In 2010 the state of California cut funding for the University of California at Berkeley by several hundred million dollars, raised student fees 10 percent, and forced faculty and staff to take unpaid furloughs.
Despite this, the university covered the nearly $6.4 million deficit generated by its intercollegiate athletics program. Campus supporters of the football program noted that two-thirds of the top NCAA football teams ran even larger deficits; the average was about $8 million.
Although some of Berkeley's faculty endorsed an "Academics First" petition, others applauded the chancellor's decision to pursue "competitive excellence" in all aspects of campus life. Berkeley's football team was mandated to compete "at the top levels of the Pacific Ten conference and in postseason and national championship play." To that end, Berkeley paid its head coach $1.5 million, about average for a Division I head coach.
This insistence on winning intercollegiate football originated in the late nineteenth century. At that time, a few colleges decided to pay coaches, recruited star prep school athletes, and charged spectators to watch the games. The game became faster and rougher. Soon the spectacle attracted huge audiences. Action often got out
¦ In painter Thomas Eakins's The Gross Clinic (1875), Professor Samuel Gross's team of surgeons cuts through flesh to repair bone, an examination of the bare essentials of life devoid of sentiment or moralism. The foremost intellectuals of the age regarded life in much the same way.
Source: Thomas Cowperthwait Eakins (1844-1916). The Gross Clinic. 1875. Oil on Canvas. Jefferson College, Philadelphia, PA, USA. Bridgeman Art Library.
Of hand and, lacking satisfactory protective equipment, many football players sustained serious injuries; each year, some were killed.
In 1892, William Rainey Harper, president of the University of Chicago, defended the high cost of winning football. "If the world can afford to sacrifice lives for commercial gain"—a reference to the victims of industrial accidents—"it can more easily afford to make similar sacrifices on the altar of vigorous and unsullied manhood." In 1896 Massachusetts Senator Henry Cabot Lodge told Harvard students that "the injuries incurred on the playing-field are part of the price which the English-speaking race has paid for being world-conquerors."
The rise of football in the 1890s symbolized a profound transformation in cultural and intellectual life. The religious sensibilities and gentlemanly precepts of an earlier age were yielding to a tougher, "more manly" mind-set. Life was a struggle, Darwin had proclaimed, in which the fittest prevailed and the losers vanished. In this "competition" for survival, power trounced sentiment. Ideas were valuable not because they espoused truths or evinced beauty, but because they left an imprint on the world. Art and literature functioned not to transcend life or prettify it but to lay bare its grim reality. This stern ethos unsettled many but also invigorated those who yearned to confront the world as it was. ¦
W. A. Rogers's engraving, "Out of the Game,” showed one injured boy tending to another. It appeared in the October 31, 1891 issue of Harper's Weekly, which included an essay by Walter Camp. Camp claimed that football cultivated the man "of executive ability.” If all life was "survival of the fittest,” then colleges were right to promote such aggressive pastimes.
World History
