Columbia Athletics Is Overdue for a Redirection

For a university made up of a small undergraduate population in a modern urban environment and that prides itself on thought-leadership, few policies could be as myopic, anachronistic, and ill-fitting than Columbia’s approach to recreation and athletics. Minor adjustments in degree will not suffice. A major change in kind is overdue.

In a globalizing world, the eight-member Ivy League conference is increasingly provincial and limiting to Columbia. Lower real costs of transportation have created a broader spectrum of universities that reject Big 10-style athletics, and embrace scholarship and amateurism. A composite Oxford-Cambridge tennis team has for decades played a team made up from Harvard, Princeton, and Yale. Soccer, basketball, fencing, swimming, volleyball, field hockey, rowing, sailing, tennis, and golf offer similar possibilities with university-affiliated clubs throughout the world. If we can send a football team to California and a basketball team to Honolulu, or Ithaca or Hanover, are London, Paris, Budapest, Milan, Cairo, or Tel Aviv beyond reach?

Second, a league and the notion of championships have resulted in over-emphasis on representative teams rather than attracting broad participation by the entire student body, faculty, and staff in exercise and recreation. Yet virtually every study about physical and emotional well-being asserts the need for lifetime exercise. Moreover, intercollegiate league sports have not resulted in broadening student participation and enabling them to joyfully engage in a variety of games and exploration of cultural activities, but rather have narrowed them and unduly focused them on self-sacrifice, deprivation, and year-round devotion to specialization of skills. Fun has been driven out of sports, and while many virtues will be carried forward, the utility of the vast majority of acquired skills will diminish rapidly after graduation day. Columbia’s focus should be on teaching every student the fundamentals of a handful of lifetime sports and providing them with the opportunity to play them in first-class facilities.

Further, we need to acknowledge that high-impact contact sports are antithetical to virtually everything that we are learning about muscular-skeletal, neurological, and cognitive issues associated with aging. I do not advocate trying to manage all risk out of life, but mindless exposure to certain injuries is as irresponsible as maintaining lead in gasoline. Columbia graduates will on average enjoy an above average life expectancy. The University should exercise moral courage and judgment in sponsoring activities that support the quality of those lives.

We also need to acknowledge the futurity of Columbia and life in America. When the present first-year students celebrate their 50th reunion, the population of the U.S. will have doubled to 600 million people. Rather than view ourselves as deprived of space, we should lead the way in addressing the challenge of creating new spaces, new forms of exercise, and inventing new ways to have fun with physical exercise. Is a treadmill the limit of our imagination?

Fifth, let’s acknowledge that while all Ivy League schools share common academic goals, they differ greatly in size, facilities, rural-urban-suburban locale, and most important, the size of their undergraduate populations. Few Columbians are aware that when Columbia won the Rose Bowl in 1934 and snapped Army’s 33-game winning streak in the late ’40s, the college had 700 students. Lou Little’s teams were augmented if not primarily composed of undergraduates from Teachers College. There is absolutely no good reason not to adjust our schedules to play smaller schools with similar academic standards. Since the college went co-ed, there are actually fewer males to support a football team than when Columbia was co-champion in 1961. Columbia is simply overmatched against larger schools. When Columbia wins it is indeed heroic.

Resistance to change is undoubtedly rooted in football. Football epitomizes just how wrong-headed our policies are. It is strategic folly to believe that after several decades of dedicated effort that undergraduate population doesn’t have a lot to do with our lack of success in football. Moreover, the intrinsic nature of football is such that beyond a certain tipping point the game is no longer safe to play. At times it has been painfully obvious that Columbia teams have been undersized, lacked depth, and not only lost games, but were physically beaten up, abused over an entire season, and suffered injuries with lifetime consequences. It is well past time that we recognize that we have a football team for guilty pleasures and wrong reasons.

What might an alternative future look like? Instead of fall homecoming focused on football, replace it with an invitational soccer tournament of men’s and women’s teams drawn from U.S. and European universities. Play the semifinals on Saturday at Kraft Field. Entertain the teams and let the participants commingle with our alumni under the tent.

Worried about alumni contributions? About attracting and recruiting students? These activities will excite new segments and draw in new sources of money and applicants. Extend the concept to basketball and fencing in the winter, track and crew in the spring. Fly a volleyball team to Milan and Rome, a fencing team to Budapest and Paris, a chess team to St. Petersburg and Moscow, a field hockey team to Lisbon and Madrid, a golf team to Dublin and St. Andrews.

Emphasize broadly participative, lifetime-exercise games that can be played for recreation in international urban environments. Teach the fundamentals of these activities free to all faculty, students and staff. Creatively locate these facilities in the expanded Morningside area. Design them into new buildings. Tennis, squash, handball, racquetball courts. Spaces for fencing, virtual golf, rock climbing. A cycling center to repair and store bikes. Heat a pool for therapeutic swimming. Develop the Hudson River as a waterfront facility for kayaking, canoeing, rowing, and sailing.

Create a new “International Ivy Affiliation” of universities and university-sanctioned clubs for lifetime, low/non-contact sports. De-emphasize championships. Re-emphasize participation, and collegiality. Avoid “league structures.” Allow tie games again. Begin small. Emphasize fun and the fellowship of athletes. End every contest with a reception in the European sports club tradition. Restrict all technical development to things that lower the cost of the sport and advance affordable performance for all participants. Outlaw technical competitive advantages.

I think it is pretty compelling that we are overdue for change. It might even be an ethical and moral duty to do so. Many of our sponsored activities are downright harmful. Our thinking is trapped in the past and entirely myopic about the future. It is pretty clear that we can redirect our capital expenditures and operating expenses without much to lose and with much, much more to gain.

The author is a member of the Columbia College class of 1963 and MBA ’69. He was a varsity lightweight oarsman.