'The [Duke lacrosse] incident, straddling at once the quintessential social flashpoints of race, class and gender, has led community and university leaders to fear that the progress they have made in recent years in improving their relationship will be swept away in the storm'.

‘Athletic departments at taxpayer-funded universities nationwide receive more than $1 billion in student fees and general school funds and services, according to an Indianapolis Star analysis of the 2004-05 athletic budgets of 164 of the nation's 215 biggest public schools. Without such outside funding, fewer than 10 percent of athletic departments would have been able to support themselves with ticket sales, television contracts and other revenue-generating sports sources. Most would have lost more than $5 million.

Additionally, taxpayers indirectly subsidize athletic departments because college sports are exempt from federal taxes, based on their tie to education. The exemption particularly benefits big schools, which receive up to 40 percent of their athletic revenue from donations, most of which are tax-deductible. At Indiana University, for example, donations constitute 21 percent of revenue; at Purdue, 27 percent.

Also untaxed is the massive amount of television money that fuels college sports. All told, that's hundreds of millions of untaxed dollars.

Critics find this inappropriate. They say college sports have largely become a business of mass entertainment -- such as this weekend's Final Four in Indianapolis-- that shouldn't receive an education-based tax exemption. In a time of rising tuition and stagnant state support for higher education, they say sports shouldn't be propped up by so much money generated outside athletic departments. Some students have fought sports-targeted fees, including at IU, which will discontinue the requirement for the 2006-07 school year.

"The subsidies grossly overestimate the role of intercollegiate athletics in higher education," said Andrew Zimbalist, a Smith College professor and leading sports economist. "This should be something that absorbs a much smaller share of outside resources."



…The average deficit [across schools] is $5.7 million. Among the money-losers were Indiana and Purdue, and two schools in this weekend's Final Four, UCLA and George Mason.

Economists who studied The Star's findings cautioned that comparing bottom lines is difficult because of inconsistencies in what schools report. They also stressed that no accounting form is perfect.

At the same time, many thought at least some of the deficits were probably greater. They were skeptical that athletic departments fully accounted for the use of services funded by the general university, including administrative time and services.



…College sports have been tax-exempt since schools began competing in the late 1800s. The NCAA was granted the same exemption in 1956, when it was just starting to learn about the commercial potential of televised football.

Now, critics say, sports have strayed too far from their nonprofit purpose of education to qualify as a charity. They note that the NCAA pays high salaries -- Brand makes $870,000 -- and competes with for-profit pro sports leagues in areas such as television and sponsorships.

"In the case of big-time college sports, the activity itself is becoming increasingly non-educational," said University of New Haven Professor Allen Sack, a starter on Notre Dame's 1966 national champion football team. "But as long as Myles Brand can argue that the University of Michigan is under the same umbrella as (small schools such as) Wesleyan University, he can cloak the issue."



…Questions have also been raised about the general university money that finds its way to athletics. Some economists and accountants are skeptical that everything shows up on the athletic budget -- for instance, use of the university attorney and rent for buildings.



…Zimbalist, who has published 14 books, including "Unpaid Professionals: Commercialism and Conflict in Big-time College Sports," said, "I don't think there's any empirical evidence that says the overall quality of a school improves as a result of having a Division I athletic team or even a successful Division I team." '

'Of course, the Duke stuff is big news. I hate the lacrosse guys. When I was at Duke they were your standard lacrosse players, but I think they've gotten [. . .] worse. When we go down every year for a football game, we see them because for every football game they show up dressed in leather and all this S&M gear. It's really fucked up. The first time we were down there, a bunch of them [. . .] were bombed [and] came by our tailgate and tried to steal our beer. So I'm not shocked to see those assholes do something like this.'

' Before UC Santa Cruz Chancellor Denice Denton moved into her university-provided house on campus last year, she demanded dozens of improvements …


...The $30,000 dog run has already been a point of controversy. UC President Robert Dynes told lawmakers last month that it was supposed to cost only $7,000, but said the project "got out of whack." '

'If jocks rule [at Landon], the boys who play lacrosse now are kings. The game, played with netted sticks and a hard rubber ball, can be as violent as football but with fewer pads. It requires the finesse of soccer and adds the brutality of rugby.

In the last two decades, coach Robinson “Rob” Bordley has built the squad into a national powerhouse. Lacrosse Magazine named it the top team in the country in 2000 and 2001. At the time of the cheating scandal, Landon had not lost a conference game in ten years.

