November 23, 2008, 12:36 PM ET

Is The Term 'Scholar Athlete' An Oxymoron?

I am a certifiable sports nut. I think my father intended that I should be. I grew up in Chicago during a great sports era — one of my first pro sports memories is the Bears beating the Redskins 73-0 to win the National Football League championship in 1940, and I saw the Bears play the Cardinals in Comiskey Park on December 7, 1941. I actually saw the Cubs play in the World Series in 1945! I was a small and skinny kid, but still dreamed of playing for the Bears some day. As it happened, one of the part owners of the Bears lived in the apartment below ours, and on some Sundays before home games, he had the whole team (about 20 players, I think) over for a steak breakfast. I was occasionally invited to join the team.

Imagine the bliss of an 8- or 9-year old to mingle with Sid Luckman, Bulldog Turner and, yes, Bronco Nagurski! But my hero was one of the Bears’ guards, Danny Fortman. I liked him because he was a tough little guy who seemed capable of blocking much bigger players. One Sunday I told him I wanted to be like him when I grew up. He looked at me sternly, though, and replied that I would be an idiot to try to play in the pros. “Be smart like me, Stanley, and go to medical school!” I did not realize at the time that Fortman was actually attending medical school. He was later, and for years, the team orthopedic surgeon for the Los Angeles Rams. My high-school athletic career consisted of a month of football in my junior year, ending when I came to practice one day and found a trainer’s cap in my locker instead of my pads. The coaches were afraid that I might get killed on the field. So I became a doctor, just as Danny had suggested. But a Doctor of History.

My interest in sports has continued during my career as a college teacher, and I regularly attend Princeton football and basketball games — and other sports in which my own students are performing. A couple of my students have gone on to the pros in football, but for almost all of the undergraduate athletes I have taught, college athletics was an end in itself. There are some very nice stories about how Ivy League athletes go on to do interesting things, like last year’s Harvard starting fullback who is now training to be an operatic tenor at the Philadelphia Academy of the Vocal Arts. Or the Florida State defensive back who yesterday won a Rhodes Scholarship, and plans to become a physician, and has been working with Seminole fifth-grade students at a Charter School. But aren’t these the exceptions that prove the rule, rather than evidence that sports are genuinely part of the educational process?

The NCAA has promoted the use of the term “student-athlete,” but I believe that usage is an oxymoron in institutions that recruit athletes with athletic scholarships. Papers like The New York Times love to feature stories about such students, but they are exceptional because they are students. Much as I love competitive sports, I think that big-time, revenue-producing sports have done a great deal of damage to higher education in this country. NCAA president Myles Brand’s protests to the contrary notwithstanding, I think many universities have lost control of their athletic programs. And the most profound losers are the students who happen to be athletes. More on this shortly . . .