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(Rate Your Students)
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and Soltan isn't. For the life of me, I can't figure out her
politics, but she's pretty fabulous, so who gives a damn?"
(Tenured Radical)

Wednesday, March 08, 2006

Or…

Okay, so the last post was an extreme version of one way you could go with college athletics -- radical decoupling. As "superdestroyer" has already pointed out in a comment to that post, there are problems with that approach, mainly involving Title IX and equity issues. UD thinks these could probably be worked out in one way or another, with some tweaking and some changes in the initial idea, but in this post, she’d like to point out that the exact opposite approach - real integration of bigtime sports into the university as an academic institution - can also be made to work.

Consider Vanderbilt, as Bloomberg News does today.

Now, Vanderbilt’s down south with those big ol’ maniacs like T. Boone’s OSU and all, but its president says “he won't get in a spending war with the football powerhouses in his conference. As long as his teams are competitive on the field, and excelling academically, the goal has been accomplished. ‘Look, what we did [was] break all of the china, and that can really silence a room,' he says of the amazement that has greeted his initiatives. 'Athletics has always been about winning and tradition, right? But what I'm saying, is that there is another way.'"

Forgive my quoting at some length; much of this is in the details:

Vanderbilt University Chancellor Gordon Gee remembers the head-shaking and snickering. His wife, Constance, wondered if he'd gone nuts. The college's athletics director thought it was a gag, until Gee removed him.

Three years have passed since Gee stunned U.S. college sports by handing control of the Nashville, Tennessee, school's athletic department to academic administrators to rein in a sports culture he said was ``segregated'' from student life.

While no major U.S. school has followed Gee's lead, Vanderbilt's teams haven't drifted into oblivion. The football and men's basketball programs, though far from stellar, remain competitive in the vaunted Southeastern Conference. The Commodores' Class of 2009 baseball recruits was voted the best in the U.S. by Baseball America magazine.

Along the way, Gee's administrators have identified $1.5 million in annual sports savings.

``They thought I was crazy and wrote my obituary that very day,'' says Gee, 62, who has been chancellor since 2000. ``But we'd built up these little companies within our universities that no longer shared the values of the university anymore. It had to stop.''

On Sept. 9, 2003, Gee announced he was moving Vanderbilt's athletic department under the management of the Division of Student Life. Run by Vice Chancellor David Williams, 58, the division controlled fraternities and sororities, intramural sports and the student health center. Athletic Director Todd Turner was asked to become a special assistant to the chancellor; he eventually left.

…Gee, the former president at West Virginia University, Brown University, the University of Colorado and Ohio State University, said at the time that he took the radical step to eliminate the ``win-at-all-costs culture'' in college sports that was fueled by television contracts, alumni boosters and politicians. Athletics has to be more closely integrated into academic and student life, he said.

``We have created a culture, both on this campus and nationally, that is disconnected from our students, faculty and other constituents, where responsibility is diffuse, the potential for abuse considerable and the costs -- both financial and academic -- unsustainable,'' Gee said at the time.

Today, Vanderbilt doesn't contend that the move turned losers into winners. Still, Gee says colleges can keep athletics from becoming a commercial venture with only a tenuous link to higher education -- and still field strong teams.

Vanderbilt's teams are no embarrassment. In the 2002-2003 season, the Commodores finished the men's basketball season with 11 victories and 18 losses, and their average attendance at home games was 8,849. This season, they are 16-11 and have an average attendance of 11,867.

NFL Draft Pick

The football team was 2-10 in 2002 with an average home attendance of 25,837. This past season, they upset the University of Tennessee for the first time in 30 years and finished the year 5-6 with an average attendance of 36,031. Quarterback Jay Cutler will be picked in the first round of next month's National Football League draft, according to ESPN recruiting analyst Mel Kiper Jr.

Jerry Porras, a member of the Knight Foundation Commission on Intercollegiate Athletics, set up in 1989 to respond to college sports scandals, says the record of Vanderbilt's teams will be closely watched.

``Athletics have become divorced from the university,'' says Porras. ``He put the athletic department back under control of the university. Now, you have to be able to compete on the field. Winning would help make their case.''

…To make a clean break at Vanderbilt, Gee eliminated the athletic director's job. Turner later became athletic director at the University of Washington in Seattle. Gee also offered coaches the security of longer-term contracts in exchange for lower salaries.

After athletics employees were reassigned or left for jobs elsewhere, Vanderbilt had saved $600,000 in salaries, benefits and overhead out of a total athletics budget of about $32 million, according to Williams, the vice chancellor, who had previously worked at Ohio State. He says annual savings will rise to about $1.5 million within a year.

Three athletics administrators left after the reorganization, and no coaches departed because of the reorganization, according to Williams.

`Run for the Doors'

``Everyone expected the coaches and athletes to run for the doors, but they didn't,'' Gee says.

After Gee acted, Williams began scouring the department's books. Three areas stood out: summer school, fund raising and tutoring.

Williams says he realized that athletes were taking the minimum number of courses during the regular school year, and then attending abbreviated summer sessions to catch up. It was costing the athletics department about $825,000, he says, to pay for about 160 athletes' summer tuition, room and board.

``Summer school is no longer a right,'' he says. Vanderbilt will cut the number of students attending summer school to about 100 this summer and reduce its expense to about $400,000, Williams says.

Athletic departments at other major-universities pay similarly large summer-school fees. Ohio State paid $1.5 million for summer school in 2005, according to documents obtained by Bloomberg News through government open-records requests.

`Why Separate Staffs?'

In fund raising, Gee decided there were redundancies. Vanderbilt is in the midst of a capital campaign that has raised $1.25 billion over the past six years, according to Williams. At the same time, athletics is trying to raise as much as $25 million to endow coaching jobs and sports scholarships.

``Why do we have separate staffs for all this, and why isn't my university development office overseeing it?'' Williams asks.

Through attrition and reassignments, Vanderbilt has cut four athletics-only fund-raising jobs, saving $200,000, Williams said. The function has been shifted to the university's central fund- raising department. By comparison, the University of Oklahoma in Norman has 12 athletics fund-raisers and an operating budget of $925,000 for fundraising, according to school documents.

Williams says sports giving has been shifted away from big, modern facilities toward endowments and that annual giving to the National Commodore Club, the school's booster organization, has increased to about $2.7 million this year from $2 million before Gee's reorganization.

Academic Support

Another Williams project focused on academic support. The university has a program to assist students with their studies; a separate unit with eight employees works only with athletes. Oversight of the group working with athletes was removed from athletics and put under the control of the university's academic advisers.

``Making sure coaches weren't involved was the first priority,'' he says.