LiberalArtsOnline Volume 4, Number 7
August 2004
With this issue, LiberalArtsOnline returns to the question of what role the sporting life ought to have on the college campus. It is a matter that we addressed in December 2003 and again in April 2004. Though we have no desire to rehash old issues endlessly, here is an essay by Ursinus College's president, John Strassburger, that we deem exceptionally helpful in putting forward a new, constructive way of thinking about the relationship between athletic participation and liberal arts education. Strassburger's comparisons of students in athletics with students in fine and performing arts should unsettle anyone who would like to believe that the issues around intercollegiate athletics are simple and clear.
-- Frederik Ohles, Editor
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Art, Sport, and the Sweet Spot
John Strassburger
President, Ursinus College
Collegeville, PA.
Recently athletics at elite colleges have come under careful scrutiny, and the picture that has emerged is not pretty. William Bowen and Sarah Levin in their book, *Reclaiming the Game*, show that compared to their non-athlete counterparts, athletes under-perform academically, cluster in the easiest majors, and prove to be less generous and less civic-minded after they graduate.
Yet over the years, many of the students I have admired most have been athletes, and they have learned great lessons from their athletic involvement. The other group that, on the whole, has contributed enormously to my own ongoing education is students who are most engaged in the arts. I do not mean to exclude scientists or humanists from the mix, because at Ursinus College and other liberal arts colleges, athletes and artists are also scientists and humanists, but I am thinking about the people whom John Updike described as "players who always are; who are, that is to say, about themselves and their art."
In the wake of recent criticism of small-college sports, I find myself asking these questions. What is it about the experience of sport and the arts that makes them so enriching? Is there something we can learn from this deeper affinity that can help us see athletics in a more productive light, one that strengthens us against the professionalization of athletics yet encourages us to stay in the game?
The Name of the Game is Learning
Many of us enjoy being spectators, and major spectacles in this country with all their electronic hoopla and hype do enthrall. Art and sport on a residential campus are different, however, just as the performers and the athletes are different. The fact that we all know one another accounts for much of the difference. And unlike performers and athletes at institutions where these activities are treated as pre-professional, it is also true that on a residential college campus everyone engaged in these activities has myriad other pursuits.
Perhaps most crucial, though, is our ability to discern growth, and to discern it among those we are applauding or cheering or simply admiring in the studio. Over time we can see progress; we all witness the learning, the gaining in confidence, depth, skill and subtlety. Because all of us experience this growth, because all of us are sharing in one another's learning, sport and art create community.
The power of these experiences and the way they draw on all that a student is, not just some narrow part, suggest to me that both art and sport belong at the heart of any approach to liberal arts education, both as subjects of study and as experiences we seek to promote. The goal at Ursinus, and for colleges like us, is to situate art and sport in an intellectually rich context. Part of that context is the understanding that things do not always turn out the way we might hope: the intellectual aspect of both sport and art is defined by our need to recognize and then diminish the gap between hope and reality.
Sweet Spots
In a liberal arts college, where actors are athletes are scientists are poets, sport and the arts should be knit into the fabric of life, and I am struck by the closeness of these worlds--not just their physical proximity on a campus like ours, but the creative and intellectual resources they engage, the discipline they require, and the seemingly miraculous outcomes they produce. At their best art and sport are performances that transform the circumstances of their creation into instants of perfection. And each achievement informs the next, whether it is the batter's well-struck pitch or the actor¹s portrayal of Antigone's grief.
Many of us like to speak of the transforming power of liberal arts education. That abstraction becomes real as students engage totally, one with another, in a communal pursuit of excellence. They are transformed as they are lifted by the strength of others. As spectators, we are lifted with them. William Butler Yeats described the experience by asking, "How can we know the dancer from the dance?" Athletes put it a different way. They talk about hitting "the sweet spot" and being "in the zone."
Several things have brought the transforming power of art and sport home to me. The first is seeing what young people accomplish. Our students have not been seduced or intimidated by the myth of raw talent. Based on their work habits and dedication, they do not believe that either art or sport just comes naturally. They learn that the more they bring to what they do, in terms of intellect, awareness, self-discipline and skill, the more they achieve.
The second experience that prompted these thoughts was reconsidering an essay by John Updike, "Hub Fans Bid Kid Adieu," about Ted Williams' last baseball game at Fenway Park. Merging art and sport, Updike models the very thing he is writing about: a supremely prepared artist, whose conscious life is devoted largely to one thing, meeting an occasion that engages all his capacities and producing something that unites performer and spectator, Red Sox fan and antagonist, Bostonian and non-Bostonian (and reader and writer).
