Veblen's Social Satire and Amos Alonzo Stagg: Football and the American Way of Life

Abstract

Since the appearance of The Theory of the Leisure Class, Thorstein Veblen's unhappy experience at the University of Chicago has been recognized as the precipitant of its criticism of American academic life. The endeavors of John D. Rockefeller, the University's founder; William Rainey Harper, its first president; and benefactors like Charles Tyson Yerkes exemplified what Veblen denounced as “the conduct of universities by business men.” Almost two decades intervened between The Leisure Class and the fuller indictment of The Higher Learning in America, which drew also upon Veblen's disappointments at Stanford, where he taught after his dismissal from Chicago. The later book developed a manuscript critique of higher education that Veblen had written in 1904. Although he professed to feel bound “under the rule of Nihil nisi bonum” to observe a “large reticence” in speaking of the University's president, his 1916 preface mocked Harper as the “Great Pioneer in reshaping American academic policy.” The book's criticisms “necessarily drew largely on first-hand observation of the conduct of affairs at Chicago” and were largely directed at the zeal for moral regeneration that Harper would have had suffuse his campus.