College Comment
Gladitorial Scholarships?
December 1992
As the fortunes and fans of Ivy League football have continued to decline, some have proposed that the league rethink its opposition to athletic scholarships. The following is adapted from an editorial on the subject that ran in the Yale Daily News on October 13. The Yale Alumni Magazine is grateful to the editors for their permission to reprint it.
Thirty-eight years ago, Yale joined seven other colleges and universities to form an athletic conference popularly known as the Ivy League. One of the principles bringing the schools together was a commitment to treat athletes like all other students.
The schools banned athletic scholarships or extra financial aid for athletes, believing that to give students financial incentives to play sports would be incompatible with the concept that student-athletes were first and foremost students.
That ideal is now under attack, as Ivy football coaches are leading a charge to give athletes, especially football players, extra financial aid. Coaches warn that unless they are able to offer athletes [more] money, in a few years Ivy schools may need to drop their football teams to the NCAA’s Division III, the lowest level of intercollegiate athletics.
Should the league be faced with the choice of offering extra athletic aid in a bid to compete with its traditional Division I-AA rivals or accepting that its financial aid policies will mean weaker football programs, it must choose weaker teams.
Alumni and coaches believe such a choice would be a wrong one, claiming that if the caliber of Ivy football continues to drop, attendance at Ivy games, which has fallen dramatically in the last 20 years, will decline further. Coaches say shrinking attendance at football games hurts schools in two ways: by lessening game-day revenue and by loosening the ties alumni have to their schools (and reducing the amount of money alumni give).
But weaker football teams will not spell financial ruin for Yale or other Ivy schools. Although declining attendance at games lowers the amount of money schools earn from ticket sales and concessions, they apparently do not make alumni less willing to donate to the endowment. Yale’s $1.5-billion fundraising drive is ahead of schedule despite the fact that Yale has beaten the University of Connecticut only once in the last ten years.
In any event, a drop would probably have less of an impact than most boosters fear, since intraleague rivalries like The Game attract far more attention than do games between Ivy and non-Ivy teams. And football attendance is already so low that it simply cannot drop much further.
But more important than any financial issue is the threat to the Ivy ideal represented by offering athletes financial aid contingent on participation. Whether [Yale] plays William and Mary or Williams is far less important than keeping intact the vital Ivy principle that all students are equal.  |
