Here is the presentation that accompanied the lecture on the Carnegie Report.

1. Amateurs No More
JRN 589 / 450
The Carnegie Report
Prof. Hanley

2. The Carnegie Report
The Carnegie Report, formally
titled American College Athletics,
was released in 1929 after a
lengthy investigation into all
elements of collegiate sports.
The Carnegie Foundation for the
Advancement of Teaching
sponsored the study, led by
Howard Savage.

3. The Carnegie Report
Five researchers visited a total of
130 schools, colleges, and
universities and collected
academic data on athletes.
Researchers also either directly
interviewed or conducted
correspondence with hundreds of
people connected to higher
education and athletics.

4. The Carnegie Report
“It is not the purpose of the
present study to add to the
considerable bulk of rumor and
scandal which darkens American
college athletics,” wrote Savage.
The foundation’s interest target
was the commercialization of
sports, particularly football, that
threatened higher education and
amateurism.

5. The Carnegie Report
He stated: “Although it appeared
to be considered unfair to attach
these tales to individuals, almost
all exhibited no compunction in
indicating freely the universities,
colleges, and schools which they
believed "must be offering
inducements.
“As the work advanced, however,
the number of persons who
discussed these problems frankly
increased almost from day to day.”

6. The Carnegie Report
The report was framed around
two questions posed by
foundation president Henry
Pritchett.
Pritchett asked the questions
based on what he perceived an
observer from overseas would see
in American collegiate sports.

7. The Carnegie Report
"What relation has this
astonishing athletic display to the
work of an intellectual agency like
a university?"
“How do students, devoted to
study, find either the time or the
money to stage so costly a
performance?”

8. The Carnegie Report
New York University football
coach Chick Meehan told his team
before the report came out in
October 1929 that:
“I’ve already read it, and you’re
going to be shocked when you see
… how little you’re getting paid.”

9. The Carnegie Report
That reflected the tone of what
Savage found in his investigation
and what the foundation
recommended in its conclusion.
In short, college sports,
particularly football, were
professional in all but name.
Amateurism had long since left
the building. Savage wanted the
British model to replace it.

10. The Carnegie Report
By the time the Carnegie
Foundation stepped in, the golden
age of college sports was
underway.
It had evolved from one overseen
by students to one that involved
highly paid coaches trying to fill
seats in enormous stadiums
across the U.S.

11. The Carnegie Report
American football begins in 1869
with a game between Rutgers and
Princeton, set up by students at
the schools.
By the 1870s, rules emerged but
differed among schools.
Still, students oversaw the rules
and the teams, with little
administrative oversight.

12. The Carnegie Report
In the 1880s, former Yale football
captain Walter Camp reformulates
the game, creating the line of
scrimmage to remove the rugby
scrum and a down-and-distance
system to remove the dull block
game where a team could hold
the ball for an entire half without
doing much.

13. The Carnegie Report
Camp continued to tinker with the
rules to make the game safer after
calls to ban because of excessive
violence and to make it more
understandable to spectators.
Mass print media offered lavish
coverage of the game, attracting
hordes of fans to the action on
college campuses.

14. The Carnegie Report
The rule changes required a
greater sophistication of play,
requiring experts to serve as
officials. They were paid.
The rules also required greater
sophistication in tactics and
training. Coaches were paid to
produce winning teams,
particularly for status-hungry
alumni.

15. The Carnegie Report
The first paid college coach is
believed to be William Wood,
hired by Yale in the 1860s to lead
the crew team after it had been
beaten several times in a row by
Harvard.
But football coaches at the turn of
the century turned the job into a
full-time, lucrative appointment
because of rule changes and
astonishingly high spectator
interest.

16. The Carnegie Report
Harvard’s coach Bill Reid, for
example, earned $7,000 a year in
the early 1900s, almost as much
as the salary of the college’s
president Charles W. Eliot.
By the 1920s, coaches such as
Knute Rockne earned as much as
$10,000 a year under long-term
contracts. Coaches jumped to the
highest bidder for their services.

