In May, Murray Sperber fled Indiana University after receiving death threats for his criticism of controversial IU basketball coach Bob Knight.

But today — just a week after Knight was fired — Sperber is back in Bloomington, meeting with his bosses and deciding when to return to teaching at the school where he has worked since 1971.

On his way home this weekend, he stopped at Notre Dame to discuss his experience and his new book.

Sperber may not be the average English professor. He is perhaps America's foremost critic of college athletics and has written four books about the subject.

Last spring, he stepped into the national spotlight when CNN released a tape of Knight choking one of his players and the coach came under review from Indiana. Sperber was the only faculty member at the school to publicly call for the coach's ouster.

That's when his life changed.

"I kept speaking out," he said Friday at Notre Dame's Hammes Bookstore. "And as it came closer to that decision in May, I began receiving lots of threats."

"I see dead people," was written on a pro-Knight Web site in reference to Sperber and other top "enemies" of the embattled coach. And there were more personal attacks, said Sperber, whose phone number is listed in the Bloomington telephone book.

"I began receiving huge amounts of nasty stuff," he said. "And then the fans discovered they could find me by looking in the IU schedule of classes."

Sperber had had enough when an anonymous caller phoned the professor and began reading off the list of his classes and room numbers for the fall semester as well as the tutorials of his freshman English class led by teaching assistants.

"And I suddenly flashed on this vision of one of these lunatics coming flying through the door and there's this young teaching assistant and 25 freshmen and he gets violent," he said. "And so I went to my boss and said `I can't teach under these circumstances.'"

The university offered to put police in his classes, but Sperber, who was a graduate student at a tumultuous Berkeley, Calif. campus in the 1960s, declined. He took a semester's leave of absence and returned to his native Montreal, where, as he put it "no one's ever heard of Bobby Knight."

Sperber was planning to go back to Indiana in the spring to do research, and resume classes next year, but after Knight's firing last week, the professor hopes to return sooner to do what he loves: teaching students.

Sperber admitted, however, that Knight's departure came as a surprise.

"Everyone expected that the end would come at a parking lot in [Purdue's] Mackey Arena," he said. "No one expected it would happen as it happened."

In the past, Sperber, whose first book on college sports was published in 1990, had often been called for press comment about Knight's behavior. This experience attuned him to the media attention his university received and how it was not for academics — for IU's music and journalism programs that are among the best in the country, Sperber noted — but rather for its basketball program and the basketball coach.

"It was Bobby Knight University," Sperber said.

This pointed to a theme that he has preached throughout his career — that athletics overshadows academics at many big-name institutions. This is the subject of the book Sperber was at Notre Dame to promote, "Beer and Circus: How Big-Time College Sports is Crippling Undergraduate Education."

The book's thesis is that large research universities do not value teaching undergraduates, and so those students become alienated and spend much of their time partying. And this leads to an overemphasis on college sports.

"Unfortunately, schools not only neglect undergraduate education, but I think, desperately, they need the tuition dollars undergraduates bring," he said. "This is their main source of income. So they've got to give them something for their money, and increasingly, what it turns out to be is what I call beer and circus — a huge party scene, much of it revolving around college sports."

Notre Dame is not one of these schools, Sperber said. Since the days of Knute Rockne, the University has kept its athletic department under control and remained focused on undergraduate education. And, unlike at some schools, no Notre Dame coach since Rockne has become bigger than the University.

Also, Sperber said, Notre Dame set a good example of how to handle a potential coaching problem when it quietly urged Lou Holtz to resign in 1996. There was never any major public outcry, as happened at Indiana last week, and there was no doubt about who was in charge.

"It shows who controls things," he said.

Unfortunately, Sperber said, Indiana could not follow Notre Dame's example, and this created a lot of problems. The issue became public and the public became galvanized, with some on campus supporting Knight and others backing Indiana president Myles Brand.

These tensions boiled over last week in protests that led to 10 students being arrested and threats against Brand and other administrators.

These problems were an outgrowth of the same ones that led Sperber to flee to Canada.

"Although, from my e-mail and such," the professor said, "I've now become a hero."

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