Two starkly different worlds coexist today within American higher education. One is the traditional academic world that conforms to the succinct statement offered by economists Claudia Goldin and Lawrence Katz: “The business of colleges and universities is the creation and diffusion of knowledge.” Because American research universities have excelled in these functions, today they enjoy global preeminence. Yet there is another world within American universities, just as firmly rooted, that bears no obvious relation to the first. It is the world of big-time college sports, a form of entertainment that has over the course of a century enmeshed itself in the American higher-education scene, becoming part of the popular conception of the “collegiate” experience.

To appreciate the gulf that divides these two worlds, it is instructive to visit the campus of a university that has a big-time sports program. Let us take a quick virtual tour of one of these – the sprawling campus of the University of Texas in Austin. It will be sufficient for our purposes to visit just two buildings on that campus.

The first stop on our tour is a five-story building that is home to the Center for Nano- and Molecular Science and Technology. This brick and concrete building houses offices, equipment, and laboratories used by scientists and engineers. The professors affiliated with this center come from departments like chemistry and biochemistry, physics, biomedical engineering, chemical engineering, electrical and computer engineering, and mechanical engineering.