Landon attracts promising students who want to excel at sports. Lacrosse stars get into Princeton, Duke, and the University of Virginia. Lacrosse helps the school raise big money from alumni.

"What brings in money better than a great sports team?” says one alum and donor to the school. “It’s not that they had a great school play but that they won the big game. Right or wrong, it’s true.”


...Alumni, students, and parents interviewed for this article say cheating is not unusual at Landon. Pressure to get good grades is high; the boys know one another well and want to help out; and the faculty is not eager to catch cheaters and turn them in. Adding to the pressure are strict grading policies that make it hard to maintain high grade averages.

“I certainly had the impression there was a culture of cheating when I was there,” says film producer Castaldi. “I failed a Spanish class that others got through by cheating.”

Says Damon Bradley: “More often than cheating, we run into plagiarism from the Internet. Cheating is not something we see in large numbers by any means.”

Cheating has become enough of a problem that a businessman who sent several sons to Landon was moved to write a six-page letter to the school’s board of trustees early this year. Most of his boys had had positive experiences there, but one had been expelled for cheating. The man, a former member of Landon’s board, had investigated.

“Without exception, everyone we talked with told us that there was widespread cheating throughout Landon,” he wrote. All of his sons “over a fifteen-year period of time said that cheating was rampant in each of their classes and had gotten worse over the years.”

The board never responded to the letter; board chair Henry Dudley refused the letter writer’s request to appear before the board on the grounds that it would set a bad precedent.'

'I listened to the news from France, and sighed over the latest outbreak of self-destructive, irrational protest playing out on the streets of Paris.

[T]ake a look at the placards, listen to the shouted slogans. This is a reactionary revolution, demanding not change, but its opposite. The students want to turn back the clock to the France of their parents, and grandparents - to some golden age, when jobs were for life and the state took care of all ills. This is militant, car-burning nostalgia.

…Reading the Belgian press yesterday morning - I could not read the French newspapers, because they were on strike - I came across an opinion piece by one Céline Moreau, "youth co-ordinator" of the FGTB, a trade union.

Her piece picked up the great buzz-word of the current French protests, "précarité" -which means something like bleak uncertainty, and carries a sense of horror at life outside the state's swaddling embrace.

Ms Moreau heaped scorn on the trial work contract that is at the heart of the French protests. This contract, she wrote, sprinkling her text with exclamation marks, allows an employer to hire a young worker for a trial period of two years, and allows them to be fired without explanation!

How could one plan any life decisions in such a world, she asked. "How could anyone contemplate major life changes - moving into their own home, having a child, asking for a loan - if they were in such a total state of uncertainty?"

I have shocking news for Ms Moreau. Millions of young Americans wake up each morning, knowing they can be fired without reason. Those same Americans will move halfway across the country, without blinking, for a better job, a bigger house, even better weather. Tellingly, "precarious" Americans are more prepared to have children than Europeans.'

'The trouble with the WB series "The Bedford Diaries" isn't the sex, it's the curriculum.

The courses at Bedford, a fictional college campus in New York City, include an elective seminar titled "Sexual Behavior and the Human Condition" (video diaries, not Havelock Ellis) and a survey course, "Urban Public Health" (Valtrex, not Venetian canals). The only hint of a Western canon in the premiere is a course that mentions 17th-century Spanish portraiture. (At least it's the Prado, not Prada.)

But basically, "The Bedford Diaries" is Harold Bloom's nightmare...

…All of [the main characters] enroll in the hottest course on campus, the seminar on sexuality taught by Prof. Jake Macklin (Matthew Modine), who calls his classroom a forum for "revelation and personal exploration." In each episode, at least one of the students makes an intimate video confession as part of the class work. Professor Macklin also makes a video diary about his own sex life…'

After AIDS was identified and had claimed hundreds of lives in New York and San Francisco, Bruce went through a period of severe anxiety, in which the slightest symptom seemed a harbinger of death. He was scrupulous about practicing safe sex with hustlers, not so much to protect himself from them as vice versa. He applied a ritualistic standard of cleanliness to his sexual encounters. In all moral dilemmas or debates he explicitly invoked the standards of “the ethical Jew,” here above all. As the years passed, he showed no signs of illness and remains healthy today. But I will never forget a daffy exchange in 1984 as I drove him from Manhattan to Syracuse for our twentieth high-school reunion, the first time we had seen our WASP sirens and tyrants since graduation. Somewhere between Albany and Utica on the Thruway, I tried to distract him from his obsessive examination of his dry skin patches and minutely swollen armpit glands. Listening to the radio, I vaguely asked him, apropos of nothing, “Did Pat Benatar have a nose job?” He peevishly shot back, “Does she have a face? They don’t operate on mice.”

