Word: sperber
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...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...
...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...
...book out this fall, Beer and Circus: How Big-Time College Sports Is Crippling Undergraduate Education (Henry Holt), Indiana University professor Murray Sperber compares the American university of 2000 with Rome circa A.D. 100. To keep the populace happy, corrupt Emperors used bread and circuses. In the modern university, administrators use beer and circuses--or Division I athletics and the binge drinking that accompanies it--to distract students from their crowded lecture classes and inattentive professors. Sperber argues that the ncaa, the advertisers who profit from college sports and the Animal House undergrads are all complicit in the deteriorating quality...
...Sperber is neither a subtle reader of Murrow's prose nor, despite her Fulbright-scholar background in political science, a decisive analyst of his ideology. She does evoke the shy, moody, sometimes preening yet fiercely loyal man who inspired such admiration and affection. Still, this should not be the conclusive Murrow biography...