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Brains and Brawn in Academe: We Ain't Come to Play SCHOOL!

2015; Wiley; Volume: 29; Issue: 4 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1096/fj.15-0401ufm

1530-6860

Gerald Weissmann,

Impact of Technology on Adolescents

After taking a sociology exam, Cardale Jones, a quarterback at Ohio State, posted a message on Twtter… “Why should we have to go to class if we came here to play FOOTBALL, we ain't come to play SCHOOL, classes are POINTLESS. ” —New York Times, December 30, 2014 (1) Robert Morris University becomes first to recognize video games as varsity sport… scholarships will [be] worth up to $19,000 per student. —Associated Press, October 6, 2014 (2) ZEPPO: “… it isn't right for a college to buy football players!”… GROUCHO (President, Huxley College): “This college is a failure. The trouble is, we're neglecting football for education. Where would this college be without football? Have we got a stadium?” PROFESSORS: “Yes.” Quarterback Cardale Jones #12 of the Ohio State Buckeyes lifts the Big Ten trophy after his team defeated the Wisconsin Badgers 59-0 in the Big Ten Championship at Lucas Oil Stadium on December 6, 2014 in Indianapolis, Indiana. Photo by Andy Lyons/Getty Images. GROUCHO: “Have we got a college?” PROFESSORS (in unison): “Yes.” GROUCHO: “Well, we can't support both. Tomorrow we start tearing down the college.”—Horse Feathers (film), 1932 (3) Groucho et al. scoring for Huxley College 31, Darwin 12. © Al Hirschfeld. Reproduced by arrangement with Hirschfeld's exclusive representative, the Margo Feiden Galleries LTD., New York. www.alhirschfeld.com Last year, the antics of American college athletics reached new heights. It began with football players (undergraduates!) at Northwestern University (Evanston, IL, USA) demanding a union contract and progressed to offers of “athletic” scholarships for varsity video-game clickers (4, 5). These alone might startle folks at universities in Stockholm, Edinburgh, Cambridge, or the Sorbonne—schools that fulfill their academic functions without athletic scholarships or stipends for electronic gaming. Next, the National Collegiate Athletic Association (NCAA) raised the ante by offering a few thousand (unaudited) expense dollars to each American athlete's already generous football scholarship (5). Through a surrogate entity, the NCAA then contracted with ESPN for payment of $7.3 billion over 12 years to telecast 7 “collegiate” games per year—4 major bowl games, 2 semifinal bowl games, and the “College Football Playoff National Championship Game”. (1) That contest—the first of its kind—featured quarterback Cardale Jones of Ohio State University, the fellow who said “ain't come to go to school.” Jones played the football of his life as his team beat Oregon 42-20. More power to him, I'd say: Cardale came to play FOOTBALL! Jones certainly learned his subject well and will be far better off than if he'd taken a shine to academics. Brawn pays; Jones is on track to be an NFL millionaire the minute he says “Goodbye, Columbus.” (6). The majority of readers, contributors, and editors of the FASEB Journal are “academics”—a name that dates back to a lush grove of olive trees: the “Aκaδημíα” (Akademia) at the northern edge of Athens. Dedicated to the goddess Athena, the grove was home to the school of philosophy founded by Plato around 380 B.C. (7). The Socratic dialogues and symposia held in the Grove of Academe have remained a model for scholarly discourse to the present day. There, too, Plato first defined “the liberal arts”. Horace looked back in wonder at that Athenian grove where scholars might “inter silvas academi quaerere verum” (seek for truth among the trees of Academe) (8). Nowadays we honor the Grove of Academe as the birthplace of reasoned inquiry, the font of Brain. However, Brawn was honored there as well. The grounds of the Akademia harbored a gymnasium and bathing area, by the side of which Plato held forth from a pillared courtyard, an excedra, where wine and bathwater flowed for a gymnast and philosopher alike. However, even before Plato, the Grove of Academe was renowned as the starting point for pregame festivities that preceded the quadrennial Panathenaean games. Under torches lit from the altar of Eros, lively processions moved into town by the Dipylon Gate to glorify the contests: torch races, sprints, chariot races, wrestling bouts, javelin flings, etc. Competition was fierce, and athletes were well rewarded. Athletes placing first or second in each category received large Panathenaic amphoras (jugs) that depicted the event; these overflowed with 40 liters of first class olive oil ($185 per liter today). The oil was meant to be sold and could be exported free of duty; the number of amphoras given as a prize depended on the event, the age-category, and the final standings. A young (collegiate-level) athlete who placed second would get only 6 amphoras, but an older pro (NFL-level) who came in first would be given 60 of the jugs (7, 9). Amphoras that survive today are the pride of major museums worldwide (priceless). Plato was one mind with Ohio's Cardale Jones. The philosopher held that intellectual and athletic efforts were equally arduous; he stated that “An athlete who aims for an Olympian or Pythian victory—he has no free time for anything else.” (10). However, Brain and Brawn were not equally rewarded: Socrates got the deadliest poison, athletes got the finest oil. We note that Brain and Brawn are similarly rewarded today by using Ohio State University and its Buckeyes team as examples (Table 1) (11–14). Ohio State is the very model of a modern Big Ten University, ranked first in its state and 18th among American public universities overall. Its salary scale fits the nationwide model as well; NCAA Class 1 football coaches are paid approximately 3- to 4-fold more than university presidents. Nevertheless, and to its credit, Ohio State's school of Arts and Sciences—in which quarterback Jones is enrolled—stresses the importance of a liberal arts education that “should not be compromised for the sake of expediency in pursuit of acquiring vocational skills.” (15). Indeed, a list of Ohio State University people prominent in the Arts would include Milton Caniff, James Thurber, and Roy Lichtenstein, whereas the Sciences have been enriched by three Nobel laureates with Buckeye roots: Paul Flory (Chemistry in 1974), Kenneth Wilson (Physics in 1982), and William Fowler (Physics in 1983) (16). Better yet, scientists at Ohio State show excellent contemporary taste; they've published 10 papers in The FASEB Journal in the past 2 years! Ohio State undergraduates can pick from a menu of 80 majors that range from Arts Management to Zoology; the longer list of 100 (!) minors includes “Coaching Education”, “Fashion and Retail Studies”, “Meat Science”, and “Turfgrass Management” (16). So much for Plato's academy, which offered students the quadrivium: Arithmetic, Geometry, Astronomy, and Music. However, if a Buckeye can get a Bachelor's of Science degree after studying Turfgrass Management (B.S. seems right), why not skip classes altogether and work on the turf itself? That would be a FOOTBALL major and “you ain't gotta go to class.” It's also a modern version of Plato's recipe, with “no free time for anything else,” for winning an Olympian victory or playing in the College Football Playoff National Championship Game against the Oregon Ducks. On January 12, 2015, the championship game was viewed by 80,000 fans in a Texas stadium and by over 30 million fans on TV (6). That's Darwinian survival of the football fittest over those who come to school to go to class. We note that the Massachusetts Institute of Technology football team plays before 900 family and friends in the college stands, despite a record of 9-0 in 2014. Its quarterback majors in aerospace engineering (17). Professionalization of American college football closely followed professionalization of the curriculum. For much of the 19th century, an Oxbridge-inspired program of classic education, plus or minus theology, was compulsory in English and American universities. However, social Darwinism was in the air. In England; Thomas Henry Huxley, Darwin's great champion, argued in 1868 that for the sake of the Empire, its gentlemanly college curriculum must be replaced by the sort of entrepreneurial studies that the Germans had launched, Erdkunde: “…a description of the earth, of its general structure, and of its great features-winds, tides, mountains, plains: of the chief forms of the vegetable and animal worlds, of the varieties of man.” Agriculture and soil management, so to speak (18). The very next year, President Charles W. Eliot of Harvard University sniffed the spoor of social Darwinism and put Huxley's proposal into action. America was on the move after the Civil War, and expansion into the western territories called for practical education in the arts of empire. Pointing to European success at technical education, President Eliot proclaimed that “We are fighting a wilderness, physical and moral, and for this fight we must be trained and armed…” (19). It may sound like social Darwinism these days, but it was a call for the “elective system,” which put an end to the classic core forever. Thanks to Huxley and Eliot, elite universities on both sides of the Atlantic replaced the study of Latin, Greek, and the Quadrivium, with elective courses in the Natural and Physical Sciences, Modern Languages, Sociology, Geology, and Engineering. To the sounds of that drumbeat, students have been naturally selecting their own “majors” ever since. Within a month of Eliot's call for manly vigor at Harvard, Princeton and Rutgers played the first intercollegiate football game in November of 1869 before a rapt crowd of 200. That initial fight for survival of the collegiate fittest spread rapidly from coast to coast. Colleges accustomed to recruiting for academic excellence (and family standing) soon turned to recruiting for athletic skill (plus or minus family standing). The turning point came when the University of Chicago hired Alonzo Stagg as the first professional college football coach in the