Beer and Circus

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Authors: Murray Sperber

BOOK: Beer and Circus
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For my mother,
GLADYS EPSTEIN SPERBER,
1912–1976,
who introduced me to reading and writing
and, most important, critical thought
Table of Contents
College students constitute the most neglected, least understood of the American academic community … . Understanding [them] requires something of a gigantic effort if we are to overcome the unrecognized bias of American academic tradition. That tradition acknowledges the rise and fall of [college] presidents, professors, courses of study, and endowments. As for students, however, they flow rather aimlessly in and out of our picture.
—Frederick Rudolph, preeminent historian of
American higher education
 
 
 
R
udolph's comments, though totally relevant today, were written over thirty years ago in an essay on the history of student life. During the 1990s, as the controversies on “political correctness” and “multicultural curriculum” swirled about, and I mainly faced a rising tide of undergraduate illiteracy in college English courses, I often remembered Rudolph's call to study student life. The 1990s controversies, so prominent in the national media, seemed irrelevant to the writing and reading problems of my students at Indiana University, Bloomington, and to the undergraduates whom I encountered at similar institutions.
Allan Bloom denounced the educational trend he termed
The Closing of the American Mind
, but he taught at the University of Chicago and did not know the legions of undergraduates whose minds had never opened. Dinesh D'Souza condemned what he considered
Illiberal Education
at Ivy League schools, but he never asked a classroom of state university students for a definition of liberalism, then waited as only one or two hands hesitantly raised. Those authors, as well as the multitude of other writers decrying the state of American higher education, follow the tradition depicted by Frederick Rudolph: they place the presidents, the faculty, or the courses
at the center of American universities and colleges, and they consign student life to the periphery. Most of all, the critics fight the curriculum wars, and they ignore the undergraduate cultures outside the classroom—where the vast majority of students spend most of their time and energies, mainly oblivious to the curriculum.
Because the critics described a university so contrary to what I have experienced in my years in American higher education, I decided to study undergraduate life. Having spent all of my student and faculty career at large public universities, I also worried about what I perceived as the decline of undergraduate education at these schools. My undergraduate experiences at Purdue University in the late 1950s and early 1960s had transformed me, convincing me to pursue an academic career. When, after graduate school at the University of California, Berkeley, I returned to the state of Indiana as a faculty member at Indiana University, Bloomington, I faced undergraduates from the teacher's side of the classroom, and I continue to do so after almost three decades at IU. In surveying my academic journey, I am struck by the fact that, as a first-year student at Purdue, I took freshmen English in a class of fifteen students, taught by a full faculty member; whereas at Indiana, I now teach freshmen English in classes of 150 students each, and I cannot begin to help students acquire the reading and writing skills offered to me and my Purdue classmates. (Both Purdue and Indiana are typical, large public universities, very representative of similar institutions across the country.)
At Purdue and most other schools in the 1950s and 1960s, honors programs for undergraduates did not exist. Universities treated all students equally, and full faculty members conducted most classes. Many undergraduates ignored these educational opportunities, but they were available to every student who wanted them. However, in doing the research for this book, I discovered that the rise of honors programs at many schools in the 1980s and 1990s frequently signaled the abandonment of general undergraduate education at these institutions, the closing of opportunities for the vast majority of students.
The 1999 U.S.
News & World Report
college issue described “an honors education” at large state schools, contrasting the small honors classes “taught by professors rather than by teaching assistants—in many instances, by the most accomplished [faculty] on campus,” versus the huge lecture halls and the indifferent instruction supplied to most undergraduates at these schools. For example, “honors freshman at [the University of] Maryland take Math 141-H, a calculus course taught in classes of about 20 students” as opposed to the “non-honors version, Math-141, taught to
a few hundred students at a time,” often by teaching assistants from foreign countries, with shaky command of English. A late-1990s report funded by the Carnegie Foundation summed up the situation: The ordinary “baccalaureate students who are not in the running for any kind of [honors] distinction may get little or no attention” from the school.
 
At many of these universities, administrators as well as students proclaim: “You get out of this place whatever you put into it”; in other words, those nonhonors students who work very hard, who aggressively find good teachers and courses, can obtain a decent education here; on the other hand, those undergraduates who “go along with the flow” will not learn very much, if anything, at this institution.
This argument reminds me of scenes in the old Disney wildlife movie
Happy Valley
, which showed salmon returning to their annual spawning grounds, hurling themselves against waterfalls to reach the calm headwaters of the mountain streams high above. Only a small number of salmon succeeded. Similarly, at most large public universities today, some determined and hardworking nonhonors students manage to obtain good educations, reaching the pools of high-level literacy and numeracy. But often these students achieve this goal despite their university and the flow against them.
Within this context, honors programs and colleges are small hatcheries, set apart from general undergraduate education. A nationally published college guidebook notes, for example, that the honors program at the University of New Mexico “offers special seminars that emphasize reading, discussion, and writing,” whereas regular undergraduate education at UNM often consists of “monster [sized] courses” where, by definition, because of the lack of contact with a teacher, students cannot easily improve such basic skills as writing and reading. UNM students “complain about class sizes, which can be as big as five hundred students in introductory courses,” but they are quickly distracted by their beloved “Howling Lobos,” the school's college sports teams. The guidebook also indicates that the party scene at UNM is excellent.
The University of New Mexico is merely one of a legion of schools in this situation. Considering the democratic ideals in the charters of public universities, the commitments of these institutions to the taxpayers of their states, as well as the large amount of money that they take from students and their families, it is unconscionable that these universities place the vast majority of their undergraduates in a kind of Darwinian wild where only a minority thrive.
 