The Enemy at the Locker Room Door
If Updike and today's liberal arts college students represent best-case scenarios--the real sweet spot--that is, lives fully lived and selves fully engaged, what is the actual problem? What is most destructive to self, community, and potential?
The fundamental difference, as I see it, between art and sport is simply that of winning and losing. In sport, competition serves as the occasion for creative expression. It is almost inevitable that the goal of winning takes on a life of its own, and this generates the real problem for sport in any educational context.
As I read Bowen and Levin and consider the experience of other college presidents, it is clear that we are in the grip of a trend that runs directly counter to the mission of liberal arts education and, I believe, to the richest experience of sport itself, not to mention art and life. The threat is specialization.
On too many of our campuses we have allowed a distinct culture to grow up within the larger culture, a ghetto, if you will, that includes athletes and coaches. As Bowen and Levin point out, students self-identify as athletes first and foremost, and they are often recruited that way. Coaches are concerned first and foremost with winning, not teaching, and they are recruited that way. To be sure, the danger is there in the arts as well, but by their nature they tend to weave into a college's larger intellectual purposes much more readily.
Intercollegiate sports have been around a very long time, and the problem is not entirely new. Ursinus' oldest football rivalry, with Swarthmore College, alas now in abeyance, dates back to the 1890s. We have been thinking about amateurism ever since. The National Collegiate Athletic Association (NCAA), organized by a group of distinguished academics at the beginning of the last century, was created to curb athletic excesses. One of the leading reformers, the famous Wisconsin and then Harvard professor and historian, Frederick Jackson Turner, was terribly worried about the rise of a "winning at all costs" ideal. The problem of specialization or professionalism is not just longstanding but endemic.
At the same time, because of a distinctive and highly unusual tradition, Ursinus has long had a model of what sport at its best can do in educating undergraduates. Women have competed in intercollegiate sports at the college for over a century. In fictional form, Updike recently wrote about the importance of that experience to his parents, especially his mother when she was a student here in the 1920s. It is important to note that the tradition included winning. For example, in 1984, the U.S. women's Olympic field hockey team included five Ursinus alumnae, one being its head coach. This is the only American field hockey team ever to have won an Olympic medal.
Yet, in a sign of the times, our field hockey program has now become a solid contender in Division III, rather than in Division I where it used to compete, because it became clear that without athletic scholarships, hordes of coaches, multimillion-dollar facilities, and all the rest, Ursinus would always be competing in other divisions at a severe disadvantage. The Ursinus tradition in women's athletics was unusual for a coed liberal arts college, and what is so sobering is that despite the great educational and competitive success of that tradition, it could not withstand the
professionalizing of Division I athletics.
Modest Proposals
Ursinus has traditions that help us meet this challenge. We instituted sports for women long before Title IX. Today we field a full complement of 25 intercollegiate teams. The College made this commitment not merely out of a sense of fairness or gender equity but because it was right in terms of our mission of student growth and achievement. Just as it was right that Ursinus have a studio art program and an art museum on campus.
On the coaching side, Ursinus tried to address the problem of overspecialization five years ago by organizing the Snell Symposium to inform women athletes in our conference about the joys of coaching. The legendary Ursinus field hockey coach Eleanor Snell was as concerned about her players' sense of self, deportment, language skills, and resiliency as she was about winning and losing. Which is to say that she saw sports in the context of education. I hasten to add: her teams lost very few games. The Symposium addressed coaching in that spirit. While its original audience was the Centennial Conference, it has become self-supporting and spread to other conferences as well.
If one of the answers to the challenges we face is to develop coaches who have had liberal arts educations, another is to examine how we recruit to make sure that we do not reinforce students' narrow views of themselves or of their goals.
The value of this effort came home to me when I was talking with one of our more successful women's coaches, someone whose teams have won conference championships and competed in NCAA tournaments as well. She observed that over the years, the players whom she recruited less intensively tended to be more well-rounded, more engaged in college and even in their sport, and less in need of all sorts of counseling and coddling. So one goal might be for conferences to limit the number of calls we make to any individual student. Surely we run the risk of losing an athlete or two, but as this coach put it, the ones who do show up will be far more likely to understand that in going to college they are part of something far larger than one aspect of themselves. In truth, I do not think we will lose many athletes. One of the best baseball players Ursinus has ever had came here in part because he did not want to spend all his time with other athletes. As he put it, "I came here to be educated."
