ABSTRACT
The reliance on students for enrollment and revenue is a constant theme in the longer history of higher education. Colleges and universities have opened their classrooms to a broader population at times and closed their doors to groups of students at other times. The relationship between students of all kinds and institutions has been a dynamic one. The earliest beginnings of the relationships between towns and colleges can be found in the migration of settlers, westward in the American expansion that began in the late 1790s and continued as frontier towns took over Native American lands. As these townships were established, churches and other missionaries served these growing communities and so began creating schools and academies. Sports emerge in several aspects of American culture in the Progressive Era. Social theories of physical education and physical fitness were common in much of the US social, political, and military discourses in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.
