Verbal Judo for Beginners

By STEVE LOPEZ

The campus cop has just left. Professor of English Murray Sperber sits in his office at Indiana University, mulling the advice on how to protect himself from hotheads. Sperber, 60, figures he had better take two self-defense courses recommended by the cop, including "Verbal Judo," which is designed to help de-escalate potential violence. When he returns to teaching in January, after sitting out a semester to avoid having his teeth knocked out, his name will not appear on course listings. For his own protection, he'll be Professor Incognito.

Sperber's problem is that he can't keep his mouth shut. He sees corruption and hypocrisy in big-time college sports, and he writes books that land like cluster bombs, sparing no one. He sees universities spending gazillions on new stadiums and practice facilities while stiffing undergraduate education, and he papers academia's ivory towers with the evidence. It's been a virtuous crusade, but Sperber made one blasphemous mistake along the way. In May he called for I.U. to fire radioactive, chair-tossing basketball coach Bobby Knight.

Taking on Knight in Indiana was like walking the streets of Baghdad with a sign saying SADDAM MUST GO. It didn't matter that there was a tape of Knight in a meltdown, making like the Boston Strangler on a former player. The 1997 incident, replayed endlessly when the tape surfaced last spring, brought outrage in Indiana. Not outrage aimed at Knight, whose three championships had always served as penance for his sins, but at Sperber, who had the gall to say it was time for Knight to go. Not to quibble, but it might have been time in 1988, when Knight compared the stress of coaching to sexual assault, saying, "If rape is inevitable, relax and enjoy it."

Eventually Knight did go, fired in September after another incident in which he laid a hand on a student. The firing led to a near riot on campus, but Sperber was forced out long before then. "I see dead bodies," said a message on a website that named Sperber and other Knight critics. "I got a call at home from someone who said if I didn't shut my mouth, he was going to shut it for me," Sperber says. On campus one day, a student offered to rearrange his smile. "But the most disturbing thing was finding out my class schedule had been downloaded by Knight fans planning to disrupt my classes."

So Sperber took this semester off, and only after Knight's firing did he consider a return. "I felt silenced, and I missed teaching," he says. After 29 years at I.U., he'll teach two "stealth courses," as he calls them. Students won't know in advance that their teacher is the anti-Knight. "Murray's a good guy and a great teacher," says student Heather Dinich, 21, who welcomes his return.

Before being exiled to purgatory, Sperber promoted his latest book, Beer and Circus: How Big-Time College Sports Is Crippling Undergraduate Education. The book is a withering indictment of universities that overemphasize graduate research and high-profile sports, offering the beer-soaked culture of the latter as a substitute for a real education. Sperber says most athletic programs lose money, despite scads of TV revenue, because of an "athletics arms race" in which coaches are paid millions and there is no end to the construction of athletic temples. Meanwhile, if Johnny can't hear the teacher despite paying a small fortune in tuition and fees, maybe it's because he's 50 yards away from the graduate assistant who's filling in for a real professor in a class of 150 students.

Sperber is no pointy head. He's an ex-jock and longtime sports nut, which is one reason he demands higher standards in college athletics. But he knows there's more talk of the I.U. basketball team's lousy start without Knight (2-3 as of last week) than of the issues he raises in his book. No one is rooting for the team like Sperber, who fears that more losses might bring out the Knight posse. At dinner one night with his wife, Sperber warily eyes a man approaching his table and wonders if he'll need to try some verbal judo. "I support what you're doing," the man says quietly, and Sperber relaxes. A moment of sanity in Bloomington.