Very few historians have written about undergraduate life; the best studies are by Helen Lefkovitz-Horowitz, Campus Life: Undergraduate Cultures from the End of the Eighteenth Century to the Present (New York, 1987); in it, she calls the academically inclined students and the faculty the “outsiders”; Calvin Lee, The Campus Scene, 1900-1970 (New York, 1970 [an anecdotal but factually accurate book]); and folklorist Simon J. Bronner, Piled Higher and Deeper: The Folklore of Campus Life (Little Rock, Ark., 1990 [his title originates in a student jest about university degrees: B.S. stands for “bullshit,” M.S. is “more of the same,” and Ph.D. is “piled higher and deeper”]). I have drawn from these sources, and some less important ones, as well as my own research, for the history of college life presented in this introduction and in the book.
A number of studies of vocational education exist, one of the best and most informative being Christopher J. Lucas’s American Higher Education: A History (New York, 1994). The statistics of GI graduation rates are from Lucas’s work; although the graduating class of 1949 was the first one dominated by vets, some ex-GIs graduated from 1946 through 1948 (they had attended college for a year or more before the war, resuming upon return). For a vivid portrait of the life of GI vets as college students, see Joseph Goulden’s The Best Years: 1945-1950 (New York, 1976); in addition, my book Onward to Victory (New York, 1998) focuses on the postwar era and discusses the GI vet college athletes. Clark Kerr was the president of the University of California who coined the phrase, the “Multiversity.” He discussed it at length in his book The Uses of the University (Boston, 1964).
Clark and Trow do not use the term “rebel,” instead employing “nonconformist.” Their term seems bound by the 1950s—at the time called the “age of conformity”—and it is much less applicable in the twenty-first century. American culture is now so diffuse that there is no dominant culture to which to conform, whereas rebels can still find some things to rebel against, such as political apathy. Helen Lefkovitz-Horowitz also uses “rebel” for one of her student types, although she gives it a much wider meaning—she includes vocational students as rebels—than do Clark and Trow and other writers.
The college and post-college careers of the two most important Beat generation writers, Jack Kerouac and Allen Ginsberg, illustrate the progression of the student rebel. Kerouac came to Columbia University in 1940 to play football; he quickly pledged a fraternity, and was a collegiate student until he started reading voluminously on his own. He became a rebel, then dropped out of football, his frat, and Columbia, and lived with off-campus rebels on Morningside Heights.
Allen Ginsberg entered Columbia in 1943 as a vocational student sponsored by a labor union. From a lower-middle-class family in New Jersey, Ginsberg hoped to rise in the world and become a labor lawyer. However, his rebel nature, his love of poetry, and his homosexuality moved him outside the vocational mold, and he dropped out of Columbia, also living with off-campus rebels on Morningside Heights. From the 1950s to the beginning of the twenty-first century, many rebel students have seen these and other Beat writers as role models, and imitated their movement away from higher education to personal salvation.
1: Animal House
The title of Animal House is sometimes listed as National Lampoon’s Animal House because the National Lampoon magazine spawned the movie. However, because most people refer to the film simply as Animal House, I use that title here. Kyle, the World Wide Web fan of Animal House, posted his comments at: http://us.imdb.com. The production history and revenue of the film were discussed by director John Landis in an interview with Bruce Westbrook of the Houston Chronicle, 10/15/98. Harold Ramis, the main writer on Animal House, made his comments to Gene Siskel of the Chicago Tribune, 8/27/78. Gene Mustain of the Chicago Sun-Times speculated about the effect of Animal House, 9/3/78.
Helen Lefkovitz-Horowitz wrote about the revival of collegiate life in the 1970s (op. cit.), pp. 260-61; and Simon Bronner also discussed this phenomenon and supplied statistics on it (op. cit.), pp. 127-28. In 1984, Lisa Birnbach began publishing Lisa Birnbach’s College Book: The Inside Scoop, Straight from Students, on the Courses, Professors, and on- and off-Campus Life at over 200 Colleges (New York, 1984); her comments about the University of Miami and the University of Illinois are in the 1984 edition. Gene Mustain quoted the comments of the U. of I. frat man in the Chicago Sun-Times, 9/3/78. Rudolph Weingartner in Undergraduate Education: Goals and Means (New York, 1992) commented about the noise level in the dorm, p. 130. I became aware of this phenomenon while visiting various student residence halls, and also seeing Indiana University publications advertising “quiet floors” in dorms. Rutgers anthropologist Michael Moffat wrote Coming of Age in New Jersey: College and American Culture (New Brunswick, N.J. 1989); his comment about “the floor party” is on p. 83. Penn State alum John Hall reminisced about “Happy Valley” in an article in the Pittsburgh (PA) Post-Gazette, 7/15/98.
