Women's College Basketball: The Death of a College

In 1997, a small college which had been running for one hundred years closed its door permanently. So what does this have to do with women's basketball? I found myself interested in the subject of colleges, universities and the history of higher education in the United States because I wanted to be able to write intelligently about women's basketball, of all things.

One problem with sports writers is that they write for today. It is assumed that the reader possesses a base amount of knowledge and when he (usually he) reads the sports page, he merely needs to be brought up to date. The move for "relevancy" is a pressing one, and the new fad in sports writing is to pepper one's writing with pop culture references so that a running back can be compared to Snooki or a baseball team's pitching lineup can be compared to Survivor characters. This means that fifty years from now, it will be almost impossible to read the older sports journalism which will be a hybrid of Walter Winchell gossip columns, pop-culture references and incomprehensible in-jokes. Most readers of the future will throw up their hands and these relevant writers will soon become irrelevant.

I remember reading in I, Claudius where Claudius states that he intends to write for a far-off posterity thousands of years in the future. (This gives Robert Graves a reason to fill in background data on ancient Roman society, because Claudius is assuming that his readership might not even know the names of people famous to every Roman of his time.) I thought about sports writing from the same perspective - how would we write sports if we knew that we were going to be read 100 years in the future? What would we say about sports if we assumed that our readers knew nothing about it? The problem is a difficult one, because sports writing is a running narrative of events, and there must be some sort of common understanding between the reader and the writer. The writer can't be forced to redefine everything for every new reader.

If the writer cannot and should not be establishing basic definitions, he should at least know something about the background of his or her own sport, and something beyond the obvious names of administrators and famous players. Knowing the "whats" turns sports into a recitation of dry facts, much like that of the pedestal of an ancient Roman statue listing the names of consuls who were present for some long-forgotten triumph. Knowing the "whys" of sport, however, is of the utmost importance because the "why" explains the "what".

So what about women's college basketball? That's three nouns right there, and the "college" is the part that I want to focus on.

What is called the system of higher education in the United States is founded on two types of institutions - institutions of basic education called "colleges" which provide four years of education after secondary school. The second type of institution is called a university, which provides education for those who wish to seek education beyond the four years provided by a college. The basic degree offered by a college is the Bachelor of Arts (BA) degree; at a university one can be awarded higher degrees. The Master of Arts (MA) or master's degree is usually awarded after two or three years of post-graduate study; the highest distinction is the Doctor of Philosophy (Ph. D.) degree awarded after many years of study. Those who have earned this degree may choose to call themselves "Doctor [Surname]", as if they were a medical doctor.

The United States has a multitude of these colleges and universities, many, many more than Europe has. This does not mean that Americans are smarter than Europeans. Far from it. Rather, the multitude of these institutions is the result more of historical accident than reflecting a quest for knowledge.

There are only a handful of real universities at the United States: the members of this list change from year to year, but only a few institutions in the United States inspire the awe that a Oxford or a Sorbonne might inspire in Europe:

Harvard

Yale

Stanford

University of Chicago

Johns Hopkins


...and...that's about it, really. The universities that come after this list tend to fade in and out. Some years Dartmouth is on the list, some years it isn't. Some years Northwestern is on this list, some years it isn't. But you'd probably find these five universities among anyone's top ten.

So why are there so many colleges and universities in the United States? The answer is that they're not really colleges or universities at all. At best, they should be called "trade schools" because a long time ago, that's what they were. There used to be a small group of places of higher learning in the United States, and for those that didn't want to teach at the university level, one went to a teacher's college (if one wanted to teach elementary school) or to a school of divinity (if one wanted to preach for a living) and so on.

School like Harvard and Yale became status symbols, and in America's capitalist economy, everyone wanted to be the next Harvard or Yale. Add America's flair for idealism and everyone who had a difference with his neighbors - usually religious - founded a college to preach the higher truth. Add to that historical expansion, which mean that North Dakota had to have a state university just like Virginia did. Add to that the baby boom of the 1940s-60s, which meant that there were more students and more money to chase around. Add to that what I call "educational regression", where one needs higher and higher ranking degrees to be assured of a middle-class job. (Fifty years ago, a high school education might have been good enough for clerical work.)

The result was that many of these schools got promoted. Bowman Teacher School bought a few buildings and added a handful of faculty to offer other degrees and expanded to Bowman College (which has a fine education department). The Smith School of Divinity added some extra theological courses that allowed them to offer a master's degree and became the University of Smith (which has a fine divinity department).

