Education: Bulletin 23

Sporadically, variously, but never so sweepingly as last week, censure has spattered the methods and conduct of U. S. college athletics. Last week’s censure was a fat, dun-colored tract labeled “Bulletin 23,” published by the Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching after more than three years examining of athletic correspondence, finances, coaching, hygiene in U. S. and Canadian institutions.

81 out of 112. Said Bulletin 23, lengthily but pointedly: Out of the 112 colleges and universities examined, 81 have ‘”subsidized” athletes. The remaining 28, free from any such taint of professionalism, were the following:

Bates, Bowdoin, Carleton, Chicago, Cornell University, Dalhousie, Emory, Illinois, Laval, McGill, Marquette, Massachusetts Agricultural College, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Ottawa, Queen’s, Reed, Rochester, University of Saskatchewan, Toronto, Trinity, Tufts, Tulane, United States Military Academy, University of Virginia, College of Wooster, Wesleyan, Yale.

One in Seven. One athlete out of every seven engaged in intercollegiate competition is “subsidized.”

How is this done? As follows, said Bulletin 23:

1) By providing jobs “for very nominal services.” (Example: Notre Dame.)

2) By priests making “arrangements among their own parishioners, members of the faculty, or friends of their college.” (Example: Boston College.)

3) By awarding scholarships to students who are potentially valuable athletes. (Examples: Pennsylvania State College, New York University, Colgate, Syracuse, University of Southern California.)

4) By alumni dinners “in honor of victorious teams,” to which impressionable preparatory school neophytes are eclectically invited. (Examples: Brown, Dartmouth, Rutgers.)

5) By tradesmen, locally patriotic, giving athletic bounties to local colleges, in one case, “out of impatience . . . with the meagre encouragement given to athletes at the local institution.”

6) By ” ‘caring for’* a more or less definite number of athletes, somewhat less formally than by awarding athletic scholarships.” (The number discovered at the following institutions varied from 25 to 50: Bucknell, Gettysburg, Muhlenberg, Oglethorpe, Pennsylvania State, Pittsburgh, West Virginia Wesleyan.)

Attitude. The frame of mind in which the Carnegie Foundation’s researchers approached their subject was suggested by the following paragraphs:

“The paid coach, the gate receipts, the special training tables, the costly sweaters and extensive journeys in special Pullman cars, the recruiting from the high school, the demoralizing publicity showered on the players, the devotion of an undue proportion of time to training, the devices for putting a desirable athlete, but a weak scholar, across the hurdles of the examinations—these ought to stop and the intercollege and intramural sports be Drought back to a stage in which they can be enjoyed by large numbers of students and where they do not involve an expenditure of time and money wholly at variance with any ideal of honest study. . . .”**

The Methods. Not covertly were the investigations conducted. With willing cooperation from college authorities, the investigators quizzed undergraduates, teachers, athletic officials. They opened files, read countless letters from preparatory school stalwarts who wished to be paid for college competition. Only at Oglethorpe University, where permission to search records and interview students and professors was refused, and the University of Georgia, where one official failed to send promised data, were there obstructions.

Men. Director of the investigation was Carnegie staff member Howard James Savage, onetime English teacher (Harvard, Bryn Mawr), Encyclopedia Britannica contributor (U. S. Athletic Sports). Other field workers: John Terence McGovern, oldtime Cornell runner (1900), member of U. S. Olympic Commission (1921), Encyclopedia contributor (Track and Field Sports); Harold W. Bentley, Columbia University Spanish Instructor, Encyclopedia contributor (Sports); Dean F. Smiley, M. D., Cornell medical adviser. The Bulletin’s preface was written by Carnegie Foundation President Henry Smith Pritchett himself, famed Astronomer, onetime (1900-1906) President of Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

Comments. Denials, rebukes, silences, weaseling humble and loudly defiant admissions followed the appearance of the bulletin.

Brown—”The report is in part false and in toto so misleading. …” New York University—”[Our] athletics are in control of the faculty and they keep [our] sport clean.” President Ernest Martin Hopkins of Dartmouth—”I pass the report over as inconsequential at this time.” Football Coach William Winston Roper of Princeton—”In ten years of coaching I’ve never made an effort to recruit a schoolboy athlete.” Dean Herbert Edwin Hawkes of Columbia: “We at Columbia College have no athletic scholarships.”

*Excerpts from a letter quoted by the New York Herald Tribune, from the president of an anonymous Southern college alumni association to a Manhattan alumnus, asking for help in ”caring for” a prospective footballer: “The man has already been picked by — and (coaches), and they say he looks mighty good. . . . We would be mighty glad if you would join us in helping us to raise the money needed, which is $600 . . . how about sending me a check for $10 or $15 or $25? . . .”

**In the current Nation (“radical” weekly), one Clarence E. Cason, sometime University of Wisconsin rhetoric pedagog, tells the woeful tale of Jeff Burrus, “the university’s best electric signboard,” Phi Beta Kappa member, Junior Prom chairman, footballer, crew captain. Pedagog Cason said that Paragon Burrus suffered a nervous breakdown from his wide participation in college affairs. Winning a Rhodes scholarship, he went abroad, suffered another breakdown. “Out of his experience has come the conviction that college athletics used him rather shabbily. . . . His picture tends to show conclusively that a football player has no time or thought to give to anything but football unless he is willing to subject himielf to abnormal strain.”