So here’s the deal. The New York Times’ Frank Bruni is still carrying around campus a monastic model of the university. Haven! Really? From what? The University of Texas is a massively profitable sports empire with classrooms.
“All this marketing and globalization of big-time sports entertainment based at public universities has invaded and transformed the whole politeia of the university,” said UT classics professor Thomas Palaima. “Students come to campus now not feeling awe at the prospect of learning and investigating truths about our world and ourselves but to get ready for game day and have a ‘college experience’ and then get a job.”
Palaima said he had recently walked past the University Co-Op, a campus institution, and thought the storefront an apt metaphor for what critics believe are the school’s misplaced priorities. “(It) was entirely given over to images of footballs and Longhorns souvenirs,” he said. “Not a book in sight or any suggestion that there was a center of learning across the street.”
You wanna watch out for that politeia. Once you hand it over to yahooiae, you can kiss your theater of ideas goodbye.
And Texas is ground zero, ain’t it? Know how Baylor University families celebrate graduation? Dodging bullets at the local war zone. Hard keeping the noise down in the library.
October 5th, 2015 at 8:11AM
HGTV’s Fixer Upper shows a more humane and literate side of Waco and environs. There are nice people living middle class lives of decency there, if that program is to be believed. (Sometimes you need a break from all of the craziness.) I have no connection to the program and have never set foot in Texas.
October 5th, 2015 at 5:41PM
“The University of Texas is a massively profitable sports empire with classrooms.”
One of the things UD, sportswriters, and university presidents regularly get wrong is this. At the typical BCS school, the sports empire is not massively profitable. It’s often not profitable at all. The typical revenue from a football team represents less than 2-4 percent of the total revenue of the entire university, and often its revenue does not even cover the cost of the football team, much less the whole rest of the sports empire.
If ever there was a case where smart people let the tail wag the dog, it’s higher education. Research and tuition is the big dog. The sports empire is a pimple.
October 5th, 2015 at 6:53PM
@Anon, U of TX is not your typical BCS schoo/program. ESPN is paying $11 million per year for twenty years for the right to broadcast Longhorn athletics.
usatoday30.usatoday.com/…08-11-texas-longhorn-network…
To receive $220 million for the inconvenience of a having a bunch of electronic contraptions set up around your athletic venues is not a pimple. But the money does demand that U of TX create a marketable product. It would be far more difficult for the U of TX to receive that kind of research scratch, given that government academic subsidies are falling.
http://www.itif.org/files/2011-university-research-funding.pdf
It’s apparent why so many unis have fallen head first into the party model of school administration…
October 5th, 2015 at 7:19PM
Anon: True of many schools, but not true of Texas. The recent dust-up over the athletic director who was perfectly honest about the commercial entity UT has become (he was finally forced out — too commercial!) revealed just how profoundly that school has become a sports venture.
When I say this, I mean to say something similar to what Felix Salmon says when he calls Harvard “a hedge fund with an educational institution attached.” No one’s denying that tuition-paying and sponsored research happens at UT; what people like Salmon and Palaima and I are suggesting is that these institutions’ identities are in the process of shifting toward massive money acquisition, either through massive endowment hoarding for its own sake ($36 billion in Harvard’s case) or through the acquisition and retention of massive commercial sports funds (when you say that schools like UT aren’t massively profitable, you overlook the fact that the way many athletic departments do accounting guarantees that almost all of that money fails to show up as profit – it’s put back into the sports program, pays for massive coach salaries/buyouts, pays for scandal cleanup – a reliable source of big expenditure at all big sports schools – new stadiums, lawsuits galore – etc. etc.).
The arms race plus the moral wreckage of university sports guarantees that little profit will ever be made by anyone anywhere. I call UT massively profitable because it is – it just dispenses most of the money immediately in ways that have nothing to do with running a university – in ways which arguably undermine the university as an academic institution. We saw this process most dramatically at work when Penn State had to pay out close to $200 million because of Sandusky. You need quite the rainy day fund when you can anticipate glitches like that in your sports program.
This sort of sums it up:
October 7th, 2015 at 6:35PM
Pointing out that UT is the anomaly, of course, makes my point. Most university sports empires are not profitable in a given year. And, if we were to look at them over multiple years, as opposed to just the temporary period when revenue peaks for a successful year, even fewer are profitable long-term.
If we are going to get into the accounting gimmicks, then we have to also throw on the scale that these empires are treated as nonprofits, do not pay their primary workforce a single dollar in wages or salaries, and hide millions of dollars of capital costs in other areas of the University budget.
Any reasonable economic analysis would show that the vast majority of these sports empires are a) A minute fraction of total university revenues and b) not in any sense of the word, profitable.
I’ll take noted sports economist Andrew Zimbalist’s opinion over Deadspin 8 days a week: http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/money-and-march-madness/interviews/andrew-zimbalist.html
October 7th, 2015 at 7:12PM
Anon: All good points. I think part of the problem here is your focus on dollars only. What I and the two other writers I cite are concerned about is not merely how much money sports at a much-imitated school like Texas makes or doesn’t make. We all know that plenty of money that could be used to support academic programs is diverted to sports at many schools. We all know that the lure of big tv money makes universities do all sorts of stupid and destructive things.
We’re just as interested in the corruption of universities by sports and sports-related money (See the University of Iowa’s deal with a beer company – they had to walk it back after people complained. Or see the fallout when a school desperate for someone to buy naming rights to its stadium sold them to a for-profit prison — a decision that also had to be walked back.) The commercialization that Palaima talks about, the commercialization people who look at Oregon’s football/Nike program talk about – however minute a fraction of revenues sports are (or are made to appear), they are an immense reputational drain on many schools. The larger the UT sports empire gets, the more other schools are going to go after that, and the more they, like UT, will look like commercial rather than educational entities. That was the main point I was trying to make.