Bill Pennington writes,

Faculty leaders and university trustees know what they do not like in the current state of collegiate athletics: low graduation rates for athletes in most major sports at the Division I-A level, spiraling athletic costs, the growing interrelationship of commercial interests with athletic departments, and what is often referred to as the embarrassment of bad behavior by college athletes.

The faculty movement to restrain the growth of big-time college sports

had its origins at the University of Oregon, where in 2000 faculty members first learned of an $80 million expansion of the football stadium when they read about it in the local paper. Professors were outraged, especially since academic department budgets had been severely slashed for years, class sizes had ballooned and a study had listed Oregon's faculty as among the lowest paid when compared with institutions of similar size.

I realize that amongst those who watch them, sports create enormous good feeling, which translates into money for the universities, but I still feel the primary mission of universities is academic. But maybe I'm wrong. The admissions officers certainly don't seem to think so. Meanwhile, in the humanities the post-modernist crap means that a lot of college study is a joke, anyway.