such a way that his popularity with students and with alumni was extensively damaged.” After that, of course, it was easy for a committee of the athletic alumni to appear before the trustees and charge that Professor Wells was “unpopular among the students.” So Professor Wells was dropped by the trustees at three months’ notice, without giving him a hearing, without giving him a right to face his accusers, in fact without his even knowing some of the charges against him.

Still more curious was the case of George Winchester, professor of physics. He had raised the money for the only first class laboratory at the college, and he had given more money than the majority of the trustees; but he committed the offense of putting studies above football, and for that he was punished. In March, 1918, the board of trustees granted to Professor Winchester “a leave of absence for the duration of the war, or so long as he remains in the service of the allies.” After the armistice the board wrote to Professor Winchester, to ask him when he would be ready to take up his work again, and Professor Winchester cabled that he would be ready to resume work on July 1, 1919; after cabling, he went to Toulon to do work with the French Admiralty. Meantime, the athletic alumni got busy with the board, and the board summarily dropped Professor Winchester, and appointed his successor! Says the committee of the Professors’ Association:

It would require stronger language than is suitable to this report to characterize justly the action taken. Regardless of any argument that might be developed to account for the extraordinary action of the board, it is sufficient to recount the bare fact that the board, after having granted a leave of absence, dismissed Professor Winchester in absentia, while he was in France on active service in the work for which leave had been granted, without a previous notification, without a hearing, without any redress whatsoever. It constitutes an act about which there can be no difference of opinion among right thinking men.

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