On his book Big-Time Sports in American Universities
Cover Interview of June 26, 2011
In a nutshell
The United States is the only country with universities that participate in what amounts to commercial sports entertainment.
Why this happened in America and not elsewhere is interesting to contemplate. James Michener called it a “quirk of history.” But what is relevant for our time is the unshakable hold that big-time sports continues to have over the universities that engage in it.
For almost a century, big-time college sports has been a wildly popular but consistently problematic part of American higher education. The challenges it poses to traditional academic values have been recognized from the start, but they have grown more ominous in recent decades, as cable television has become ubiquitous, commercial opportunities have proliferated, and athletic budgets have ballooned.
The book asks two questions. Why do universities play big-time football and basketball? And: Is it good for them or not?
I set out to gather information that would shine light on the role of commercial sports and then let the facts speak for themselves. I reasoned that there was already plenty of opinion concerning big-time sports, its problems, and reform proposals. I consulted histories and analyses, used published information, and collected new, unpublished data. I tried to make it an empirical book about universities, not about sports.
The book looks at big-time college sports in four different ways: as a consumer product (and the subject of mass hysteria), as a business that many universities undertake, as a tool for building institutional support, and as an implicit component of education for the university’s students.
I conclude that the unshakable hold that big-time sports has over the universities where it exists cannot be explained by the benefits that athletic competition brings to the academic mission alone. Rather, the ingredient that gives big-time sports its remarkable staying power is quite simply support from the top: university trustees or regents want to have competitive teams.
As to the benefits and costs, the college sports enterprise is decidedly a mixed bag. The much-denounced costs are all too real, but there are also some unheralded benefits as well. In any case, it is an American phenomenon that is not going away.
[T]he Holocaust transformed our whole way of thinking about war and heroism. War is no longer a proving ground for heroism in the same way it used to be. Instead, war now is something that we must avoid at all costs—because genocides often take place under the cover of war. We are no longer all potential soldiers (though we are that too), but we are all potential victims of the traumas war creates. This, at least, is one important development in the way Western populations envision war, even if it does not always predominate in the thinking of our political leaders.Carolyn J. Dean, Interview of February 01, 2011
The dominant premise in evolution and economics is that a person is being loyal to natural law if he or she attends to self’s interest and welfare before being concerned with the needs and demands of family or community. The public does not realize that this statement is not an established scientific principle but an ethical preference. Nonetheless, this belief has created a moral confusion among North Americans and Europeans because the evolution of our species was accompanied by the disposition to worry about kin and the collectives to which one belongs.Jerome Kagan, Interview of September 17, 2009
In a nutshell
The United States is the only country with universities that participate in what amounts to commercial sports entertainment.
Why this happened in America and not elsewhere is interesting to contemplate. James Michener called it a “quirk of history.” But what is relevant for our time is the unshakable hold that big-time sports continues to have over the universities that engage in it.
For almost a century, big-time college sports has been a wildly popular but consistently problematic part of American higher education. The challenges it poses to traditional academic values have been recognized from the start, but they have grown more ominous in recent decades, as cable television has become ubiquitous, commercial opportunities have proliferated, and athletic budgets have ballooned.
The book asks two questions. Why do universities play big-time football and basketball? And: Is it good for them or not?
I set out to gather information that would shine light on the role of commercial sports and then let the facts speak for themselves. I reasoned that there was already plenty of opinion concerning big-time sports, its problems, and reform proposals. I consulted histories and analyses, used published information, and collected new, unpublished data. I tried to make it an empirical book about universities, not about sports.
The book looks at big-time college sports in four different ways: as a consumer product (and the subject of mass hysteria), as a business that many universities undertake, as a tool for building institutional support, and as an implicit component of education for the university’s students.
I conclude that the unshakable hold that big-time sports has over the universities where it exists cannot be explained by the benefits that athletic competition brings to the academic mission alone. Rather, the ingredient that gives big-time sports its remarkable staying power is quite simply support from the top: university trustees or regents want to have competitive teams.
As to the benefits and costs, the college sports enterprise is decidedly a mixed bag. The much-denounced costs are all too real, but there are also some unheralded benefits as well. In any case, it is an American phenomenon that is not going away.