Acknowledge the sports-entertainment complex

Duke University professor Charles T. Clotfelter says college faculty and administrators are wrong to ignore the “sports-entertainment complex”:

For reasons that are peculiarly American, universities here have developed commercial-sports enterprises that have no counterpart anywhere else in the world. With clear-eyed rationality, they nourish their sports enterprises year after year because, contrary to their official pronouncements, intercollegiate athletic competition is actually one of their core functions.

After all, he writes:

Google the names of your university’s president and the head football coach, and you will see who gets more coverage.