The Game of Life, Beer and Circus and Intercollegiate Athletics and the American University

The Game of Life: College Sports and Educational Values
James L. Shulman and William G. Bowen. Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 2001, 378 pp.

Beer and Circus: How Big-Time College Sports Is Crippling Undergraduate Education
Murray Sperber. New York: Henry Holt & Co., 2000, 322 pp.

Intercollegiate Athletics and the American University: A University President’s Perspective
James J. Duderstadt. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2000, 331 pp.

Reviewed by Randolph M. Feezell

These are the questions that are central to a cluster of new books that focus on intercollegiate athletics: The Game of Life: College Sports and Educational Values, by James Shulman and William Bowen; Beer and Circus: How Big-Time College Sports Is Crippling Undergraduate Education, by Murray Sperber; and Intercollegiate Athletics and the American University: A University President’s Perspective, by James Duderstadt. Overall, these books paint a disturbing picture, but hardly a surprising one. The issues raised are not new; in fact, they have been around since virtually the beginning of college athletics on campus.

A 1929 report by the Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching noted many of the concerns examined in these recent books: the materialism of athletics departments; illegal recruiting tactics and the influence of boosters; the quasi-professionalism of the "student-athlete," a term contrived in a fit of public relations genius by a director of the National Collegiate Athletic Association (NCAA); the overarching problem of integrating academic and athletic values; and the distorted messages sent to young people about the importance of athletics in higher education and society.

The value of the current books is that they give one a sense of renewed urgency concerning the problems surrounding college athletics. Because of the increasingly enormous sums of money involved and the seemingly endless thirst for sports entertainment by the public, the perverse influences on higher education seem more extreme, the voices of reform more strident.

Each book discusses the major myths associated with college sports programs. If readers have the patience to plow through over one thousand pages of careful examination of college sports, most will conclude that these myths, or important variations of them, deserve either outright rejection or death by qualification.

Shulman and Bowen examine what they call "two of the most powerful myths that circulate around college sports": that former athletes are "disproportionately generous" in donating to their alma mater, and that "winning sports programs encourage alumni/ae in general to give more money." Of the three books, this study may receive the most attention because of its methodology. Using a restricted-access database, "College and Beyond," developed by the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, as well as data compiled by the College Board and the Cooperative Institutional Research Program based at the University of California, Los Angeles, the book contains scores of charts, graphs, and tables, on students from thirty highly selective schools who entered college in 1951, 1976, and 1989.

Shulman and Bowen’s findings are surprising on two counts. "The data," they write, "flatly contradict one of the strongest myths about college athletics, that winning teams, and_especially winning football teams, have a large, positive impact on giving rates." On the other hand, the authors found that winning is correlated with increased giving at coed liberal arts schools (the institutional population in this category includes Kenyon, Oberlin, and Williams), where sports teams receive less attention and where there are no athletic scholarships. For big-time sports programs and the Ivies, winning football games does not translate into increased giving rates to the institution.

Among several additional findings, Shulman and Bowen conclude that athletes graduate at acceptable rates, but perform less well than their classmates in terms of class rank (this has become more pronounced in recent years) and underperform in terms of expectations based on entering test scores; that male athletes tend to make more money after college than their classmates, although their earnings are not related to how many years they played in college or the level of play; that athletes tend to rate themselves highly as leaders, yet there is no evidence that they provide more leadership after college; and that, "in the aggregate, alumni/ae from all three eras and from all types of institutions want their schools to place less, not more, emphasis on intercollegiate athletics than the schools do at present."

Shulman and Bowen (as well as Sperber and Duderstadt) are unequivocal in their rejection of the myth that "college sports is an effective money-making machine." While the money spent on sports programs varies according to the level of play, most schools lose money on these programs.

Beer and Circus is the most disturbing and pessimistic of the three books under review, perhaps because of the rhetorical atmosphere in which it lives. Spurning the controlled voice of an empirical scientist or the experienced and judicious tone of a former university administrator, Sperber is angry. His anger and disgust are directed not only at the usual suspects—rich celebrity coaches, corporate-like athletic directors, and corrupt "blue-chip" boosters—but also at university administrators who have presided over the events described in the book: the decline of undergraduate education and research institutions, and the substitution of "beer and circus" for a meaningful education. He is also deeply critical of the NCAA, which he claims functions as a "trade association for coaches and athletic directors" rather than as a representative of the educational will of its member institutions.

