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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 the beginning of the century with such consistency and intensity that our understanding of higher education in America cannot be complete without an understanding of intercollegiate athletics. It matters not at all whether the college be large or small, public or private, distinguished or mediocre, a center of advanced research or a community college, in all of these places intercollegiate sports have a substantial role. Some colleges, to be sure, avoid sports. A few prosper without intense intercollegiate competition, but they are the exception. When we look at the history of America's great universities we find virtually all have risen to preeminence accompanied by a major commitment to intercollegiate sports: Michigan, Illinois, Berkeley, UCLA, Florida, Harvard, Yale, Princeton, Stanford, to name but a few of the members of the American Association of Universities (the premier research university association). In these universities, sports played and still play a key role in their growth and achievement.

Over the decades of the twentieth century, America has become ever more sports-minded. Television, professional sports, and competitions at the high and middle school have all increased the public's commitment to sports. At the same time, the nation's focus on sports translates many social issues into sports issues that sometimes become the surrogate context for the resolution of social conflicts. We find ourselves discussing race, class, and gender in sports as both a substantive and symbolic matter for all of society. Equally important, intercollegiate sports serve as a testing ground for values about competition, amateurism, human and social values, and personal morality. Issues of payment, corruption, competition, and finance capture the public's enthusiasm and the colleges' and university's time and attention.

Yet with all the focus on American intercollegiate sports, much remains poorly understood about the relationships between sports, universities, and the academic enterprise. The purpose of this colloquium is to address some of these issues within a historical context. We seek not to resolve the question of values, whether intercollegiate sports are a good or a bad thing, but to understand the historical development of intercollegiate sports in America's major research universities.

Every historical inquiry needs a thesis to orient its studies and create boundaries around complex subjects.

"In America, since at least the beginning of the twentieth century, intercollegiate sports competition has been the essential element in creating constituencies and support for America's great public and private colleges and universities. Absent a national higher education policy, inspired by the local, church-related origins of many of America's most prestigious colleges and universities, and driven by the need to build large coalitions of support for public and private academic enterprises, America's colleges and universities turned to intercollegiate athletic competitions as the key element in building their financial base. Almost all of today's great comprehensive American research universities found themselves required to develop high profile, expensive, and successful intercollegiate athletic programs as a prerequisite for adequate financial support. The issues of governance, integrity, quality, and purpose that these programs brought with them may have overwhelmed many institutions, but these problems existed only as an unavoidable side effect of the necessary investment in intercollegiate athletics. At the same time, the public's enthusiasm for sports has made intercollegiate athletics a focus for the social issues of race, class, and gender and the moral issues of values and purpose."

We approach this thesis with the goal of developing a historical perspective. The topic lends itself to the purposes of this colloquium on historical method because we all think we know much about intercollegiate sports. Some of us love sports, some hate them, and others do not care. We have many preconceptions about sports and about the role of sports in universities. We think we know more than we do. By exploring this topic as historians, however, we learn to separate our opinion from our analysis, read controversy with a critical eye, examine original documents, and seek the facts and the substance of our understanding of intercollegiate sports. 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 colloquium is experimental. While I have given this colloquium before, this is the first time we will use the Internet and its tools to support the work of this class, and so we will learn together. You have the obligation to read, talk in class, participate in the discussion forum on the Internet, communicate with me when useful by email, and write your papers. I have the obligation to read, talk in class, moderate the discussion forum, respond to your mail, and critique what you write. Together we will shape the context of this colloquium, seeking ways to make it better and enhance its value for the next class of students. This is what historians do, of course. We read, talk, and write, each generation leaving a record and a discussion that prepares the ground 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 good sources for this colloquium in books, articles, dissertations, news magazines, newspapers, congressional and state legislative hearings and testimony, interviews, autobiographies, music, television, and official reports of all kinds from universities and conferences and the NCAA. Indeed, one of our chief tasks will be to sort through this material and focus our inquiry onto some manageable topics. You will also have the resources of the Internet at your disposal, and one of the purposes of this colloquium is to give you experience in using this medium. The Internet has a wide range of resources available, although they tend to be poorly organized and idiosyncratic. Nonetheless, with persistence there is much to be found. The Internet resources also have another defect for historians. Most Internet information about intercollegiate sports refers to the events of yesterday, today, and tomorrow. While this is fine for those of us interested in sports, it tends to distort our understanding of the historical development of intercollegiate sports because so much of the data comes from our own moment in history.

One of the tasks of this colloquium is to learn how to guard against the analytical fallacy of projecting today's attitudes and circumstances back into the past. The sports enterprise that we see around us at American universities has a rich historical tradition. Things we see as today's urgent business often have long historical antecedents and the actions that cause today's headlines do not come from a new idea or crisis but rather a replay of fundamental traditions in American collegiate sports. In this colloquium we search for the structure and fundamental organization of college sports, we look for the development of college athletics that produced yesterday and today highly paid coaches, great fan enthusiasm, tremendous national media attention, and the opportunity for scandal and corruption. We search for the fundamental link that has bound intercollegiate sports to American higher education for at least a century. This requires knowledge and information about what we have become and what we were. It is much easier to learn about what we have become than it is to learn about what we were. In this class we must do both.