Universities more than sports

What is the purpose of a university?\n A surprising number of students and alumni seem to think the purpose is to support athletic programs. This way, students will have something to cheer for, to set random fires for, to smash windows for and to tear the dolphins out of Showalter Fountain for. It's even better, apparently, if the university also provides a haven for aging, angry white men, whose flamboyant public tantrums will teach America's youth the true meaning of sportsmanship.\n I'm not going to lay down my own opinion of what a university is "really" for, since I don't have one. Rather, I believe the university has many missions, with room for a variety of motives and goals in the people who teach and attend. I'm more interested, first, in pointing out that for many people the educational mission of a university is at best secondary to the noble task of winning NCAA championships; and second, in asking whether the various missions urged on the university can be reconciled, because like it or not, none of them is likely to go away.\nProfessor Murray Sperber has argued forcefully, and I think convincingly, in his books "College Sports Inc." and "Beer and Circus" that the emphasis on intercollegiate athletics is harmful to the educational mission of universities. (It's a safe bet, from what I've seen, that few people discussing these issues have read Sperber's books. Ignorance is bliss.) Sperber's critics tend to waffle between declaring, against all the evidence, that sports bring in more money than they cost; or if not, they're as valid an educational program as philosophy, literature or mathematics, which should be audited to make sure they bring in enough money, too.\nIf I understand him correctly, Sperber would like universities to focus as exclusively as possible on what used to be called "the life of the mind," and now is often called "the production of knowledge." He is, I believe, vague on how to pay for this. Unfortunately, Sperber has also shown, no less convincingly, that universities need the tuition money students will pay for the privilege of attending a university they can cheer for. State legislatures just aren't interested in supporting higher education anymore, and the money has to come from somewhere.\nThose who want something to cheer, on the other hand, mostly seem willing to let a few eggheads analyze DNA, stellar spectra and Shakespeare as long as they don't interfere with beer consumption and watching ESPN. They're vaguely aware not only that the university has something to do with all that intellectual stuff, but that it wouldn't exist without it.\nOr could it? I wonder sometimes. Take a look at "Academic Keywords" by professors Stephen Watt and Cary Nelson, which on pages four and five describe something called the University of Phoenix, a purely commercial institution of higher learning with 59 "campuses." Watt and Nelson quote a Columbia University administrator who said students at such a school want "the kind of relationship with a college that they had with their bank, their supermarket and their gas company. They say 'I want terrific service, I want convenience, I want quality control. Give me classes 24 hours a day, and give me in-class parking.'" Add a Division I athletic program, woo Bob Knight away from Texas Tech and you'd have a winner.\nI'm one to talk, right? I who, after all, never finished a degree. But I've stayed around IU for its intellectual and, dare I say, spiritual qualities: the atmosphere of a place with room for people engaged in the production of knowledge, people from all over the world, working in a variety of fields for a variety of reasons. Having the libraries, the museums, the international student groups and the people here makes Bloomington a very different kind of place than the small northern Indiana town where I grew up. I'm not at all interested in college sports (incorporated), but then lots of people are not at all interested in literature, science or critical theory. \nIs there room for all of us here?\nThe question, then, is whether and how a university so constituted can survive. As long as the money rolls in from somewhere, no doubt it can. Let's have no illusions, though, about purity, pretending that universities exist on some higher plane free of tawdry economic and other material concerns. Those who live the life of the mind, at least, should be able to comprehend the whole picture -- the production of knowledge and beer and circus -- and think about what it means.