Last Call: High-Risk Bar Promotions That Target College Students by Debra F. Erenberg and George A. Hacker, published by the Center for Science in the Public Interest, Washington, D.C., 1997, provides an excellent survey of undergraduate alcohol consumption during the final decades of the twentieth century. Much of my discussion of the situation on campuses during the 1970s and 1980s comes from this report, as well as from other sources, and my clear memory of Indiana University and other beer-and-circus schools during those decades.
The fan of Animal House, Justin Siegel, posted his comments on the web at http://us.imdb.com. Gene Siskel was the film reviewer who commented about “every parent’s worst fears—that they are paying $5,000 each year to send their sons and daughters on a vacation called ‘college’” (Chicago Tribune, 8/25/78). The most amazing aspect of his comments was the price of college for one year—only $5,000! Simon Bronner mentioned frats as “underage drinking clubs (op. cit.), pp. 127-28, and Ernest Boyer, head of the Carnegie Foundation, discussed the same phenomenon in College: The Undergraduate Experience in America (New York, 1987), p. 208.”Beer and Loafing [at Indiana University]: A Fifth-Year Senior Reflects on Years of Madness,” by Robert J. Warren, appeared in the Indiana [University] Daily Student on 4/19/91. John S. DeMott of Time magazine discussed the student deaths from balcony falls, 4/7/86. The poll of college student attitudes begun in the late 1980s was done by this researcher: I mainly wanted to measure student opinion on intercollegiate athletics, and I started by handing out a questionnaire in my undergraduate classes at Indiana University, and similar schools. The most useful responses were to the question”After you graduate or leave your university, what do you think you will remember most vividly about your time there?” I kept this question for the survey used for this book.
Michael Moffat commented on the anti-academic ethos at his school (op. cit.), p. 91, “locating a good party,” p. 26. Sociologist David Reisman in On Higher Education: The Academic Enterprise in an Era of Rising Student Consumerism (San Francisco, 1980), discussed the relationship of academic faculty to academically inclined students, p. 5; he also endorsed Clark and Trow in this discussion.
2: College Sports Winners and Losers
The Frederick Rudolph quote is in his classic history of American higher education, The American College and University: A History (New York, 1982), p. 381. Thomas Ehrlich’s memoir is The Courage to Inquire: Ideals and Realities in Higher Education, with Juliet Frey (Bloomington, Ind., 1995); the quotes on the Bob Knight “rape” incident are on pp. 137—39. Many accounts of this incident exist, newspapers and magazines having covered it exhaustively. The best account between book covers is by Joan Mellen in Bob Knight: His Own Man (New York, 1988). She quotes Professor Robert Byrnes on “Ehrlich spoke of Knight as if he were a member of a different social class,” p. 272.
The higher education writers who commented on the “three things” that can happen to a college president dealing with college sports were John R. Thelin and Lawrence L. Wiseman in The Old College Try: Balancing Academics in Higher Education (Washingto
n, D.C., 1989), p. 66. Oddly, they do not explain what the three things are; therefore, I take full credit, or blame, for the three items in the text here.
Ira Berkow’s comments came in a column in the New York Times, 5/21/90. My book College Sports Inc.: The Athletic Department vs. the University (op. cit.), has a section, “Toxic Waste,” on the scandals of the 1980s, pp. 205-307, including a discussion of the New Mexico scandal, pp. 294-95. David Whitford wrote A Payroll to Meet: A Story of Greed, Corruption, and Football at SMU (New York, 1989); Benjamin Rader in American Sports: From the Age of Folk Games to the Age of Spectators (Englewood Cliffs, N.J., third edition, 1990) wrote about the NCAA’s non-reaction to cheating, p. 273; and the 1988 edition of Don Heinrich’s [Pre-Season] College Football guide worked out the percentages on cheating (np). Of all publications, the Chronicle of Higher Education has covered intercollegiate athletics more thoroughly and thoughtfully than any other; for the last three decades, it has printed periodic articles listing athletic programs under NCAA sanctions and the nature of their violations, for example, “20 Institutions Under NCAA Sanctions,” 3/5/99. With these as a guide, the reader can go into the Chronicle’s excellent database, as well as Lexis-Nexis or Dow Jones and find detailed articles about specific incidents.