One way for schools to get popular was to offer entertainment, particularly by offering sports. (*) The schools with the most money offered football, a very expensive sport whereas schools with smaller budgets offered basketball because it was cheaper. The hope was that these sports teams would become a draw. To some extent, professional sports in America is partially subsidized by the education system, because most professional players are drawn from the teams that play at these colleges and universities - the professional sports class is trained by the state within the university system.

In 1971, Title IX was passed by the United States Congress and signed into law. This law prohibited discrimination based on many forms - including gender - in how a college distributes its money. In effect, this meant that college sports had to either subsidize women's sports or eliminate many of the fees they charge to students - after all, if a female student pays a student fee or the taxpayer subsidizes the state college, shouldn't all students have the same opportunity to participate in sports? There was an explosion of women's teams in every sport except full contact sports like football and certain other sports that had female-dominated variations (men's baseball vs. women's softball).

Basketball was a relatively inexpensive sport to support at the college level. It didn't require open space that had to be tended by groundskeepers. It took place indoors. It only required giving between ten and fifteen players scholarships, where their student costs would be paid for if they participated in sports. It did not require much in the way of specialized equipment. The result is that there are hundreds of colleges that participate in women's basketball, competing against each other for the honor of being a championship team. Only a minuscule percentage of their players will advance to the professional ranks and make money from basketball - but still, many women compete on college teams.

So what is this about the title "The Death of a College?" Let's go back to that college in my hometown. It was always sort of in the background growing up, but I never really thought about it much. Even in my small town, the college didn't dominate the community - some small towns in America are called "college towns" because if it weren't for the presence of the college as a central point, the town would probably be nothing without the college. My town was certainly not a college town - despite a population of under 10,000 with only about 4,000 in the city limits - despite the fact that we had a college in it.

This college was initially a "community college" - a two-year college that provided basic courses. After the two years, students would usually end their education with an "associate degree" (AD) or transfer to a four-year institution. In 1964 or so, the college promoted itself into a four-year institution, but even so it made little impact on our town.

By the 1990s, the college had a reputation for being an expensive four year school where the wealthy and stupid kids went - the college would take you if you couldn't get into anywhere else. Even so, the 1990s would be a rough decade for the hometown school. Two state universities - in the never ending business-like quest for expansion - established "annexes" which offered basic courses which would be accepted at the university level. The idea was that community teenagers would go to the annex after high school, and then go to the university which would be guaranteed to accept their transfer credits. These two annexes now directly competed with the small town college, and enrollment plummeted.

The result was that the college's endowment began shrinking into the negative numbers, and with no money, the school failed to upkeep the basics....including the library. This brought it into conflict with the triangle upon which every American college is founded:

a) accreditation, or the right to be recognized as a college
b) the power for students to obtain financial aid while attending college, which is granted by the federal government
c) the power to grant degrees, which is conferred by the state

With no library worth speaking of, the college lost its accreditation. It was now on a race against time to regain its accreditation (a) before it fell afoul of the federal government (b). However, the college was already in the red and living off student financial aid. When accreditation was lost, the federal government decided that it would not grant financial aid to any school attending this college. This meant no federal money.

I don't know if the state ever got around to (c) - stripping the power to confer degrees from the school. The school was founded by a religious denomination, and the school's belief was that this affiliation would rescue it as the denomination would not let the school fall. But it did. In December 1997, the school gave up the ghost and closed its doors permanently. Other colleges agreed to accept the credits of the students, one specific college accepted the school's historical records, and that was the end.

The place is now called a "community center". Maybe when I go back home, I'll take some pictures there.

Did sports help? No. In the 1990s the school founded a football team, but it had to compete at the lowest level of competition in the United States (NAIA, I believe). The school had mens and women's basketball for years, but never had the kind of success that could grab the town's attention. Funnily enough, if the school had been better at sports...it might have survived for a few more years. If it had had a good women's ball team - if it had any kind of good team - it might still be a thriving institution.

_________

(*) There is the "bread and circuses" theory of college sports, which goes like this. Many big schools save money by having graduate students teach, and all of those students teach from a select group of college texts, meaning that the education that a student gets at Florida State - in the basics, anyway - isn't really that good. In order to distract students from this fact, there is a lot of fol-de-rol about how important Florida State football is to the university.

It might be important, but the success of the football team has little (if anything at all) to do with one's quality of education or ability to get a job after graduation. Whereas Harvard and Yale...well, those degrees convey some influence. If you really want to insult a university in the United States, call it a "football school" or a "basketball school", two things which Harvard and Yale are certainly not.