Beer and Circus

by Murray Sperber

  As College Sports Megalnc. moves toward the bleak future of professionalization and greater beer-and-circus, the presidents of other research universities should follow Dr. Chace’s example, particularly at a time when the U.S. economy is booming. In all probability, they will not.

  A decade ago, the book College Sports Inc. concluded with the line, “The subtitle of this book is The Athletic Department VS. the University.” If College Sports Inc. succeeds in its conquest [of Big-time U’s], a future subtitle will read, The Athletic Department IS the University. That subtitle now applies to many Big-time U’s, and college sports has evolved into College Sports Megalnc.

  Unless the trustees, administrators, and other persons in charge of large, public research universities come to their senses, a future book title will read: Beer and Circus: How College Sports Destroyed Undergraduate Education at Big-time U’s.

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  Many people helped me with this book. Foremost were my friend and agent John Wright, and my sympathetic editors, David Sobel, and his assistant, Anne Geiger. John has helped me with every one of my college sports books, and his timely intervention during the writing of this one saved the entire project, turning a horse close to being scratched into one able to hold the rail and go the distance. Now that the book is completed, I look forward to spending many pleasant hours with John at the track, and accepting his advice on subjects other than writing. (Thanks also to Terry Golway for insisting that I listen to John.)

  David Sobel inherited this book when its original editor left Henry Holt and Company. Not only did David treat this “orphaned” work as one of his own book “children,” but he provided excellent advice throughout the project. He also remained calm when the author was much less so, and his reassuring e-mails and baritone presence on the telephone soothed very jangled nerves. In another life, he would make an outstanding athletic coach, able to size up his players and intuit what will produce the best effort from each.

  Anne Geiger did a marvelous job of line editing the manuscript. She possesses the key quality of a superb line editor: rather than try to impose her ideas of style and argument on an author, she gets inside a writer’s prose and subject, and offers astute suggestions on how to improve the manuscript. Considering that the subject of this book was far from her natural interests, her accomplishment was remarkable.

  In addition, a word of thanks to Bill Strachan, former editor in chief at Henry Holt and Company, and now president of Columbia University Press. He made possible my previous books on college sports, and also accepted this one for publication. He believed in the project from the first time he heard about it, and, as a former swimmer at Carleton College, he enlightened me about the world of Division III intercollegiate athletics.

  I am also very grateful to the many persons whom I interviewed for this book. First on the list is the late Edward “Moose” Krause, longtime athletic director at the University of Notre Dame. I was fortunate to speak with Mr. Krause before his death, and I am pleased to use some of his comments in this text. (I must also thank my friend and fellow author John Kryk for sharing the transcripts of his interviews with Mr. Krause with me.)

  More than one hundred other interviewees helped me with this project. Whether they spoke on or off the record, they were invariably generous with their time and observations. I was able to fit only a small fraction of their words and names into the final text, but they all greatly contributed to my knowledge of student life and college sports, and I thank them. I owe a special debt to the officials of Emory University, where I spent a week during April 1999: among others, President William M. Chace; lecturer in English JoAn Chace; Admissions Director Dan Walls; Athletic Director Chuck Gordon; and the sports editor of the student newspaper, Reid Epstein. Although, in the end, I used only a few of their statements in the text, they provided ample evidence that the Division III model is the best one for intercollegiate athletics, and they will see their point of view reflected in many comments in this work.

  Similarly, I wish to thank a number of faculty and staff members of the University of Iowa for making my visits to that school so pleasant. At the top of the list are Steve Weiting, Judy Polumbaum, John Soloski, and Bonnie Slatton. Many other faculty and staff members of other institutions helped me with my work in many different ways, most notably: Aaron Baker at Arizona State University; Howard Bray of the Knight Center at the University of Maryland, College Park; Andy Geiger at Ohio State University; Lynette Carpenter at Ohio Wesleyan University; Alfredo Gonzalez at Hope College; Joe Ricapito at Louisiana State University; Joanne and Chris Eustis, formerly at Virginia Tech; Frank Cioffi at Central Washington University; Mike Oriard at Oregon State University; Hugo Witemeyer at the University of New Mexico; Tom Haskell at Rice University; Gerry Brookes at the University of Nebraska, Lincoln; Howard Schein at the University of Illinois, Champaign-Urbana; John Hess at Ithaca College; Ann Shapiro at Cornell University; Bill Fischer at the University of Buffalo; Richard Purple at the University of Minnesota (Twin Cities); Joe Roberson at the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor; Todd Crosset at the University of Massachusetts (Amherst); and Jeff Fry at Ball State University. In addition, there were many faculty members and administrators at other schools—I visited more than forty NCAA Division I-A institutions—who aided me greatly but who wished to remain anonymous; I have honored their requests, but I do want to thank them in print for their valuable aid.

  At the University of Notre Dame, where I did research for my previous two books and also this one, I am forever indebted to head archivist Wendy Clauson Schlereth; Charles Lamb, in charge of the archives’ graphics collection; and associate archivists Peter Lysy and Wm. Kevin Cawley. I must also thank University of Notre Dame vice president Richard W. Conklin; and university staff members George Rugg, Dennis Brown, Sharon Sumpter, and Bob Thomson.

