CONCERNING ATHLETICS
Because of such athletic tendencies, the college student has been the recipient of the disapprobation of a certain type of onlookers in general, and of many college faculties in particular.
President Lowell of Harvard, in advocating competitive scholarship, in a Phi Beta Kappa address at Columbia University, said, “By free use of competition, athletics has beaten scholarship out of sight in the estimation of the community at large, and in the regard of the student bodies.” Woodrow Wilson pays his respects to student athleticism by sententiously remarking, “So far as colleges go, the side-shows have swallowed up the circus, and we in the main tent do not know what is going on.”
Professor Edwin E. Slosson, who spent somewhat over a year traveling among fourteen of the large universities, utters a jeremiad on college athletics. He found “that athletic contests do not promote friendly feeling and mutual respect between the colleges, but quite the contrary; that they attract an undesirable set of students; that they lower the standard of honor and honesty; that they corrupt faculties and officials; that they cultivate the mob mind; that they divert the attention of the students from their proper work; and pervert the ends of education.” And all these cumulative calamities arrive, according to Professor Slosson, because of the grand stand, because people are watching foot-ball games and competitive athletics. The professor would have no objection to a few athletes playing foot-ball on the desert of Idaho or in the fastnesses of the Maine woods, provided no one was looking. “If there is nobody watching, they will not hurt themselves much and others not at all,” he concedes.
Meanwhile, regardless of their doom,
The little victims play.
In fact, such argument appeals to the average collegian with about the same degree of weight as the remark of the Irishman who was chased by a mad bull. The Irishman ran until out of breath, with the bull directly behind him; then a sudden thought struck him, and he said to himself: “What a fool I am! I am running the same way this bull is running. I would be all right if I were only running the other way.”
It will doubtless be conceded by fair-minded persons generally that in many institutions of North America athletics are being over-emphasized, even as in some institutions practical and scientific education is emphasized at the expense of liberal training. It is difficult, however, to generalize concerning either of these subjects. Opinion and judgment vary almost as widely as does the point of view from which persons note college conditions. A keen professor of one of the universities where athletics too largely usurped the time and attention of students, justifiably summed up the situation by saying:
The man who is trying to acquire intellectual experience is regarded as abnormal (a “greasy grind” is the elegant phrase, symptomatic at once of student vulgarity, ignorance, and stupidity), and intellectual eminence falls under suspicion as “bad form.” The student body is too much obsessed of the “campus-celebrity” type,—a decent-enough fellow, as a rule, but, equally as a rule, a veritable Goth. That any group claiming the title students should thus minimize intellectual superiority indicates an extraordinary condition of topsyturvydom.
During the last twelve months, however, I have talked with several hundred persons, including college presidents, professors, alumni, and fathers and mothers in twenty-five States and provinces of North America in relation to this question. While occasionally a college professor as well as parent or a friend of a particular student has waxed eloquent in dispraise of athletics, by far the larger majority of these representative witnesses have said that in their particular region athletic exercises among students were not over-emphasized.
University Hall, University of Michigan
Yet it is evident that college athletics in America to-day are too generally limited to a few students who perform for the benefit of the rest. It is also apparent that certain riotous and bacchanalian exercises which attend base-ball and foot-ball victories have been very discouraging features to those who are interested in student morality. In another chapter I shall treat at some length of these and other influences which are directly inimical to the making of such leadership as the nation has a right to demand of our educated men. In this connection, however, I wish to throw some light upon the student side of the athletic problem, a point of view too often overlooked by writers upon this subject.
In the first place, it needs to be appreciated that student athletics in some form or other have absorbed a considerable amount of attention of collegians in American institutions for over half a century. Fifty years ago, even, we find foot-ball a fast and furious conflict between classes. If we can judge by ancient records, these conflicts were often quite as bloody in those days as at present. An old graduate said recently that, compared with the titanic struggles of his day, modern foot-ball is only a wretched sort of parlor pastime. In those days the faculty took a hand in the battle, and a historical account of a New England college depicts in immortal verse the story of the way in which a divinity professor charged physically into the bloody savagery of the foot-ball struggle of the class of ’58.
Poor ’58 had scarce got well
From that sad punching in the bel—
Of old Prof. Olmstead’s umberell.
It will be impossible to fully represent the values of athletics as a deterrent to the dissolute wanderings and immoralities common in former times. Neither can one dwell upon the real apotheosis of good health and robust strength that regular physical training has brought to the youth of the country through the advent of college gymnasiums and indoor and outdoor athletic exercises. Much also might be said in favor of athletics, especially foot-ball, because of the fact that such exercises emphasize discipline, which, outside of West Point and Annapolis, is lamentably lacking in this country both in the school and in the family. While there is much need to engage a larger number of students in general athletic exercises, it is nevertheless true that even though a few boys play at foot-ball or base-ball, all of the students who look on imbibe the idea that it is only the man who trains hard who succeeds.