 
We certainly can't give our students a quality degree—not with class size growing geometrically and our 30-to-1 faculty/student ratio—but at least we can encourage students to have fun, and root for our teams while they're here … .
 
Football Saturdays are great here and so are winter basketball nights. In our Admissions Office literature, we've stopped saying that we provide a good education—our lawyers warned us that we could get sued for misrepresentation—but we sure promote our college sports teams.
 
—An administrator at a Sunbelt university
This school is a
Big-time U: a large public research university with high-profile football and/or men's basketball teams playing at the highest NCAA levels.
This institution is typical of many universities that have stopped trying to give their students a meaningful undergraduate education, but, because student tuition dollars are a major and dependable source of income, they attempt to provide their students with something in return for their money. An Admissions Office brochure for this Big-time U noted that students receive “a wonderful lifestyle experience here”—the text accompanied by photos of student fans cheering at football and basketball games. A junior at this university phrased it more succinctly: “This place is a four-year party—one long tailgater—with an $18,000 annual cover charge.”
 
Few critics of higher education examine undergraduate student life, and none consider the impact of big-time college sports upon undergraduates. Because, for many years, I have studied and written about intercollegiate athletics, its history and its current problems, I have long wondered about its relationship to student life and undergraduate education—after all, intercollegiate athletics originated in nineteenth-century student life, and undergraduates have always been among its most ardent supporters. In the mid 1990s, I set out to research this topic, mainly through questionnaires and interviews at various schools, primarily but not exclusively those sponsoring big-time college sports programs. (In 1998, I also placed my questionnaire on the World Wide Web.)
The results of over nineteen hundred survey responses and almost one hundred interviews revealed a powerful synergy between big-time college sports and contemporary student life. I concluded that many universities,
because of their emphasis on their research and graduate programs, and because of their inability to provide quality undergraduate education to most of their students, spend increasing amounts of money on their athletic departments, and use big-time college sports—commercial entertainment around which many undergraduates organize their hyperactive social lives—to keep their students happy and distracted and the tuition dollars rolling in. University administrators deny that they employ this strategy, but their denials do not change the reality: at many Big-time U's,
beer-and-circus
—
the party scene connected to big-time college sports events
—replaces meaningful undergraduate education. Many students enjoy and willingly participate in beer-and-circus, but their assent does not alleviate the problem; indeed, it compounds it, making solutions more difficult.
In this book, I explain the origins of beer-and-circus, its current manifestations, particularly the epidemic of student binge drinking, and I offer a plan to remedy it. However, it is essential to place beer-and-circus within the context of contemporary American society, and to inquire into the social costs of the neglect of general undergraduate education.
 
 
An entire academic field—outcomes and assessments—attempts to measure student learning at various educational levels. Some of the findings for college graduates are astounding, and depressing:
In the area of qualitative skills, 56.3 percent of American-born four-year college graduates are unable consistently to perform simple tasks, such as calculating the change from $3 after buying a 60-cent bowl of soup and a $1.95 sandwich. Tasks such as these should not be insuperable for people [with college degrees].
—From
An American Imperative:
Higher Expectations for Higher Education
by the Wingspread Group
The National Adult Literacy Survey (NALS) administered face-to-face interviews with over twenty-six thousand Americans, and discovered such items as the high percentage of college graduates who could not compute a simple amount of change, as well as an even higher percentage who could not read and understand a simple set of directions.
When the U.S. Department of Education examined the transcripts of thousands of college graduates, the majority from public universities, including many big-time college sports schools, it discovered one reason for
the low level of numeracy and literacy. Almost 40 percent of these grads had no college credits in English or American literature; almost 31 percent had never taken a college course in mathematics; 26 percent had no courses in history or political science; and 58 percent had no university exposure to a foreign language.
Other exit surveys and tests of graduates produce similar results—low literacy and numeracy rates. The main conclusion is that many colleges and universities, rather than acknowledge their failure to educate a majority of their undergraduates, pass them through to meaningless degrees. At one level, this is consumer fraud; at another, because state and federal money is involved, it is a public scandal.
Apparently some students have a mordant sense of humor about their lack of education. In the rest rooms of bars near some Big-time U's, above toilet paper dispensers, graffiti often proclaims, “BACHELOR DEGREES FROM THIS SCHOOL: TAKE ONE.”
 
The problems in American undergraduate education transcend big-time college sports; in fact, they go beyond colleges and universities to the country's secondary school system and its failure to prepare large numbers of its graduates for higher education. The solutions to this dilemma are not simple. However, rather than write another diatribe about “the whole mess,” I prefer to focus on an overlooked and important aspect of the problem: the connections between beer-and-circus at Big-time U's and the neglect of general undergraduate education at these schools. Considering that these universities contain almost 40 percent of all undergraduates in America, I do not believe that I have overly narrowed the scope of this book. In addition, because many schools wish to join the big-time college sports ranks, the problems discussed here are not shrinking but growing.

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