Few issues in American higher education have so captured the public imagination and attention as sports. Sports competition has accompanied the growth and development of American colleges and universities since at least the beginning of the twentieth-century with such consistency and intensity that we cannot understand higher education in America without recognizing the role of intercollegiate athletics. In colleges of every type, large or small, public or private, distinguished or mediocre, a center of advanced research or a community college, sports play a substantial role.

Some colleges, to be sure, avoid sports. A few prosper without intense intercollegiate competition, but they are rare exceptions. When we follow the history of America's great universities we find virtually all rose to preeminence accompanied by a major commitment to intercollegiate sports: Michigan, Illinois, Berkeley, UCLA, Florida, Ohio State, LSU, Harvard, Yale, Princeton, or Stanford. In these universities, sports remain closely aligned with institutional growth, achievement, and identity.

Over the decades of the twentieth century and continuing into the twenty-first, America has become ever more sports-minded. Television and other forms of media from print to radio and now the Internet have greatly expanded public consumption of sports entertainment, especially at the levels of big time college sports such as football and basketball and for all professional sports. This, in turn, has increased the commitment of parents and their children to organized sports competitions associated with schools and private sports-coaching clubs or programs. As sports has become ever more significant in the public consciousness, key issues of national concern, whether related to race, class, and gender or associated with values and standards of behavior, have been translated into sports issues. These games offer a context for the discussion and on occasion the partial resolution of fundamental social conflicts. Intercollegiate sports serve as a venue for testing values about competition, amateurism, human and social values, the place of education in American life, and personal morality. Concerns about payment, corruption, competition, and finance in college sports capture public enthusiasm and put colleges and universities in the middle of debates that extend well beyond the educational functions of the institutions or the rules of the playing field.

Yet with all the focus on American intercollegiate sports, much remains poorly understood about the relationships between sports, society, universities, and the academic enterprise. We address some of these issues within a historical context, and while we may not necessarily resolve the question of values, whether intercollegiate sports are appropriately managed in our institutions, we can approach an understanding of the historical development of college sports competition in America's major research universities.

Every historical inquiry needs a thesis to create boundaries around complex subjects. The following statement offers a premise for this discussion, open to refinement, disagreement, or rejection:

In America, since at least the beginning of the twentieth century, intercollegiate sports competition has been an essential element in creating support for America's public and private colleges and universities. Absent a national higher education policy, inspired by the local, sectarian origins of many of America's most prestigious colleges and universities, and driven by the need to build substantial coalitions of support for public and private academic enterprises, America's colleges and universities turned to athletic competition as a fundamental element in building constituencies that would sustain their financial base. Almost all of today's comprehensive American research universities, for example, developed high profile, expensive, and successful intercollegiate athletic programs as a prerequisite for adequate institutional financial support. The issues of governance, integrity, quality, and purpose that these programs brought with them challenged institutional governance, but only as an unavoidable side effect of the necessary investment in college athletics. At the same time, the public's enthusiasm for sports has made intercollegiate athletics a focus for the general American social issues of race, class, and gender and the institutional issues of values and purpose.

An exploration of college sports offers some challenges because most Americans believe they understand both sports and universities. We have many preconceptions about sports and about the role of sports in universities because we think we know more than we do. By exploring this topic as historians, we learn to separate our opinion from our analysis, read controversy with a critical eye, examine original documents, and seek the facts that can inform our understanding. When we have concluded our work, we may still love or hate our sports, but the analysis we develop and the understanding we achieve will provide us with a basis for our opinion.

This course is in a constant state of development. While I have given this course before, it remains a work in progress. You have the obligation to read, attend class and ask questions or comment as appropriate, participate frequently in the online discussion through our email Listserv, and communicate with me when useful by email. I have the obligation to provide a basis for each week's conversation and topic, moderate the discussion groups, engage with you in the online discussions, and evaluate your work. Together we will shape the context of this course, seeking ways to make it better and enhance its value for the next class of students.

This semester's course reflects the experience and contributions of previous semesters' classes. This is what historians do, of course. We read, talk, and write, each generation leaving a record for future generations of historians who will improve on the research and the explanations we provide. We will not solve all the issues related to the history of intercollegiate sports in America, but we will understand college sports programs much better.

You will have no difficulty finding additional reading for this course in books, articles, dissertations, news magazines, newspapers, congressional and state legislative hearings and testimony, interviews, autobiographies, music, television, movies, and official reports of all kinds from universities, conferences, and the NCAA. You will have the resources of the library and the Internet at your disposal. The Internet has a wide range of materials available, although often they appear poorly or idiosyncratically organized. Nonetheless, with persistence there is much to be found.

Internet resources have another defect for historians. Much information available on the Internet about intercollegiate sports refers to the events of yesterday, today, and tomorrow. While this serves those of us interested in the current events of sports, it tends to distort our understanding of the historical development of intercollegiate athletics because so much of the data come from our own moment in history. As you find sites with important information for historians on the Internet, you can share those sites with the rest of us through our discussion forum. We also have extensive information on sports topics in the university's library, and students will find many references in the readings that can lead them to useful material. The library catalog is easily available online.

One of the tasks of this course is to learn how to guard against the analytical fallacy of projecting today's attitudes and circumstances into the past. The sports enterprise that we see around us at American colleges and universities has a rich historical tradition. Things we see as today's urgent business often have long historical antecedents. The actions reflected in the headlines may not come from a new idea or crisis but rather reflect and respond to fundamental traditions in American collegiate sports.

In this course we search for the structure and enduring organization of college sports. We look for the development of college athletics that produced yesterday and today highly paid coaches, great fan enthusiasm, endless national media attention, and the opportunity for scandal and corruption. We search for the organic link that has bound intercollegiate sports to American higher education for over a century. This requires knowledge about what we were and what we have become. It is much easier to learn about what we have become than it is to learn about what we were. In this class we do both.

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