17. The Carnegie Report
By the late 19th century, football
had already become a
Thanksgiving Day ritual.
Demand for tickets soared. In
1893, the Yale-Princeton game in
New York drew 40,000 spectators
– some paying $5 per ticket (an
enormous sum at the time). That
created a demand for more seats.

18. The Carnegie Report
In 1903, Harvard opened a
concrete-and-steel stadium – the
first of its kind - that held 35,000
spectators.

19. The Carnegie Report
The power of alumni – especially
in this case, the Class of 1879,
who covered some of the cost - is
evident in the dedication plaque
that still graces a portal.
“To the Joy of Manly Contest,”
reads the top line of it.

20. The Carnegie Report
Yale, meanwhile, played its home
games on a large field encircled
with wooden seats until 1914.

21. The Carnegie Report
In 1914, Yale opened the Yale
Bowl, the largest stadium of its
kind in the world at the time with
room for more than 60,000
spectators.
Princeton likewise opened a new
concrete stadium, Palmer
Stadium.

22. The Carnegie Report
Stadiums started to appear on
college campuses en masse across
the country in the 1920s.
These were large edifices, most
still in use today, designed to
reflect the size of the Yale Bowl.

23. The Carnegie Report

24. The Carnegie Report
University of Illinois President
David Kinley invoked ancient
Greece in his plans for a stadium,
which he said would “provide a
link between American culture
and the classical Greek civilization
upon which modern education
was based.”
He added: The stadium would
“bring a touch of Greek glory to
the prairie.”

25. The Carnegie Report
The stadiums would be built in
part to honor World War I
veterans but worries over their
cost and place on college
campuses persisted.

26. The Carnegie Report
“These new stadiums are mighty
fine, but they simply add to the
worries of a coach … Some of the
stadiums cost as much as
$200,000. Forgetting football for a
minute and taking up frenzied
finance, it is easy to figure that a
team must take in about $100,000
profit before it pays the interest
on the investment …

27. The Carnegie Report
“For a coach to turn out a bad
team with a stadium to worry as
well as the players makes the job
all the harder. In football the fans
like a winner as in baseball and a
poor team puts an awful dent in
the receipts.” – Knute Rockne,
who was secretly lobbying Notre
Dame to build an on-campus
stadium at the time.

28. The Carnegie Report
Even Walter Camp was concerned
about the situation.
“We may have gone too far in the
erection of huge bowls, and
stadiums, but time alone can tell.
Meantime these structures yield
the necessary funds to support
not only the major but minor
sports, and to defray the general
athletic upkeep,” he wrote.

29. The Carnegie Report
A report issued by a federal
research group in 1933 revealed
the full popularity of college
football in the 1920s.

30. The Carnegie Report
The report noted that between
1921 and 1930. attendance at
college games doubled.
Baseball, meanwhile, faltered as
attendance, while strong, grew by
only 11.5 percent, or about half of
the population growth in the cities
where Major League teams
played.

31. The Carnegie Report
“The spectacular increase in
attendance at football games
during the past decade has been
accompanied by a wave of
grandstand and stadium building
far surpassing any previous
development of this kind,” the
report stated.

32. The Carnegie Report
Amid the rush to build stadiums to
generate more revenue through
college football, in June 1922
Wesleyan University’s athletic
director Edgar Fauver suggested
that the Rockefeller or Carnegie
foundation study intercollegiate
athletics, including the questions
of amateurism and
professionalism.

33. The Carnegie Report
In 1925, concerned at the
commercial influence college
athletics wielded over academics ,
the Carnegie Foundation for the
Advancement of Teaching decided
to study the subject and asked
staff member Dr. Howard J. Savage
to study the subject. In January
1926, he launched what turned
out to be a three-year
investigation.

34. The Carnegie Report
The Carnegie investigation into
college athletics coincidently
began two months after Red
Grange of Illinois signed a pro
contract with the Chicago Bears in
November 1925.

