December 5, 2005--The Toilet Bowl
From my photo at the right, you can see that I went to college quite a few years ago. So many, that fewer and fewer of us are available for class reunions, and those of us who are still around are no longer recognizable to each other. In fact, some of us are not recognizable to ourselves—me included. For example, I used to have hair.
I went to Columbia, one of the eight Ivy League colleges, and we were proud that Columbia traditionally had the worst football team among the other Ivies. My father took great pleasure in the fact that during the total of eight years that my brother and I went to Columbia, the football team was the opposite of undefeated. He liked the idea that academics was our priority and that participating in athletics was about camaraderie and sportsmanship and not winning and losing. He actually taught us to see the character-building virtues in doing our best while losing. Dad also thought that the NCAA, in addition to sponsoring the Sugar and Rose Bowls, should have an end of season event for teams such as Columbia’s--The Toilet Bowl. Not the most delicate of ideas, but it tells you how he thought about the trend at the time toward more and more emphasis on Big Time sports and their subsequent commercialization.
Thus when I read the article in Sunday’s NY Times about how at Haverford College there is a debate raging about the role of athletics, I flashed back to my own days at Columbia (see link for full article).
Haverford is one of a small circle of very selective, academically-minded liberal arts colleges where until recently it did not help one’s chances of being admitted to have been on a varsity team in high school. Now, they acknowledge, it is taken into consideration, with at least 15 percent of the current student body having had athletics play some role in the admissions process.
It goes further than that—the college recently opened a new sports complex on campus and nearly 40 percent of Haverford’s 1,100 students are on varsity teams. One student opines, “They built a new $30 million athletic center . . . not something for the arts.” Some students note that the campus is becoming, in a sense, segregated with students congregating in groups by team.
Others claim that having competitive teams at Haverford lifts school spirit and has not caused any discord among students. As one alum said, “If Haverford gives a music concert, no one scores it a C-minus. But if you play a basketball game and lose, 87-42, everybody sees that in the newspaper the next day.” And who knows, maybe their attention will drift elsewhere when it comes time to think about where to send their own children or write checks.
I don’t know about that. I do recall, though, that in my day at Columbia (and I hope this is still true) we kept score in a different way—how many Nobel Prize winners were on the faculty; if we couldn’t beat Rutgers in football, our cheerleaders would encourage us to taunt the Rutgers student body with a chant about our having Lionel Trilling teaching us; about how 100 years ago, if you can believe it, we “beat West Point”; and in 1933 we even won the Rose (not Toilet) Bowl when everyone who played was a so-called “student-athlete.”
Though, like me, none of these guys from ‘33 have much hair left.
I went to Columbia, one of the eight Ivy League colleges, and we were proud that Columbia traditionally had the worst football team among the other Ivies. My father took great pleasure in the fact that during the total of eight years that my brother and I went to Columbia, the football team was the opposite of undefeated. He liked the idea that academics was our priority and that participating in athletics was about camaraderie and sportsmanship and not winning and losing. He actually taught us to see the character-building virtues in doing our best while losing. Dad also thought that the NCAA, in addition to sponsoring the Sugar and Rose Bowls, should have an end of season event for teams such as Columbia’s--The Toilet Bowl. Not the most delicate of ideas, but it tells you how he thought about the trend at the time toward more and more emphasis on Big Time sports and their subsequent commercialization.
Thus when I read the article in Sunday’s NY Times about how at Haverford College there is a debate raging about the role of athletics, I flashed back to my own days at Columbia (see link for full article).
Haverford is one of a small circle of very selective, academically-minded liberal arts colleges where until recently it did not help one’s chances of being admitted to have been on a varsity team in high school. Now, they acknowledge, it is taken into consideration, with at least 15 percent of the current student body having had athletics play some role in the admissions process.
It goes further than that—the college recently opened a new sports complex on campus and nearly 40 percent of Haverford’s 1,100 students are on varsity teams. One student opines, “They built a new $30 million athletic center . . . not something for the arts.” Some students note that the campus is becoming, in a sense, segregated with students congregating in groups by team.
Others claim that having competitive teams at Haverford lifts school spirit and has not caused any discord among students. As one alum said, “If Haverford gives a music concert, no one scores it a C-minus. But if you play a basketball game and lose, 87-42, everybody sees that in the newspaper the next day.” And who knows, maybe their attention will drift elsewhere when it comes time to think about where to send their own children or write checks.
I don’t know about that. I do recall, though, that in my day at Columbia (and I hope this is still true) we kept score in a different way—how many Nobel Prize winners were on the faculty; if we couldn’t beat Rutgers in football, our cheerleaders would encourage us to taunt the Rutgers student body with a chant about our having Lionel Trilling teaching us; about how 100 years ago, if you can believe it, we “beat West Point”; and in 1933 we even won the Rose (not Toilet) Bowl when everyone who played was a so-called “student-athlete.”
Though, like me, none of these guys from ‘33 have much hair left.
posted by Steven Zwerling at
10:56 AM
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