Intercollegiate Athletics at Gettysburg College, 1920-1975

Some historians suggest that despite markings on the calendar the Twentieth Century did not begin in America, culturally speaking, until after the 1917-1918 war. Until that time, they assert, Americans thought and behaved as they had in a prior and more innocent age. After 1918 Americans adopted the more frenetic life-style of what has become known as the Roaring Twenties, the Jazz Age, or the Mad Decade, a period which ended with the onset of the Great Depression of the 1930s. The era saw the emergence of such athletic titans as Babe Ruth, Jack Dempsey, Harold Red Grange, Bobby Jones, Bill Tilden, and others. An indication of the new place of women during the period was the fame won by Gertrude Ederle in swimming, Helen Wills Moody in tennis, and Glenna Collett in golf. [excerpt]https://cupola.gettysburg.edu/collegehistory/1003/thumbnail.jp

Intercollegiate Athletics at Gettysburg College, 1879-1919

In 1932, as a part of Gettysburg College\u27s Centennial observance, Dr. Samuel G. Hefelbower \u2791, a quondam member of the faculty and from 1904 to 1910 President of the College, wrote and edited a largely filiopietistic volume entitled A History of Gettysburg College, 1832-1932. In this 446-page narrative. Dr. Hefelbower devoted considerable space to the development of extracurricular life on the campus. He allotted forty pages to the rise of Greek letter fraternities. eight pages to the Woman\u27s League. and nine additional pages to such now-defunct student pursuits as the Bible Society, the Linnaean Society, and the Y.M.C.A. Honorary fraternities and departmental societies took up eleven more pages. Yet he made only three references to athletics. and together they totaled but fifteen lines of print or less than half a page. One might conclude from the good doctor\u27s treatment that sports had attracted, up to 1932 at least, but minuscule interest on the part of Gettysburg undergraduates. That this was not the case is made clear by perusing the columns of student publications, the minutes of innumerable faculty meetings, and certainly in consulting the recollections of old grads. The fortunes of the College\u27s intercollegiate athletic teams played a much larger part in life on the campus. Moreover, if the athletic program then, or now, served any viable educational purpose, a claim often advanced for it. surely it deserves more attention than Dr. Hefelbower gave it. Some members of the campus community cherish the notion that competitive athletics have no place in institutions of higher learning. In their view, intercollegiate sports programs. particularly in our own day, constitute a supine surrender by academia to anti-intellectualism and commercialism. Such distractions, contend these critics, represent an aberration, if not a perversion, in the educational process - an obstacle in the long struggle of Western Man to liberate himself from ignorance. [excerpt]https://cupola.gettysburg.edu/collegehistory/1002/thumbnail.jp

The Fourth Amendment Fetches Fido: The Future of Dog Searches

For over thirty-five years, the Supreme Court has grappled with the controversial issue of affirmative action and race preference. Beginning with Justice Lewis Powell’s influential opinion in Bakke v. U. Cal. Davis in 1978, leeway has been permitted for admissions policies that take account of race, as long as it is not given determinative weight so as to exclude consideration of nonminority candidates, or used to set quotas. As the Court has become increasingly conservative, however, its license for race preference has tightened considerably, and it has become receptive to “reverse discrimination” plaintiffs challenging such policies in universities and the workplace. Grutter v. Bollinger (2003) purported to immunize good faith race-conscious university admissions for a period of twenty-five years, but with the retirement of its author, Sandra Day O’Connor, the Court chose to revisit the matter in Fisher v. University of Texas, decided on June 24. While remanding to the lower courts without a definitive ruling on UT’s program, it is the contention of this article that the decision may well seal the fate of race-sensitive decision-making by public actors. Seven justices, over the dissent of Ruth Bader Ginsburg, sign onto an exacting strict scrutiny standard of review anachronistically borrowed from cases challenging pernicious discrimination motivated by a desire to exclude and subjugate disfavored groups. This “searching” examination, which treats affirmative action in the interest of diversity as inherently suspect and presumptively unlawful, is unjustified legally and unwise as a matter of policy. Implicitly, the Court adopts a paradigm of white male victimhood, which has turned anti-discrimination provisions on their head. The article also challenges the contention that affirmative action inevitably sacrifices “merit” to preference, by confronting the misconceptions regarding merit, and particularly the glorification of standardized testing

