Tracking the Tiger: A history of Ivy League academics and athletics

While Princeton consistently ranks at the top of college lists for everything from Ivy League Championships to intramural participation, athletics have a larger effect than stocking trophy cases in Jadwin Gymnasium. This article, the first in a series that will run Tuesdays and Thursdays for the next five weeks, approaches athletics from one of many angles, seeking to piece together how sports affect life at Princeton.

Since the dawn of college sports, administrators, coaches and student athletes have struggled to reconcile the classroom and the playing field.

In the beginning, there was football. Young men at Harvard, Princeton and Yale in the late 19th century played a soccer-like variation of the game during breaks from their studies, though their puritanical teachers frowned upon the practice.

It was 133 years ago yesterday, on Nov. 6, 1869, that Princeton played the first intercollegiate football game in American history against Rutgers University. Other schools followed suit, and soon, many of the eight schools that now make up the Ivy League — Brown, Columbia, Cornell, Dartmouth, Harvard, Princeton, the University of Pennsylvania and Yale — engaged in regular matches.

The informal association was soon termed the Ivy League. Theories on the name's origin include a newspaperman's catchy original phrase relating Princeton's campus to Oxford's ivy-covered walls and the notion that Harvard, Penn, Princeton and Yale were the four — IV in Roman Numerals — most powerful schools. There was no formal league structure until the mid-20th century.

In November, 1945, in what was known as the Eight President's Football Agreement, the heads of the schools officially established the conference's player eligibility rules and game schedule "for the purpose of continuing college football in such a way to retain the value of the game while keeping it in fitting proportion to the fundamental purpose of academic life," the agreement read.

The meeting stemmed in large part from growing concerns about college football — that the sport was overemphasized at academic institutions, that the grades of athletes suffered and that schools were subsidizing high school players' prep school educations so as to attract them.

"In general terms," the agreement stated, "the problem is one of avoiding the well-recognized excesses of intercollegiate football while retaining and enhancing the values which are known to lie in the sport."

The agreement articulated an ideal that the Ivy League — which expanded to include all sports in 1954 — has been working to realize ever since.

"For me, there is an overarching educational mission of the university, the extent to which all components support that which is critical to its mission," said the Univeristy Director of Athletics Gary Walters '67. "I think that athletics, academics, arts, community life in the dorm, social life on the 'Street,' bull-sessions in the dining hall all contribute to the educational mission of Princeton as I understand it."

The issue of the student-athlete was reexamined most recently in "The Game of Life," written by James Shulman and University President Emeritus Dr. William Bowen. The work addresses topics that include recruitment, admissions advantages, classroom performance and leadership roles of athletes in the colleges.

One of the key points in Bowen's book is that the student athlete is no different from a student with a different type of special talent, such as a concert pianist. With the increasing competitiveness of the college admissions process, and the ever-growing valuing of distinctive candidates, the person who excels in both the academic and athletic arenas appeal to the eyes of college admissions officers. In this sense, the student athlete not only fulfills his academic commitments, but also brings prestige to the school as a member of a winning team.

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Bowen explores the issue of admitting students from a largely economic perspective. In every admission decision, he admits, there is an opportunity cost. That is, for every student admitted there is another student as gifted who is denied admission.

The question Bowen focuses on is: To what extent does the student athlete fill out his coveted spot? Walters asserts that athletics, which have their own educational value, contribute to the University in their own way.

"The athletic experience, from a cognitive standpoint, is as rich an experience as there can be," says Walters. "Athletics properly taught has co-curricular value."

The Ivy League agrees that athletics play a central role in the University experience, but the League's mission statement still maintains that "the principles that govern admission of Ivy students who are athletes are the same as for all other Ivy applicants."

The statement goes on to say that each institution must "admit all candidates including athletes on the basis of their achievements and potential as students and on their other personal accomplishments; provide financial aid to all students only on the basis of need, as determined by each institution; and provide that no student be required to engage in athletic competition as a condition of receiving financial aid."

The Ivy League places greater emphasis on academics than the National Collegiate Athletic Association, under which it falls. In contrast to that of the Ivy League, the NCAA's mission statement focuses principally on athletic concerns. "To initiate, stimulate and improve intercollegiate athletics programs for student-athletes and to promote and develop educational leadership, physical fitness, athletics excellence and athletics participation as a recreational pursuit."

Walters seeks to more fully implement the Ivy League's mission. In an effort to strengthen the connection between athletics and academics he has created several programs during his tenure. The faculty-fellow program, for example, assigns one or more professors to each team to serve as a liaison to younger players. Such efforts are part of a League-wide trend to integrate academics and athletics.

From its birth more than a century and a half ago as a recreational outlet, organized Ivy League athletics have become an essential part of the college experience. But while the prominence of Ivy League sports has come into focus, their connection to academics — the schools' founding mission — remains unclear.