{"id":12614,"date":"2012-09-10T05:30:27","date_gmt":"2012-09-10T09:30:27","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.geneveith.com\/?p=12614"},"modified":"2012-09-10T05:30:27","modified_gmt":"2012-09-10T09:30:27","slug":"progressivism-and-college-football","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.patheos.com\/blogs\/geneveith\/2012\/09\/progressivism-and-college-football\/","title":{"rendered":"Progressivism and college football"},"content":{"rendered":"\n<\/head>

George Will reviews The Rise of Gridiron University: Higher Education\u2019s Uneasy Alliance with Big-Time Football<\/a> by Brian M. Ingrassia, in which we learn that big-time intercollegiate football grew out of progressivism and its vision for higher education:<\/p>\n

Higher education embraced athletics in the first half of the 19th century, when most colleges were denominational and most instruction was considered mental and moral preparation for a small minority \u2014 clergy and other professionals. Physical education had nothing to do with spectator sports entertaining people from outside the campus community. Rather, it was individual fitness \u2014 especially gymnastics \u2014 for the moral and pedagogic purposes of muscular Christianity \u2014 mens sana in corpore sano<\/em>, a sound mind in a sound body.<\/p>\n

\nThe collective activity of team sports came after a great collective exertion, the Civil War, and two great social changes, urbanization and industrialization. . . . .\n

Intercollegiate football began when Rutgers played Princeton in 1869, four years after Appomattox. In 1878, one of Princeton\u2019s two undergraduate student managers was Thomas \u2014 he was called Tommy \u2014 Woodrow Wilson. For the rest of the 19th century, football appealed as a venue for valor for collegians whose fathers\u2019 venues had been battlefields. Stephen Crane, author of the Civil War novel \u201cThe Red Badge of Courage\u201d (1895) \u2014 the badge was a wound \u2014 said: \u201cOf course, I have never been in a battle, but I believe that I got my sense of the rage of conflict on the football field.\u201d<\/p>\n

Harvard philosopher William James then spoke of society finding new sources of discipline and inspiration in \u201cthe moral equivalent of war.\u201d Society found football, which like war required the subordination of the individual, and which would relieve the supposed monotony of workers enmeshed in mass production.<\/p>\n

College football became a national phenomenon because it supposedly served the values of progressivism, in two ways. It exemplified specialization, expertise and scientific management. And it would reconcile the public to the transformation of universities, especially public universities, into something progressivism desired but the public found alien. Replicating industrialism\u2019s division of labor, universities introduced the fragmentation of the old curriculum of moral instruction into increasingly specialized and arcane disciplines. These included the recently founded social sciences \u2014 economics, sociology, political science \u2014 that were supposed to supply progressive governments with the expertise to manage the complexities of the modern economy and the simplicities of the uninstructed masses.<\/p>\n

Football taught the progressive virtue of subordinating the individual to the collectivity. Inevitably, this led to the cult of one individual, the coach. Today, in almost every state, at least one public university football coach is paid more than the governor.<\/p>\n

As universities multiplied, football fueled the competition for prestige and other scarce resources. Shortly after it was founded, the University of Chicago hired as football coach the nation\u2019s first tenured professor of physical culture and athletics, Amos Alonzo Stagg, who had played at Yale for Walter Camp, an early shaper of the rules and structure of intercollegiate football. Camp also was president of the New Haven Clock Co. Clocks were emblematic of modernity \u2014 workers punching time clocks, time-and-motion efficiency studies. Camp saw football as basic training for the managerial elites demanded by corporations.<\/p>\n

Progressives saw football as training managers for the modern regulatory state. Ingrassia says that a Yale professor, the social Darwinist William Graham Sumner (who was Camp\u2019s brother-in-law), produced one academic acolyte who thought the \u201cEnglish race\u201d was establishing hegemony because it played the \u201csturdiest\u201d sports.<\/p>\n

Reinforced concrete and other advancements in construction were put to use building huge stadiums to bring the public onto campuses that, to many, seemed increasingly unintelligible. Ingrassia says \u201cHarvard Stadium was the prototype\u201d for dozens of early 20th-century stadiums. In 1914, the inaugural game in the Yale Bowl drew 70,055 spectators. The Alabama, Louisiana State and Southern California football programs are the children of Harvard\u2019s, Yale\u2019s and Princeton\u2019s.<\/p>\n

\u201cIt\u2019s kind of hard,\u201d said Alabama\u2019s Bear Bryant, \u201cto rally \u2019round a math class.\u201d And today college football is said to give vast, fragmented universities a sense of community through shared ritual. In this year\u2019s first \u201cgame of the century,\u201d Alabama\u2019s student-athletes played those from Michigan in Cowboys Stadium in Arlington, Tex., which is 605 miles and 1,191 miles from Tuscaloosa and Ann Arbor, respectively.<\/p>\n

via George Will: College football and big government \u2013 The Washington Post<\/a>.<\/p><\/div>\n<\/blockquote><\/body><\/html>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

George Will reviews The Rise of Gridiron University: Higher Education\u2019s Uneasy Alliance with Big-Time Football by Brian M. Ingrassia, in which we learn that big-time intercollegiate football grew out of progressivism and its vision for higher education: Higher education embraced athletics in the first half of the 19th century, when most colleges were denominational and […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1281,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[14,18,20],"tags":[525,1016,1813],"class_list":["post-12614","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-education","category-football","category-history","tag-college-football","tag-higher-education","tag-progressivism"],"yoast_head":"\nProgressivism and college football<\/title>\n<meta name=\"description\" content=\"George Will reviews The Rise of Gridiron University: Higher Education's Uneasy Alliance with Big-Time Football by Brian M. 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