Murray Sperber may be best known as an outspoken critic of cashiered basketball coach Bobby Knight. But Sperber, who teaches English and American studies, also has written extensively for more than a decade about problems surrounding athletics in U.S. colleges. In his latest book, “Beer and Circus: How Big-time College Sports Is Crippling Undergraduate Education,” he focuses on what he sees as a deteriorating state of education at the undergraduate level of major public universities. He cites, among many factors, an overemphasis on research instead of teaching, lowering admission standards to increase tuition dollars, and tacit approval by administrators of a “college lifestyle experience”–read: party scene–to encourage enrollment.
Q: Just what do you mean by “Beer and Circus”?
A: There’s a famous Latin saying that the Roman emperors distract the populace from their policies by giving them cheap daily bread and the Circus Maximus with the gladiators. About 10 years ago, I was driving on a Saturday morning with my wife by Memorial Stadium in Bloomington before a football game. On one side of the road, there were all these tailgaters and on the other side were all these student apartments with all these kegs of beer on the lawns and students getting drunk. My wife, who had gone to California in Berkeley and was used to an entirely different atmosphere, wanted to know what was going on. I said: “It’s beer and circus.” That really sums up much of what I thought was happening at Indiana University and other schools.
Q: It will be distressing for parents to read in your book, written by someone who’s in the front lines of the college scene, that drinking is so prevalent on campuses. Is it really as bad as you say?
A: Absolutely. I came out of that subculture as a student at Purdue. I was president of my fraternity and we had our beer blasts on Saturday. But I see how my students drink, and all the sports bars lining the campus. I’m just amazed how full they are on an average weeknight. I go into a convenience store on a Tuesday night and the line at the ATM goes out the door with students getting more cash to spend in the bars. Parents don’t really know.
Q: Your book is about the breakdown of the educational process at large, public universities, and college sports is portrayed more as a symptom than a cause. Isn’t the subtitle, “How Big-time College Sports Is Crippling Undergraduate Education,” misleading?
A: I hate the subtitle. In the book, I do talk about the synergy between big-time college sports, beer marketers and the failure of undergraduate education. In fact, I write a number of times that you can’t separate the cause and effect here. But the subtitle implies causality that is not there. I’m sure the people at Henry Holt won’t be happy I am saying this, but I have to give the truth. I know they did it because I am best known for writing about the problems of college sports. But I think this book is much larger and more serious.
Q: You describe a disparity in education that students get at the “beer and circus” schools.
A: I did a lot of research, getting something like 1,900 responses, and it became absolutely clear to me that undergraduate education at the large, public research universities is in terrible shape. But how can you prove it? When I’d call the administrators up and ask them to tell me about the education at their school, I’d always hear, “Oh, it’s great. It’s fabulous.” Then, by chance, I happened to be in a bookstore and I saw Petersen’s Guide to honors programs, which essentially reprints what the schools send. I started reading and I realized that what the schools were describing, over and over again to the public, was their honors program . . . instead of general education at the school. It would say, for instance, “Come here and you won’t take these huge lecture courses taught by a distant faculty member or a graduate assistant. You’ll take a course with 15 students in a class taught by a full faculty member.” It was like they’d handed me a key to the store. I think the honors programs are really what many of these universities are describing about their undergraduate education for the masses of students.
Q: One cure you have for the ills of big-time college sports is to totally eliminate athletic scholarships.
A: Well, for one thing, the athletes are really getting a one-year contract renewed every July, essentially by the coach, on athletic performance. As a result, this really puts the athlete under the thumb of the coach. Then, if the coach demands 30 to 50 hours a week and a kid wants to take something demanding like pre-med, the coach will say no because of all the labs or whatever. A lot of athletes participate in this, especially at the Big 10 levels, because they dream of a career in the pros.
I came to like the Division III model at smaller schools such as Emory University because the athletes are very integrated into the student body. Most important, if they qualify for student financial aid, it is done out of the financial office and the coach has no control over them. I actually saw athletes miss a practice because of academic commitments. Sports for them was a very positive thing. They were taught discipline, how to organize their lives, and it didn’t become a burden, like it often does at Division I and the higher levels. It seemed to me a very simple, clear-cut solution.
Now, some people have hit me over the head and said I’m racist. Don’t I realize this will really hurt African-American kids? I say, no. The vast majority of them will qualify for financial aid and it will actually help them because it will allow them to get out from under the thumb of the coach. It’s such a sensible solution that it won’t occur.
Q: You write that one of the myths about successful athletic programs at universities is that they make a lot of money for the school. You used Wisconsin’s trip to the 1999 Rose Bowl as an example.
A: Wisconsin’s payout for playing was like $1.8 million and they spent $2.1 million. A former student of mine was a reporter in Madison and he sent a list of the official traveling party: 832 persons, from the president’s office and all their spouses and the faculty athletic committee and all their spouses, and so on. Of course, they stayed in a fancy Beverly Hills hotel. And then people wonder why those who nominally have control over athletics don’t do anything. They’re on the gravy train and totally complicit.
But the part that got me was this: I’m reading down the list and near the bottom there’s three Bucky Badgers (Wisconsin’s mascot). I couldn’t figure out why they needed three, because only one runs out on the field. Then I saw that for the New Year’s Eve party they spent something like $39,000 and it occurred to me that, if the first two Buckys got wasted, they could always suit up the third for the game.
Indiana’s one of the few schools in the Big 10 that’s made money the last couple of years, and it did so because it couldn’t go to a bowl game and waste money.
Q: Doesn’t athletic success increase giving to schools?
A: This is truly one of the great myths. I came across a list in U.S. News & World Report about alumni giving and it was revealing. You look at the top 20, and the common denominator tends to be schools that give a quality undergraduate education are ranked high. In fact, in the top 20, there were only four 1-A football schools–Notre Dame, Stanford, Duke and Rice. The schools at the top of the list were mainly the Ivy League schools, and schools like Lehigh, Emory, Washington University of St. Louis. I feel it’s because these schools give a quality education and the alums get good jobs from it and they feel a lot of loyalty.
But you keep dropping down the list, and there’s Michigan, at something like 122, and Wisconsin in the 130s and Texas in the 140s and so on. Indiana’s off the chart and the list ends at 200. You’d think, just in sheer numbers, these schools would overwhelm the smaller schools (for alumni giving).
I think what happens is that a lot of alums of these schools, if they got a good education, it was despite the school, and they don’t feel much loyalty.
Still, I’ve talked to college presidents who really believe the myth. In fact, if anything, the athletic department people often compete with the academic-side people for the same dollar.
Q: How culpable are university presidents for the problems we’re seeing?
A: I think they’re very culpable. Part of the problem is that they don’t understand anything about sports and they don’t want to hear about things like the binge drinking. They love the research universities because that’s where many of them came from. They’re not going to solve the problems. For one thing, they usually don’t stay on the job long enough to do anything. I think the average stay is something like 4 1/2 years. It takes a year just to learn where the toilets are.
It’s a very bad system when the people in charge prefer to go on the Rose Bowl trips with three Bucky Badgers rather than think about what’s happening. No, it’s going to take some sort of public outcry.
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This is an edited transcript.
