The University of Oregon – one of the scummier sports schools around – is having a bit of trouble holding aloft the ‘self-supporting’ banner. We don’t take a penny! Our program makes so much money we don’t need to take a penny!
Well, if you’re persistent enough, and don’t mind filing repeated public-records requests, you’ll discover in the fine print at almost every school that claims to be self-supporting all sorts of contractual maneuvers that amount to subsidies.
For instance, UD‘s friend
Bill Harbaugh, an economics professor … filed a public-records request. What turned up was an illuminating “memorandum of understanding” between Pat Kilkenny, former athletic director, and former UO president Dave Frohnmayer that was signed in June 2009, two weeks before Frohnmayer retired.
That memo capped the athletic department’s overhead assessment at 3 percent through June 2012. That is one half the assessment rate charged other UO auxiliaries this year …
For instance:
UO diverted $8.5 million in general fund dollars from 2002-2010 to pay for academic support — including tutoring and counseling — of its athletes.
For instance:
[T]he general fund is picking up 50 percent of the legal costs in defending UO against possible recruiting violations by the football program.
A clean program (UD hasn’t encountered one yet, but assume a clean program) of this sort costs a fortune; a dirty one, like Oregon’s (And pretty much all the others. You know Jerry Tarkanian’s famous saying: “In major college basketball, nine out of 10 teams break the rules. The other one is in last place.”), costs a mega-fortune because of all the court cases and settlements and lawyers. Basically big-time university sports programs are always under threat of sanctions for violations, always being sued by fired coaches, always – see Penn State – defending themselves against criminal conduct accusations, always paying hotshot accountants to hide their bright budgeting ideas (as in the present case), etc., etc. Do you have any idea how much money self-supporting jock schools have to take out of their general funds just to protect their asses from what it means to do business as a big-time university sports team?
That’s the student newspaper at the University of Oregon. UO’s new president, who seems to discern the link between universities and education, has reversed the former president’s decision to move the date of graduation ceremonies to a ridiculous time in order to accommodate a really cool sports event on campus.
Students graduating in spring 2010 will now be able to walk in June’s commencement ceremony knowing they have completed their required courses, because University administrators backed out of a plan to hold the ceremony before spring term final exams.
Students will now turn their tassels June 12, 2010, the date for which commencement was slated before the University announced in December that it would move the ceremony to June 5 to accommodate the NCAA Track & Field Championships scheduled for Hayward Field on June 9-12.
… Critics enfiladed the University for the original date change, saying it was an inconvenience to students that would cut into the hours available to take exams. Biology professor Nathan Tublitz went as far as to write a commentary in the Register-Guard saying the move evinced what he called then-University President Dave Frohnmayer’s commitment to athletics at the expense of academics.
“This decision to prioritize athletics over academics, inconveniencing thousands of students and their parents, might have been excusable were it not the latest in a long line of similar decisions,” Tublitz wrote, going on to question Frohnmayer’s salary and, by implication, his integrity in accepting $265,000 in payment from an unnamed donor through the UO Foundation.
Frohnmayer responded with an angry commentary of his own, accusing Tublitz of factual inaccuracies. “This is not just any track meet,” he wrote, “but the NCAA National Championships – an event that will pump millions of dollars into the local economy and is part and parcel of the rich track and field heritage of the UO.”
The response drew national attention, with Frohnmayer criticized by Inside Higher Ed blogger Margaret Soltan, who accused Frohnmayer of a “tendency to twist or try to suppress the truth.”…
UO MATTERS is a new blog written by anonymous faculty members at the University of Oregon, a school that’s gotten more than its share of negative attention on University Diaries.
The pun in the blog’s title points to matters of importance on campus (an overpaid president, too many administrators, a sports obsession, a budget crisis, anti-intellectualism, etc.) and the basic attitude of concern among the blog’s authors — their university matters, and its betrayal of fundamental academic principles is so severe that these people have gone public.
Reasonably public. The university can be vindictive, so they’ve chosen to remain anonymous.
If you take a look at UO MATTERS, you’ll see that at this point it’s still rather an insider’s document, most of it offering specifics about salaries, cutbacks, distribution of funds, and so forth. UD anticipates that this blog will evolve toward a more public voice, since its issues are the same issues all ill-run universities confront.
UD thanks one of its writers for alerting me to UO MATTERS.