In this regard, we also need to discuss whether the time has come to curb Early Decision for athletes qua athletes. We all hear stories--always from other institutions, it seems--of coaches saying: commit early and you will have a spot, because then I will not need to recruit another goalie, wideout, freestyler, etc. Nothing could do more to lead students to stereotype themselves than receiving promises in exchange for "going early." Allowing athletes to make their choices later, free from the idea that they have to choose on the basis of a spot on a team, will also, I believe, curb some of the disengagement that goes with ghettoization and special treatment.
But there are other answers beyond focusing on sport itself. Several years ago, faculty members at Ursinus created a two-semester course for all first-year students addressing the most fundamental questions of human existence. Then the dean of students arranged for all first-year students to live in two sets of three adjacent residence halls. When we participated in the National Survey of Student Engagement (NSSE), conducted at 600 campuses across the nation, we discovered that making intellectual engagement the first-year centerpiece for all students had succeeded beyond our dreams. The NSSE folks were struck as we were by the phenomenal results.
We have been purposeful in making intellectual community the center of the first-year experience. Another antidote to compartmentalization, of course, is simply to have athletes engage in the arts, and actors, dancers, and sculptors also compete in athletics. Some of these crossovers happen accidentally, but it is crucial, especially for those in the arts, to reach out to make them happen all the time.
Art's Urgency
Although I began the essay by praising the way in which sport and the arts both lift the education of everyone on a residential college campus and then noted the powerful parallels between the two sets of learning opportunities, I have said more about sport because the arts are under less scrutiny. But even with regard to the arts, we should remember that on many campuses they are relative newcomers, just as English literature as a subject for study did not gain legitimacy at Oxford until the end of the nineteenth century. Nonetheless, the arts are crucial to education, perhaps more so than ever. On my own campus, where there has been an amazing flowering of the arts in the past decade--from a proliferation of campus sculpture to new programs in dance and sculpture, and burgeoning offerings in theater--it is easy for me to recall being moved again and again to laughter, grief, and awe.
Three aspects of the arts make them crucial in our own times. One is their power to knit us together. These shared experiences--so magnified on a campus where we know everyone with whom we are sharing--nurture the humane conversation that is the marrow of community. And as the horrors and tragedies of the last century follow us into this one, the arts can inspire us to avoid the worst calamities by enlarging our experience through creative, connective acts.
Finally, the arts, as Vaclav Havel has argued, are so necessary now because technology and science have reached a point where reason, or at least operational goals, can outstrip conscience. We need to experience each other as creative centers, not as categories or instrumentalities, and the arts encourage us to do that.
Art is also the best antidote to pretension. As Saul Bellow said in his Nobel Prize speech in 1976, "Only art penetrates what pride, passion, and intelligence and habit erect." Yet sport, too, addresses our illusions. One universally redeeming aspect of sport is that it allows for no pretension: no one can run faster, throw farther, or jump higher than she can run or throw or jump. Both art and sport can always be pressed into the service of a narrow agenda, be it old-school chauvinism or xenophobic nationalism, but I believe that the fundamental impulse of the people on the stage or the field and in the audience is to join hands.
Despite their relative newness on most of our campuses, the arts are much further along than athletics in their integration into college life. And the arts benefit from this integration. Athletics can benefit as well, and given the closeness of the two realms, their parallel popularity, and the creative and inspirational territory they share, they need to be as integral as possible to our students' lives.
One of our dance faculty members, who is writing a book on creativity, makes the same point. He tells his students that creativity has a great deal to do with how they live their lives, that the quality of their interactions with the world, not a narrow focus, shapes their capacity to make art that reaches people. If that is true, so is the converse, that the richness of our creative experience, sport included, feeds back into all other areas of our lives.
Coda and Overtime
In a college where athletes are also artists, musicians, and/or members of Phi Beta Kappa or publishing scientists, extracurricular activity is not something people merely stop and start, or compartmentalize as separate from the rest of their education or their sense of self. There is no reason for students in sports and students in the arts to be any different from students doing research in a science laboratory full-time for a summer, who see themselves integrating their experiences into who they are. They speak of the discipline of scrupulously logging into their lab books every half hour, of recording their data with precision, no matter how idiosyncratic their own results seem. This need for constant scrupulousness leads them to speak of living their lives whole. As one of them said at the end of a summer's research, "It was no longer a matter of just understanding integrity; it was a matter of living it."
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An earlier version of this essay appeared as an occasional publication of Ursinus College. We reprint it here with permission.
Direct personal responses to John Strassburger at jstrassburger@ursinus.edu.
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The comments published in LiberalArtsOnline reflect the opinions of the author(s) and not necessarily those of the Center of Inquiry or Wabash College. Comments may be quoted or republished in full, with attribution to the author(s), LiberalArtsOnline, and the Center of Inquiry in the Liberal Arts at Wabash College.