“Dear President Ehrlich,
“I’m 84 years old. I’m in a wheelchair. I live for Indiana basketball, and you can take your [expletive] bow ties and go back to where you belong.”
This is only one of 10,000 handwritten notes the wide-eyed, first-time president Thomas Ehlrich received as president of Indiana University after the late Bob Knight, three-time NCAA champion head coach of the men’s basketball team and Hoosiers legend, considered going elsewhere.
This altercation and several others showed Ehrlich the early signs of the trouble university presidents were heading into regarding the power struggle between academics and athletics on Division I university campuses.
Three decades removed from his tenure, student-athletes-turned-NIL millionaires and multi-billion-dollar network deals are hard-cash examples of how emphatically college sports have continued to steamroll U.S. culture—and colleges’ research and academic missions.
“That’s the kind of funding that dangerously skews the purposes and place of universities in our country today,” Ehrlich says on the latest episode of the University Business Podcast.
The money-motivated dissolution of the PAC-12 is transforming student-athletes into “gladiators,” Ehrlich adds. “When players spend more time on airplanes than they do in the classroom, that’s deeply troublesome.”
President moves: Wave of retirements opens opportunity for new hires
But external pressure on today’s president extends far beyond the football field or basketball court. The protests over the Israel-Hamas war that have rattled colleges and universities over the last year are similar to student demonstrations against apartheid South Africa in the 90’s.
“There are new issues here with intense political overtones,” he says, “but they’re not brand new.”
Ehrlich, now an adjunct professor at Stanford University, chronicles the complexity and nuance of these increasing external pressures on presidents in his new fictional book “The Search: An Insider’s Novel about a University President.”
“I hope presidents can find in their positions the joy that I found. I loved being the president, not at every minute of every day, of course. No job gives you every minute of every day.”
You can listen to this episode at any time on Spotify, Amazon Music, Apple Podcasts, Podbean or down below.
