Win One for the Giver? Alumni Giving and Big-Time College Sports.

Abstract

For intercollegiate zied many coaches americans, attempt athletics, to rousing rally thanks their half-time in large downtrodden part speeches to a charges 1940 in which movie epitomize frenthat zied coaches attempt to rally their downtrodden charges epitomize ntercollegiate athletics, thanks i large part to a 1940 movie that depicted Notre Dame's Knute Rockne beseeching Fighting Irish to one for Gipper (former Notre Dame player George Gipp). In years that have passed, a premium on winning has come to pervade college sports for more self-serving reasons, such as athletes' need to establish national reputations so they can graduate into professional ranks and coaches' need to build winning records so they can entrench themselves in their positions or move on to even better things. Clearly, big-time college sports (football and, to a lesser extent, basketball) are no longer considered merely pleasant diversions from important business of life if they were ever seen in that light. Americans may smirk at unrefined athletic fanaticism that ignited a soccer war between Honduras and El Salvador, but how different are passions that rage each autumn when game of season is played between Army and Navy, Texas and Oklahoma, Ohio State and Michigan, USC and UCLA, or Harvard and Yale? Although the Gipper is no longer with us, college football and basketball teams are still trying to win for sake of alumni. Many old grads are staunch supporters of athletic department, its personnel and its policies; are faithful followers of school's teams; and are prolific donors to school's annual fund. But if football or basketball team falls on hard times, athletic directors, coaches and even college presidents become a target for disgruntled alumni groups. Because alumni are thought to be so attuned to their school's athletic fortunes, it is widely believed that alumni donations soar after a successful season and plummet in wake of athletic failure. In words of old saw, Alumni are for giving but not forgiving.

Cite this work

No public copy is stored for this record, so only the metadata is cited.

Stored only when both papers are in the corpus — 72 citations exist upstream.