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All the brains in the world can’t save you from…

…football fuckupery. Of course you expect benighted places like Southern Illinois Carbondale to screw themselves permanently via sports spending; but Berkeley?

Yes. In the midst of hideous budget cutting from the state, Berkeley now admits its absurd projections for private donations to its expensive football stadium renovation have fallen way short.

The nearly half-billion-dollar Cal athletic project encompasses a $321 million renovation of Memorial Stadium that opens Sept. 1 and $153 million for a new multisport training facility. That’s far more than Stanford University spent building a new stadium in 2006.

In public pitches for the project starting in 2006, university officials talked about raising hundreds of millions through an “Endowment Seating Program” that was to endow all 29 of Cal’s varsity sports and more yet by selling naming rights to various components of the stadium… But the economic downturn hindered sales and by November 2010, [the athletic director] had posted online a letter to fans saying she was “heartbroken that the program’s intentions will, in all likelihood, not be fully realized.”

So now UC, its leaders having fallen for typical wish-fulfillment athletic accounting, will stick it to the students, upping tuition and fees and degrading the quality of education in tons of other ways so that a chunk of the little money they’ve got from the state goes to upgrade a football stadium.

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UD thanks Andre.

Margaret Soltan, April 18, 2012 6:55PM
Posted in: sport

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One Response to “All the brains in the world can’t save you from…”

  1. Mike S. Says:

    Don’t forget that Chancellor Birgeneau and Athletic Director Barbour had to quietly dump $78 million over 7 years into DIA just to make it look solvent as a precondition to obtain financing for the renovation.
    Quietly and in violation of UC’s own policies…

    Sadly there appears to be very little interest in this particular matter among the students. It’s easy to whip up a crowd to protest tuition hikes, but everybody KNOWS Cal needs a football team. The conversation usually ends there b/c people cannot be bothered with “nuances”. The suggestion that the stadium renovation was irresponsibly put together gets no traction b/c people don’t want to acknowledge that administration officials and the institution as a whole are just marks for the banks. It’s just too depressing to go about with the knowledge that supposedly smart educated adults running the biggest and best public university are – in reality – subjugated by their own propaganda and group-think blinders. They are totally lacking basic common sense, really.

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