Description
Book SynopsisThis 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 Rutgers students and alumni who set out against enormous odds to resist the decline of their university.
Trade Review“Read this book if you care about both sports and undergraduate education. . . . Dowling tells a sad and very personal story of the failed struggle at Rutgers, but readers at other institutions will have no difficulty in substituting the names of their own presidents and athletic directors. Dowling is not against athletics. He is for education.”
—Stanley N. Katz,Princeton University
“Universities exist to transmit understanding and ideals and values to students . . . not to provide entertainment for spectators or employment for athletes. . . . When I entered a much smaller Rutgers sixty years ago, athletics were an important but strictly minor aspect of Rutgers education. I trust that today’s much larger Rutgers will honor this tradition from which I benefited so much.”
—Milton Friedman,Rutgers
“Read this book if you care about both sports and undergraduate education. Dowling is one of the most brilliant and dedicated teachers I know. He has been struggling for more than a decade to save the educational soul of Rutgers University. This book exposes the Faustian bargain university trustees and presidents make to field nationally competitive athletic teams.
“Dowling tells a sad and very personal story of the failed struggle at Rutgers, but readers at other institutions will have no difficulty in substituting the names of their own presidents and athletic directors. Dowling is not against athletics. He is for education.”
—Stanley N. Katz,Princeton University, president emeritus of the American Council of Learned Societies
“Big-time college athletics are helping to ruin higher education at Rutgers and elsewhere, writes insider and star professor of literature, William Dowling. In his personal story of involvement with athletics at Rutgers, Dowling pleads for Rutgers and other universities to become places that are student-centered and intellectually challenging.”
—Ronald A. Smith,author of Sports and Freedom: The Rise of Big-Time College Athletics
“Even if you care not a fig about the Neanderthalization of our universities, you’ll get a buzz out of Dowling’s furious prose. Dude’s got a chip on both shoulders and half a dozen angry beehives throbbing in his bonnet. . . . Spoilsport is the follow-up fans of the classic football book Friday Night Lights (which was about sports corruption in the football-rotted high schools of West Texas) have been waiting for.”
—Steven Wells Philadelphia Weekly
“[Confessions of a Spoilsport] is, mostly, a well-argued diatribe, and a very useful one—perhaps the best overview of college-sports corruption published. It should be required reading, for education and sports writers, not to mention high school students pondering their college choices along with their financially fearful parents.”
—Robert Whitcomb Weekly Standard
“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
Table of ContentsContents
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
