Beer and Circus

by Murray Sperber

  At least I’m not in the bars every night like most of the nonathletes in my dorm. I even go to class in the morning, that’s more than you can say for some of those clowns … . Don’t get me wrong, they’re not bad guys, they just don’t know the meaning of work.

  Similarly, on the issue of special academic privileges, athletes employ the vocational justification, offering a version of “I work hard at my sports job, and I think it’s only fair that I get tutoring and other help.” They also frequently say, as a University of Texas (Austin) female distance runner remarked: “The tutors are there for you, but by the time I get to their offices at night, I’m so tired that I can barely stay awake. I’ve been up since 5 A.M. when I hit the roads … . I’ve also run all afternoon.”

  As for “priority scheduling”—the opportunity to gain places in a class before regular students can register for the course—the web page of the Ohio State athletic department explains that “priority scheduling allows student-athletes to arrange their classes around [sports] practice times.” This can help the academic careers of some athletic scholarship holders, but it also places sports ahead of education in other athletes’ lives. Because almost every coach holds mandatory afternoon practices, usually from 3 to 6 P.M., this schedule eliminates the possibility of an athlete majoring in or taking classes in any subject that requires lengthy afternoon labs or studio sessions (pre-med, architecture, and many others). Robert Smith, the All-American runner at Ohio State in the early 1990s, complained that the OSU athletic department would not allow him to be a pre-med student; as a result, he left the Big Ten school.

  A more common problem for athletes occurs when their hopes and dreams of playing their sport at the professional level conflict with their academic aspirations. As discussed in chapter 11, many Division I athletes have to—and often want to—spend so much time in their sports that they have trouble obtaining a decent education. But every college athlete needs to maintain a minimum GPA to remain eligible for competition. Athletes tend to solve this problem the same way that many regular students, particularly those in the collegiate subculture, solve their eligibility dilemma (not flunking out of school): They take “gut” courses and “mickey” majors. The case of another OSU football star, Andy Katzenmoyer, illustrates this situation.

  At Ohio State a few summers ago, priority scheduling enabled Katzenmoyer and a number of his teammates to enroll in three rather easy courses and to remain academically eligible to play that fall. ESPN and Sports Illustrated fell upon the story—it perfectly fit their current journalistic styles: classical sentimentality, long paeans to the Buckeyes’ glorious football tradition, mixed with hip cynicism about a famous jock’s classroom troubles. Overlooked in the media brouhaha was the fact that these courses were open to all Ohio State undergraduates, and, after the athletes’ priority registration, regular OSU students filled the classes. Also overlooked was the fact that the average OSU course is not very difficult, and if athletes had more time or inclination for academics, and if hard-drinking undergrads were not so anti-academic or lazy, then neither group would need to take the “guts.”

  But the sports media rarely examines this reality. Instead in the Katzenmoyer case, it used the “dumb jock” cliché. In fact, he came from a family that stresses education (his parents are high school teachers), but he wanted to be a vocational athlete. He regarded playing college football as “a job, except I’m not getting paid [officially] for it.” He noted that, as a freshman, “I came in here and learned the Ohio State defensive system and everything around that in a very short period of time. I wouldn’t think they [the media] would say I’m a genius, but they wouldn’t say I’m a stupid person.” But most media members said exactly that—it fit preconceived notions and made for amusing copy.

  Katzenmoyer was typical of many athletes in big-time intercollegiate athletic programs: his full-time sports job was much more engrossing and important to him than taking college courses. Why shouldn’t it be? His dream since childhood was to play in the NFL, and he wanted to concentrate fully on his minor league training. The Ohio State franchise in College Sports Megalnc. was the logical place for him at this point in his career. And, after playing that fall, he realized that he was ready for the next professional level, and he entered the NFL.

  The Andy Katzenmoyer case illustrates a profound and unresolvable contradiction: College Sports MegaInc. and its franchises insist that their main employees be amateur student-athletes, but these employers also demand that the employees train and perform at the highest possible level (no network pays to televise Oberlin College football games). One result of this contradiction is the infrastructure of questionable courses and majors available to athletes, as well as other Big-time U students.

  At this juncture, beer and circus meet, the collegiate subculture and the athletic department joining to subvert the educational ideals of the university—and receiving assistance from the administration and the research faculty who tolerate the existence of academically dubious courses and majors for their own ulterior motives (see chapter 11, “The Faculty/Student Nonaggression Pact”).

  When reporters ask coaches and ADs questions about athletes taking easy courses, usually athletic department officials become defensive and invoke the Buckley Amendment—“It’s against the law to discuss a student’s academic file.” However, if athletic department people were more savvy, and did not mind upsetting university administrators, they would tell the truth: After the athletic department fills as many slots as it needs in these courses, regular undergraduates jump in and register for the open places. An underenrolled “gut” course is an oxymoron. A Syracuse University professor told the Chronicle of Higher Education: “There are innumerable ‘guts’ on every campus, some of them specially designed for student-athletes,” but all of those courses and many others are available to all undergraduates. Moreover, “There are empty degrees, totally hollow degrees out there” awarded to athletes and regular students.

