Beer & Circus U

Durham, N. C.—When students do receive a good college education, they have usually taught themselves, but too many undergraduates do not make the effort, according to a recently retired professor who describes himself as an “unrepentant liberal.”

“’We’re getting a good education in spite of Berkeley,’ is something that you will hear from students at Berkeley,” Professor Murray Sperber told the crowd at the John William Pope Center’s annual conference on higher education. Professor Sperber himself received both his Masters’ degree and his Ph.D from the University of California at Berkeley in the 1960s.

Although that commentary speaks well of the initiative of the students who “home school” themselves while away at college, there is an overriding drawback to this approach to self-instruction. “The school still takes your money,” Professor Sperber points out.

More often than not, Professor Sperber notes, professors’ working relationships with their students are governed by an informal “faculty-student nonaggression pact.” “Professors don’t ask much of their students and students don’t ask much of their professors,” Professor Sperber explains.

“Many professors will admit to watering down their courses,” George Leef, executive director of the John William Pope Center for Higher Education Policy, pointed out to Professor Sperber. “True,” Professor Sperber conceded.

Professor Sperber is the author of Beer & Circus: How Big-Time College Sports is Crippling Undergraduate Education. An English professor at Indiana University (IU) for more than a quarter century, Professor Sperber was quite visible and vocal in his criticism of IU’s storied basketball coach Bobby Knight.

In researching the book, Professor Sperber took extensive tours of college campuses. These visits were originally spurred by his daughter’s search for the college of her choice.

He noticed that parents did not ask many questions. When they did, they were invariably the same two: “Why can’t you have a better football team?” and “How big are the keggers?”

Professor Sperber offered up some alternative inquiries: “Are the classes large or small?” and “Are they taught by full-time or part-time faculty or by graduate students?”

“Sixty percent of courses are taught by part-time faculty,” Professor Sperber points out. Graduate students also have a full workload. “You have students teaching other students,” Professor Sperber has observed.

At the college level, “Privates are doing a much better job of education than publics,” Professor Sperber admits, after having spent most of his working life teaching in a state university. Unfortunately, “one percent of students are educated by private schools,” Professor Sperber notes. Partly because of these trends, Professor Sperber, despite his professed liberalism, supports vouchers for college students.

Full-time faculty would rather teach small numbers of graduate students than large classes of undergraduates, Professor Sperber has observed. Moreover, this trend, which began in the 1970s, has not abated, Professor Sperber observes.

Professor Sperber says that he hears “a complaint from both left wing and right wing colleagues that you cannot influence students.” Still, he may have inadvertently shown how the former have come to overwhelm academia.

Professor Sperber was hired at IU in 1971. “In the early 1970s there were more jobs for candidates with Ph.Ds than there were applicants with Ph.Ds,” Professor Sperber told the crowd here at the Hilton. “That was the only time in history that that has happened.”

It was also the time when Vietnam veterans were still fighting in Vietnam and anti-war protestors received the full range of degrees, including their Ph.Ds, that would keep them in college. Able to graduate to tenure-track positions, they could hunker down until they mentored the next generation of pedagogues…

Malcolm A. Kline is the executive director of Accuracy in Academia.