A number of books exist on athletic department finances during the final decades of the twentieth century. College Sports Inc. (op. cit.) is available in most college and public libraries; Andrew Zimbalist’s Unpaid Professionals (Princeton, N.J., 1999) updates many items in College Sports Inc. and projects athletic department losses well into the twenty-first century. In 1993, the National Association of College and University Business Officers published an excellent report on the subject, The Financial Management of Intercollegiate Athletics Programs; and every two years, the NCAA publishes its Revenues and Expenses of Intercollegiate Athletics Programs, revealing some of the acknowledged deficits of athletic departments. In recent years, the NCAA has divided the reports into one for Divisions I and II, and one for Division III, and it plans to continue this format in future.
Isiah Thomas’s quote was in Newsweek, 1/30/89. For a discussion on the NCAA’s change from four-year guaranteed athletic scholarships to one-year renewable deals, see College Sports Inc. (op. cit.), pp. 207-10. For many chapters on this issue, see College Athletes for Hire: The Evolution and Legacy of the NCAA’s Amateur Myth, by Allen L. Sack and Ellen J. Staurowsky (New York, 1998). An example of athletes being on one-year contracts based on athlete performance occurred at Auburn University in 1999. According to USA Today, new football coach Tommy Tubberville cut “players he didn’t feel could help the team”; the unnamed reporter explained, in case the readers did not know, that “All NCAA scholarships are reviewed annually,” 5/3/99.
Peterson’s Guides, publishers of standard and non-controversial college guidebooks, commissioned two men inside the college sports world, Stephen K. Figler and Howard E. Figler, to write Going the Distance: The College Athlete’s Guide to Excellence on the Field and in the Classroom (Princeton, N.J., 1991). Within this context, their comments are both reliable and startling; they commented on the “fifty hours or more each week,” p. 12; “The label of student-athlete says it all,” p. 1; “The team demands so much of your time,” and “Coaches arrange aspects of your life,” p. 95; and “WINNING VERSUS YOUR [ATHLETES’] WELFARE,” p. 13. For a discussion of coaches’ annual incomes, and deals, see College Sports Inc., Part Two, “Greed City: College Coaches’ Salaries, Perks, Deals, & Scams”; in addition, the databases contain hundreds of articles on these subjects.
The interview with Fred Akers, former NCAA Division I-A head football coach, took place in Lafayette, Indiana, on March 11, 1991; I interviewed him for another project, but I’m pleased to use some of his comments in this book. NCAA PR director Jim Marchiony made his remarks about the “voluntary” rules to Art Rosenbaum of the San Francisco Chronicle, 4/9/91. Jerry Eaves, the Howard coach, was quoted by Charles Farrell in Basketball Times, 10/15/92. The Division I men’s volleyball player was at Stanford and made his comments to me in Palo Alto, California, on 7/27/98; he asked to speak off the record because he was on athletic scholarship. David Leon Moore of USA Today wrote about U.S.C. football player R. Jay Soward, 10/5/99. Joe Abunasser, a former NCAA Division I assistant basketball coach, made his comments in an interview, 11/22/99.
3: The NCAA, the Tube, and the Fans
Athletic director Gene Slaughter of Capitol University in Columbus, Ohio, made the remark about “Greed,” in the Columbus Dispatch, 9/16/82. William Atchley commented about the NCAA in an interview in Stockton, California, 6/10/88. Many books discuss the NCAA’s self-interested rules and its manipulations of them; see Paul Lawrence, Unsportsmanlike Conduct (New York, 1987); also see former NCAA executive director Walter Byers’ book of the same title (Ann Arbor, Mich., 1995); the Sack and Staurowsky book (op. cit.); and College Sports Inc. (op. cit.), Part Four, “The NCAA: The Fox in the Henhouse,” pp. 309–44, with specific material on the MAC and its football stadium problem, p. 312. ESPN executive Loren Matthews remarked, “The bottom line is money,” in an article by Rick Warner of the Associated Press, 8/22/90. J. A. Adande wrote about the importance of the 1979 NCAA final game in the Los Angeles Times, 3/25/99; Jack Craig discussed the broadcast history of college basketball in the Boston Globe, 7/14/91; Randy Minkoff commented on ESPN’s role in popularizing the sport in the 1980s in a United Press International article, 11/15/86; and Richard Sandomir, who has covered the business of college sports extremely well over the years, outlined the TV revenue for the men’s tourney in the New York Times, 9/10/99. Dana C. Caldwell of the Tampa Tribune discussed the NCAA’s attendance requirement for Final Four games in the men’s tourney, and also quoted John Wooden on playing in domes, 3/25/99; and Mal Florence of the Los Angeles Times quoted Jerry Tarkanian on the expanded field of sixty-four, 3/14/86.