  Despite the common interest of athletic scholarship holders and beer-drinking students in their school’s “College of Ridiculous Studies,” the collegians usually resent athletic department priority scheduling. Perhaps undergraduate jealousy toward all athlete perks causes this hostility, or the more practical objection that priority scheduling allows the jocks first dibs on the easy classes. Whatever the reason, the result shows that many regular students, including those most enthralled by big-time college sports, have mixed feelings about the jocks—unless the team wins big, and it covers the spread, and they meet the athletes personally, and …

  This contradicts one of the most cherished myths about big-time college sports: It builds school spirit and campus community. That fiction, as well as myths about the importance of big-time college sports in student recruitment, retention, and alumni donations, forms the basis of the “New 3 R’s”—the topic of the final chapter of this book.

  21

  THE NEW 3 R’S

  In the 1990s, as undergraduate enrollment and outside funding decreased, many colleges and universities turned to professional consultants to tell them how to solve these major problems. These gurus, always full of jargon, created the “New 3 R’s.”

  As an associate of a university planning firm that has assisted more than fifty colleges in developing quality-of-life facilities such as recreation centers and stadiums, I have concluded that these structures play a pivotal role for all students, not just jocks. These facilities are among the keys to the new three R’s of higher education—recruitment (of students), retention (of current students) and renewal (of alumni support).

  —Jeffrey Turner, an executive with a consulting

  firm specializing in higher education

  Brandishing their New 3 R buzzwords, the consultants convinced administrators to pour precious resources into recruitment campaigns for new students, retention efforts to stanch the huge freshmen dropout rate, and fund-raising drives aimed at alumni (renewal). In addition, as Jeffrey Turner explain
ed, the New 3 R’s required a commitment of millions of dollars for big-time college sports facilities and programs.

  The New 3 R’s continue to drive many Big-time U’s. That the consultants and the university officials who implement their plans never mention the Old 3 R’s—reading, ’riting, and ’rithmetic—indicates how far these schools have drifted from their historic missions. In the twentieth century, although most universities could not truly educate all of their undergraduates, they maintained that goal—at least for public consumption. In the twenty-first century, a growing number of schools will probably substitute the New 3 R’s and sports entertainment for general undergraduate education. Whether presidents and administrators do this consciously, or it occurs because of their fixation on enrollment and external funding, the result is the same: Beer-and-circus rules many American campuses, and the Old 3 R’s have become passé, as old-fashioned as their name.

  Nevertheless, in an ultimate irony, the New 3 R’s do not work very well. Recruitment campaigns tied to big-time college sports have very mixed results; for every Flutie Factor success, there are many more anti-Flutie Factor failures—all those losing teams at “loser” schools—and even some of the college sports winners like Kansas State fail to increase enrollment. Retention efforts to keep students at a school mainly succeed at Division III colleges and relatively small Division I universities, not at Big-time U’s, and success has little connection to big-time college sports. Finally, contrary to the longtime myth, big-time intercollegiate athletics does not generate significant alumni contributions to the academic parts of a university; the evidence indicates that alumni giving is independent of college sports success or failure, and even national championships mainly produce money from booster fans—not alumni—for the athletic department, and for no other part of the university.

  Deconstructing the New 3 R’s is not only valuable for its own sake, but also for what it reveals about the present and future of the American research university.

  [In recruiting undergraduates, schools should ask] can kids get the courses they want here? Are the classes and advisory system really personal [for students]? Do the teaching faculty and facilities stack up? … But instead of grappling with these questions, too many colleges respond by saying, “We can’t do much about real value [in our undergraduate education programs] … .”

  For places like Syracuse [University], this discussion raises the issue of whether we can continue to run a research institution on the back of undergraduate tuition. Is it not time to admit that we have perhaps been too faculty-centered, and will fall behind in today’s hectic rush for undergraduates until we can prove that we are indeed student-centered?

  —David Smith, dean of admissions and

  financial aid at Syracuse University

  The honesty and acuity of this college official is unusual. In the article that quoted him, the writer noted that, unlike this dean, most “admissions professionals appear less and less to be part of the academy; they now seem truly external, having little regular engagement with the central [historic] purposes of their institutions.” Increasing numbers of admissions personnel do not even work directly for the university; they are outside consultants hired on short- or long-term contracts. The jargon for this procedure is “outsourcing admissions” and, in reality, many of these recruiters are bounty hunters, paid to find and bring back as many applicants for admission as possible, often paid per “warm body.”

  The bounty hunters do not lack for clients: for every “selective admissions” university like UNC-Chapel Hill, there are twenty de facto “open admission” schools like the University of Alabama, Tuscaloosa. Neither the bounty hunters nor their clients inquire about whether their student prey should attend these universities, or whether these young men and women should even enroll in college at this point in their lives, or ever.

