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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question_answer ANECDOTE
Notre Dame's Success
Notre Dame combined entrepreneurial leadership, Catholic identity, and football success to become a leading university.
Their early TV contract with NBC contributed significantly to this growth.
question_answer ANECDOTE
Carnegie Report and SEC
The 1929 Carnegie Report revealed widespread subsidization of athletes, prompting the SEC's formation.
Presidents aimed to control athletics, but some like McVeigh at Kentucky genuinely sought de-emphasis, unlike others.
insights INSIGHT
Unintended Consequences
The SEC's creation highlights the unintended consequences of reform efforts.
Presidents seeking to de-emphasize athletics inadvertently created a powerful athletic conference.
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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 