35. The Carnegie Report
“The condemnation of ‘amateur’
Red Grange going professional
was likely the most highly
criticized action in intercollegiate
history,” wrote the scholar Ronald
Smith.
Grange didn’t play for the “Joy of
Manly Contest” as did Harvard’s
Class of 1879. He wanted to get
paid.

36. The Carnegie Report
Ironically, the media reflected this
ideal, describing players who
turned pro as “gold diggers.”
Professional sports served as the
“antithesis” of amateurism in a
philosophical tension: material
versus spiritual rewards.

37. The Carnegie Report
Even before its investigation
began, the Carnegie Foundation
had already reached a conclusion:
it would expose the full
commercialization of college
athletics to convince schools to
dismantle football and other
revenue-producing sports and
install the British model of
amateurism.

38. The Carnegie Report
Pritchett (left in photo) signaled
its intention: “Hitherto, athletics
has absorbed the college; it is
time for the college to absorb
athletics.”

39. The Carnegie Report
In effect, the foundation decided
to do the work the NCAA was
formed in the first decades of the
20th century to do, and reformers
sought to install over that time.
After all, according to the NCAA’s
original constitution, it was to
provide “regulation and
supervision” of college athletics to
maintain the “dignity and high
purpose of education” with
athletics based on amateur play.

40. The Carnegie Report
“The principles of amateur sport
in the bylaws demanded that each
member agree to prevent
inducements to athletes to enter
colleges for athletic purposes and
to prohibit all but bona fide
students in good academic
standing,” the scholar Smith wrote
in a study of the NCAA.

41. The Carnegie Report
As Smith has shown, colleges had
tossed out British conceptions of
amateurism by the turn of the
20th century and pursued the
American model.
Schools competed against
professionals, sold tickets, paid for
athletes’ food and tutoring,
recruited athletes, and paid for
coaches and game officials.

42. The Carnegie Report
And, of course, it had been widely
known that many athletes,
including some who had no
intention of competing college
courses, had been paid with no-
show jobs or fellowships.

43. The Carnegie Report
The hypocrisy is clear even in the
action of Amos Alonzo Stagg (on
the left in photo), the Yale-
educated, former All-America
football player who went on to
coach University of Chicago
football for decades and
vigorously support amateurism.

44. The Carnegie Report
Stagg recruited quarterback
Walter Eckersall to Chicago in
1904 even though he had been
suspended by the Amateur
Athletic Union for accepting pay
to play summer baseball.
Moreover, Eckersall was hardly a
model student. He completed less
than half the credits he needed
for his degree in four years of play.

45. The Carnegie Report
Casper Whitney, friend of Walter
Camp and editor of Outing
magazine, took specific aim at the
summer baseball teams he
claimed contaminated the
amateur ideal by paying college
players who competed along side
professionals.

46. The Carnegie Report
Inspired by Whitney, the NCAA
formed the Committee on
Summer Baseball, which
concluded that “the playing of
baseball in summer for gain is
distinctly opposed to the
principles of amateurism,” as
Smith has noted in his studies.

47. The Carnegie Report
When the U.S. entered the First
World War in 1917, the NCAA
produced a war-time resolution to
make sure colleges maintained
their athletic programs, but
reformers smuggled into the
document measures such as
freshmen ineligibility, pay cuts of
coaches, no pre-season practices
and no reduction in admission
standards, among other things.

48. The Carnegie Report
Now, the Carnegie Foundation
would carry that reform banner,
but it would find resistance when
trying to turn college athletics into
a 20th century reflection of Tom
Brown’s Schooldays’ moral lessons
applied to America.

49. The Carnegie Report
The 350-page American College
Athletics was finished in July 1929
and released on October 23, 1929,
during the football season.
It generated massive press
coverage - the New York Times
centered the story at the top of
the page - that focused on
recruiting and paying athletes.

