Abstract
This book highlights a largely ignored area of American exceptionalism: the strange marriage between universities and big-time sports. As Charles Clotfelter puts it, “…in no other large country in the world is commercialized athletic competition so closely tied to institutions of higher education” (p. 6). The author’s objective in this book is restricted to high profile elite football and basketball competition involving several hundred universities—the NCAA football bowl subdivision (FSB) and NCAA division I-A basketball—at schools such as Notre Dame, Michigan, UCLA, Alabama, and Texas, which appear regularly on television and earn huge sums of money from ticket sales and television revenue, features that “give them a striking resemblance to professional sports franchises” (p. xi).
Though Clotfelter’s ostensible focus is on big-time college sports, his actual concern is with universities, specifically with protecting and preserving their core intellectual functions from the threat of elephantine sports. He begins this study by posing three questions: (1) why is the enterprise of big time sport a part of the operations of contemporary universities?; (2) what are the consequences for universities that undertake it?; and (3) what, if anything, needs to be done about it?
To answer these questions, he gathers a large and impressive body of research data from both previous studies and new research done specifically for this book. Some of the research findings are eye popping. For example, the average basketball team in one of the major conferences appears on television 27 times a season; the average pay for football coaches at 18 universities with big-time sports programs increased from $337,000 in 1981 to more than $2.4 million in 2009 (expressed in 2009 dollars).
Following these preliminary observations, the author turns to his central thesis that the universities and big-time sports marriage is dysfunctional. In taking this position, he is hardly unmindful of the often cited benefits universities derive from big-time sports such as increasing applications for admissions and building social capital through enhanced feelings of affiliation and community among students and alumni of the university.
These benefits notwithstanding, Clotfelter argues that universities and big-time sports represent contradictory enterprises, one committed to academic values of teaching and research, the other to commercialized entertainment; and that these contradictory values reflect incongruous organizational styles and cultures. While the academic enterprise operates through a loose decentralized structure inherited from the medieval university, the athletic enterprise operates through a tightly managed chain of command characteristic of the military battalion.
The most significant consequence of the university’s loose organizational structure is its vulnerability to the power of the athletic department. That is because the university’s weak “hierarchical control allows for the growth of semiautonomus fiefdoms” (p. 36) with the result that big-time sports departments have become unusually autonomous and powerful.
What social forces lie behind this power of big-time sports athletic departments, making them relatively impervious to university control? The author cites an array of social forces: the heightened demand of the affluent American public for entertainment, television’s impact in dramatically transforming the scale of big-time sports, and university sports cartels embodied in the formation of the NCAA and various athletic conferences. Finally, and the most consequential, are the “booster coalitions” which function as an “entrenched, well-connected axis of power outside the university’s formal decision making structure. Dominated by successful businessmen…” with political and financial clout, these boosters exert considerable influence on regents and trustees, allowing “the athletic department to do whatever is necessary to win games and, in so doing, [to] occasionally deviate from traditional university values or even violate rules” (p. 36).
Following this diagnosis of the social forces behind the dysfunctional marriage, Clotfelter lists five things that need reform: (1) unsustainable economics, (2) unfairness to the have-nots, (3) exploitation of revenue athletes, (4) abuse of non-profit status, and (5) crime and rule violations. Suggesting proposed remedies that range from extremely radical and moderately radical to moderate, he seeks to move beyond ritual hand wringing and rhetorical sermons to significant changes, as all of his proposed remedies share one overriding aim: shrink the scale of big-time college sports.
Going from his tough-minded proposals to an assessment of this study, we must ask, what is the sociological takeaway? Seen from that standpoint, the study seems incomplete because it was done by an economist whose rationale for wanting to reform big-time college sports derives from a normative perspective, not a sociological conception of a social problem. In fact the author admits that the decision of the universities to engage in commercialized sport is perfectly rational, a point highlighted by two revealing observations: those engaged in big time sport rarely quit, and many universities outside the circle of big-time sports want in. But perhaps most damaging to his call for reforms, given his primary concern with protecting the core intellectual functions of universities, is his surprising finding that “the academic standing of top-rated universities with big-time programs has not declined appreciably in the past 15 years, in comparison with that of similar institutions without them” (pp. 218–9). Why then should they change?
The sociological penetration of this book would have been deeper if Clotfelter had asked a fourth question (added to his initial three): under what conditions is this dysfunctional marriage likely to become a social problem? This book along with recent journalistic articles decrying the state of big-time college sports may help to bring about that development. But if the popularity of university based big-time sports can be taken as a reliable indicator, major reform seems a long way off.
In conclusion, this book is a well written and impressive work of research. It should be especially appealing to sociologists interested in sports and higher education. But it is also recommend to every sociologist who wants to gain insight into the peculiar world of big-time college sports.