The Fevers of Reason. Gerald Weissmann

Gridiron

       After taking a sociology exam, Cardale Jones, a quarterback at Ohio State, posted a message on Twitter . . . : “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

       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

       ZEPPO: . . . it isn’t right for a college to buy football players! GROUCHO: (president of Huxley College): This college is a failure. The trouble is, we’re neglecting football for education.

      —Horse Feathers (film), 1932

      THE STORY OF “ATHLETICS” IN AMERICAN COLLEGES has never been more amusing. Shortly after football players (undergraduates!) at Northwestern University demanded a union contract, Robert Morris University advertised that it would award “athletic scholarships” [sic] for varsity video-game players. Antics like these would have been enough to startle folks at universities in Stockholm, Edinburgh, Cambridge, or at the Sorbonne—schools that fulfill their academic functions without athletic scholarships or stipends for electronic gaming. But, not to be outdone, the National Collegiate Athletic Association (NCAA) raised the ante by offering a few thousand unaudited expense dollars to each American college athlete’s already generous football scholarship. The NCAA proceeded to slip in a payment to ESPN for $7.3 billion over twelve years. It guaranteed telecast of seven “collegiate” games per year: four major bowl games, two semifinal bowl games, and the “College Football Playoff National Championship Game.”

      That contest—the first of its kind—featured quarterback Cardale Jones of Ohio State University, the fellow who said he “ain’t come to play SCHOOL.” Cardale came “to play FOOTBALL,” and played the game of his life as his team beat Oregon 42–20. Jones showed the world that he’d learned his subject well and will be far better off than if he’d taken a shine to academics. Brawn pays the recent graduate a lot better than Brain: while the average English major expects about $32,000 a year on graduation, Jones is on track to be a millionaire in the NFL the minute he says “Goodbye, Columbus.”

      MOST FOLKS I KNOW ARE “ACADEMICS,” a name that harks back to a lush grove of olive trees: the 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.E. 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”). Nowadays we honor the Grove of Academe as the birthplace of reasoned inquiry, the font of Brain.

      Brawn, however, 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 an exedra, a pillared courtyard, where wine and bathwater flowed for gymnast and philosopher alike. However, even before Plato, the Grove of Academe was renowned as the starting point for festivities that preceded the quadrennial Panathenaic 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, and more. Competition was fierce, and athletes were well rewarded. Athletes placing first or second in each category received large Panathenaic amphoras, or 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 six amphoras, but an older pro (NFL-level) who came in first would be given sixty of the jugs. Amphoras that survive today are priceless, the pride of major museums worldwide.

      Plato was of one mind with Ohio’s Cardale Jones. The philosopher held that intellectual and athletic efforts were equally arduous; he stated, “An athlete who aims for an Olympian or Pythian victory—he has no free time for anything else.” But Brain and Brawn were not equally rewarded: athletes got the finest oil, Socrates got the deadliest poison.

      WE CAN SEE THAT BRAIN AND BRAWN are similarly rewarded today, using Ohio State University and its Buckeyes as examples. Ohio State is the very model of a modern Big Ten university, ranked first in its state and eighteenth among American public universities overall. Its salary scale fits the nationwide model as well: NCAA Class 1 football coaches are paid approximately three to four times as much as university presidents.

      Nevertheless, and to its credit, Ohio State’s College of Art and Sciences—in which quarterback Jones is enrolled—in a “Statement of Principles” stresses the importance of a liberal arts education that “should not be compromised for the sake of expediency in pursuit of acquiring vocational skills.” Accordingly, a list of Ohio State University people prominent in the arts includes Milton Caniff, James Thurber, and Roy Lichtenstein, and the sciences have been enriched by three Nobel laureates with Buckeye roots: Paul Flory (Chemistry, 1974), Kenneth Wilson (Physics, 1982), and William Fowler (Physics, 1983).

      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. So much for Plato’s academy, which offered students the quadrivium: arithmetic, geometry, astronomy, and music. However, if a Buckeye can get a bachelor 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, “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. 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 played before 900 family and friends in the college stands, despite a record of 9–0 in 2014. The MIT quarterback was majoring in aerospace engineering.

      PROFESSIONALIZATION OF AMERICAN COLLEGE FOOTBALL closely followed professionalization of the curriculum. For much of the nineteenth century, an Oxbridge-inspired program of classic education, plus or minus theology, was compulsory in English and American universities, with social Darwinism in the wings. 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 program launched by the Germans: 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, as Ohio State would have it today.

      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, “We are fighting a wilderness, physical and moral, and for this fight we must be trained and armed . . . ” 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 beat, 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