Harold Stassen and the Ivy League, continued

    Stassen may have been foolish, but he was not wrong. When the University of Oklahoma challenged the NCAA’s television policy in 1984, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled that it did indeed violate the antitrust laws. But by then it was far too late for the Quakers.
    When the eight Ivy presidents met again in December 1951, they looked back on one of the bleakest years in college sports history. Besides the showdown with Penn, 90 Army cadets, including most of the football team, had been expelled for cheating. William and Mary was found to have altered academic transcripts in order to keep athletes eligible. Several football games had been marred by violence. Most shocking of all were revelations that basketball players at City College of New York and six other schools had shaved points at the instigation of gamblers. Against all this, the NCAA had been powerless, its new TV policy a rare exception.
    Since signing the Intercollegiate Agreement in 1945, the Ivy group had done little. The presidents themselves had not met as a group for almost six years. Some schools—most notably Penn, Cornell, and Dartmouth—had also interpreted the agreement to provide more latitude in recruiting than purists thought acceptable. In a confidential memorandum to his trustees, Harvard’s president James Bryant Conant baldly stated that “in retrospect it was certainly a great error on Harvard’s part to have entered this new so-called Ivy League arrangement, and particularly to have given up the proselyting clause.”
    Conant’s solution was to return to the tight collegiality of the Big Three, either as a counterweight to the other Ivies or, if need be, as an independent group. In the fall of 1950, he, Dodds, and President A. Whitney Griswold of Yale met secretly to formulate strict policies on recruiting and admissions practices that would at least insulate themselves against backsliding by the others.
    It was not until almost a year later, just after the Penn imbroglio, that the “Joint Statement of Scholarship Policy by the presidents of Harvard, Yale and Princeton Universities” was published in booklet form. It condemned athletic scholarships in all forms and reiterated that only college officials could commit the college on either admission or financial aid. Although the ostensible reason for printing the document was to distribute it to Big Three alumni, several of the other Ivy colleges saw it as an attempt to put public pressure on them.
    Given Penn’s intransigence and the general fragility of the alliance, it was far from certain, as the presidents’ December 1951 meeting approached, whether the whole Ivy structure would simply fall apart like the old Intercollegiate Football Association. “I will lay you two to one that neither Pennsylvania nor Cornell will go along with us,” Griswold predicted to Conant, “and I will give you even money that Dartmouth won’t either. I think it is worth making a try for all of them … but I also come with profound feelings of futility for any true Ivy group solidarity that reaches beyond Harvard, Yale, Princeton, Columbia, and Brown.”
    Instead the others did come around, recognizing perhaps that they could not afford to stand apart and fearing that the Big Three would cut them out. They appointed Conant and Dartmouth’s John Dickey to redraft the Intercollegiate Agreement and later that winter adopted an eight-point code of amateurism. In addition to tightening even further the eligibility, recruiting, and subsidization rules, they prohibited players and coaches from participating in postseason contests, shortened the season by setting a late date for the start of fall practice, and banned spring practice altogether.
    Because it was an issue on which the Big Three themselves disagreed, spring practice proved to be the final snag. Yale had been the first to ban it, a unilateral decision that prompted 11 members of the board of athletic control to resign. Conant praised Yale’s act, while his football coach, Lloyd Jordan, called it a disaster. Cornell and Princeton promptly announced that they would continue spring practice, while Penn went so far as to extend it to six weeks.
    Schools that favored spring practice defended it as essential both to competitiveness and to safety, citing studies that showed ill-prepared players were more likely to get hurt. They also argued that it would actually undermine reform by increasing pressure to recruit top athletes, who would need less training. To opponents, though, practice out of season was emblematic of overemphasis and incompatible with the ideal of a student-athlete.
    Under the rules that governed Ivy presidents’ meetings, six votes were needed for a motion to carry. With Princeton and Cornell strongly in favor of continuing spring practice, proponents of a ban found themselves one vote short. Incredibly, as low as Penn’s standing was, it now found itself the crucial swing vote. His political experience at last coming to good use, Stassen recognized that he was in a position to demand a concession. In exchange for Penn’s support for ending spring practice (a position his own athletic department vigorously opposed), the other Ivy colleges agreed to play the Quakers at least once every five years. “We had to decide whether we were going to be in the Ivy League,” Stassen explained later. “It was a matter of going along with the others.” When he submitted the agreement to Penn’s board of trustees, the chairman congratulated him “on his effective leadership in reaching a highly satisfactory solution to a once difficult problem.” With a stroke, the Ivy boycott of Penn was lifted.

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