country-only 2 years after the university itself was founded in 1890 (20)! Caricature of Thomas Henry Huxley (1825-1895), champion of the “fittest.” Image courtesy of the History of Medicine (National Library of Medicine). Alonzo Stagg's legacy is huge. The billion-dollar football world of Cardale Jones and others today became what it is thanks to Stagg's invention of that uniquely American institution, the football scholarship. It was called a “student service payment” in the 1890s and evolved to guarantee survival of the fittest on the field, if not the classroom. Poor kids, rich kids, and kids of any color or origin, one and all, could go to college as long as they had Brawn—plus or minus Brain (and good reason, too). Before “student service payments”, it was open season for any lug who could handle a ball, as long as the alma mater was served. Stagg was not entirely scrupulous in his selection of players. Hugo Bezdek, one of the 1904 Monsters of the Midway, was identified as a professional boxer named “Hugo Young” by a rival from the University of Illinois. Bezdek recalled the “Illini” accusers plotting his exposé at “some saloon” and added “I don't know anything about the Illinois teams hiring the iceman to play for them…I don't know whether they really were a gas-house gang or not. They may have been genuine Illinois students” (22). Thus, college football players can do business at “some saloon”? Ice-men and gas-house workers can be hired to play college ball? The prestige of a university can hang on victory over a rival at sport? It sounds like the recipe for a Hollywood comedy. It was. The 1932 comedy is called “Horse Feathers” (3) and is a wicked commentary on a Carnegie Commission report that had blown the whistle on a generation of collegiate shenanigans: “College football is a highly organized commercial enterprise. The athletes are commanded by professional coaches. The great matches are highly profitable enterprises” (23). In the flick, Groucho Marx plays Quincy Adams Wagstaff, the brand new president of Huxley College. Groucho's son, played by Zeppo, had been an undergraduate football player at Huxley for 12 (!) years. Frank tells Zeppo that Huxley hasn't won a ball game for decades and that the college's reputation is on the line. The only way to save Huxley is to hire a two hulking football players, who hang out at “some local saloon” (speakeasy in '32), but as bad luck would have it, the president of Huxley's archrival Darwin College had gotten there before him. Groucho proceeded to sign up two saloon regulars: Chico, a bootlegging ice man; and Harpo, an ice man and dog-catcher (shades of the Illini gas-house). Back on campus, University president Groucho also acts as football coach, guidance counselor, locker-room trainer, and biology professor. On the other hand, Chico and Harpo, similar to Cardale Jones these days, were hired to play FOOTBALL and found that “classes are pointless”: GROUCHO (as biology professor): “Let us follow a corpuscle on its journey… Now then, baboons, what is a corpuscle?” CHICO: “That's easy! First is a captain… then a lieutenant… then is a corpuscle!” (3) The climax of the film, as expected, comes at the annual Thanksgiving football game, which pits Huxley against Darwin. All 4 Marxes are suited up, the University president dons the helmet, knickers, and cleats and makes a tackle from the sidelines. It's a tight match but Huxley has selective advantage in this struggle for life. In the final quarter, bearing several concealed footballs, the 4 brothers are carried into the end-zone in a chariot: Harpo's horse-drawn garbage wagon. Huxley wins 31-12: Brain beat Brawn in Academe, but it's only a flick. That image of 4 comedians riding across the goal line, à la Ben-Hur, was featured on the cover of Time magazine. It made the point that, in 1932, you could buy football players at a saloon and that the Carnegie Commission was right and that “The great matches are highly profitable enterprises” (23). The enterprise is perhaps even more profitable these days, e.g., the 7.3 billion contracts signed in 2014 between the NCAA and ESPN (1). As for the athletes, they should be rewarded for their Brawn. Footballers in Division 1—as in the Big 10—are on a professional career path and should be unionized; they should also be permitted to major in football itself. Similar to the Olympians training in the groves of Plato's Academe, they have “no free time for anything else” and should not be forced to go to classes, the principles of which the players can acquire on the field. If you can major in Turfgrass management, well… Cardale Jones had it just right after the championship: “I don't think it's going to be based on your athletic ability. It's going to be based on your ability to process and diagnose information.” (6)—shades of Huxley—the Darwinist, that is. I'd argue that a Division 1 football player should be free to pick any class he chooses that can teach him anything more valuable than “to process and diagnose information.” As for the rest of us in Academe: how about the 7 liberal arts for a start?