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University Park, PA—William Dowling, Distinguished Professor
of English and American Literature at Rutgers University, tells the
story of the Rutgers 1000 group of alumni, faculty, staff, and students
and their losing battle for the institution’s academic soul
and intellectual integrity.
In Confessions of a Spoilsport: My Life and Hard Times Fighting Sports Corruption at an Old Eastern University, Professor Dowling gives his first-hand account of the fight against commercialized college athletics at his university. Having witnessed academic decline at the University of New Mexico arising from its scandal-ridden basketball program, Professor Dowling was duly concerned when Rutgers University appeared to be driving down the exact same road with its football program. Rutgers 1000 was organized in an attempt to depose University President Francis Lawrence, withdraw from the Big East conference, and abolish athletic scholarships. The group’s ultimate goal was to de-emphasize athletics and re-emphasize academic excellence before Rutgers turned into the “school of last resort” that it was rumored to have already become.
Now as the 2007-2008 college football season gets under way following
a breakthrough season that had Rutgers fans dreaming of a national
championship, this book asks some very difficult questions about
big-time college sports and the costs that athletic boosterism have
had on academic quality. As Rutgers alumnus and Nobel Prize winner
Milton Friedman observed, “Universities exist to transmit
understanding and ideals and values to students . . . not to provide
entertainment for spectators or employment for athletes.”
Professor Dowling’s book concludes that the administration
at Rutgers has unfortunately ignored that astute observation from
arguably its most influential and distinguished alumnus, and has
done so to the detriment of its academic standards and reputation.
Table of Contents
Introduction
1 Lost in Loboland
2 The Birth of Rutgers 1000
3 The Friedman Statement
4 Warriors on the Web
5 The Coca-Cola University
6 Sportswriters in Wonderland
7 Sympathy for the Devil
8 “I Am an Alumni!”
9 The Hour of Victory
10 Requiem for Rutgers 1000
Epilogue: A View from the Banks
Appendix: The Rutgers Review Interview
Note on Sources
Acknowledgments
Index
The Author
William C. Dowling is University Distinguished Professor of English
and American Literature at Rutgers University. Of the ten books
he has published, the most recent include Oliver Wendell Holmes
in Paris: Medicine, Theology, and the Autocrat of the Breakfast
Table, Literary Federalism in the Age of Jefferson, and The
Senses of the Text: Intensional Semantics and Literary Theory.
He has also written widely on college sports in such publications
as The Chronicle of Higher Education and Academic Questions,
and about challenges to the system of scholarly communication in
the Journal of Scholarly Publishing.