Description: Harry Lewis will lead a seminar on Amateur Athletics. The amateur ideal as stated in the principles of the NCAA is at odds with the actual intensity and specialization of college athletics. The history of athletic competition reveals the source of the tension. The seminar will first explore five interwoven threads in the history of sports: ancient Greek athletics, which were plainly professional; sports in Victorian England, where amateurism was invented in service of separation of the social classes; the Olympic movement, a reconstruction of ancient Greek athletics consistent with the British sporting ideal; American college athletics in the late nineteenth century, in which imported class prejudices met American populism; and American college athletics today. The seminar will consider the ways in which this social history survives in the NCAA rulebook, and whether the framework of amateurism can and should survive as the guiding philosophy for colleges. Harvard’s own athletic history and philosophy are important examples. Weekly discussions based on readings; three papers; occasional guests with experience in athletic administration. Students from all backgrounds are welcome, whether they are devoted to or skeptical of college athletics, and whether they are more interested in ancient Greece or in March Madness, but all should be ready to read, write, think, and talk about the point of college sports.
Meeting time and place: Mondays, 1-3pm. Maxwell Dworkin 123.
Requirements: Two short papers due Weeks 3 and 6 (700 words each, in the form of an "opinion piece"), and one 10-page research paper due at the end of the course.