Eric A. Moyen and John Thelin, experts in higher education, dive into the fascinating history of college sports in the U.S. They explore how collegiate athletics evolved from student-led competitions to a major influencer on university identity. The duo discusses the symbiotic relationship between sports and academia, the tensions of commercialization, and the impact of desegregation. They also highlight the financial challenges facing today’s athletic programs and question the sustainability of this unique American institution.
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Student-Led Sports
Initially, college sports were student-run, exemplified by the Harvard-Yale crew meet.
Students chose team colors for identification, like Yale's blue and Harvard's magenta.
insights INSIGHT
Early Sports Parallels
Early intercollegiate sports mirrored aspects of modern sports like corporate sponsorships and media coverage.
The 1852 Harvard-Yale crew meet had both.
question_answer ANECDOTE
First Intercollegiate Sport
The first intercollegiate sporting event was a Harvard-Yale crew meet in 1852.
A railroad company sponsored the event, foreseeing the publicity potential.
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Many college professors like to remind each other that no other nation on earth has the system of collegiate sports that has developed in the United States, one in which the mishaps of a mediocre football team attract much more attention than what goes on in classrooms, labs, and libraries–and yes, I am thinking of the University of Virginia. These professors love to quote Cornell President Andrew Dickson White refusing to allow the Cornell football team to travel to a game with Michigan: “I will not permit thirty men to travel four hundred miles to agitate a bag of wind.” They remember that the University of Chicago had a football team and even a stadium, until President Robert Hutchins killed the program, declaring it an “infernal nuisance.”
But they’re less likely to know that it was that same Andrew Dickson White who nourished Cornell intercollegiate athletics, financially supporting the Cornell crew team so that they could beat Harvard and Yale. And professors are even less likely to contemplate an awful historical truth, that college sports have always enjoyed a symbiotic relationship to the university that hosts them, and that they have grown and changed in more or less the same way that the American university has grown and changed. Far from being a peripheral accident of history, college sports reveal important insights into American higher education.
Such is the argument of my guests Eric A. Moyen and John Thelin. Eric A. Moyen is a professor of higher education leadership and the Assistant Vice President for Student Success at Mississippi State University. John R. Thelin is the University Research Professor Emeritus of the history of higher education and public policy at the University of Kentucky. Both of them have written numerous books on both American higher education and college sports. Now they have co-written College Sports: A History.
Historically Thinking