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| Spelman College (Photo credit: waynetaylor) |
Spelman College Withdrawing From N.C.A.A. - NYTimes.com: Hoping to replace organized sports for the few with fitness for all, Spelman College this week formally announced its withdrawal from intercollegiate athletics. ...
“When we studied this early this year, I was startled to see that we really had only 80 student athletes out of 2,100 students, and our program was costing almost $1 million,” said Beverly Daniel Tatum, the college president. ...
Instead, the administration decided in April to end intercollegiate sports and direct some of the savings into a fitness and nutrition program for all students. ...
Erik Christianson, an N.C.A.A. spokesman, said the group knew of just one other college in the past decade that had dropped intercollegiate sports entirely, the New York City College of Technology in Brooklyn, a branch of the City University of New York.
Spelman eliminates athletics in favor of campus-wide wellness initiative | Inside Higher Ed: Many colleges will do just about anything to get a bigger share of the ever-increasing revenue and recognition brought from participation in intercollegiate athletics. This past year alone, universities rushed to join conferences that made little sense geographically or competitively, and college presidents dropped their initial resistance to a football playoff system.
Spelman College is doing the exact opposite. The historically black liberal arts women’s college in Atlanta will announce today that it is completely eliminating intercollegiate athletics at the end of this academic year."
Spelman joins the Ivy League in this focus on students and willingness to limit athletics.
Point/Counterpoint: Paying College Athletes | The Sport Journal: "However, by the mid-1950’s many schools were still struggling with the issue of offering athletic scholarships. Some university presidents ultimately decided to maintain the principles of amateurism and further serve the mission of higher education. Those were presidents of universities that today make up the Ivy League. They concluded that it was not in the best interest of their universities to award athletic scholarships, and have remained steadfast even today."
Links: History of NCAA and Sports at Universities
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| President of the United States Theodore Roosevelt (Photo credit: Wikipedia) |
Point/Counterpoint: Paying College Athletes | The Sport Journal: "In the late 1800’s, football played by college teams was a brutal sport but enjoyed by many fans. However, from 1900 to 1905, there were 45 players who died playing the sport (22). This prompted President Theodore Roosevelt to summon the presidents of Harvard, Yale, and Princeton, and threaten them with a ban unless the sport was modified. As a result of that meeting, a group of 62 university presidents convened to form the Intercollegiate Athletic Association in 1906. This group evolved into the NCAA in 1910, but as a group it only possessed supervisory power (22)."
College Athletics - History Of Athletics In U.s. Colleges And Universities - Sports, Intercollegiate, University, and Football - StateUniversity.com: "Intercollegiate athletics in the United States has come to be regarded as higher education's "peculiar institution." This somewhat critical characterization results from the fact that although intercollegiate athletics is seldom listed as part of the central mission of a college or university, athletics have come to command inordinate visibility, resources, influence, and attention both inside and outside many campuses. Analyzing, explaining, and dealing with this disparity between official philosophy and actual practice presents a complex analytic task. To truly understand the present situation requires a reconstruction of college athletics' unique historical evolution."
"Visitors to an American campus cannot help but be struck by the physical presence of the intercollegiate athletics enterprise. In the twenty-first century, it is not unusual for a major university campus to contain both a football stadium that seats 70,000 spectators and a basketball arena that accommodates audiences of 20,000. In the year 2000 many universities had annual operating budgets for athletics ranging between $30 million and $60 million. The success and pervasiveness of college sports described was not inevitable, but is the result of particular innovations and episodes over the past 150 years. "
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