Since the earliest days of intercollegiate sports competition, the relationship between academic goals and athletic aspirations has been a recurring source of controversy. The objective of producing winning teams without sacrificing academic integrity often proved to be a delicate balancing act and sometimes a source of despair among leading officials at academic institutions. In January 1962, John T. Caldwell, the chancellor of North Carolina State College, addressed the dilemma in the wake of a point-shaving scandal at his school. He explained that college sports is the “only activity of [an academic] institution which excites the common interest of large numbers of students, large numbers of the faculty, large numbers of alumni, and large segments of the general public.” But this benefit often caused “painful” problems for administrators who sought to “satisfy partially the idealism of the educator, the appetites of sports enthusiasts, and the balance sheets of trustees and business officers.” In attempting to meet the competing and sometimes incompatible demands of those constituents, Caldwell suggested that he and his counterparts in schools across the nation had “a bear by the tail.”Footnote 1 At the center of efforts to gain control of the bear was the National Collegiate Athletic Association (NCAA).
Many scholars have carefully studied and analyzed the history of the NCAA's attempts to legislate against violations of academic integrity and to promote a level playing field in college sports. Kurt Edward Kemper offers a new perspective on this issue by reviewing what he calls a struggle “for the soul of college basketball.” He does a masterful job of sorting out the various organizations that sponsored amateur basketball and providing details about their rivalries for dominance in the first six decades of the twentieth century. He shows that during the 1920s, the NCAA vanquished its competitors, the Amateur Athletic Union and the Young Men's Christian Association, in their frequently sharp differences over influence, rules, and styles of play. Kemper argues that the NCAA expanded its control as college basketball increased in popularity and that it acted primarily in the interests of schools that pushed for and participated in big-time, commercialized sports. He is particularly critical of the mostly large institutions that imposed a “home rule principle” on NCAA members, which assured that no school would be bound by rules passed by the organization. He writes, “This allowed the barons of college athletics to operate largely without oversight, to disdain those who would presume to restrain them, and to view college athletics as their fiefdom” (p. 14).
Kemper devotes a large part of his book to the discord between the NCAA and the National Association of Intercollegiate Athletics (NAIA). In 1937, the NAIA's predecessor organization sponsored the first national intercollegiate basketball championship. The tournament was intended for small colleges and was not held for the purpose of profit, and the NAIA continued that tradition. The NCAA attempted to undercut the NAIA in ways that were “ruthless,” “prolonged,” and “ultimately . . . successful” (p. 60). Eventually, it dealt a serious blow to the NAIA by creating its own college division basketball tournament in 1956. The NCAA's action resulted in a loss of membership but not the destruction of the NAIA. Kemper strongly rebukes the NCAA for its campaign to marginalize its rival.
The author also contrasts the reluctance of the NCAA to include historically black colleges in its postseason tournaments with the more enlightened practices of the NAIA. He accuses NCAA officials of spouting platitudes on racial matters while failing to take meaningful steps for fear of alienating its powerful members from the South. The NAIA, on the other hand, “unselfconsciously committed itself to integration as an expression of democracy and Americanism” (p. 193).
Kemper's book highlights problems that are key aspects of the history of college athletics and presents issues that other scholars have not fully recognized or considered. But its conclusions are not convincing. Kemper does not spell out what he means by the war for “the soul of college basketball.” Presumably, the fight for the soul was a battle between noncommercial sports that appealed only to localized communities and commercial sports that attracted a national audience. If so, it was never much of a contest. Big-time sports emerged a short time after collegiate competition began, along with its substantial threats to academic integrity. By the time the NCAA was formed, schools that emphasized winning, even at the expense of academic standards, were in control of the college sports scene. The much more pristine model that small schools favored and that the NAIA embodied had little or no chance to overcome the well-established norms that had prevailed since the early twentieth century.
Attempts to impose reforms that would clean up college sports and give top priority to academic principles foundered, in large part because the impact depended upon the support of individual schools that exercised home rule. Further, as Kemper points out, even small schools in the 1950s “began engaging in the same abuses and the same drift toward commercialism that their predecessors had decried” (p. 218). It is unlikely that small colleges that participated in NAIA events provided answers to the difficulties of balancing academic and athletic objectives. Many avoided those issues simply by adopting limited athletic ambitions. Their approach did not apply to institutions that grabbed a bear by the tail by opting for the path of big-time sports.
Kemper's book is a welcome addition to the scholarly literature. It does not, however, offer a road map to correcting the abuses that too often plague college athletic competition.