  Special thanks also go to my colleagues in the National Alliance for College Athletics Reform for supporting my work on college sports over the years, listening to my ideas, and arguing so vociferously with me. I have learned more from them about this topic than from any other faculty group in America. Heading this list are Jon Ericson, Allen Sack, Ellen Staurowsky, William Dowling III, Linda Bensel-Meyers, Ed Lawry, Rob Benford, and Andrew Zimbalist. I look forward to working with them in the future, and I hope that NAFCAR can make a difference in the reform of intercollegiate athletics.

  At my own school—Indiana University, Bloomington—many persons helped me with this project: in the main library, Ann Bristow, head of the reference department, and her assistant Dave Frasier; also thanks to other members of the reference staff, Mary Buechley, Mark Day, Anne Graham, Jeff Grau, Jian Liu, and Frank Quinn, as well as graduate assistants Steve Duecker, Merlyne Howell, Brian Smith, and Joe Tennis. In addition, I must thank Christine Brancolini and Colleen Talty of the IU library’s media/ reserve services, who have aided me in so many ways over the years, including on this project.

  In the English department of Indiana University, I received assistance from many people, most notably the chair, Ken Johnston, and staff members Reba Amerson, Susan Osborne, June Hacker, Linda Goodwin, and Will Murphy, as well as faculty members Don Gray, Susan Gubar, Charles Forker, Roger Mitchell, Lew Miller, Jim Naremore, David Nordloh, and Albert Wertheim. In other IU departments and the administration, David Pace, Dave Nord, Tim Long, Ken Gros Louis, and Steve Sanders were especially helpful. Special thanks go to the Teaching Resources Center at IUB: Director Joan Middendorf and her able past and present assistants, Alan Kalisch, Jen Bauers, and Kathy Gehr, helped me in many ways with my teaching and with this book.

  In addition, I must thank all of the Indiana University undergraduate students with whom I have shared classrooms over the years. I learned more from them about college life and college sports than from any other single source. At this point, after almost three decades of teaching at IU, I have encountered close to five thousand undergraduates in my classes, and I remember the majority of them very clearly and with aff
ection.

  I also owe a special debt to the 1,906 students across the country who filled in my questionnaire for this book. They will see their opinions and statements throughout the text, and, without their assistance, this book would be far less informative.

  I must also thank all of the readers who wrote to me after reading my previous works or various magazine articles. In an Internet age, I very much enjoy receiving e-mail from them, and I urge them to write to me with their comments about this book. My e-mail address is: sperber@indiana.edu; my home page is: http://php.indiana.edu/~sperber.

  At my publisher Henry Holt and Company, many people helped with this book and my previous ones, and I appreciate the time and effort they extended on my behalf. Special thanks go to marketing director Maggie Richards, publicity director Elizabeth Shreve, her former assistant Robin Bacon, and current assistant, Heather Fain; copyeditor Nora Reichard; and production editor David Koral. At the Princeton Review college guidebook, I must thank editors Paul Cohen and Julie Mandelbaum for their help.

  Finally, I am forever indebted to my wife, Aneta, for her love, strength, and good advice; in addition, she put my questionnaire on the web, and without this assistance, the project would have suffered greatly. I also must thank my daughter Gigi, and former foster daughters Jayme and Logan, for their patience and understanding, as well as their willingness to sit with me during late-night dinners, and early-morning breakfasts.

  Lastly, I acknowledge my eternal debt to my late son, Oliver, who was so inspiring in life and whose memory has kept me company during the long hours in the library, and in front of the computer. Ollie taught me the difference between the trivial and the important, and how sports should be fun and play. To treat sports with deadly seriousness is to ruin them, and to profane the reality of life and death.

  NOTES

  The following notes provide references for quoted material in the book and further explanations for some of the comments in the text. The notes follow the order of material presented in each chapter of the book. However, when a source is clearly cited within the text, particularly magazines and college guidebooks along with their datelines, it is not repeated in the footnotes. For example, the many citations in the text to the U.S. News World Report annual college issue for 2000 (formally subtitled America’s Best Colleges) are not repeated below.

  The quoted material from on-the-record interviews is footnoted according to name of interviewee, date, and place of the interview. However, in the case of interviewees who chose to speak off the record, I have noted this and included only the place and date. I regret that some university administrators and students chose anonymity. I understand their reluctance to see their names in print, particularly if they spoke critically of their schools, but in some cases they chose anonymity even when they praised their universities. I attribute this to the growing power of the public relations industry: increasingly they advise clients, including universities, to stonewall on every controversial subject, to not answer reporters’ and researchers’ questions, and if an interviewee feels impelled to respond, to do so off-the-record so that the interviewee can maintain maximum “deniability.”