There is, too, a feeling among those who know intimately the real values of college play life, when wholesale denunciations are made of undergraduate athletics, that it is possible for one outside of college walls or even for one of the faculty to produce all the facts with accuracy, and yet to fail in catching the life of the undergraduate at play. Inextricably associated with college athletics is a composite and intangible thing known as “college spirit.” It is something which defies analysis and exposition, which, when taken apart and classified, is not; yet it makes distinctive the life and atmosphere of every great seat of learning, and is closely linked not only with classrooms, but also with such events as occur on the great athletic grand stands, upon fields of physical contest in the sight of the college colors, where episodes and aims are mighty, and about which historical loyalties cling much as the old soldier’s memories are entwined with the flag he has cheered and followed. While we are quoting from Phi Beta Kappa orators, let us quote from another, a contemporary of Longfellow, Horace Bushnell, whom Henry M. Alden has called, next to Emerson, the most original American thinker of his day. In his oration before the Phi Beta Kappa Society of Harvard sixty years ago, Dr. Bushnell said that all work was for an end, while play was an end in itself; that play was the highest exercise and chief end of man.
It is this exercise of play which somehow gets down into the very blood of the American undergraduate and becomes a permanently valuable influence in the making of the man and the citizen. It is difficult exactly to define the spirit of this play life, but one who has really entered into American college athletic events will understand it—the spirit of college tradition in songs and cheers sweeping across the vast, brilliant throng of vivacious and spell-bound youth; the vision of that fluttering scene of color and gaiety in the June or October sunshine; the temporary freedom of a thousand exuberant undergraduates; pretty girls vying with their escorts in loyalty to the colors they wear; the old “grad,” forgetting himself in the spirit of the game, springing from his seat and throwing his hat in the air in the ebullition of returning youth; the mercurial crowd as it demands fair play; the sudden inarticulate silences; the spontaneous outbursts; the disapprobation at mean or abject tricks,—or that unforgettable sensation that comes as one sees the vast zigzagging lines of hundreds of students, with hands holding one another’s shoulders in the wild serpentine dance, finally throwing their caps over the goal in a great sweep of victory. One joins unconsciously with these happy spirits in this grotesque hilarity as they march about the stadium with their original and laughable pranks, in a blissful forgetfulness, for the moment at least, that there is any such thing in existence as cuneiform inscriptions and the mysteries of spherical trigonometry. Is there any son of an American college who has really entered into such life as this who does not look back lingeringly to his undergraduate days, grateful not only for the instruction and the teachers he knew, but also for those childish outbursts of pride and idealism when the deepest, poignant loyalties caught up his spirit in unforgettable scenes:
Ah! happy days! Once more who would not be a boy?
A friend of mine had a son who had been planning for a long time to go to Yale. Shortly before he was to enter college he went with his father to see a foot-ball game between Yale and Princeton. On this particular occasion Yale vanquished the orange and black in a decisive victory. After the game the Yale men were marching off with their mighty shouts of triumph. The Princeton students collected in the middle of the foot-ball-field, and before singing “Old Nassau,” they cheered with even greater vigor than they had cheered at any time during the game, and this time not for Princeton, but for Yale. The sons of Eli came back from their celebration and stopped to listen and to applaud. As the mighty tiger yell was going up from hundreds of Princetonian throats, and as the Princeton men followed their cheers by singing the Yale “Boolah,” the young man who stood by his father, looked on in silence, indeed, with inexpressible admiration. Suddenly he turned to his father and said: “Father, I have changed my mind. I want to go to Princeton.”
The Serpentine Dance after a Foot-ball Game
Such events are associated (in the minds of undergraduates) not only with the physical, but with the spiritual, with the ideal. The struggle on the athletic-field has meaning not simply to a few men who take part, but to every student on the side-lines, while the pulsating hundreds who sing and cheer their team to victory think only of the real effort of their college to produce successful achievement.
Standing beneath a tree near Soldiers’ Field at Cambridge, with undergraduates by the hundred eager in their athletic sports on one side, and the ancient roofs of Harvard on the other, there is a simple marble shaft which bears the names of the men whom the field commemorates, while below these names are written Emerson’s words, chosen for this purpose by Lowell:
Though love repine and reason chafe,
There came a voice without reply—
’Tis man’s perdition to be safe,
When for the truth he ought to die.
Not only upon the shields of our American universities do we find “veritas”; in spirit at least it is also clearly written across the face of the entire college life of our times. Gentlemanliness, open-mindedness, originality, honor, patriotism, truth—these are increasingly found in both the serious pursuits and the play life of our American undergraduates. The department in which these ideals are sought is not so important as the certainty that the student is forming such ideals of thoroughness and perfection. This search for truth and reality may bring to our undergraduates unrest or doubt or arduous toil. They may search for their answer in the lecture-room, on the parade-ground, in the hurlyburly of college comradeships, in the competitive life of college contests, or even in the hard, self-effacing labors of the student who works his way through college. While, indeed, it may seem to many that the highest wisdom and the finest culture still linger, one must believe that the main tendencies in the life of American undergraduates are toward the discovery of and devotion to the highest truth—the truth of nature and the truth of God.