As Knight's foremost (and often lone) critic, Sperber, an English and American studies professor at I.U. for 29 years until a spate of threats from pro-Knight yahoos sent him on a forced sabbatical earlier this year, has come to embody the crusade to eliminate big-time college sports. After the sacking of Knight, Sperber has been hailed as the victor in a modern-day clash between the academy and the locker room, and he's hoping to parlay the hype into a momentum that may radically alter college athletics. Ironically, it may not be for the better; while Sperber's intent is to save the integrity of academics, his agenda recalls a time when university life was the sequestered province of a privileged white elite.

In a sign of just how much higher education has changed in this century, there was no genteel elite to be found when a pack of enraged students marched on I.U. president Myles Brand's residence in the aftermath of Knight's firing -- burning the president in effigy while chanting, "We want beer!" Watching what he called "the riots" from his exile in Montreal, Sperber saw the best type of commercial for his just-released book, "Beer and Circus: How Big-Time College Sports Is Crippling Undergraduate Education." He was witnessing, in his view, nothing less than his thesis come startlingly to life.

"On one level, it was gratifying to have an intellectual theory and then to get caught up in events that bear out that theory," Sperber says. "But it was also disturbing. Those images -- that was pure 'beer and circus.' Don't think for a minute that those students weren't drinking."

In short, Sperber's argument is that big-time collegiate sports subverts undergraduate education because large universities that emphasize research and graduate programs, in an effort to field winning teams, will spend inordinate sums of money on bloated athletic departments rather than on providing quality undergraduate education. Such schools, he asserts, use sports to keep their students happy and drunkenly distracted -- the educational mission of the university be damned.

Sperber paints a not-too-pretty picture of the state of education: Close to 40 percent of undergrads never take English or American lit; 58 percent never take a foreign language; almost a third successfully avoid ever taking a math course. Sperber posits that this is how the administrations of America's universities would have it, that they've created the conditions that led one student to tell Sperber his college education was "a four-year party -- one long tailgater -- with an $18,000 cover charge." This is what "beer and circus" has wrought, Sperber maintains: Binge drinking, cheating in class, huge lecture halls taught by teaching assistants and a faculty that has signed onto a tacit "nonaggression pact" with students so as not to interrupt the ongoing party with football or basketball games at its epicenter.

If Sperber has his way, all this will change. And, thanks to his increasingly high profile courtesy of the Knight imbroglio, he very well might lead the charge. Sperber has helped form the Drake Group, a consortium of academics intent on ending athletic department hegemony on the university campus. (Sperber is joined by, among others, Smith College's Andrew Zimbalist, author of "Unpaid Professionals: Commercialism and Conflict in Big-Time College Sports," and the University of New Haven's Allen L. Sack, coauthor of "Athletes for Hire.")

They are a self-described radical group that favors a return to the low-key style of intercollegiate competition now practiced in the Ivy League and at Division III schools like Emory University in Atlanta and Hamilton College in central New York state (two of Sperber's pet models) where, instead of athletic scholarships, a system of need-based financial aid -- as for any student -- is in place. Their mantra is "no tinkering" and they would release to the public the academic records -- classes taken, but not grades -- of athletes, so as to weed out those who skate through school taking "Mickey Mouse" courses.

Maya Angelou reads from "The Heart of a Woman"