"Football has become a business, carried on too often by professionals, supported by levies on the public, bringing in vast gate receipts, demoralizing student ethics, and confusing the ideals of sport, manliness, and decency."1 Frederick Jackson Turner, the historian of the American frontier, pronounced this judgment in 1906.
Apparently Murray Sperber of the University of Indiana thinks little has changed in the past century. The major public universities, according to Sperber, neglect undergraduate education while keeping the masses amused by staging huge tailgate drinking orgies around football and basketball games. For him big-time college sports have simply translated the Roman bread and circus into an American idiom.2
It is not just the major universities that are charged with being infected with furor athleticus. William Bowen and James Shulman contend that many selective private colleges have diluted the academic quality of their campuses by succumbing to the lure of intercollegiate athletics. Since these colleges aggressively recruit athletes with only passing regard to their academic qualifications, Shulman and Bowen feel that as many as one-third of the student body may be academically inferior thus compromising the intellectual standards at these elite colleges.3
These judgments are just a sampler from a century-long drumbeat of condemnations of intercollegiate sports. College education is no longer restricted to an exclusive elite as it was a century ago. Still today's indictments of collegiate sports sound remarkably similar to those offered when the Rover Boys where living it up in the Ivy League in the years before the Great War. Over the past century new Jesuit colleges have been established and all have grown from small institutions enrolling several hundred students to the current array of twenty-eight colleges and universities that are fully established in the mainstream of American higher education. Hence it may not be surprising that Jesuit universities are largely indistinguishable from their peer institutions in terms of support for intercollegiate sports. Does that mean the charges leveled against college sports in general apply also to programs in Jesuit colleges? Is there indeed a pervasive beer and circus atmosphere on Jesuit campuses? Are there so many academically inferior athletes enrolled in Jesuit universities that the intellectual climate at these institutions is compromised? Why in the world would a Jesuit institution striving to promote the greater glory of God by educating men and women for others wish to maintain a major intercollegiate sports program? In a word, must Jesuit universities wishing to be faithful to Jesuit educational ideals drastically reduce their commitment to intercollegiate sports? Or do intercollegiate sports indeed contribute to the Jesuit mission in higher education?
Before addressing these questions it will first be useful to determine the extent of intercollegiate sports at Jesuit universities. I will then make the case that intercollegiate sports do indeed contribute to the mission of a Jesuit university in twenty-first century America. Even though I will argue primarily from my experience at one Jesuit university with a major sports program, Boston College, my conclusions should apply mutatis mutandis to other Jesuit institutions.
All Jesuit universities field intercollegiate teams. Club and intramural sports also are alive and well on all Jesuit campuses. In these respects they are simply responsive to American attitudes. Americans are sports-minded, especially college-age Americans. Students avidly follow the exploits of their own college teams as well as all college and professional sports on the networks, ESPN, and ESPN2. Sports Center is one of the most-watched TV programs on campuses including Jesuit campuses. Interest in sports is not exclusively a passive coach-potato TV exercise. College-age men and women are heavily invested in their health and physical appearance. It is not surprising that all Jesuit universities have major recreational or "wellness" facilities where students expend calories running here and there and lifting this and that. The basic rationale for these facilities is simple: enrollment would suffer without them. No one has seriously suggested that these facilities be dismantled; however few contend that a wellness facility is an essential component of the intellectual mission of a university on a par with the core curriculum. Intercollegiate sports programs do not enjoy a similar pass. Some critics contend that college sports should be seriously curtailed if not dismantled entirely. As we shall see, this action would affect a significant portion of the student body and as I will argue would result in a singular disservice to Jesuit aspirations in American higher education.
Sports in Jesuit Universities
Boston College has approximately 800 student-athletes representing thirty-four teams, as seen in Table 1. Eight Jesuit universities field twenty or more teams and all are represented by at least nine. At twelve of the universities, athletes constitute ten percent or more of the student body, while Wheeling Jesuit University appears to be the most sports-intensive with over twenty percent of the student body being athletes. All in all nearly ten thousand or eight percent of all undergraduates in Jesuit universities were student athletes in the academic year 2000-2001. These figures are fairly representative of universities in the United States. Some of the elite universities have a higher percentage of athletes among the student body than the Jesuit schools and some universities undoubtedly have a lower percentage. Harvard University, for example, is represented by 1,500 athletes or 23 percent of the undergraduate student body on some forty-one Division 1 teams.
However, there are sports and there are sports and there are athletes and athletes. The rationale for maintaining a Division 1A football team with eighty-five scholarships in a Jesuit university will differ in many respects from that of a fencing team with no scholarships. It will be useful therefore to divide sports programs into two categories. In the first category are Division 1 teams, with scholarship athletes, a potential for media coverage as well as revenue from gate receipts and TV and radio contracts. In the second category are other NCAA Division 1 as well as Division 2, Division 3, as well as NAIA Division 1 and NAIA Division 2 teams. The NCAA Division 1 category includes football, men's ice hockey, baseball (men), softball (women), men's and women's basketball and men's and women's soccer teams. Boston College is one of the two Catholic universities--Notre Dame being the other--and the only Jesuit university to field a Division 1A football team. Holy Cross, Fordham, Georgetown and Fairfield have Division 1AA football teams. Boston College, Holy Cross and Fairfield support Division 1 hockey programs. Many Jesuit universities have Division 1 men's and women's basketball teams some of whom appear regularly in the NCAA March Madness basketball tournament. Several have successful men's and women's soccer teams as well as track and field, baseball and softball teams. Thus there is great diversity among the sports programs at Jesuit universities and no one template can adequately describe and justify the sports programs at all twenty-eight schools. My remarks in the remainder of this essay will be based therefore on my experience at one university, Boston College, over the past twenty years and will be relevant to other universities only by an appropriate adaptation.
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