  The recruiters often behave like college sports recruiters, sometimes possessing the ability—like their athletic department counterparts—to admit a potential student at the moment he or she assents, bypassing regular admissions procedures. U.S. News discussed this technique within the context of the tremendous “pressure to win” that schools exert upon admissions deans, comparing these officials to athletic head coaches “who want to keep their jobs [and] need to chalk up one winning season after another.”

  So intertwined are the Admissions Office and the athletic department at many schools that they dictate major policy decisions. In 1999, Texas Christian University left the Western Athletic Conference to join Conference-USA, severing historic conference ties with nearby colleague and traditional rival Southern Methodist University, and in-state colleague Rice University. Instead of continuing relations with these similarly private and academically oriented universities, TCU moved to a league of mainly mediocre and far-flung public universities, including East Carolina, Louisville, and Cincinnati.

  The TCU athletic director, speaking for the school, explained the decision:

  Most of our out-of-state students come from the midwestern corridor, and as a member of C-USA, TCU will gain exposure to an extremely high percentage of the nation’s population, the media centers and large urban areas of the Central and Eastern time zones.

  Apparently a recruitment consultant advised the TCU Admissions Office and the athletic department to make the move; the premise of the advice is that TCU will attract greater attention in, and increase the number of applicants from, these population centers. But for this strategy to succeed, the TCU football and basketball teams have to win. Otherwise, for many young TV viewers in these central and eastern cities, TCU becomes that religious “loser school” with the weird nickname, the Horned Frogs. (Despite its name, Texas Christian University is a secular institution.) For many decades, TCU has mainly fielded losing teams, and loosening its ties to Texas football might produce even worse squads (the state is one of the great high school recruiting areas in the country, and although TCU is far down the recruiting food chain, it is still on it).

  Finally, what did TCU’s move to C-USA have to do with the quality of undergraduate education at the school? Nothing. Even its traditional student base—74 percent of its undergraduates are from Texas—is ignored in the move to chase elusive out-of-staters. A more sensible institutional decision would be to copy Rice University: In the last decade that school has massively upgraded its undergraduate education program and put relatively little money into its athletic department; in the process, it often produced losing football and basketball teams, and gained a national reputation for academic excellence.

  Rice now ranks sixteenth on U.S. News’s national university list, but TCU remains in the second tier, schools between 51 and 120. Texas Christian University is not as wealthy as Rice, but it is a well-funded institution; instead of pouring millions into its athletic department, TCU could put that money into undergraduate education. But it wants to chase the elusive Flutie Factor and hope that sports victories, if they come, will translate into increased applications for admissions. This tactic seems perilous and shortsighted, as well as anti-educational. Even in terms of the New 3 R’s, the strategy seems counterproductive: Rice’s current freshmen retention rate is 95 percent versus TCU’s 80 percent, and most of the C-USA schools acknowledge even lower rates, some below the national average of 75 percent.

  But tell that to the consultants who preach the New 3 R’s. When pressed about the Flutie Factor, they quickly point to schools like Texas A & M and the University of Texas at Austin, and they correctly claim that these big-time college sports programs help attract students. The consultants leave out the part about how these schools have very old and successful—winning—college sports teams, as well as famous football weekends and year-long party scenes. In addition, for many applicants, part of the beer-and-circus attraction of UT (Austin) and Texas A & Mare their famous rivalry games against each other and against Big 12 powerhouses like Nebraska and Colorado. What C-USA rivals will appear on TCU’s schedule to attract large numbers of T
V viewers and potential applicants for admission? Will the C-USA members mentioned above, or others like Memphis or Alabama-Birmingham, become TCU’s big rivals and generate the high TV ratings? The chances of the annual TCU-Cincinnati game outdrawing Texas-Nebraksa are almost nil.

  Finally, the first New R—recruitment—is mainly smoke and mirrors, not able to withstand scrutiny or the reality of big-time college sports.

  Vanishing Freshmen

  One in Four Nationally Does Not Return for Sophomore Year … Retention is generally higher at private schools—where students tend to get more individual attention—than at public schools. It is higher at smaller colleges, where students are less likely to feel lost in the throng.

  In some cases, the school imposes obstacles [to retention], such as requiring freshmen to attend … numerous large lecture classes.

  —U.S. News college issue, 2000

  The consultants maintain that big-time college sports programs help keep freshmen on campus and returning for their sophomore year. Big-time U’s would be more likely to improve their retention rates if they ignored this piece of advice and imitated Division III colleges and small Division I schools like Rice. Those institutions employ a simple retention formula, one that has nothing to do with big-time intercollegiate athletics: They hire and reward faculty for teaching undergraduate courses; they limit class size and offer few lecture courses; and they build authentic communities of teachers and students. This final achievement contradicts one of the major myths about big-time college sports: At buge, impersonal institutions, it provides a central rallying point, bringing all elements of the university together into a real community.