Far More Than Commercialism: Stadium Building from Harvard's Innovations to Stanford's ‘Dirt Bowl’

Abstract

Nearly all the leading universities in the US constructed enormous American football arenas following Harvard's 1903 stadium until the Great Depression concluded most stadium building at the close of the 1920s. Stadiums were the most materialistic campus symbols of the ‘Golden Age of Sport’, icons representing what critics charged was the crass commercialization of higher education. Yet, they were much more than money makers. From Harvard wanting its games to be played on the college campus and away from cities to Stanford's desire to outdo its neighbour, the University of California, universities used stadiums to advertise their institutions, satisfy their alumni, connect with their communities and recruit winning athletes. Above all, stadiums were an important part of the development of higher education in the US as institutions competed among themselves for honour and emulation, imitating the eastern institutions that gave big-time athletics to America, Harvard, Yale and Princeton.