Education
Ph.D., sociology, Pennsylvania State University
B.A., University of Notre Dame
About Allen
Dr. Sack was named Professor Emeritus after teaching at the University of New Haven for 41 years. Dr. Sack earned his a Ph.D. in sociology from Pennsylvania State University and a B.A. from the University of Notre Dame where he played on Ara Parseghian’s 1966 National Championship football team.
He is the Immediate Past President of the Drake Group, a faculty-controlled advocacy organization whose mission is to defend academic integrity in college sports. He also served as the Director of the federally-funded Center for Athletes Rights and Education (CARE) in the early 1980s. CARE was co-sponsored by the National Football Players Association and the National Conference of Black Lawyers.
He has published extensively in scholarly journals on topics ranging from soccer and ethnic cleansing in the Balkans, to sport marketing and the role of sport in economic development. He has presented papers at countless scholarly conferences and written several books. Over the past decades he has been a leader in efforts to bring big-time college sport into line with its stated academic mission. Dr. Sack recently met with the U.S. Secretary of Education and others to support a bill proposed by Congressman Jim Moran of Virginia to create a President’s Blue Ribbon Commission on collegiate sports.
As a public intellectual, Dr. Sack has written numerous guest columns and op-ed articles for news papers such as the New York Times, The Los Angeles Times, The Christian Science Monitor, The New York Daily News, The Indianapolis Star, The Hartford Courant, The Chronicle of Higher Education, and Inside Higher Education. He has made appearances on shows like Good Morning America, The McNeal Lehrer Report, CNN, The Big Ten Net Work, ESPN Classic, Outside the Lines, and on over one hundred radio networks. His most recent article on college sports appears in Transparency International’s Global Corruption Report.