'Here are some papers that were delivered at the annual CCCC (Conference on College Composition and Communication). With so many college students graduating without the ability to compose a coherent paragraph, one might assume the focus of the convention would fall upon writing skills and rhetorical structures. But for a fair portion of the entries, we get something else.

One paper is entitled “‘Register Your Penis’: Using Critical Discourse Analysis to Uncover Gender Conflict,” and the description runs, “As part of a larger thesis, this paper focuses on the “Penis Registry,” an activity introduced by CSU, Chico’s Women’s Center in support of Take Back the Night (TBTN), a nationwide university event . . .”

Here’s another one, showing us that there is no topic to which the race isue may not be applied: “Race, Rhetoric and the Digital Divide: From Digital Writing to Blogging.” And this: “Classroom and Race Issues for Building Community,” and this: “alternative Rhetorics: Postcolonial, Race, Womanist.”

And what would a general humanities conference be without something on the Middle East, as in: “Rhetoric and the Question of Palestine,” with a description containing the requisite sneer quotes--"The continuing saga of violence and bitterness known as the ‘Israel-Palestine conflict’ is less a matter of contested land than it is a matter of contested reality, framed in rhetorics that lead to radically different moral conclusions.”

And, to display hipness, we need some pop culture stuff, if only to show our appreciation of its subversive potential. Here is “Disturbing the Peace: Hip Hop as Theory, Politics, and Pedagogy,” and also “Rhetorics of Reception: Three Cases from Popular Culture” (two of them being the films Barbershop and Million Dollar Baby).

And, finally, for the political slant, there is a panel on “Towards A Progressive Politic in High School English Classrooms in Chicago.” Can one imagine a session at CCCC that begins “Towards a Conservative Politic”? '

USC President Steven B. Sample has resigned his relatively new seat on the board of the J. Paul Getty Trust, citing conflicting duties.

In a three-sentence resignation letter dated Feb. 28, Sample said his responsibilities to USC "make it impossible for me to continue" as a Getty trustee. His resignation was effective immediately, and he declined to comment Tuesday.

Sample joined the Getty board in September 2004. Trustees typically serve four-year terms. A series of controversies in recent months — including a continuing probe by the state attorney general and the resignation of the trust's President Barry Munitz on Feb. 10 — have made being a Getty trustee a thornier job.

Since Munitz's departure, veteran Getty administrator Deborah Marrow has served as interim president.

Getty spokesman Ron Hartwig said the trust's board "will be having discussions" about the search for a new president at its next meeting in May, "but they've not yet begun that process."

Cinderella's Dirty Secret
College basketball's little guys are
just as corrupt as the powerhouses.

By Jacob Leibenluft


The big story of this year's NCAA Tournament has been the rise of the "little guys." Small-fry programs like Bradley, George Mason, and Wichita State have knocked off traditional powers like Kansas and North Carolina. Not only have these upset victories been fun to watch, we're also told that they represent the triumph of virtue in college sports.

"The better the little guys play, the better it is for the tournament and college basketball," wrote the Washington Post's John Feinstein. "We've long since lost our belief in the myth of the 'amateur student-athlete,' " explained ESPN.com's Tim Keown. "But once a year, Northwestern State hits a 3 at the buzzer and we believe again. We root for Bradley and George Mason because they're good stories, and because they seem a bit purer than the bulk of the field." The Chicago Sun-Times' Greg Couch even argued that Bradley's victory brought about the "return of innocence" to the sports world.

Let's take a closer look at Bradley University, that great restorer of innocence. Patrick O'Bryant, the Braves' 7-foot-tall NBA prospect, was suspended for eight games earlier this year for accepting money for work he never did. Three other Bradley players were found to have accepted excessive payments. (The school claimed the players didn't realize they were receiving too much money.) After the Braves' second-best player, Marcellus Sommerville, transferred from the University of Iowa in 2003, his father told the Peoria Journal-Star that Bradley coaches engaged in illegal tampering, encouraging Sommerville to switch schools while he was still enrolled at Iowa. Starting point guard Daniel Ruffin was forced to sit out his freshman year when the NCAA refused to accept his test scores.

