Turning intercollegiate athletics into a performance major like music

ABSTRACT

Myles Brand offered a provocative defense of intercollegiate athletics (IA) by  arguing that it is substantively similar to traditional performing arts, such as art or music, and so should be accepted by faculty as a legitimate part of a university's educational mission.  Randolph Feezell characterized Brand's analogical argument as 'sophistic' and defended the reasonableness of what Brand termed the 'Standard View' of athletics whereby it is peripheral to a liberal arts education. I contend that Brand did not bring his persuasive analogical argument to its logical conclusion: IA should contribute to a new, first-of-its kind academic major in Competitive Sport. Feezell’s criticisms of Brand’s analogical argument were unpersuasive, and his conception of a liberal arts education was outdated. As a result, I defend the legitimacy of a Competitive Sport major comparable to a Music Performance major and give a detailed description of its rigorous, liberal arts-based curriculum that integrates faculty and coaching instruction through shared learning objectives and outcomes. I conclude by identifying, and responding to, several practical issues if such a major were to be implemented in a US university.

KEYWORDS:

• Intercollegiate athletics
• college sports
• competitive sport major
• music performance
• sport and the liberal arts

Acknowledgments

I would like to thank those, mostly Pacific colleagues, who gave me feedback on an earlier draft of this article or discussed the proposed Competitive Sport major with me: Wes Yourth, Mark Van Ness, Jonathan Latta, Dan Ebbers, Michael Madary, Louise Stark, Gene Pearson, Luke Lee, Pete Schroeder, Alan Lenzi, Bruce Peltier, Lisa Cooperman, Jennifer Maroney, Gary Smith, Doug Mende, Paul Ustach, Marc Sola, Stu Matz, Michelle DiGuilio, my spring 2020 Philosophy of Sport class, the Journal reviewers and especially the editor, Paul Gaffney.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes

1. This is the title of Thelin’s Introduction (1994). See also Deford (2005).

2. See Smith (1988, 212) and Savage (1929).

3. Unlike Feezell, Breivik did not analyze the cogency of Brand’s analogical argument and so overlooked its potential curricular consequences.

4. The top five faculty concerns in the survey were, in order, the following: IA costs too much and is not self-supporting; IA is subsidized at the expense of academics; IA trumps academics on campus; IA is too commercialized; and IA demands too much time of student-athletes. I suspect that faculty objection to IA is based on these kinds of reasons and not primarily on the rejection of IA as a type of educational experience.

5. There is an ambiguity in Brand’s intended meaning in the ‘value’ of IA that can create confusion about his focus. Brand’s limited goal is to defend the ‘educational value’ of IA for student learning and not whether the ‘value’ of IA in all of its aspects outweighs the financial and ethical costs that the organization or institution of IA creates. Brand begets this confusion by identifying some of these costs at the beginning of his article and adding several later (13), asserting without argument that they are ‘false or exaggerated’(9), and then redirecting his analysis to the educational or learning similarities between IA and the performing arts.

6. Jenkins (2011) described a few courses that could be part of an academic major. See also Pargman (2012).

7. Smith (1988, 211).

8. Brand was mistaken that learning physics and philosophy only involve factual or theoretical knowledge and not the performance of skills. Physics majors learn to design and conduct their own experiments, and philosophy students learn how to demonstrate their understanding through argumentative debate.

9. Brand was unaware that there are universities and community colleges that award academic units for athletes to participate in their sport.

10. For example, see Shulman and Bowen (2001, 2), Duderstadt (2000, 268), and Clotfelter, (2011, 29–30).

11. This is Feezell’s summary of Cordner (2002).

12. https://www.aacu.org/leap/what-is-liberal-education.

13. The title of the major is open to debate. Originally, I thought 'Sport Performance' was fitting based on the analogy to Music Performance; however, one of the established majors in  Sports Science or Studies programs is 'Human Performance,' so there would be understandable confusion. To include 'Intercollegiate Athletics' in the title of the major would be inaccurate since Club-level athletes are eligible. So I settled on 'Competitive Sport.' The typical sport-related majors in the US are Human Performance, Athletic Training, Sport Management, Sport Pedagogy, Sport Studies, and Sport Communication.

14. Verified participation in community college athletics would count toward the three-year sport performance requirement. In the US, two-year community colleges and four year colleges and universities have organized sports in some form. At four year institutions, there is intercollegiate athletics (NCAA-sanctioned with athletic scholarships at the Division I and II and NAIA levels, not at Division III), club sports (usually with coaches, practice, and travel), and intramural sports (no coaches, usually no practices, and on campus).

15. I use basketball as the example since I played four years of Division III at the University of Redlands and one year on a professional development team in Giessen, Germany.

16. ‘Fulfilling the American Dream: Liberal Education and the Future of Work, AAC& U/Hart Research Associates, July 2018 at https://www.aacu.org/research/2018-future-of-work.

17. The three waves are how women can be warriors when they were considered unequal to men, how warriors can breed yet be prohibited from having private families, and how philosophers can be rulers.

18. See Smith (1988, 121 and 131–132).

19. Quoted in Thelin, 36.