Willing Your Team to Defeat

Morgan Day Frank’s paper sets out to examine forms of collective agency and will at the turn of the twentieth century through readings of early campus fiction. If novels like Owen Johnson’s Stover at Yale helped establish... [ view full abstract ]

Morgan Day Frank’s paper sets out to examine forms of collective agency and will at the turn of the twentieth century through readings of early campus fiction. If novels like Owen Johnson’s Stover at Yale helped establish institutions of higher education in public life by representing them as conscious agents, capable of shaping the lives of students and the society they were a part of, nowhere do these collective identities become more legible than in scenes featuring college football, particularly when the protagonists’ team loses. Frank argues that rather than accurately describing how collective will works — that is, through its own obstruction — these novels helped naturalize a theory of collective intention that has historically frustrated political attempts to regulate corporations and legal attempts to prosecute corporate liability. What Yale is and does might become clearer to Dink Stover and the readers of Stover at Yale when the football team suffers a heroic loss, but — as recent athletic scandals at institutions like the University of North Carolina can attest — moments of collective failure rarely clarify who, or what, the collective is, and how it inflicts damage on the public it’s supposed to serve.