50. The Carnegie Report
The report found that one in
seven college athletes received
some level of subsidy, ranging
from scholarships to loans.
Yale was the only school of the Big
Three – Harvard and Princeton are
the other two – that was free of
scandal. West and Cornell also
were noted as free of subsidies.

51. The Carnegie Report
The report pointed to
commercialism, which it described
as the “darkest blot” on college
athletics.

52. The Carnegie Report
“The Development of the Modern
Amateur Status” chapter blames
America’s short history for
misunderstanding the Greeks.
“Unfortunately, the history of such
older conceptions has had little
bearing upon the American
amateur convention ; we are too
young a nation to listen to the
ancients,” he wrote.

53. The Carnegie Report
Confusion over how to define an
amateur also played a role in
America veering from the
traditional definition, citing the
following mid-19th century
example:

54. The Carnegie Report
“An amateur is any person who
has never competed in an open
contest, or for a stake, or for
public money, or for gate money,
or under a false name; or with a
professional for a prize, or where
gate money is charged; nor has
ever at any period of his life
taught or pursued athletic
exercises as a means of
livelihood.”

55. The Carnegie Report
That definition, adopted by the
National Association of Amateur
Athletes of America in 1879,
revealed a “legalistic attitude of
mind and shown by its
prohibitions how to ‘beat the
rules.’”
Savage preferred the simpler
definition used in the 1920s:

56. The Carnegie Report
“An amateur sportsman is one
who engages in sport solely for
the pleasure and physical, mental,
or social benefits he derives
therefrom, and to whom sport is
nothing more than an avocation.”

57. The Carnegie Report
In 1916, as noted in an earlier
presentation, the NCAA landed on
the following definition:
“An amateur athlete is defined as
one who participates in
competitive physical sport only for
the pleasure, and the physical,
mental, moral, and social benefits
derived therefrom."

58. The Carnegie Report
In 1921, the NCAA expanded its
amateur principles to include the
following:
“In the opinion of the National
Collegiate Athletic Association the
spirit of amateurism carries with it
all that is included in the
definition of an amateur and
much more.

59. The Carnegie Report
“It stands for a high sense of
honor, honesty, fair play, and
courtesy. It stoops to no petty
technicalities and refuses to twist
or avoid the rules of play or to
take unfair advantage of
opponents.”

60. The Carnegie Report
Savage supported non-
prescriptive definitions of
amateurism to the legalese,
prescriptive language embedded
in some definitions.
“With the rise of commercialism
in college athletics, its
temptations became in many
instances too strong to be resisted
…

61. The Carnegie Report
“… The result has been a great
increase in the number of ways by
which, sometimes even under the
guise of philanthropy, the amateur
convention is set at naught.”
He concluded: “To the individual
conscience of the honorable
sportsman, there is no middle
ground between amateurism and
professionalism.”

62. The Carnegie Report
Savage, however, was realistic. He
knew fine-grain distinctions in
definitions of amateurism would
cause problems.
“At no other point in the whole
field of college athletics is honesty
so severely tested as it is in
connection with the convention of
amateurism,” he wrote.

63. The Carnegie Report
And he identified the core
tension.
“The root of all difficulties with
the amateur status touches the
desires of certain athletes to
retain the prestige that
amateurism confers and at the
same time to reap the monetary
or material rewards of
professionalism,” wrote Savage.

64. The Carnegie Report
Colleges experienced that tension.
“We are told by the college
officials that we must conduct our
sports and play along amateur
lines, but we must finance them
along lines that are purely
commercial and professional,”
said F.W. Marvel, Brown
University's physical director.

65. The Carnegie Report
While understanding the tension,
Savage came down hard on the
need for the purest definition of
amateurism to be followed in
college.
Otherwise, the institution would
be undermined in many aspects in
both intellectual and social agency
contexts. He wrote:

66. The Carnegie Report
“Admitting unqualified students
because of their athletic prowess
would reduce academic
standards; lead to special
privileges for exams; and disunify
the student body, among other
things.
“No other force so completely
vitiates the intellectual aims of an
institution and its members.”

