Jonathan Yardley
Don't be misled by the title of this book. Though Murray Sperber discusses big-time college athletics at length and with impressive asperity, his real subject is the decline of undergraduate education at what he calls "Big-time U," the "large public university with high- profile football and/or men's basketball teams playing at the highest NCAA levels." At many of these institutions, he argues, "beer-and- circus--the party scene connected to big-time college sports events-- replaces meaningful undergraduate education." The case he marshals against these places--"schools" scarcely seems the right word--is overwhelming, a devastating condemnation of "higher education" in America.</br></br>Sperber teaches English at the Indiana University, where for years he has enjoyed the dubious privilege of observing Big-time U at intimate range. The basketball program there, under the egregious, and finally fired, Bobby Knight, may or may not embody all the worst excesses of Division 1A athletics--Sperber calls Florida State University the "national champs" of beer and circus, and with ample reason--but it certainly is a leading contender. Because of his outspoken views on big-time athletics generally and Knight specifically, Sperber is a controversial figure on his own campus, but that has not stopped him from speaking out or from writing books, of which Beer and Circus is the most important.</br></br>Much of what he says in the book has been said before, by him (in a previous book, College Sports, Inc.) and by others. What is new here is the direct connection he makes between two phenomena that would seem at first glance to be unrelated. Just about everyone knows that under the enthusiastic management of the National Collegiate Athletic Association, big-time football and basketball programs have become the tail that wags the academic dog, and just about everybody knows that almost every undergraduate at these big schools is, as a freshman at Ohio State told Sperber, "just another number," rolled through the assembly line with little if any attention from tenured faculty and not much more from the graduate students and teaching assistants who shoulder so much of what passes for the academic load.</br></br>Sperber argues that these phenomena feed off each other. The big public universities (and some of the private ones as well) are engaged in an unseemly competition for prestige as reflected in the frivolous but influential rankings of U.S. News and World Report and other publications. These are based principally on graduate programs and research, helping persuade university administrators "that research prestige was the way to attract attention to their institution and to improve its standing in the academic world." A few years ago, I listened with still-undiminished horror as the newly crowned chief administrator of my alma mater told alumni (and anyone else who would listen) that his chief goal for the institution was to elevate it to Number One among public universities at U.S. News; that ambition seems to be universal.</br></br>But ambitions such as that are expensive, and universities need funds to underwrite them. Enter the undergraduate, whose tuition and fees these universities covet and for whom they compete energetically. "In the 1980s," Sperber writes, "some higher education officials began to discuss 'the student as consumer'. . . . Colleges and universities needed to fill their classrooms and dorms . . . and, as a result, except for the most prestigious schools in the country, the demographic crunch of the 1980s and early 1990s transformed admissions from a selection process to a sales campaign, often involving clever scams."