By Bill Littlefield

We should be grateful to Rus Bradburd for giving us an opportunity to laugh as the forces of marketing and ignorance steamroll — ominously and without sufficient kickback — across the academic landscape.

Big Time by Rus Bradburd. Etruscan Press, 292 pages

We encounter the “big time” state university in Rus Bradburd’s novel only after its naming rights have been sold to a major brewing company. It’s Coors University now. The members of the History Department are selling popcorn at a football game, hoping to raise enough money to cover their salaries. Criminal justice professors are in charge of security at the game. They dress accordingly, and they carry handcuffs. The English Department has been eliminated. Why? Its professors have balked at their assignment: cleaning the restrooms in the stadium. A few Lit professors have hung around to establish a tent city, where they stage pointless, interminable committee meetings and eat crackers and cheese. It’s hard to blame them. They have nowhere else to go. On the tent city’s best days, people arrange to read to each other and “modern dance students flit about,” suggesting, I guess, that on the fringes of Coors University, education might still be taking place.

But officially, the transformation is complete. Okay, Coors University still has a president. He’s even been named one of “Ten Innovators To Watch” by Business Week. But he reports to the football coach. Most people on campus don’t seem to know the president’s name.

Like a lot of things that have transpired recently, this, too, can happen here. In fact, one challenge that faces Rus Bradburd in this comic novel is transcending the absurdity that has already become the daily routine of big time college sports. It has to be at least a decade since a football player at Ohio State complained about having to attend classes because, as he put it, “We came here to play football, not to play school.”

The struggle at the center of this novel begins to take shape when a couple of professors decide to try to return their university to days of yore, when they didn’t have to ask the football coach’s permission to assign homework. They’re opposed not only by the athletic department, but also by the students, who are all in favor of the campus that’s been transformed into a village of theme pubs. Nor is the press much of an ally. The sellout to Coors “sent ripples through the national media for two days, then it never came up again.” Other state universities are considering selling naming rights to Foxconn, Cigna, Costco, and Walgreens.

So the efforts of Professor Mooney and Professor Braverman come off as heroic, sure…but they also feel doomed, at least until they are joined by Layla Sillimon, a poet whose career received a gigantic boost when Taylor Swift said she liked Sillimon’s first book. Professor Sillimon’s energy and poetic spirit will face a tough test against the Business and Economics departments, producers of “a mound of paper evidence that proved academics were no longer viable without Football and Basketball.” (author’s caps)

Bradburd spent fourteen years as an assistant basketball coach at the University of Texas at El Paso and New Mexico State. Then he changed his mind and did sixteen years as an English professor.  He knows whereof he speaks, and he writes like a guy who’s having an awfully good time warning academics and the rest of us about something we’ve probably already noticed. The future of “big time” college football is being determined and debated these days, as are the future of college basketball, and university education in general. We can be grateful to Bradburd for giving us an opportunity to laugh as the forces of marketing and ignorance steamroller on — ominously and without sufficient kickback — across the academic landscape.

Bill Littlefield’s most recent novel is Mercy (Black Rose Writing)