The Crucial Issue in American College Athletics

Abstract

JN SPITE of enormous crowds at intercollegiate games, the college athletic situation is deplorable and the conditions are chronic. The problems were so serious twenty years ago that the Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching studied the field and reported upon the topic, American College Athletics, issued in I929. The National Collegiate Athletic Association and the College Physical Education Association are constantly studying the athletic conditions that confront them, and these conditions are characterized by such words as commercialism, subsidization, exploitation, bribery, gambling, and proselytism. Can the existing conditions be changed? Can the recognized evils be abated? Can the practice of a culture be directed into new channels? More than thirty years ago it was rather easy to change the type and quality of the then prevailing physical education. Surely nothing was more detrimental to the future welfare of American youth than the stupid posturings of the competing systems of gymnastics. But the movement for a new program of physical education succeeded everywhere in American life for the simple reason that the pattern proposed was in perfect harmony with many of the salient features of the American social scene. The effort of some Americans who believed in calisthenics and formal gymnastics never really had a chance to succeed because the ideas behind the foreign systems of gymnastics rested on the social and political doctrines of different cultures. On the contrary, the proposals for natural programs were based not only on the biologic needs of youth but also on the social scene in which they lived, a culture that admired functional physique, initiative in action, self-reliance, and the competitive features of games. This complete shift in the character of physical education in American schools and colleges was a harmonious adjustment to the culture of which it was a part, and through the years physical education prospered. Gymnasiums and athletic fields, pools and playgrounds, are as notable in sports as electric refrigerators, radios, automobiles, and the innumerable gadgets of industry are in the ordinary experiences of life. This improvement in plant, however, is no more a measure of the soundness of our program than the things of our current life reveal the welfare of the social scene around us. There are those who write despairingly about the disillusionments of modern life. Can the soul of contemporary college sport be saved? It is here contended that sport is an