You Say You Want an Institution: The Athletic Revolution Goes to College––and Flunks Out

• In Event: Left of Sports

Abstract

In the winter of 1973, Howard Cosell visited Oberlin College to meet Jack Scott, the college’s new athletic director. Cosell, the face of ABC Sports, described Scott as a “populist radical” and hailed his decision to hire multiple Black head coaches––Tommie Smith as track coach and assistant athletic director, Cass Jackson as football coach. Oberlin had been one of the first colleges in the nation to admit Black students and women, and Cosell situated Smith’s and Jackson’s hiring within the institution’s proud progressive tradition. Scott loved the spotlight, and he welcomed Cosell’s admiring report. But he had arrived in northern Ohio with more radical ambitions than Cosell appreciated or perhaps wanted to acknowledge.

Scott, the thirty-year-old author of The Athletic Revolution, advocated for what he called “athletics for athletes.” Sports, he thought, should be governed by athletes, not administrators. They should promote mass participation above spectatorship, pleasure above competition. Scott wanted to remake sports––and through sports, higher education. He wanted a revolution, and the small, prestigious liberal arts college outside Cleveland would be his testing ground.

The man who had hired Scott, Robert Fuller, was not much older than him. Fuller had been just thirty-three years old when Oberlin, his alma mater, had appointed him its tenth president in 1970. Fuller, born in 1936, and Scott, born in 1942, had absorbed the idealism of the 1960s and, like others of their generation who had once occupied university buildings, sought in the 1970s to institutionalize their values––to bring them through the university’s front doors. Scott prided himself on making the right kind of enemies. Walter Byers, the longtime head of the NCAA, had described Scott as the ringleader of the “Woodstock Athletic Association.” Vice President Spiro Agnew had dismissed him as one of the counterculture’s “permacritics” who detested the “American competitive ethic.” But at Oberlin, Scott found himself in a new position. He could no longer throw rocks at the man. He was the man.

Within a year of Cosell’s visit, Scott was out as athletic director. More than two hundred students signed a letter published in the school paper condemning some of Scott’s policies and his behavior toward faculty and students who disagreed with him. Scott resigned and accused Oberlin of “living on its reputation.”

This paper will revisit Scott’s Oberlin experiment to explore the relations between sports and education and the Left and liberalism on the American campus. Sports are often seen by the Left as a bastion of conservatism and commercialism at universities and colleges. Could they instead be, as Scott believed, the vanguard of a revolution? Can the Left ever find a place of power at the most liberal of American institutions, the university? Or must it operate from the undercommons? Can there be such a thing as a radical administrator? This paper will ask what happened to the revolution when it entered the institution.

Author

• Joseph Darda, Michigan State University