1. The Advent of Modern Democracy

Everywhere there was a strong tendency to modify the concepts of political liberalism into a justification of democracy. By and large, this was not the result of the creation of a completely new political theory. The advocates of democracy tended to justify their doctrine with natural-rights theories from the Enlightenment, with a utilitarianism reminiscent of John Stuart Mill, with deductions drawn from the romantic glorification of the individual, or with appeals to the record of the United States. In general, they took over the concepts of the middle-class liberalism of the nineteenth century. However, the very logic of the liberal position in an increasingly industrialized world forced democrats to advocate the removal of many of those limitations on popular participation in government which liberals earlier had thought necessary. With victory apparently in sight in the years 1871-1914, democracy can be studied through its acts, in the difficult task of putting into practice under widely divergent conditions those general concepts which had been forged in an earlier age. In the process strongly egalitarian institutions were developed which became identified with democracy in the minds of most Westerners. It is in the observations of this process that we can test the definition of democracy as government responsible to the will of the people. [excerpt

2. The European Balance of Power, 1500-1789

The years between 1500 and 1789 were characterized by keen rivalries, at first primarily dynastic but later national in nature, as one state after another sought to establish its hegemony on the continent of Europe. Some powers, such as Spain and Sweden, declined. Others, such as Prussia and Russia, appeared for the first time as states to be reckoned with. Especially after about 1600 European diplomats, jealous of the relative position and security of their own countries, thought in terms of maintaining a balance of power, to prevent any one state or bloc of stats from dominating the Continent. This idea, like the practice of diplomacy, has been traced to the Italian city-states, whose leaders in the fifteenth century strove to prevent any one of their number from achieving a position from which it could control Italy. [excerpt

3. Soren Kierkegaard and Karl Barth

Soren Kierkegaard (1813-1855) seldom left his native city, Copenhagen, and, except for two brief visits to Berlin, never left Denmark. The externals of his life were rather ordinary for the son of a wealthy hosier. He always employed at least one servant and dressed in the best of fashion, but his death found him with the last of his income in his pocket. He was a lonely man seeking only one or two intimate friends, passing the daily pleasantries with everyone, but warding off with his masterful use of irony most of those who tried to befriend him. When he asked for and received the ridicule of a local scandal journal, his slightly twisted frame — he had an injury of the spine — became his trade mark because of the journal\u27s cartoons. [excerpt

1. International Anarchy (1900-1918)

It is probable that most people, if asked to list the characteristics of the Western World in this century, would place at or near the top of their list something about international rivalries. Curiously enough, a similar poll conducted in Europe and North America in 1900 would likely have given equal prominence to the idea that the world had entered a period of increasing international amity. [excerpt

1. Carl Becker on Progress

The first selection was written by Carl L. Becker (1873-1945), for many years professor of history at Cornell University (1917-1941), and one of the most highly respected members of his profession. One of his particular interests was the Enlightenment, about which he wrote a famous book: The Heavenly City of the Eighteenth Century Philosophers (1932). But while he clung to his fascination with the Enlightenment, Becker was in revolt against the scientific history which it had largely fostered. The ideal of scientific history, he thought, was noble enough, but unattainable and useless. Influenced by pragmatism, Becker asked the question: Can there by anything like objectively written history? Is the raw material from which it is to be derived a string of pure facts that the historian himself so deeply involved in his own cultural milieu that he reads into the past his own presuppositions (whether he wants to or not) and to a considerable extent finds what he wants there, both facts and interpretations? [excerpt

5. The Rise of English Parliamentary Government (1603-1789)

The century in which Richelieu and Louis XIV fashioned an absolute dynastic state in France is noteworthy in English history for a very different reason. While the state was being set for Louis XIV to declare, if he wished, I am the state, Englishmen were establishing the principle that all political authority is limited by law. This idea, which is called constitutionalism, was surely not new, having had its roots in English, feudal, and medieval history. But, what is profoundly significant for Western Civilization is that this idea became an operative political principle in late seventeenth century England. In the eighteenth century the English successfully devised a frame of government which preserved the gains which they had made earlier. [excerpt

4. The Enlightenment Again Under Attack

Until recently, and especially in the United States, Western Civilization has been dominated by Enlightenment thought, tempered by the criticisms of the nineteenth century. One of the current questions is whether this strand of thought is adequate to cope with the problems of the age of anxiety. Those who believe that the Enlightenment ideas are still basically sound suggest the giving up of transcendent or long-term goals in favor of more immediate aims. Equality and freedom are, in such a context better when they apply to more people than when they apply to fewer. According to this way of thinking, one interpretation of justice would be better than another if it could be realized by more people. That type of security is better which more people can enjoy. Thus the Enlightenment concepts are dealt with less qualitatively than quantitatively. [excerpt