3/25/2011: The economist Charles Clotfelter, at Duke, has a new book: Big-Time Sports in American Universities. Apparently library JSTOR downloads dip in the two days after a team wins a BBall tournament. I’ll read and see if the other empirical findings are more significant. Here is a quote from the book, taken from the Insidehighered interview by Doug Lederman:
“It would be healthy for American higher education to come to terms with its deep commitment to entertainment in the form of big-time sports,” he writes. “To pretend that this activity is a sideline no more significant than dining halls or art museums, or that athletes in the revenue sports are held to the same academic standards as other students, is to engage in a form of double-talk that would be unacceptable in most of the classrooms of those same universities.
“It would be more in keeping with the intellectual traditions of the academy to acknowledge the rather unshakable hold that commercial sports has over the universities that engage in it,” he continues. “Besides clearing the air of this kind of polite deception, such an acknowledgment would allow for an open discussion about the potentially important spillover benefits generated by big-time college sports, as well as its more obvious costs. Accepting the potent devotion to college sports also makes it easier to understand why the presidents and trustees of such universities have been unable to accomplish meaningful reform.”
Margaret Soltan has some comments as well. She pulls out this quote:
[T]he ingredient that gives big-time sports its remarkable staying power is quite simply support from the top – the university’s trustees or regents – who want to have competitive teams. Period.
Part of the opposition to Lariviere’s restructuring plan is rabid OSU fans – read the comments on any Oregonian story. And of course the OUS board is , well, diverse. If we ever do get a UO only board, we should keep in mind that they are going to care mostly about UO sports – not UO academics!
The current best empirical work on sports and academics is summarized in Jonathan Orzag and Mark Israel, here.
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