The Paradox of Compulsory Fandom

When he was chancellor of the University of California at Berkeley, the economist Clark Kerr famously quipped in a faculty meeting that his job had devolved into providing parking for the faculty, sex for the students, and athletics for the alumni.

True as this observation may have been when Kerr uttered it in 1958, it is far truer today. When I received my B.A. from the University of Michigan at Ann Arbor in 1982, the total endowment of the entire university was around $115 million. Since then it has shot into the stratosphere — last year it reached a valuation of $17 billion.

It would be hard to overstate the role that sports, and most particularly football, have played in transforming the institution’s finances. Forty years ago it had a modest endowment; today, its endowment rivals that of the oldest and richest universities in the nation. The Victors for Michigan fund-raising campaign, which ran between 2013 and 2018, raised over $5 billion by itself. That this campaign was named after the college’s fight song (“The Victors”) hints at the centrality of college sports in the cementing of institutional loyalties that can later be, as the business-school professors say, “monetized.”

Speaking of which, Michigan’s business school is named after Stephen M. Ross, a real-estate developer and the owner of, among many other things, the NFL’s Miami Dolphins. Ross is a diehard Wolverine fan: In addition to the business school, the entire athletic campus is also named after him. Ross has given hundreds of millions of dollars to the university — and he is one of many extraordinarily rich people whose affections for Michigan’s sports teams in general, and its football program in particular, have inspired them to help build the university’s once modest endowment to its now staggering heights.

It should surprise no one, then, that, per his Twitter account, the university’s incoming president, Santa J. Ono, has spent the weeks since his appointment was announced in July rapidly familiarizing himself with the history of Michigan football, and developing an allegiance to the virtues of the winged helmet at something approaching light speed.

“I’m going to do everything I can to support the coaches and the players to compete at the highest level,” Ono said when he accepted the job. Ono noted that, at his previous university, he had “even been known to actually go in” locker rooms “at halftime and, if the team’s behind, give them a pep talk.” (At the University of Cincinnati, Ono once donned a football uniform and participated in passing drills with the team. He also crowd-surfed at Cincinnati football games).

According to one member of the Board of Regents that hired him for his new job, Ono’s tremendous enthusiasm for the sports teams at his various institutions was a key factor in the board’s decision. Regent Jordan Acker emphasized that Ono was a top pick for every member of the board “because of his ability to surround athletic events with joy.”

“This is a man who clearly loves what he does,” Acker said. “And students know it. Look, you can’t fake authenticity anymore. People will see right through you.” Ono “doesn’t fake it. He has it, he is it. I think that’s why he’s going to be a successful president of this university.”

A cynic might recall the aphorism attributed to, among others, George Burns: The most important thing in acting is honesty — once you’ve learned to fake that, you’ve got it made.

Less cynically, here we encounter what we might call the paradox of obligatory fandom, in the context of the career aspirations of professional university administrators, that requires the more ambitious among them to move from institution to institution as they travel up the academic hierarchical ladder.

Contrast that with genuine fandom. I was 10 years old when I discovered the University of Michigan had a football team — it was November 23, 1969, and the front page of The Ann Arbor News featured roses around its border. My parents were Mexican immigrants, and even though my father worked at the university, I didn’t know what the Rose Bowl was, or that the team was called the Wolverines. I quickly became a devoted — it’s fair to say obsessive — fan of the team, and that obsession has now survived for more than half a century. Curiously, my eventual acquisition of three degrees from the University of Michigan had no effect on my fandom, which was already at peak intensity before I ever set foot in a classroom on the campus.

While genuine fandom grows organically with time, and perhaps eventually fades in a similar way, obligatory administrative fandom operates differently. It is an artificial psychological state, that the adept administrator must stimulate within himself as a matter of synchronizing his new professional identity with the passions that animate the residents and alumni of the institution he has just joined.

Consider in this light the awkward career trajectory of Gordon Gee, who has served two separate tenures as president of Michigan’s football archrival, Ohio State University. (Gee is now in his second tenure as West Virginia University’s president). During his first go-around, Gee committed the horrendous faux pas of referring to a game with Michigan that had just ended in a tie as “one of our greatest wins ever.” Nearly 20 years later, during his second term, Gee (over?)compensated for this by, when asked if he was considering firing the fabulously successful but scandal-ridden head football coach Jim Tressel, by replying, “No, are you kidding? Let me just be very clear. I’m just hopeful the coach doesn’t dismiss me.”

The paradox of obligatory college-sports fandom is a microcosm of a larger, related paradox. Universities are built and maintained, to a significant extent, by institutional loyalty. That is, they are sustained by people who are dedicated to a place not merely because it provides a paycheck, but because their professional and even personal identities become enmeshed with that place, in ways that go beyond merely self-interested economic calculation and professional career advancement.

To be a long-term member of a university community, as traditionally the vast majority of the tenured faculty has always been, is to identify with whatever aspects of the institution seem essential to it, in ways that to at least some extent set it apart from other universities. This goes beyond cheering for the college’s teams, who indeed many faculty members care little or nothing about, except perhaps to the extent that success on the playing field makes tight-fisted state legislators and deep-pocketed donors more likely to bestow their largess on the institution as a whole. But only the most cynical and self-interested longtime faculty member can remain completely immune to the siren call of a more general school spirit. The loyalties to the sports teams of these places are thus often an echo of this deeper and more significant loyalty.

The irony here is that, as professional university administrators become more like top corporate officers, who move from company to company as part of a stylized career progression, universities are run increasingly by people who have no organic connection to institutions that have always depended on precisely those kinds of connections to make them what they are.

It’s no wonder, then, that university presidents now find themselves having to be, as it were, more Catholic than the Pope when it comes to displaying the kind of enthusiasm for the university’s sports teams that serves as a kind of proxy for the far-more-diverse loyalties and enthusiasms that make someone a Princeton Tiger or a Texas Longhorn or a USC Trojan, or, for that matter, a Michigan Wolverine.

I wish President Ono nothing but success in his new venture, and trust that with time the enthusiasm he now displays for the Maize and Blue as a matter of professional obligation becomes as natural to him as it does to those of us who have spent decades enjoying and suffering the peculiar psychological state that is genuine fandom.

After all, we tend to become what we pretend to be — and this can be as true of fandom as of anything else.