Also American Council on Education Fellow
University of Minnesota, Twin Cities
Graffiti forecasting the collision between academics and Division III athletics appeared on the campus quadrangle when I entered Bucknell University in 1969. Painted on the sidewalk was a two-word question: "Why play?" As a recruited, non-scholarship athlete, I took notice and I asked questions. I learned that the authors of the question were disgruntled baseball players, not whimsical existentialists. The translation of their concise protest turned out to be: "Why bother? Why compete? Why win?"
The prior spring the university's administration had soured the regular season good mood of the team by barring their advance to a post-season tournament. The rationale for that decision was academic and irreversible: Students are not excused from campus for athletic events during final examinations. End of story.
But for me it did not end there. That story has always remained a symbolic benchmark in the ensuing national debate about college education and intercollegiate athletics, brought to a fine fever now by the Mellon Foundation's clarifying and provocative book, *Reclaiming the Game: College Sports and Educational Values* (2003).
The "Why play?" story captures how much has changed in thirty-five years of competition between athletics and academics. It is now impossible to imagine any administrators with the authority, let alone the audacity, to rule against post-season competition. In Division III of the National Collegiate Athletic Association (NCAA), national championships seem an irremovable part of the landscape.
There has been a steady gathering of athletic momentum during the past decades. Admission advantages and scholarship monies flow to athletes. Media attention to Division III sports dynasties heightens the Sears Cup competition. Tensions over athletics are not simply local feuds between unyielding deans and disaffected jocks. Athletics has moved from the sideline of liberal arts college campuses to the midfield of student life, and in some cases collegiate life.
Those of us who have long loved both liberal arts education and athletics are being forced to confront what William Bowen and Sarah Levin aptly call the "creeping intensification of college sports and the academic-athletic divide." Much to their credit, Bowen and Levin understand that in our ongoing confusion about the place of athletics within a liberal arts education there remains no wiser voice than that of the late A. Bartlett (Bart) Giamatti, scholar and sports fan, university president and baseball commissioner.
Bowen and Levin quote Bart Giamatti approvingly and at length in order to remind us of his key principles for harmonizing studies and sports. For Giamatti, both studies and sports are a process of "exploration and fulfillment," and neither studies nor sports is a "process of pursuing a professional career." Studies are the first priority--the senior, not the silent partner. Athletics "contributes to the point, but is not the point itself." Locally, athletics must be construed broadly to include not just varsity teams, but club sports and intramurals. Coaches are primarily teachers of enrolled student athletes, not recruiters who spend countless hours "wooing off-campus." And finally, colleges and universities that prize liberal arts education must speak and act "as a Group"--as conferences--to limit the expenditure of "disproportionate amounts of time on athletics."
Articulated in a series of speeches and essays he wrote as president of Yale University in the 1980s, Giamatti's rules still ring true for several reasons. In the face of a growing divide, he argued for a valued role for sports within a liberal learning experience. At a time of escalating athletic competitiveness, he preached restraint and a sense of proportion. When considering the unique demands on the coaching profession, he insisted on the common bond of instructional duty. Giamatti expressed eloquently what many of us have felt dimly: To reclaim the game, we must have deep, clear, and persuasive convictions about our educational values.
When I applied to college a generation ago, "jock school" was a term of derision, unfairly reserved for local state colleges that prided themselves on their championship banners and their friendly admissions procedures for high school athletic heroes. Now the data presented about even the most selective schools in *Reclaiming the Game* suggest that the appropriate question is: "Which Division III liberal arts college is NOT a jock school?" Bowen and Levin quote a New England Small College Athletic Association president who says, "The picture is very clear. There are not outliers--only liars." Their most striking and sobering finding is about the growing number of recruited athletes on liberal arts campuses: about 25% of all male and 15% of all female students.
As of the January 12, 2004, Division III membership vote, a worst case collision of schools with widely varying assumptions, values, and practices has been avoided. The NCAA membership adopted the most important provisions of the "reform agenda" proposed by the President's Council, led by Middlebury College's John McCardell. Among the provisions of the reform are an end to "red-shirting," a shortening of competitive seasons, reduction of practice times, and new reporting requirements on financial aid packaging for student athletes and all other students.
These reforms are real, substantive changes that will serve to slow the kind of intensification that drives athletes from the academic mainstream of campus life. They will target differential financial packaging schemes for athletes, thereby bringing the practice of "presidential scholarships" for athletes under greater scrutiny. Just as importantly, they symbolize the achievement of presidential control and they show an effective process of shared learning about how to negotiate this delicate set of issues. Speaking recently at the annual meeting of the American Council on Education, NCAA President Myles Brand called the substance and symbol "the most dramatic changes" because the Division III membership "voted to reaffirm the academic missions of their institutions."
