The following year, the Faculty of Arts and Sciences assumed responsibility for the athletic program, which had posted heavy deficits since before World War II. The Harvard Athletic Association became the Department of Athletics in 1951; that year, the Faculty absorbed $318,000 of the department’s debt.

University President James B. Conant ’14 justified the expense, arguing that athletics were “as much a proper charge against the resources of the Faculty as the maintenance of a library or a laboratory.”

Buck wanted to attract more athletic recruits, but he also strongly supported the College’s mandatory non-varsity athletics. He pushed for a tuition raise in 1952, in part to cover fees for undergraduates’ participation and to make all College athletic events free of charge for spectators. The Department of Athletics supported the changes, even though they pushed it $100,000 deeper into debt.

An editorial in The Crimson suggested Buck’s inclusion of such fees in tuition placed an unnecessary burden on the “middle income non-scholarship student,” and was unfair to those students who did not want to attend athletic contests.

“The college has a traditional duty to turn out men capable of its degrees, but none to manufacture students who know its football cheers and basketball tactics,” The Crimson quipped.

Buck’s 1952 appointment of Wilbur J. Bender ’27as chair of the Admission and Scholarship Committee signaled the fourth major shift in athletic policy. Bender embarked on a campaign to carry out the policy of balance at the college which Buck had laid out, calling on Harvard clubs across the country to search out students who excelled in extracurricular as well as scholarly pursuits.

Buck and Bender sought excellence in all areas, but some expressed concern that the new recruitment initiative would place undue emphasis on athletics. A 1951 article in The Crimson outlined the ways in which the College had begun to pursue the nation’s most desirable applicants, outlining the program’s merits but warning that the new recruiting apparatus could be abused.

“Unleashed alumni who track down only football players could do the College much greater harm than those who overlook the athletes and other schoolboy leaders and hunt solely for scholars,” the article read.

But despite the administration’s support for football and enhanced emphasis on extracurricular activity, Conant met in 1951 with Yale President A. Whitney Griswold and Princeton President Harold W. Dodds to discuss restraining the expansion of intercollegiate athletics. The Statement of Scholarship Policy would lay the groundwork for the formal code of the Ivy Group in 1954, particularly the Ivy commitment to amateur sports.

In the statement, the three presidents affirmed that the office of admissions—not any coach or alum—should make the final decision on admission and financial aid. Athletes were to be eligible for aid in the form of scholarships or jobs on the same terms as other students.

But Harvard failed in its fight for a provision to bar coaches from visiting high school athletes, and eventually expanded its recruiting efforts to match those of its Ivy League peers.

Rivals contended that the Ivies remained too professionalized.

In an interview with The Crimson in November 1952, Maryland football coach Jim Tatum accused the “Big Three”—as the universities that had signed the 1951 scholarship policy came to be called—of concealing scholarships they gave to athletes and speciously maintaining their athletes’ amateur status.

“It’s only a difference in degree,” Tatum said of scholarships granted to athletes. “I can’t see a single distinction, except we admit what we’re doing and they use a different name for it in the Ivy League.”

Criticism came from inside the Ivy League as well. President Griswold wrote in Sports Illustrated in 1955 that “All the Ivy League colleges, including my own, have plenty of unfinished business on their hands” regarding athletes and aid.

Clasby said the major issues of 50 years ago surrounding college sports and football in particular are particularly resonant today, as Ivy presidents debate reductions in recruiting, forced rest periods, and other means to temper intensity.

“Right now it’s apropos,” he said. “There are a lot of feelings with football and other sports, to put less emphasis on some of them. Especially in the Ivy League.”

—Staff writer David B. Rochelson can be reached at rochels@fas.harvard.edu.