At least Bradley graduates 73 percent of its players—a figure many of its fellow Cinderellas can't come close to matching. The plucky Wisconsin-Milwaukee Panthers, who dominated Oklahoma in the first round, have a graduation rate of 28 percent. Bradley's Missouri Valley Conference rivals at Wichita State (50 percent) and Northern Iowa (30 percent) don't fare much better. Only two schools in this year's tournament failed to graduate any black players that enrolled as freshmen between 1995 and 1998 (the most recent period for which data is available): Northern Iowa and Nevada, both mid-majors. By contrast, four schools managed to graduate 100 percent of their players in that same period. Three of them are the basketball factories Illinois, Florida, and Villanova; the other is the Patriot League's Bucknell, which only started awarding basketball scholarships three years ago.

Much of the little guys' appeal comes from the fact that the players don't turn pro after their sophomore year and the coaches don't get paid big bucks. But that has less to do with morals than opportunity. Mid-major players don't emerge fully formed from a magical peach-basket-laden gym in rural Indiana, ready to hoop it up and hit the books with equal enthusiasm. They come from the same shady prep schools and junior colleges as the major-conference studs—they're just not quite good enough to get recruited by the top-tier teams. (Sometimes they even come from the major-conference schools. Wichita State has players who once suited up for Illinois and Marquette.) And there's no more mercenary figure in sports than the mid-major coach. Every year, a small-time coach or three—Kent State's Stan Heath, Nevada's Trent Johnson, Wisconsin-Milwaukee's Bruce Pearl, the Tulsa coach du jour—happily parlays a tournament run into an opportunity with a big fish.

What separates the mid-majors from college basketball royalty isn't scholar-athlete purity. It's two more tangible things: history and money. Mostly money. What happens when a mid-major gets flush with dough? It morphs into Gonzaga, a school that quickly and eagerly adopted the same skewed priorities as its big-time brethren. Constant hype on ESPN? Check. A recruiting scandal in the recent past? Check. A coach that gets paid more than twice as much as the university president? Check.

If Duke and UConn are the Yankees and Red Sox of college basketball, then Bradley and Wichita State are the NCAA's Royals and Tigers. They have less money and less talent than the sport's bluebloods, but that doesn't make them any more honest. Upsets make the NCAA Tournament great because they're unexpected. Just stop telling me that Cinderella's heart is pure.

A business professor at the University of Southern California was arrested on Friday by the FBI on charges of swindling students and others in a real estate fraud, the U.S. Attorney's Office said.

Barry Landreth, who had taught real estate finance and development at the university, stole at least $1.5 million in the first 10 months of 2005, telling students and other investors he would buy land in Chicago and Las Vegas and then sell it for large profits, an FBI affidavit said.

Instead, he transferred all the money into his personal account without buying the land, the FBI said.

Landreth was arrested at his home, where he kept a stable of show horses.

The university said in a statement Landreth had worked part-time at the school. Most recently, he taught a course in the Marshall School of Business and was currently on administrative leave.

When will these [March Madness] players attend class? Will they be studying physics on the bench during timeouts? Will they be arguing about the Protestant Reformation while practicing layups? I don't think so. Doesn't it bother anyone - their parents, their professors, university officials - that they are missing nearly a month of school?

…I work out daily and avidly follow the New York professional teams. As a teacher, I encourage my students to play something - anything.

But I don't support college teams. The whole environment seems unseemly to me. It would be nice if players practiced for a couple of hours after classes and had a weekly Friday night game. But that world disappeared long ago, if it ever existed.

Today's "amateur" college game forbids players from collecting endorsements, but it allows coaches to serve as hosts on television shows, incorporate their clinics and moonlight for companies such as Nike, which pays a handful of big-name coaches between $120,000 and $200,000 yearly to distribute free shoes to their players. And what happens to the players?

Many of the players weren't "college material" when they were admitted. And not only were they admitted, but many were given scholarships (blocking out deserving students who actually wanted an education). Only a tiny percentage make it to the pros. And the others? I shudder to think.

In the wonderful documentary "Hoop Dreams," which followed the lives of two basketball players during their school years, there was a particular scene that drew great laughter from the movie audience. One of the high school players, a sad, inarticulate, lost young man, was asked what he wanted to major in at college. Head down, he mumbles, "Communications."

