In giving mental nourishment, why lay before young and impressionable men and women un-American doctrines and ideas that take mental time and energy from the study and consideration of the great fundamentals and eternal truths, fill the mind with unprofitable mental trash which, with some, result only in sowing the seeds of discontent and unrest? And which can result only in absolute life failure, spiritual and material.
The first thing we note from the above is, what an extremely low standard of English composition prevailed at Harvard from 1877 to 1881. The second is, upon what feeble intellectual equipment it is possible for a man to have charge of two great American railroads. The third is, why Mr. Howard Elliott declined an invitation to discuss the railroad problems of the country on the same platform with Glenn E. Plumb. The fourth is, why an advocate of special privilege tries so desperately to avoid giving the young people of the country an opportunity to compare his mental equipment with that of the radicals.
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.