A book published this week by a Duke professor explores the relationship between high-profile athletics and higher education. In “Big-Time Sports in American Universities,” Charles Clotfelter, Z. Smith Reynolds professor of public policy and a professor of economics and law, writes about both the obvious and intangible costs and benefits associated with major programs. The Chronicle’s Taylor Doherty spoke to Clotfelter about his book’s findings and about what national trends reveal about Duke’s own athletics department.
The Chronicle: This book focuses more on higher education’s relationship with sports than on the actual play on the field or court. Could you tell me about your approach to this book? How did it come together?
Charles Clotfelter: It sort of began dawning on me that of all the topics that scholars of higher education deal with... they hardly ever look at big-time athletics as a serious topic of study for universities in a way that they would interdisciplinary research, admissions, the best techniques for teaching, the use of libraries [or] the use of new technology.... The scholars that look at these kinds of things, for some reason, have chosen just to ignore the reality of big-time sports.
I said, wait a minute, this is a big deal. It’s not something that should just be ignored.... If you think about the power that a big-time sports operation has over the university it’s in, it’s enormous. You can’t schedule a meeting that conflicts with the basketball game or football game because nobody would come....
Another thing I looked at was mission statements. Almost every university worth its salt has a published mission statement. It came to be the rage in the 80s and the 90s. Duke has one—in fact I helped [former President] Nan Keohane when I was in the second floor of the Allen Building during that time. We were drafting it, and like any committee thing it’s a work of many hands, but it expresses what the University’s mission is. Well, I noticed that the Duke mission statement doesn’t mention the first thing about sports. Isn’t that interesting? Then I thought, let’s look at some others.... I took 58 universities that are in the five biggest conferences—that’s the SEC, ACC, Big Ten, Big 12 and the Pacific 10 back in those days—and then I added Notre Dame. Out of all of those universities, 52 of them have published mission statements. So I asked the question how many of them mention sports, athletics, anything like that? The answer is five.
TC: What were the surprising findings when putting your book together? What does this book add to the conversation concerning the relationship between higher education and sports?
CC: I’ve uncovered data of a lot of different sorts that no one has uncovered until now.... One of the things I looked at—I think I have the first measure of the effect of the NCAA basketball tournament on the University. I looked at articles viewed through JSTOR—I had day-to-day data for 78 different libraries over a three-month period in the three different years. I looked at who were the guests in presidents’ VIP boxes at football games—only [at] public universities. I looked at expenditures and sources of revenue. One of the surprises was that the biggest sources of revenue for the most successful big-time college programs is not television; it’s not even ticket sales—it’s contributions.
TC: So approaching this as an economist, are there cases in which a school’s athletics program might lose money on paper but offer intangible benefits that justify the costs?
CC: That’s the message of economics: Don’t just confine yourself to the things that are easily measured or the things that happen to be traditionally included. The kind of statistics that we hear about, all of these teams losing money, what they’re referring to is the revenues and expenditures of the department. But we traditionally put in the athletic department all these sports that we want to have but we know they’re not going to make money. We put them in there, but there’s no special reason why you’d want to have them in—we just do it traditionally. Other things are excluded. Many universities would not put in the revenue side the additional sales of apparel that are trademarked, but you might say that is really due to the athletic department, so why not give them the credit? There are a lot of more or less arbitrary accounting decisions that determine whether or not you’re going to make money or lose money. But there are also some costs that are not included as well.
My orientation in writing the book was cost versus benefits, but at the end of the day, I can’t tell you that the benefits are greater than the costs because some of them are just downright intangible. But it still makes a certain amount of sense to go on and do the exercise. It forces you to consider what are the benefits, and what are the costs of doing this sort of thing.
TC: In recent years, Duke has made a renewed effort to improve the quality of the football program. When you look at the college landscape in general, what is the feasibility of a school like Duke having a top football team and a top basketball team?
CC: I’ll step back from Duke a little bit again. When I look at how much emphasis is placed on big-time sports—and I define that as football at the top level and basketball at the top level—[the fact is] that once a university has one of these programs, they almost never get rid of it, [and so] I conclude that the benefits must be greater than the costs. Because these are smart universities, they’re not doing these things because they’re not thinking....
Given that, there must be sufficient reason to keep doing this, and it must not be a close decision because they don’t drop it for a while and start again. And what I conclude is that you can’t really explain the longevity and the power of college sports simply by the amount that it contributes to the academic aims. What you have to do is to say what this university is really about is not just teaching, research and service. It’s about a fourth thing, and that is competition in these sports, and this is so important for its own sake that its worth it to the trustees to get it going.
Having said that, how do you explain how we do at football [at Duke]? I think most universities’ trustees say we want to be competitive. At Texas, competitive means we want to win most often. At least you don’t want to just be an embarrassment, [and] I think this is where the urge to do football is kicking in at Duke. You know, we have an urge to be more competitive. We don’t like having lost to Carolina in football for the last I-don’t-know-how-many years, you know, 20 straight years or something. It’s just not good. Do I think it’s a good idea? I don’t have a judgement about this. But can I explain why it’s happening? Yes, because the Trustees don’t want to keep getting beat by Carolina.
Get The Chronicle straight to your inbox
Signup for our weekly newsletter. Cancel at any time.