Shleifer [...] played sometimes indistinct and overlapping roles as he lobbied in favor of his projects and advised both the United States and Russia while making investments for his own personal gain, all the while presenting himself as independent analyst and author. The endowment funds of both Harvard and Yale gained access to valuable investments through networks inhabited by Shleifer and/or his currency-trading wife. His investments in Russia, which he does not deny, included securities, equities, oil and aluminum companies, real estate, and mutual funds -- many of the same areas in which he was being paid to provide impartial advice.

[T]he strange saga of Harvard's involvement in US aid to Russia in the 1990s is more than a scandal about Summers and Harvard. The case illustrates the overall failure of the US accountability system.... [It illustrates] the web of interconnections that enabled Harvard economist Andrei Shleifer, a friend of then Treasury official Lawrence Summers, and a close-knit group of Russians and Americans to largely shape US economic aid policy and Russian economic "reforms" while managing virtually the entire nearly $400 million US flagship economic aid project. Summers helped Shleifer and Harvard gain noncompetitive government awards through arrangements that were highly unusual in foreign aid contracting at the time, according to US officials.

This maze of networks guaranteed the Harvard players their success in the 1990s. It also enfeebled the multiple investigations of their activities during the same period. Although the US Justice Department filed suit in 2000 (following a three-year investigation), alleging that Shleifer and Harvard had conspired to defraud the US government, the case came to a head only last summer with a negotiated settlement that required the university to pay $26.5 million in fines and Shleifer to pay $2 million. And despite being versed in Summers's entanglements, in 2001, the Harvard Corporation, with sole authority to hire and fire the Harvard president, appointed him the university's president....The Harvard case points to the failure of modern democracy to adapt its monitoring and accountability systems to a new breed of players exemplified by Shleifer.

Tenure-track faculty members teach only 40 percent of classes in the University of Pennsylvania's School of Arts and Sciences, according to a report by a graduate-student union at Penn that has been fighting for university recognition. Lecturers on short-term contracts teach almost the same amount, the report says.

As a result, the group argues, students at Penn are not getting the education they are paying for.

"Confidential to parents: drop the 40 large per annum on a liberal arts college education for your kids instead."

Depending on where you look, Washington State University head baseball coach Donnie Marbut claims to have a master's degree, a teaching certificate or both.

In reality, he has neither.

He's lauded in official team biographies as a university baseball MVP, most inspirational player and all-conference infielder.

None of that is true either.

And there are other issues in Marbut's past that raise questions, a Seattle Times investigation has found.



[Before we get into the details: UD does wonder when the bullshit about university sports and character building is going to end. Many universities have given themselves over to liars, crooks, and conmen like Marbut. The only thing special about this case is that the university knows and acknowledges what he is but remains steadfast in its love for him.]


At Edmonds Community College, where Marbut coached until 2003, he used the school's facilities for his own gain, and witnesses say he took cash from groups that used the college fields. In another instance, he submitted a phony invoice to get Edmonds to pay for protein powder for players — a purchase the college had warned him was improper.

Marbut denied any financial improprieties. Of the false academic and athletic claims, he said some were errors by others, some he didn't notice and others were his own honest mistakes. [How were these “honest”? “mistakes”? This is how a seasoned petty crook talks.]

“I never was one to read a bio. ... I never thought I was important. Now any time anybody quotes me or says anything about me or writes anything about me, I'll do a better job of watching it," he said. [Huh?]

Marbut, who led Edmonds Community College to a league championship before joining the struggling Cougars as an assistant coach in 2003, has inflated his academic and athletic accomplishments for years.

The Times found he has listed the false academic claims on handwritten job applications and on typed résumés, and he's allowed the misleading athletic accomplishments to be repeated for years in team media guides and on the Cougar Web site.

Officials at Edmonds Community College said that, despite a recent state audit criticizing athletic-department finances under Marbut, they didn't know about the phony invoice, improper payments or false academic claims.

"During Donnie's tenure, none of this came up. If it had, we would have dealt with it harshly," said Edmonds Community College President Jack Oharah. [You didn’t notice a state audit?]

…Yet in Pullman, administrators say Marbut's $77,000-a-year job is safe.

"A couple of these things are errors in judgment by a person who has a lot of potential but who was young and ambitious and didn't really think things through," said Marcia Saneholtz, WSU's senior associate athletic director. "He will continue to be our baseball coach." [All WSU students can now expect the same understanding from the school when they lie and cheat.]


When Marbut became WSU's head baseball coach in May 2004, he was given a mandate to rebuild a baseball program that had dominated its division a decade earlier, but had finished last in the Pac-10 the previous five years.

