info@woodslane.com.au
Contact us on (02) 8445 2300
For all customer service and order enquiries

WOODSLANE

Popular Subjects

Woodslane Online Catalogues

9780271032931 Add to Cart Academic Inspection Copy

Confessions of a Spoilsport:

My Life and Hard Times Fighting Sports Corruption at an Old Eastern University
Description
Table of
Contents
Reviews
Google
Preview

In 1998, Milton Friedman’s statement drew national attention to Rutgers 1000, a campaign in which students, faculty, and alumni were resisting the takeover of their university by commercialized Division I-A athletics. Subsequently, the movement received extensive coverage in the New York Times, the Wall Street Journal, the Chronicle of Higher Education, Sports Illustrated, and other publications.

Today, “big-time” college athletics remains a hotly debated issue at Rutgers. Why did an old eastern university that had long competed against such institutions as Colgate, Columbia, Lafayette, and Princeton, choose, by joining the Big East conference in 1994, to plunge into the world of such TV-revenue-driven extravaganzas as “March Madness” and the Tostitos Fiesta Bowl? What is the moral for universities where big-time college sports have already become the primary source of institutional identity?

Confessions of a Spoilsport is the story of an English professor who, having seen the University of New Mexico sink academically in the period of a major basketball scandal, was galvanized into action when Rutgers joined the Big East. It is also the story of the Rutgers 1000 students and alumni who set out against enormous odds to resist the decline of their university—eviscerated academic programs, cancellation of minor sports, loss of the “best and brightest” in-state students to the nearby College of New Jersey—while tens of millions of dollars were being lavished on Division I-A athletics. Ultimately, however, the story of Rutgers 1000 is what the New York Times called it when Milton Friedman issued his ringing statement: a struggle for the soul of a major university.


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



“Dowling provides evidence that will make the reader sit up and take notice. He writes well, providing clear, comprehensive evidence of the pitfalls of big-time athletics.”

—M. E. Beagle, Choice

Google Preview content