Penny Thoughts: Athletics Democratized Higher Education in America

The Super Bowl for this year was completed a month ago. And now, those of us who know that football is the pantheon of American values, not just of athletic endeavors, have begun our long withdrawal from the gridiron battles of this season and the anticipation of next season – with the exception, this year, of the XFL. 

My wife has been patient for seven months, but not without delivering some jibes about me being one chromosome removed from a “knuckle-dragger” just because of this Great American Institution.

Nevertheless, as I began to deflate after the Super Bowl, I began to reflect on the totality of the experience, starting with the pop-up vignettes of players who make outstanding plays, both good and bad, which indicate the years they have played, other accomplishments, and the colleges which they attended. Many viewers want to see just where these paragons of athletic achievement received their higher educations, with or without a tongue-in-cheek utterance or reference.

At the same time, there are those who might cringe at the mention of their precious alma mater harboring such “students” as these. They fall into the category of the “academic purists” who firmly believe that athletes “have no place on a college campus,” and you have heard the litany of their anti-athletic blather.

Still, that whole perspective is worth examining in the context of a society which professes equal opportunity for all citizens, and the history of higher education in America is replete with slow, gradual increments of admitting those who previously could not attend a college because of its social barrier.

Let me step back a second and regroup.  American higher education, for roughly the first one-hundred seventy-five years of our existence as a country was, for all intents and purposes, an elitist enterprise reserved for only the very wealthy and the upper echelons of American society.  Furthermore, it was predominantly for males only.  Hence, the pool of prospects was, by design, very restricted.  As a result, we saw colleges emerging for women only, and other colleges established solely for minorities, i.e., Tuskegee Institute.

It needs to be re-sated that higher education during those early decades was exclusively for the privileged few since education itself had limiting factors, namely the need to get able-bodied persons into the workforce. Even those with high school educations were seen as a kind of special breed.

It was also during this period that some athletes made it to the “big” schools, like Alabama and Michigan, but their attendance was not met without some subtle, and not so subtle, opposition. In fact, the 1942 movie “The Male Animal” starring Henry Fonda and Olivia de Havilland, focused on the dichotomization of a college professor and his wife’s former football hero on campus. This issue of college even entertaining the idea of such a “beast”, as Fonda’s character points out, ran counter to the “hallowed” nature of the halls of higher learning.

This was the role athletics played in democratizing higher education in America – it allowed colleges and universities to admit students whose academic records were considered but whose athletic prowess was also included in the equation for their admission.

Then, World War II ushered in the G.I. Bill, which virtually guaranteed full opportunity for all veterans who wanted a college education. And the democratization of American higher education was in full swing.

Today, the debate quietly smolders on college campuses and even the National Collegiate Athletic Association (NCAA) has established a set of well-defined strictures to make certain that students who are admitted as student-athletes do, in fact, meet universal standards for acceptance in accord with the institution’s mission statement. At the same time, these regulations penalize institutions whose graduation rates of their student-athletes does not meet a pre-set quota.

All these efforts reinforce the fact that it has been athletic ventures which have borne the brunt of democratizing higher education in America. No one disputes the fact that veterans deserve an opportunity after having served this Nation in the military, but that social largesse has not translated to student-athletes whose admission to some university might cause some to echo Henry Fonda’s reference to them not belonging on a college campus.

Our founders recognized and we continue the foundation today that education is the cornerstone of a sound republic based in democracy such as ours.  And I, for one American, think it is ironic that, the G.I. Bills notwithstanding, it has been athletic achievement which has been the vehicle transporting higher education closer and closer to democracy.