Beer and Circus

Beer and Circus: How Big-Time College Sports Is Crippling Undergraduate Education is a non-fiction book from long-time undergraduate sports researcher Murray Sperber about the damaging effect college sports have on the quality of undergraduate education both for athletes and non-athletes on modern college campuses. Sperber focuses on the party scene surrounding college sports, interviewing researchers, students, faculty, and administration from around the country to talk about the impact that college sports have on undergraduate education.

Beer and Circus takes its name from the ancient Roman activity of appeasing the poor and underserved masses with cheap bread and violent entertainment in the Coliseum. He compares this activity of using bloodshed and lowbrow entertainment to keep the minds of the masses busy to the party culture at large undergraduate institutions and research universities. Sperber believes that today's undergraduates at large state schools are essentially charged tuition to tailgate, binge drink, and attend games in order to fund the research of doctoral students and world-renowned faculty, whom younger students rarely meet or interact with. Sperber takes a multi-pronged approach to his critique of college sports, focusing on the money athletics bring in and where it goes, and the impact of partying and binge drinking on young people.

First, Sperber talks about money – athletic programs often use the huge amounts of money they bring in to defend the role they play on campus and in the local community. Student athletes often receive scholarships but are never paid for their work, and athletic programs make extraordinary amounts of money from their players, selling merchandise and expensive tickets in exchange for some notoriety and the chance to play at the professional level. Sperber dissects this argument, both for athletes and non-athletes, bringing up the inequitable exchange of tuition money for free, lucrative labor. He also talks about where the money goes that athletic departments bring in – and reveals that the money rarely makes it to undergraduate education funding. Instead, schools use the appeal of sports culture and partying to entice young people to their institutions, where they take their tuition dollars and use them to fund more sports programs, build facilities, and hire expensive researchers who rarely look up from their work long enough to support young students. These tuition dollars help give the school a good reputation among academics, but the actual quality of education the undergraduate students receive is laughable compared to the quality and attention given to masters and doctoral students, whose work undergrads help fund.



Sperber also talks about the party culture that accompanies college athletics, and the damaging effect it has on students. Corporations, recognizing the moneymaking potential on college campuses, now flock to sporting events to sell their products and encourage undergraduates to party and drink. Colleges, rather than fighting their reputations as party schools, entice students to campus with the promise of tailgates and “a darn good time.” All of this is accompanied by freshmen programs that are typically taught in enormous lecture halls by teaching associates, who are underpaid and overworked. Sperber also takes on sorority and fraternity culture, its relationship to college sports, and its role as essentially party centers and providers of alcohol to immature and underage students.

Sperber doesn't just complain, however. He uses his sociological studies and questionnaires from students, faculty, and administration to make a number of recommendations about how to improve undergraduate education at large public universities. His first suggestion is to demand minimal levels of academic achievement from students, remove athletic scholarships, lower enrollment to decrease class sizes, and focus on teaching, rather than partying. He also recommends separating out pure research from other departments on campus, giving researchers more time to focus on their work and providing undergrads with access to knowledgeable professors.

A professor of English and American studies, Murray Sperber has taught at the University of Indiana Bloomington and UC Berkeley in the Graduate School of Education. He served as the first chair of the Drake Group, which sought to reform college sports and the role they play on campus. Sperber has actively spoken out about college sports on a number of prominent radio and TV programs, and was forced to retire from the University of Indiana Bloomington after his criticism of the college's handling of the firing of men's basketball coach Bob Knight. He has written a number of books, including Onward to Victory: The Crises That Shaped College Sports and College Sports Inc.: The Athletic Department vs. the University. Beer and Circus was his first book on the subject.