Athletics deserves as much intellectual inquiry as the liberal arts, Trinity College philosophy professor Drew Hyland '61 said in a lecture yesterday, asking the audience to imagine a world where wrestling vies with mathematics as a main school subject.
Hyland, a former Princeton basketball player, addressed about 100 students and members of the Princeton Varsity Club in McCosh 10 at "The Sweatiest of the Liberal Arts: Athletics and Education." Making allusions to ancient Greece and current European educational models, he argued that the common view of sports as divorced from the academic sphere harms students' potential growth.
"By giving short shrift to the arts and physical education, we are cutting off from our children [their] core sensibilities," Hyland said.
He began by describing the ancient Athenian view that the two foundations of a young person's education were the pursuits of the muses and those in the gymnasium. The Athenians, he noted, did not subscribe to our modern conceptions of improving the mind and body separately, or the traditional Christian and Cartesian philosophy that holds the soul over body.
"What if there are parts of our quality as a person that are only developed in athletics?" Hyland asked.
As Plato noted in "Republic," he continued, activities of the gymnasium develop the soul.
"My experience with basketball was literally defining," Hyland said. "I became who I am because of my passion for basketball."
Hyland also addressed the disconnect in the American system, where schools offer sports but do not include them in educational endeavors.
He developed a class at Trinity — and later wrote a book — about the philosophy of sport. "I didn't want [my students] to say what I had to say, that none of my professors ever called on me to think about sports," he explained.
In his class, Hyland had students confront their own experiences with sports, the positive and negative ethics involved and the contribution of athletics to academic discourse. Coaches, he said, are some of the most successful professors.
"Athletics is a wonderful learning environment not for war, but for the difficult ethical issues of life," he said.
Hyland concluded his lecture by addressing questions from the audience ranging from the role of parents in sports and the demise of the multi-sport athlete to self-segregation among athletes and performance enhancing drugs.
The lecture was the eighth in the biannual Jake McCandless '51 Speaker Series. The next lecture in the series will be given by Frank Deford '61, an NPR commentator and Sports Illustrated writer.
Besides the series, the Varsity Club presents off-campus lectures for alumni as well as on-campus events for athletes.
Louise Gengler '75, assistant director of the Princeton Varsity Club, described her job as offering scholar-athletes "a community beyond their own sport and to help the alumnus reconnect and support the sport teams."
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