Ex-president’s novel explores college sports tensions

Of the 10,000 or so critical letters that Thomas Ehrlich received during the spring of 1988 while president of Indiana University, there is one that sticks in the memory of the east coast legal scholar’s memory.

“President Ehrlich, I’m 84 years old, I’m in a wheelchair, I live for Indiana basketball. You can take your goddamn bow ties and go back where you belong,” the letter read.

Professor Ehrlich, who had only been in the role a few months, had “crossed swords” with iconic Indiana basketball coach Bob Knight and local fans were showing where their allegiances lay, along with their thoughts on his fashion style.

The tension between academia and college sports is one that the Indiana president emeritus, himself now 90 years old, explores in his first novel, The Search: An Insider’s Novel about a University President.

While the pair later became friends, the character of Buddy Knowland in the novel is loosely based on the “extraordinarily charismatic” but controversial Mr Knight, who won three national championships with the Indiana Hoosiers, and coached Team USA to an Olympic gold medal in 1984.

Now an adjunct professor at the Stanford University School of Education, Professor Ehrlich told Times Higher Education that a lot has changed in college sport since 1988 – but “none of it good”.

With “outsized” budgets of over $250 million (£194 million), football and basketball coaches of the biggest schools earning up to $13 million a year, and players now being paid and spending more time on airplanes than in classrooms, he said it was “scary” how the focus of some institutions has shifted away from academia.

“The players have become gladiators and I think that has a very dangerous and corrosive effect on the academic enterprise of a university,” he added.

The former provost of the University of Pennsylvania and former dean of Stanford Law School said his run-ins with Mr Knight, who died last year, were “very unpleasant”, but otherwise he found that sport mostly enhanced his time as president of Indiana.

In particular, he enjoyed crafting “institutional architecture – the challenge of building a great university into an even greater one”, which sports can help to achieve.

“There really is the festival dimension – the sense of togetherness, particularly in public universities, where I couldn’t walk down a street in Indiana without seeing graduates,” he said.

“They wanted their university to succeed, they’re proud of it, and they also want their teams to win – as did I.”

Professor Ehrlich, who has authored, co-authored or edited 14 non-fiction books, said he hoped that people enjoy his first novel, and get a sense of what it really feels like to be a university president.

“I hope it enhances the worry and the reaction to this dangerous rush of money and the search for money in deeply troubling ways in intercollegiate sports,” he added.

patrick.jack@timeshighereducation.com