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.
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