Various writers have analyzed the NCAA’s spending of the men’s basketball tourney revenue; see College Sports Inc. (op. cit.), pp. 309–44, and Andrew Zimbalist (op. cit.), pp. 173-87. Rick Bozich’s comments appeared in Basketball Times, 10/15/92 (no author given). For a discussion of the poll of college student attitudes begun in the 1980s, see above; the comment about “college culture today” also appeared as a student response to the first form of the questionnaire. The research of Dr. Robert Cialdini was quoted by Bob Andelman in Why Men Watch Football, (Lafayette, La., 1993), pp. 39—40. Allen Bogan, a psychology student at Indiana University, used the term “fandemonium” in an unpublished paper with that title, 12/12/93.
The Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching sponsored a number of studies on intercollegiate athletics in the 1920s, culminating in the Carnegie Foundation Bulletin Number Twenty-Three: American College Intercollegiate Athletics, mainly authored by Howard Savage, New York, 1929. This study, the most comprehensive in the history of college sports, is popularly known as the “Carnegie Report.” The Miller Lite Report on American Attitudes Toward Sports was published by Research & Forecasts, Inc., New York, 1983. In discussing the findings in this report, I treat “almost always,” “often,” and “sometimes” responses as qualified affirmatives, and the “rarely” and “never” as qualified negatives. For readers who wish to see the full breakdown of responses, please consult the Miller Lite Report.
The student who explained his fascination with ESPN was Charles Barksy, in an interview in Bloomington, Indiana, 4/4/94. Rudy Martze of USA Today had an excellent article on the synergy between ESPN and college basketball in that newspaper, 3/15/90. Jim O’Connell, Associated Press basketball writer, wrote about the early history of “Midnight Madness,” giving Charles “Lefty” Dreisell credit for starting it, 10/13/94; and Will Parrish of McClatchy Newspapers Inc. discussed Joe B. Hall’s 1970s open invitation to the University of Kentucky fans, 10/16/97. The late 1980s survey of how college students spent their time appeared in the Chronicle of Higher Education in an article by Susan Dodge, 10/4/89. Jodi Glickman of India
na University described undergraduate reactions to ESPN’s SportsCenter in an unpublished paper, “College Sports and Current Student Life,” 2/1/94.
My book Onward to Victory: The Crises That Shaped College Sports (New York, 1998) has lengthy discussions on “Gee Whiz” and “Aw Nuts” sports journalism—see the index for the pages under those entries. The New York Times ran an article on the ESPN sports announcers and their favorite sayings, 11/1/98 (no author given); some of the quotes in the text are from that article and some are from my own viewing of the program. Bill Jeakle and Ed Wyatt wrote How to College in the 1990s (New York, 1989); the quote beginning “Come game time” appears on p. 106. The issue of ESPN The Magazine analyzed in the text appeared 11/02/98; Nick Bakay wrote the piece on “Halloween vs. Midnight Madness,” p. 33; and Anne Marie Cruz did the one on the Tulsa recruit, p. 116. Michael Hiestand of USA Today discussed the marketing survey that charted the generational split, 12/10/91.
4: Corporate Beer-and-Circus
Of all mass-market college guidebooks in the 1980s and early 1990s, Lisa Birnbach (op. cit.) aimed hers most directly at prospective college students, informing them in detail about extracurricular life and the social scene at different schools. Birnbach’s guidebooks were controversial within the higher education community, particularly in admissions offices. Dennis Drabelle of the Washington Post quoted one higher-education consultant: “‘She says all the things the respectable [guide] books are afraid to get into’” (11/1/87). Her comments, although sarcastic at times, reflect student opinions at the schools visited; in addition, they usually parallel the comments in another non-standard guidebook, the Insider’s Guide to the Colleges, published by the staff of the Yale [University] Daily News, as well as other sources, including my own research in this period. As a result, Birnbach’s comments seem accurate, and I have used them to illustrate various points in the text. Her comments about the University of Arkansas appeared in the 1992 edition, pp. 17-19; as did her remarks about the University of Southern California, pp. 73—77.
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