Although the team finished last again in 2005 with a 21-37 record, Marbut managed to recruit a dozen top prospects for this year's team. [Wait for the inevitable article about how corruptly he managed this feat.] This year, the Cougars are off to their best start since 1994, with an 18-6 record and conference play starting Saturday.

Audit released

Last September, the state released its audit of the Edmonds Community College athletic program, covering the years Marbut was a coach and athletic director. The audit faulted the athletic department for poor recordkeeping and financial oversight. And it concluded that Marbut had profited by using college facilities to run a private baseball camp, a violation of state law.

The office forwarded Marbut's name to the State Executive Ethics Board for investigation in December. The board has not yet decided whether to review the case, said director Susan Harris.

After the audit, The Times obtained Marbut's personnel files from Edmonds and WSU. Those and other documents revealed the numerous false claims about his achievements.
Nine different records wrongly state that Marbut earned a teaching certificate, a master's degree or a graduate degree from St. Martin's College in Lacey, Thurston County.

In five of the records, the errors appear on forms or résumés that he himself filled out or created. Three are handwritten job applications he submitted at Edmonds Community College, in June and September 1999 and November 2001. One is a résumé he submitted to WSU in 2003. And one is a biographical data sheet he filled out for the university's Human Resources Department.

Marbut, 32, acknowledged that he never earned a teaching certificate or any other graduate degree. He points out that his coaching jobs have required only a bachelor's degree, which he does have.


…He said his WSU boss, assistant athletic director Saneholtz, told him it wasn't a problem.

Saneholtz said she did not recall that conversation. [Compassionate… and forgetful.]

At Edmonds, Marbut said, his supervisor, associate dean Nicola Smith, knew he didn't have the teaching certificate but told him to write it down anyway when he applied to be athletic director.

Smith responded: "I would not be in a position to tell someone to falsify a job application." [But it looks as though I did anyway.]

MVP claims

The misrepresentations don't end with Marbut's academic accomplishments.

WSU and Edmonds team biographies assert Marbut was chosen most valuable player on the Portland State baseball team in 1996 and most inspirational in 1997. Both bios also claim Marbut was named an all-Pac-10 North division infielder in 1996.

Two of those awards, the MVP and infielder honors, actually belong to a man Marbut hired last year to be his volunteer assistant coach: Matt Dorey, who played second base for PSU in 1996. The most inspirational player in '97 was third-baseman Darren Case, according to PSU records.

…Marbut blamed the WSU errors on the college Sports Information Office.

WSU Sports Information Director Rod Commons said mistakes in media guides do occur, but he couldn't explain how the Marbut errors happened or why they weren't fixed.

Ilsa Gramer, a former graduate student who was responsible for sports information for the WSU baseball program, said coaches must sign off on the media guide before it goes to the publisher. Marbut's biography appeared for two years without being corrected, Gramer said.

Marbut had no explanation for the Edmonds inaccuracies.


[It’s a long article. I’ll spare you the details on the protein supplements he tried to peddle and his off the books field rentals and other, er, personal enrichment activities.]


While WSU administrators stand by Marbut, they acknowledge the coach's past has followed him to Pullman.

As the state ethics board considers taking up Marbut's case, Saneholtz, the assistant athletic director, said the controversy may impact WSU's ability to recruit players.

"We are concerned about all the hearsay and innuendo that has been generated in the baseball community that could be unfairly damaging to our baseball program," she said.

40 Percent of Campus Master Plan
Going to 2 Percent of Students

Although student athletes make up about 2 percent of OSU’s student population, 38.2 percent of the money allocated for the five-year Campus Master Plan will go to the athletic village, the sports complex for athletes’ use.

Gary Shutt, director of communications, said although a slightly larger amount of money is going toward athletics than academics in the five-year plan, donors are simply giving their money where they see it’s needed.

“We’re having to play catch-up,” Shutt said. “Our athletic facilities are way below those of other Big 12 schools. Fortunately, we’ve had donors who’ve stepped up.”

…“Athletics are for all students, and when students go to games, it’s part of their OSU experience,” Shutt said. “While they may not actually be running on the track, they are still participating in athletics.”

…Allison Hechtner, elementary education freshman, said she thinks it is sad that donations to academics are sometimes overlooked in favor of athletic donations.

“I think the mission of the university has been distorted,” Hechtner said. “Instead of being based on academics, it’s now based on athletics and entertainment.”