  As a person who has always spoken his mind and put his name next to his remarks, I am distressed by this off-the-record trend, and I hope it ends soon. However, as an author who wants to do the best work possible, I felt that I had to use some off-the-record comments, although I tried to keep them to a minimum. In addition, before quoting them in print, I tried to get in touch with the interviewees, and urged them to go on the record. Occasionally, they agreed but most often they refused. My rule for using off-the-record comments became thus: if the person had spoken on tape, I would use the quote; if not, I would not. As a result, I have a verifiable record of the interviewee’s comment. This rule seems the best way to assure readers of the authenticity of the off-the-record quotes in this book. Sadly for my research, a number of interviewees made very useful remarks after the taping session ended, but I have not quoted these comments.

  As for the student quotes from the questionnaire for this book: because the survey asked for anonymous responses, no names were placed on the hard copies of the questionnaire (the ones handed out in classes and in campus gathering places, such as student union buildings). On the web survey, I assured respondents that I could not reveal their names because I was using a public server that does not maintain log files, identity codes, or return addresses.

  The results on some of the questions on the survey differ slightly from those given in the final chapter of my book, Onward to Victory: The Crises That Shaped College Sports (New York, 1998). After the publication of that book, I continued to distribute the questionnaire, including posting it on the World Wide Web. As a result, I received many more responses, and this changed the totals somewhat. In addition, the reader will note in the text and in these footnotes a number of citations from the student newspaper and other publications of Indiana University, Bloomington. I am not singling out my employer for special praise or condemnation. IU is a typical, large, public research university, and because I happen to read its student newspaper and some of its other publications on a daily basis, and clipped and saved many items from those periodicals over the years, I ended up citing them in this book more often than I did items from any other single school. I am certain, however, that if I worked at another university, I would have included as many citations from that school in the book as I did from Indiana University.

  Finally, for entries in the footnotes from college guidebooks, because of the erratic pagination in those publications but the consistent alphabetic listing, I have not always given the page numbers, instead referring the reader to the alphabetic listings. Similarly, because of the many editions that daily newspapers publish, and the frequent changes of the headlines on articles, I have given only the name of the periodical, the subject, author, and date. In a database age, this is almost always sufficient for retrieving articles.

  Preface

  Frederick Rudolph’s comment is in his essay, “Neglect of Students as a Historical Tradition,” in the anthology, The College and the Student, edited by Lawrence E. Dennis and Joseph F. Kaufman, published by the American Council on Education (ACE), Washington, D.C., 1966, p. 47. The Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching funded the Boyer Commission and the latter group published Reinventing Undergraduate Education: A Blueprint for America’s Research Universities, Stony Brook, New York, 1998; the quote on ordinary “baccalaureate students” is on p. 7. The argument that “You get out of this place whatever you put into it” occurs repeatedly at Big-time U’s; for some printed examples of it, see The Insider’s Guide to the Colleges, compiled and edited by the staff of the Yale Daily News, New York, 2000; for example, “Louisiana State is a large research university … introductory courses tend to be large … . As one undergrad said, ‘You can get a lot out of an LSU education if you put a lot into it.’” The quotes about the University of New Mexico are from the same source, 2000 edition.

  An American Imperative: Higher Expectations for Higher Education was published by the Wingspread Group, Washington, D.C., 1993. The material quoted here is on pp. 5-6. An explanation of Juvenal’s “bread and circuses” phrase is in Veni, Vidi, Vici by Klaus Bartels, Darmstadt, Germany, 1999, pp. 130-31. My book College Sports Inc.: The Athletic Department vs. the University was published by Henry Holt and Company, New York, 1990. The administrator at the Sunbelt University spoke off the record, claiming that his bosses would not appreciate his comments about how beer-and-circus worked at his school. The junior at this university put his comment on the questionnaire that I handed out on campus at this school.

  Introduction

  The Clark and Trow passages in the introduction are from their essay, “The Organizational Context,” in College Peer Groups: Problems and Prospects for Research, edited by Theodore M. Newcomb and Everett K. Wilson, Chicago, 1966, pp. 17-70. According to Clark and Trow, the essay “appeared first in unpublished f
orm in 1960,” and their conclusions are based on research done in the late 1950s and updated in the early 1960s. In their work, they go far beyond the descriptive passages used in the introduction to this book, and they present complicated social science matrices to analyze college students. Their work sparked a debate among sociologists and higher-education authorities, some seeing it as a valuable administrative tool, and others criticizing its statistical aspects and results. For a time, the Educational Testing Service used a version of Clark and Trow’s work in college placement tests, but this infuriated many social scientists. In the end, the statistical formulas sank the entire essay, and the ideas in it disappeared from sight. (For a summary of the debate, see P. T. Terenzini and E. T. Pascarella’s “An Assessment of the Construct Validity of the Clark-Trow Typology of the College Student Subcultures,” American Educational Research Journal, 1977, vol. 14, pp. 225-48.)

  However, by discarding the matrices and statistical formulas, and using the descriptions as historical insights, not social science, Clark and Trow’s discussion of undergraduate subcultures proves a useful starting point for a book on this topic. Obviously, I use their remarks—with major emendations and additions—in this manner. American society and higher education have changed significantly since Clark and Trow did their research; nevertheless, their comments on student subcultures remain the single best explanation on record.