Beer and Circus Read online

  In the film, the scene that begins the Deltas’ final, riskiest, and most hilarious prank starts when they learn that the dean of students has expelled them from campus. One of the members groans, “War’s over, man, Wormer dropped the big one.” To this, Bluto replies:

  Over? Did you say ‘over’? Nothing is over until we decide it is! Was it over when the Germans bombed Pearl Harbor? Hell no!

  OTTER [a fraternity brother]: Germans?

  BOON [another fraternity brother]: Forget it, he’s rolling.

  BLUTO: And it ain’t over now. ‘Cause when the goin’ gets tough [thinks hard], the tough get goin!

  The Deltas loved Bluto’s ignorance, and collegiate audiences enjoyed the film’s profoundly anti-academic stance. The few scenes that occurred inside a classroom depicted the students as totally bored and indifferent to education. An Animal House fan explained that the movie proves “college is not about studying and growing up. In the Deltas’ eyes, this is their last chance to have fun with their lives.” Similarly, in a poll of college student attitudes begun in the late 1980s, to the question—“After you graduate from and/or leave your university, what do you think you will remember most vividly about your time here?”—very few respondents mentioned courses, professors, or anything connected to the academic functions of their school. Almost all the answers centered on extracurricular experiences: having fun at memorable parties and at college sports events, participating in great pranks, and friendships with peers.

  Anthropologist Michael Moffat observed the anti-academic ethos at his school, and commented:

  Imagine, for instance, that you were an undergraduate who had been reading a sonnet by the poet Shelley for a classroom assignment, and that it had really swept you away. Unless you enjoyed being a figure of fun, you would not have dared to articulate your feelings for the poem with any honesty in the average peer group talk in the average dorm lounge [or any other average college housing unit].

  However, if you were an academically inclined undergraduate and living in an honors college or off-campus with a group of your academic friends, you would probably discuss your enjoyment of Shelley and other intellectual or emotional discoveries. Moreover, you would live almost as far outside the student mainstream at your school as your faculty mentors did. You and your professors could discuss Shelley and other topics with understanding and feeling, but none of you could broach such subjects with the average student at your university. Moffat pinpointed this distance when he stated that “almost all of” his fellow professors at Rutgers “would have been confused and uncomfortable in the average dorm talk session, and none of them would have had any inkling of how to go about locating a good party on the College Avenue Campus.” Possibly the academic undergraduates at his school would know how to find “a good party”—however, probably they would not attend it for fear of being mocked or even assaulted by drunken collegians.

  During the 1970s and 1980s, the old ritual of faculty bringing their undergraduate sons and daughters into the academic profession continued—the present university outsiders selected the future outsiders. In 1980, a sociologist noted that “a disproportionate percentage of academics … come from that small fraction” of undergraduates “taught by faculty members with a desire … to introduce students into what an earlier era would have termed the ‘mysteries’ of their craft.” Not only did these “mysteries” include the wizardry of research, but also the mastery of the arcane jargon of various fields and disciplines.

  Significantly, although the barriers between most student subcultures began to drop in this era, the one separating academic undergraduates and other groups only lowered slightly. Few academic students participated in the collegiate subculture of time-consuming social rituals, long periods of partying, and fervent support of college sports teams. Indeed, many academic students, like their faculty models, still defined themselves in opposition to this subculture (this began to change for academically inclined students in the 1990s).

  In the 1970s and 1980s, the lack of interest in college sports not only separated academics from the mainstream of university life at many schools, but also from an important component of popular culture outside the university. As the electronic media ratcheted up the coverage of all sports, especially intercollegiate athletics, more students embraced their college teams than previously, and more members of the general public became college sports fans. Nevertheless, a majority of academics remained indifferent to the fun and games, usually spending basketball nights and football afternoons doing course work (if students) or research (if faculty). However, the cultural division over athletics had major consequences for higher education when college sports controversies and scandals occurred.

  The people within universities who were supposedly in charge of intercollegiate athletics—the college presidents—usually came out of academic backgrounds and, as a result, knew little about college sports. In the 1970s and 1980s, when various university presidents tried to exert control over “power coaches” or corrupt athletic departments, deplorable incidents often happened. Because these episodes took place so frequently and had such negative effects upon schools—and this phenomenon continues to the present day—it seems appropriate to begin the next chapter with a discussion of a famous 1980s incident, and also probe its core cause, the gulf between the academic and collegiate subcultures.

  2

  COLLEGE SPORTS WINNERS AND LOSERS

  Winning has always been important in college sports, one historian of higher education noting, “The games had to be won. Americans lacked a psychology for failure.” The 1970s began with a U.S. president in office who regularly quoted the maxim, “Winning isn’t everything, it’s the only thing.” In that decade and the following one, the college sports obsession with victory often undermined the educational objectives of university administrators, as well as the health and welfare of the workers in the college sports industry, the multitude of vocational student-athletes.