For the time being, Division III remains Division III, the NCAA's repository of an amateur ideal emphasizing scholar over athlete, well-roundedness over specialization, and the joy of competition over the thrill of victory. The drift toward behaviors more characteristic of Division I has been questioned, critiqued, and officially rejected. Bringing this phase of the reform process to closure is a significant step, since Division I has often failed to move beyond the rhetoric of reform. In the words of Ewald Nyquist: "The rhetoric of reform [in 'big-power athletics'] in the past reminds one of the warrior monuments in Washington, DC parks: The posture is heroic, the sword is held high, but the movement is nil."
While the movement in Division III is impressive, divisive issues remain, and they threaten its future. Questions about the character of football threaten traditional rivalries and conferences. "Big squad" schools that need males to fill classes and "small squad" schools that are trying to shrink the number of "slotted" athletes they admit have different institutional interests. Whether the intensity of these differences can be softened through intra-league negotiations is not clear. Perhaps the Swarthmore College decision to eliminate football and the Macalester College tack of moving to a non-conference schedule will become models for others. "Football-only" conferences will surely be debated and tried.
Concerns about the sizes of squads and admissions issues are not restricted to football. Division III schools differ significantly in their assumptions about how much "team depth" they need to stay competitive. How schools view the place of athletic competitiveness within their institutional identities is the key dividing line. For some schools high-profile competitiveness is central, a historic source of pride, a form of social capital, and their primary recruiting tool. For others, athletic competitiveness is a piece of an ethos, not a value to pursue at too dear a price. These institutional differences are serious obstacles to the NCAA's ability to keep these schools contentedly playing on the same fields and courts.
Without oversimplifying too much, the problem can be stated this way: Can schools for whom it is very important to win conference and national championships continue to co-exist with those for whom a respectable .500 season is the expectation and the norm? Can both types of schools continue to agree on the rules of the game? Or does it make more sense for one group to break off and form a Division IV?
President Giamatti campaigned for an ethics of clarity. "It is our students," he wrote, "in whom the spirit of Yale will live, and it is they who deserve to know upon what ground of belief we stand, and why we have chosen to stand there." In the near future, Division III schools may have to take up this challenge and explain their fundamental assumptions about the place of competitive sports within an undergraduate education. We may have to understand the disgruntled baseball players who asked, "Why play?" and have a coherent answer for them.
The answer we know by heart is that we play to win, that winning is important. We play to test individual strengths within the camaraderie of team and in the context of stiff competition. We play to prove ourselves the best today, in this season, during this era. Unfortunately, this logic of "taking it to the next level"--however familiar and appealing--turns play into pressurized work for students and their coaches. It is a logic that escalates commitment and compromises educational quality. It is a logic that sets sports apart from the reason we exist. Inquiries about what it means to be human are not about winning or losing.
The contours of a persuasive alternative answer are difficult to discern. Recasting the question means asking, What is the place of play within a liberal arts education? It seems an odd question. The place of play? Play is so intrinsically enjoyable that it is difficult to explain or even to describe. One of its distinguishing joys is the lack of self-consciousness that goes with it. Like trying to say why a joke is funny, any attempt to justify play seems to violate its very nature.
But Giamatti would argue, I believe, that play is intrinsic to liberal learning. Playfulness is the imagination's compass for finding paths out of ourselves, out of our instilled beliefs, and out of our received values. Imaginative play is the kind of thinking that provides an escape route from being stuck, especially stuck in the here and now. It is that combination of cognitive skill and dispositional courage that allows us to reconsider what it means to be human, and to reassess what we call the human condition.
Giamatti called the arts and sciences "the disciplines for knowledge that teach the mind to free itself." The implication is that the liberal arts education journey is impossible absent a playful consideration of a stranger's thoughts and expressions. Liberal arts education teaches the mind to free itself when it sets self-justifications aside. At the heart of liberal learning is the act of playing with the likelihood that another's thoughts and expressions are more accurate, fair-minded, and elegant than our own. We know this truth about how and why play nourishes liberal learning. That is why our classrooms thrive on the speculative. That is why the "What if..." and the "Supposing that..." cues that we as teachers offer to our students generate the most searching thinking.
I am arguing that the aspiration to reclaim the game requires us to reawaken our assumptions about the place of non-competitive play in a quality liberal arts education. I understand how frivolous that may sound at a time of such devotion to work and such anxiety about assessment. But if we agree that athletics will have a new, yet valued place on our campuses, then we must have a common vocabulary and we must use that vocabulary to articulate an encompassing set of values. We must share a "ground of belief" that our institutions can proudly defend, and that our student-athletes can exuberantly embody.
Direct personal responses to John G. Ramsay at ramsa010@umn.edu.
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