… relentlessly unmasks that university’s sports lies (background here). Like Reed Olsen at Missouri State University, Killingsworth is part of a special breed of university professor: A smart economist able to detect all of the bs universities put out about how lucrative big-time sports on campus are (or will be; it’s almost always got to be will be). So for instance, in a recent opinion piece, Killingsworth writes:
Its report to the NCAA shows that the subsidy to [Rutgers] athletics is $28 million: $18.5 million from discretionary university funds and another $9.5 million from student fees. None of these funds are earmarked for athletics — the university is free to spend those dollars on anything it wants, or even hand them back to students and their families as tuition reductions. All told, the subsidy amounts to almost $1,000 for each undergraduate. The student fees alone work out to almost $330 per undergraduate.
Nevertheless, Rutgers officials from [President] Barchi on down repeatedly refer only to the $18.5 million in discretionary funds as a subsidy. They never mention student fees. Sayonara! $9.5 million in subsidies conveniently disappear.
Killingsworth barely touches on the reputational costs to Rutgers of its absolutely endless athletics scandal. He doesn’t need to.
June 12th, 2013 at 10:22PM
Thanks for the addition of the link in the recent post. But just to note the more general phenomenon I was talking about . . . To lead us to the Killingsworth piece you cite, the natural thing to do would be to highlight the phrase “in a recent opinion piece” with the hyperlink. Instead, you highlight the phrase “Its report to the NCAA shows” . . . now, reading that, I would assume that following the hyperlink would lead me to the Rutgers report, not the Killingsworth piece about it. Just an example of how to make hyperlinking more user-friendly. Thanks, regardless, for the coverage.
September 11th, 2015 at 9:31AM
[…] board meetings with people like himself. He doesn’t wanna know from his school’s massively catastrophic overspending on athletics, and he certainly doesn’t wanna threaten his classiness (doctor, […]