Original Article: http://dartreview.com/archives/2005/01/31/what_college_athletics_should_be.php

What College Athletics Should Be

Monday, January 31, 2005

Editor's Note: The late David T. McLaughlin 1954, President Emeritus of the College, was a three-sport varsity athlete as an undergraduate at Dartmouth, lettering in football, basketball, and track and field; his senior year he was ranked as the fifth leading wide receiver in the nation and the best in the Ivy League. His gridiron record for yards gained in a single season stood for twenty-three years. He delivered the following address on April 27th, 1984 at the Wearers of the Green banquet, an annual awards ceremony for the football team and alumni. Parts of it are excerpted here; the address provides an interesting perspective on "what College athletics should be."

Courtesy Dartmouth College Library

— David McLaughlin, President Emeritus. —

There is in the chronicle of Dartmouth Athletics a passage that goes all the way back to Eleazar Wheelock's original code of College laws, which contained this message to the students concerning participation in sports: "...whereby the channel of their diversions may be turned from that which is puerile, such as playing with balls, bowls, and other ways of diversion, as have been necessarily gone into by students in other places for want of an opportunity to exercise themselves in that which is more useful,... it is therefore earnestly recommended to the students..., That they turn the course of their diversions, and exercises for their health, to the practice of some manual arts, or cultivation of gardens, and other lands, at the proper hours of leisure..."

How far we have come!... Today we participate in more than thirty intercollegiate sports, involving a thousand and seventy-five students annually, with fully seventy-six percent of Dartmouth's campus engaged in one way or another in competitive athletic activities.

It is fair to ask, To what purpose? To what purpose does the College commit over two million dollars a year of its general funds, in support of our athletic and our physical education programs? Why do we annually lobby the admissions office and all of the other constituencies of the College to recognize the priority of athletics? Why do we try to convince people that Marcus Aurelius was right when he said "the art of living is more like wrestling than dancing"?

Certainly part of that answer is here tonight. It is in the faces and fabric of those who have competed, at whatever level, in their athletic careers—and won and lost. It is found in the definition of our historic purpose: to strive always for excellence and to achieve in all that we do some service to society.

Clearly, the lessons of the liberal arts are manifest in the discipline and the sacrifice of athletic endeavor. Team and individual competitive endeavors are a positive force in the process of liberal learning at Dartmouth. Over the years, I have been persuaded that the scholar/athlete is a reliable model for determining leadership capacity for a broad range of roles within society.

But the sophistication of college athletics and the competence of our athletes have gone through a remarkable transition in recent decades. It is difficult to identify the exact point in time when that change began to accelerate. Perhaps it was in the late-1950s, but it has continued unabated since that time—in skiing, hockey, football, and in a number of other skill areas. Equipment has been customized, to enhance performance. In almost every sport, coaching has assumed a new professionalism and has become a science, as well as an art. Due to new training methods, diet, and genetics, college athletes are bigger, stronger, taller, and better able to compete than ever before.

At Dartmouth, seventy-five percent of the performance records in football have been established since 1960—one-third of them in the last four years. In track, almost eighty percent of the College's records have been reset in the late-1970s and the early-1980s. That same pattern is true for swimming and other sports.

This more demanding level of proficiency has had both positive and negative consequences. On the one hand, it has enabled our athletes to achieve at higher levels—to raise the height of the bar, and to increase one's expectations of oneself... That is, after all, one of the primary contributions of competitive athletics: to know oneself through achievement.

On the other hand, the change has been largely coincident with greater revenue flows from television proceeds, in football and basketball. This smudging of the line between amateurism and professionalism has increased the involvement in collegiate athletics of those in administration who have less than altruistic motives. This tendency, coupled with the natural evolution of sports, has fostered greater specialization and time-on-task concentration by our athletes. Such tendencies are difficult to accommodate within the liberal arts—particularly in an institution which offers a wide program of intellectual, cultural, social, and extracurricular activities; an institution which define broadly the substance of the Dartmouth experience.

It is the richness and the expectation of Dartmouth's liberal-arts tradition, as well as that of our Ivy League sister institutions, which can disadvantage our intercollegiate competitive posture. While over-specialization can be an unfortunate by-product of modern college athletics, tendencies toward professionalism have even greater potential for undermining the value, the integrity, and the ethics of academic athletics.

President William Jewett Tucker was sensitive to that condition when he wrote, years ago: "The college athlete has reached an exacting position of privilege, more exacting than he is probably aware of... Such a position must be to him its own sufficient reward, else he will forfeit his right to it. The moment that a college athlete asks for other rewards than high honor from his fellows, that moment he ceases to be worthy of their honor."

It has been charged by some that Ivy athletics are not part of 'the real world'—that our insistence on a prominent role in the N.C.A.A. councils is an anachronism, the plea of a 'has been' trying to regain past glories.

To the contrary, I would submit to you that it is the Dartmouths of this country who still represent 'the real world' of what college athletics should be—those institutions willing to commit a significant portion of their general budgets to preserve the integrity of amateur athletics; those insistent on awarding financial aid to students based on need, and not on athletic prowess; and those firm in their historical belief that institutional purposes are not well served when we matriculate two classes of students into our colleges: those who lead the league in academic achievement and those who lead the league in stolen towels.

I would suggest that, over the long pull, it is those schools that have kept faith with the high principles of collegiate athletics that will be seen as institutions which have maintained the path that others will inevitably follow in returning college athletics to their rightful place in the education of future generations of men and women...