67. The Carnegie Report
Savage concluded: “All this would
be true if professionalism were
practiced frankly and openly.
Where, however, its practice is
concealed, an even deadlier blow
is struck at spiritual values.”
In short, Savage believed that the
university would be destroyed by
an athletic department pretending
to be something it’s not.

68. The Carnegie Report
As far as social agency goes,
Savage wrote that the “proposal
that the amateur convention in
college sport be abolished, is a
counsel of defeat” and “would
bring with it a new set of evils that
would be infinitely worse than any
that now obtain.”

69. The Carnegie Report
Savage is clear in that he believed
college athletes to be an exploited
group because they brought
money to the university but were
not openly paid.
Commercialism has led to profits,
he wrote, that “have been gained
because colleges have permitted
the youths entrusted to their care
to be openly exploited.”

70. The Carnegie Report
The report found that almost all
institutions with athletic
departments subsidized athletes
through scholarships,
questionable loans, jobs, alumni
gifts, training tables, free tutors,
and cash, among other things.
That made the case for college
athletics to be based on
amateurism difficult to defend.

71. The Carnegie Report
“It is under this regime that
college sports have been
developed from games played by
boys for pleasure into systematic
professionalized athletic contests
for the glory, and too often, for
the financial profit of the college,”
Savage wrote.

72. The Carnegie Report
Football transformed colleges
from centers of intellectual life to
the center of the entertainment
industry, the report stated.
The solution? Return college
football and other sports to their
rightful place as the pursuits of
amateurs.

73. The Carnegie Report
“It is important that the doctrine
of amateurism be preserved,
whether the college is regarded as
an intellectual or socializing
agency,” the report stated.
For the “good of the nation,” the
code of amateurism needed to
return to college campuses.

74. The Carnegie Report
According to American College
Athletics, the recruitment of
college athletes had become “a
more businesslike procedure”
since 1917 – when the NCAA
published its war resolution that
sought to reform college athletics
- involving coaches, athletic
directors, and faculty.

75. The Carnegie Report
Michigan was one of the 84 out of
130 schools identified as offering
inducements to athletes.
Michigan acknowledged that it
employed a system of illegal
recruiting and that certain
athletes received favorable
treatment, but that the violations
at the school were exaggerated by
Savage.

76. The Carnegie Report
“What ought to be done?” asked
Henry Pritchett in the report’s
preface?

77. The Carnegie Report
“The paid coach, the gate
receipts, the special training
tables, the costly sweaters and
extensive journeys in special
Pullman cars, the recruiting from
the high school, the demoralizing
publicity showered on the players,
the devotion of an undue
proportion of time to training, the
devices for putting a desirable
athlete, but a weak scholar, across
the hurdles of the examinations…

78. The Carnegie Report
“… - these ought to stop and the
inter-college and intramural sports
be brought back to a stage in
which they can be enjoyed by
large numbers of students and
where they do not involve an
expenditure of time and money
wholly at variance with any ideal
of honest study.”

79. The Carnegie Report
Despite the widespread
dissemination of the Carnegie
Report among colleges and
thorough press coverage, the
work had no immediate impact.
College sports would continue to
be based on the American model.
The players would be perceived as
amateurs, with a knowing wink.

80. The Carnegie Report
Still, there would be more debate
over amateurism in college sports
as the 20th century deepened.
“The present study is not the final
word on American college
athletics,” wrote Savage.

81. The Carnegie Report
Seven years after the release of
the Carnegie Report, Stanford
basketball, led by Hank Luisetti,
beat Long Island University, 45-31,
in front of nearly 18,000
spectators at Madison Square
Garden.
The game set the stage for the
National Invitational Tournament
in 1938 and the NCAA tournament
the following year.

82. The Carnegie Report
The Carnegie Report, meanwhile,
moldered in college libraries, it’s
recommendations for a return to
intramural sport entirely
dismissed and long forgotten.