Valuing education and playing for the fun of it

Even in a week that featured the twin excitements of lecturing on Boethius and a campus visit by Hamid Karzi, two of my more memorable events were athletic in nature. The first, on Saturday, was the football season-opener against Lehigh, the other, on the following Thursday, a public lecture by former president Bill Bowen entitled "Saving the Game: College Sports and Educational Values." Both of these were night events. These days I have a little difficulty following the ball at night games, but shared disadvantage is easier to bear, and since the Princeton defense had the same problem I didn't feel too bad. I have a similar difficulty with night Power Points, but that was OK too. Nobody falls asleep in a Bowen lecture.

Years ago, when I did a stint of service on the Athletics Committee, I was rewarded with elite seating at football and basketball games. Now each year I can purchase renewals of two great stadium seats on the 49.6-yard line, just under the presidential box, among a Sea of Tigers — alumni class presidents, former first-stringers and the approximately ten other faculty members who actively support our team. There I can enjoy not merely the game but a level of expert volunteer commentary unavailable in other sections of the stands. Lehigh thrashed us soundly. We had few redeeming moments. Our finest hour (a twelve-second breakaway run, actually) was annulled by one of several dumb penalties. There was much bitching and moaning on the Tiger Sea, as was stylistically appropriate; but I actually found the experience reassuring. If your football team looks like that — well then, surely, you must have one hell of a Classics Department.

Still, I was taken aback by a reproachful remark offered by one pundit, orange of complexion and black of mood, who fumed that the Princeton team had "played like a bunch of rank amateurs." Think about that for a minute: Princeton football players behaving like amateurs. How I wish! The real problem, in my view, is that too few college athletes altogether play like amateurs. Indeed a kind of sorry professional model, backed by major money and commercial interests, dominates American sports beginning at least as early as junior high school; for it is far easier to master professional style than professional substance. You may not have Shaquille O'Neal's moves, but you can own his shoes. If you have a line coach whose mode of pedagogy is the verbal equivalent of a rubber truncheon, it is hardly surprising that your linemen, on the rare occasions when they sack the Lehigh quarterback, perform the statutory NFL war-dance of the bestiarius who has just dispatched a Libyan lion.

The difference between professionals and amateurs is a matter of fundamental priorities. Profession does not always involve money — monks and nuns are after all professional ascetics — but it does involve primary, intentional commitment. What is amateur is, as the word's etymology reveals, what is done for the love of the thing. The profession of college students is, or should be, getting a college education. But Bill Bowen's lecture — a kind of summary statement of the chief findings of a recent, deeply researched book written with a collaborator — suggested just how hard it is to order educational priorities in a climate that favors if it does not demand the recruitment of student athletes. Bowen insisted that he was not talking "about" Princeton, nor was he, in any direct sense. Hardly surprisingly, however, his statistical findings perfectly accord with the local experience of Princeton college masters and others who have been more or less closely involved with undergraduate life. The implications of his findings are inescapable. A 'Prince' article covered his lecture well, and I shall not further compromise what slim chances the authors have of earning some royalties by leaking those findings in detail. But the top line — and why should all important lines be "bottom" ones? — is that the widespread model of large collegiate athletic programs built upon the recruitment of athletes ill accords with the goals of liberal education.

The inescapability of implications, alas, hardly bothers a practiced escapist. Since the inescapability of the bankrupting of Social Security or the exhaustion of fossil fuel reserves seems incapable of disturbing our national torpor, the chances of a Great Awakening over the issue of college athletics, even here in our ivory tower, are slim.

Not that the active recruitment of certain students is a bad idea. In fact, I think we ought to do more of it. As an overworked English professor I think we ought to search, vigorously, for young people eager to take advantage of some of our excellent but underpopulated departments. Why should I personally, year in and year out, direct more senior theses than are written in the entire German Department? If we make recruitment efforts, as Bill Bowen said in response to a question about "affirmative action," they ought to have some obvious connection to our educational values. A winning sports team is not an educational value. A vigorous German department is. Besides, among all those prospective German majors there must be some eager to play Fussball, and just for the fun of it. John V. Fleming is the Louis W. Fairchild '24 Professor of English. He can be reached at jfleming@princeton.edu.