STATE COLLEGE, Pa. _ As educators readied a Penn State lecture hall for last month's Sports Ethics Conference, marketing students half a campus away were scrutinizing Pittsburgh Pirates' customer data, an agricultural class was testing NFL field surfaces, and a kinesiology department lecture focused on drug use in athletics.
At the state's largest university as well as colleges all across the nation, sports have moved beyond their traditional boundaries and into the academic mainstream. Serious educators who once sniffed at sports are now examining the games' intersection with business, history, law, philosophy, literature, journalism and more.
In addition to courses in traditional PSU majors such as physical education and golf course management, students can choose from such classes as Philosophy of Sport; Sports Marketing; Introduction to the Sports Industry; Sports, Media, and Society; Women and Sports; Sports, Ethics, and Literature; and the Historical, Cultural, and Social Dynamics of Sports.
At Penn State, experts say, this trend reflects both America's ongoing obsession with sports and the realities of a campus and a small college town that derive much of their identity from the success of Nittany Lions athletics.
"It makes sense to use sports" as a teaching tool, said John Affleck, who heads Penn State's Curley Center for Sports Journalism, "because our students are really interested in sports. You immediately have their attention."
Affleck recently joined other academics here in sports-related fields to form the Center for the Study of Sports in Society, an effort to synthesize and improve disparate teaching and research efforts.
"Just look at the course I teach," said Steve Ross, a sports law professor and the driving force behind the center. "You can't focus on sports law without knowing what is sound public policy toward sports. And you can't figure out sound public policy without drawing on many disciplines."
And it's not just students and researchers who are benefiting. The NFL and artificial-surface manufacturers profit from _ and often contribute financially to _ turf studies in the College of Agricultural Studies. Marketing students have helped baseball teams understand and solve issues of attendance and promotion. And several strapped news organizations in the state are getting assistance from eager PSU sports journalism students.
This growing connection might even be more pronounced at Penn State if not for the last decade's social earthquakes.
In 2008, the business school had a commitment from ESPN to fund an analytical sports research center. But the recession later that year killed those plans. Three years later, the Jerry Sandusky child-abuse scandal struck, and funding for anything sports-related virtually dried up.
"That just devastated this place," said Wayne DeSarbo, a Business College professor who has linked marketing and analytics courses to sports. "You mentioned sports and people just wanted to run away."