  The State of Indiana has a love affair with basketball, and Bob Knight, IU’s coach, was a legend long before I arrived [in 1987 to become president of Indiana University]. In my first year I learned an essential lesson: Intercollegiate athletics can be an all-consuming diversion from the academic goals of a university president … .

  How would an Ivy League type, who came from the East Coast and wore bow ties, react to basketball as the Hoosier lifeblood? Many asked that question.

  —Thomas Ehrlich, former president of Indiana University

  In this memoir, Ehrlich maintained that he understood college basketball before he arrived in Indiana, but, considering his academic background, his claim is dubious, and subsequent events revealed his ignorance about the game. During the first year of Ehrlich’s presidency, Bob Knight appeared on a national television program on the topic of job stress; Knight was asked by Connie Chung how he handled the intense pressure involved in coaching a big-time college basketball team. He compared the pressure to rape, noting that “if rape is inevitable, relax and enjoy it.” That a high-profile public figure could make such a remark in 1988 mainly revealed the isolated, macho world in which Knight lived, his obliviousness to the women’s movement of the previous decades and to the feelings of most Americans on the subject of rape. But Knight had recently won his third NCAA men’s basketball championship and had become the emperor of Indiana, living in his high castle.

  Predictably, many IU faculty members protested to Knight’s boss, the IU president, about the coach’s remark. Ehrlich issued a mild statement mainly indicating that Knight’s views did not represent the views of Indiana University. This enraged the megalomaniacal coach, and he threatened to leave IU and accept an offer from the University of New Mexico, which was at the time looking for a new coach. As Ehrlich wrote, “The matter was on the front page of every paper in the state” of Indiana, and precipitated a huge public debate concerning the pros and cons of keeping Bob Knight at IU. In the end, Ehrlich backed down, apologized to Knight, helpe
d convince the coach to stay at IU, and, in so doing, blighted his presidency. (In his memoir, Ehrlich avoids the negative parts of the story, blandly commenting, “Knight stayed at IU and the crisis passed.”)

  Forever after this incident, a majority of IU faculty viewed Ehrlich as weak and ineffectual, and they would not cooperate with his policy initiatives. In addition, constantly reminding the faculty of Ehrlich’s capitulation to the basketball coach were newspaper photos, as well as TV shots, of the president sitting in the IU section at every home game, wearing a silly cream and crimson suit (IU’s colors) and cheering his lungs out for the “Hurrying Hoosiers.” Ehrlich hung on for six more years, and then terminated his failed presidency, which had been moribund from the day he revealed who possessed actual power at Indiana University: the coach, not the president.

  Would Ehrlich have acted differently if he had not been mired in the academic culture and had known something about college basketball or, at the minimum, had consulted with someone who did? Probably so. Ehrlich could have called Knight’s bluff; he could have summoned the coach to his office and said, “Bob, I think that you will love it in ‘The Pit’ [the nickname for the University of New Mexico arena]. Bob, you will particularly love recruiting for the Lobos [by all accounts, Knight hates recruiting]. Bob, you will have the pick of all those blue chip players who come out of New Mexico high schools [almost none do; New Mexico is not Indiana where, in the 1980s, Knight “gathered” rather than recruited]. And Bob, what you will particularly like is going into the L.A. ghetto as all Lobo coaches have to do, and taking what remains after UCLA and other Pac-10 schools get the cream of the crop, and also after Tark the Shark gets his guys for UNLV. Bob, you will love the prospects that are left, the most academically and socially marginal players around. They are exactly the kind of athletes who respond to your yelling and your regimented style. Take the Lobo job, Bob, it’s perfect for you.”

  But knowing nothing about college basketball, Ehrlich never made this speech. Instead he trusted his academic training to help him survive the situation. It didn’t. A faculty member who provided a back channel for Ehrlich and Knight remarked on the enormous distance between the president’s world and the coach’s, and how “Ehrlich spoke of Knight as if he were a member of a different social class from himself … whose behavior was bound to be different from his own.” However, to be fair to Ehrlich, probably his presidency was doomed before he ever set foot in the state of Indiana. Not only was he an outsider by birth and background, but, as an academic, he was an outsider within his own highly collegiate university. He never understood the majority culture at IU, and after he alienated his natural allies—the faculty, his fellow academics—the game was over.

  In analyzing the Ehrlich-Knight confrontation, two higher education writers commented that it “reinforced a basic research finding: When a president deals with college sports, three things can happen, and two of them are bad.” The only good outcome is if the president’s university has a winning team in a high-profile sport; then the CEO can ride the wave of victory and good feeling, garnering lots of student, alumni, and fan support. Bad things happen if the president has a nasty public confrontation with a prominent coach, or an athletic director, or an athlete (for example, a quarterback flunking out of school); a confrontation will set off a fire-storm of negative comments from fans on- and off-campus, as occurred in the Ehrlich-Knight encounter. Worst things occur when a scandal envelops a university athletic department, particularly one involving popular coaches or players; then the media arrive on campus, and soon the headlines blare such news as, SECRET SLUSH FUND FOR BIG-TIME U ATHLETES. The president, as the person in charge of the university, must investigate, try to clean up the mess, assure the various university constituencies that such scandals will never occur again … ad infinitum.