Sperber’s book is unified by its focus on the results of a questionnaire he developed to study the effects of big-time college sports on undergraduate students. He is not a social scientist, and he admits that his results, garnered from some nineteen hundred survey responses and nearly one hundred interviews, are anecdotal. Responses came from students attending Division I and Division III institutions, so he is able to offer a number of enlightening comparisons of student attitudes at institutions with big-time sports programs and at institutions without athletic scholarships.

According to Sperber, undergraduate students at universities with big-time sports programs are forced to take huge lecture classes and are rarely taught by full-time professors in small settings; faculty members at these universities are uninterested in undergraduate teaching and enter into what Sperber calls a "nonaggression pact" with students who are bored and do not want to study hard, thus fueling grade inflation; and students generally spend an inordinate amount of time drinking and partying "round the team." Sperber describes the way in which an evil trinity—beer, the Greek system, and big-time college sports—create a predominant collegiate subculture whose most vivid representation in popular culture is Animal House. Like Roman emperors who kept their subjects happy by providing bread and circuses, universities now endorse an analogous strategy to recruit and retain students, implicitly endorsing a culture of binge drinking and partying connected to the ESPN-hyped billion-dollar commercial entertainment enterprise called big-time college sports. Sperber concludes: "The synergy between the neglect of general undergraduate education and beer-and-circus is so profound that it is impossible to separate cause and effect."

James Duderstadt’s Intercollegiate Athletics and the American University: A University President’s Perspective offers a history of the University of Michigan’s athletic programs as well as college sports in general, numerous accounts of the author’s personal experiences as president of the university, and informative discussions of university finance and the governance and financing of intercollegiate athletics. But the heart of the book is devoted to Duderstadt’s worries about the commercialization of intercollegiate athletics, and, in particular, the distinctive problems of big-time college football and basketball.

In low-profile sports, "athletes are students first and athletes second, [but] football and basketball are different. These sports have developed cultures with low expectations for academic performance." Duderstadt worries about shoe contracts, celebrity players, and even basketball’s "final-four" tournament. Athletes are "employees of the athletic department and the graduation rates and academic performance of athletes in these sports are extremely weak in relation to the rest of the student body." He ends a chapter on the "student-athlete" with a radical suggestion: we need to decouple "football and basketball from the world of big-time show business" and reconnect "these programs, their coaches, and their student-athletes to themeducational mission of the university."

From the standpoint of reforming college and university sports programs, the final three chapters of Duderstadt’s book are by far the most provocative. He explicitly asks why universities should conduct intercollegiate athletics in the first place. He gives up on any economic argument and insists that there can be only two reasons for a sports program: "to provide an educational opportunity for students beyond the classroom," and to provide "events that unify the campus community and those who identify with the institution such as alumni." The first argument, how-ever, is undermined by the way in which big-time college programs often exploit the athletic department’s quasi-professional student-employees, and the second is undermined in much the way that Sperber describes. As for athletics providing entertainment for the public, Duderstadt argues that big-time football and basketball, because they are irrelevant to the mission of the university, should be treated simply and only as commercial enterprises. He ends with a number of proposals to sever the link between college sports and the entertainment industry.

These books should occasion a more vigorous debate within colleges and universities about the role of sports in their institutions. Those who are indifferent to their institution’s athletics programs may want to rethink their neglect. The critics have added ammunition; supporters of athletic programs must now do better than repeat the standard slogans and myths. However, as I have suggested, the details are important. There are, in fact, small colleges where the economic argument is decisive.

Moreover, it is important not to overstate the case made against college sports. The subtitle of Sperber’s book is misleading. The book shows the effects of big-time sports at certain kinds of institutions, but it is far from clear that sports have a "crippling" causal effect even at these institutions.

One wants to be more charitable and assert that college sports can have educational and community-building benefits. But the conditions under which these beneficial effects could arise seem quite different from the world of Division I athletics, even in low-profile sports. Sport is a form of human play—competitive play, to be sure. No doubt athletes often gain enormous satisfaction from the sheer joy of participating in an intrinsically valuable activity. I had fun playing college sports. I would not have missed it for the world. My children agree. And I admit that I still enjoy watching games. That said, given the complex situation described in these books, is it justification enough?

Randolph M. Feezell is a member of the Department of Philosophy at Creighton University.

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