  Rarely does a day pass when the daily newspaper doesn’t contain some story of recruiting or ethical violation in some athletic department in some grove of academe.

  —Ira Berkow, New York Times columnist

  Berkow offered his comments after surveying the long river of college sports scandals during the 1970s and 1980s. Like all steady flows, the river contained some prodigious pieces of flotsam and jetsam. Berkow cited the case of Dexter Manley, the NFL All-Pro end who admitted that he had entered Oklahoma State University in 1977 unable to read or write, played there for four years, and left still “illiterate.” Other commentators highlighted the early-1980s scandal at the University of New Mexico, where, for a number of years, the basketball coach arranged for players to receive academic credit for extension and summer school courses that they never took (the Lobos coach wanted to ensure the playing eligibility of the academically marginal athletes that President Ehrlich should have reminded Bob Knight about). And by the late 1980s, with the river flowing faster, a book about corruption in the Southern Methodist University football program summed up the situation with its title, A Payroll to Meet. (The polluted river rolled on through the 1990s, with illegal pay scandals at many schools, including Texas Tech and Michigan State, and the decade ended with academic messes in the athletic departments of the University of Minnesota and the University of Tennessee.)

  During all these years, the NCAA possessed police powers but patrolled the river in canoes, not speedboats. “Consequently,” as one sports authority wrote, “close observers of the college sports scene, including coaches and athletes, estimated that only a small fraction of the total violations resulted in punishment by the NCAA.” Some observers maintained that the NCAA did not really want to clean up intercollegiate athletics; instead, mainly for PR reasons, it pulled out the especially putrid programs but let most other offenders float along.

  Supplying the players with academic and financial favors while in school constituted two major areas of dishonesty, but enticing them to enroll—the recruiting process—produced another large cesspool. In 1988, an authoritative preseason football guide divided cheating in Division I-A recruiting into three categories and sets of percentages: (A) 15 to 20 percent of all programs made illegal offers of cash and/or goods to recruits; (B) 65 percent assured an athlete’s “social comfort and/or academic success if he signs”; (C) 15 to 20 percent “occasionally bend a rule” to sign a player. Therefore, all schools cheated in one way or another. If 100 percent was the total in football, then basketball, with many shady coaches and hungry players, easily reached that number and, if it had been possible, would have surpassed it. The recruiting scandals continued through the 1990s, involving such “usual suspects” as Louisiana State and Louisville, and “new kids” Southeast Missouri State and Weber State.

  Another important area of athletic department deception, one almost unknown to the public but familiar to university administrators, was fiscal. Throughout the 1970s and 1980s, cases of athletic directors and coaches committing fraud emerged, but more systemic and outrageous were the overspending practices of almost all athletic departments. During these years, even as college sports revenues increased significantly, expenses rose faster, generating huge amounts of red ink. According to the NCAA’s own financial reports, the vast majority of its members lost money on their college sports programs, often millions of dollars a year; however, because the NCAA allowed athletic departments to engage in “creative accounting,” outside experts calculated the real losses as at least three times higher than the reported figures. Moreover, universities had to cover these annual deficits with funds that could have gone to academic departments, student scholarships, or other educational objectives.

  Athletic department mismanagement, lavish spending, and waste caused most of the annual losses, but university officials, including presidents, were extremely reluctant to assert control over athletic department finances. Nasty and debilitating confrontations with ADs (athletic directors) and coaches—the people benefiting most from the overspending—constituted the first “bad thing” that happened “when a president deals with college sports.” As a result, when the 1990s economi
c boom pumped even more dollars into athletic department coffers, the annual deficits continued to increase (see Chapter 18).

  Coaches and ADs profited from this system, but how did the athletes fare? Tales of corrupt jocks filled the media from the 1970s to the end of the century and beyond, but the NCAA and other sponsors of intercollegiate athletics always argued that the media focused too much on jocks on the take and ignored the multitude of honest athletes who, without attention, played their sports and went to class. The NCAA and member schools have long called these undergraduates “student-athletes.”

  Isiah Thomas, a college and NBA star in the 1980s, and now a pro basketball executive, commented:

  When you go to college, you’re not a student-athlete but an athlete-student. Your main purpose is not to be an Einstein but a ballplayer, to generate some money, put people in the stands. Eight or ten hours of your day are filled with basketball, football. The rest of your time you’ve got to motivate yourself to make sure you get something back.