Several years ago, the largely powerless Faculty Senate of the University of Alabama voted overwhelmingly to recommend a modest “surcharge" (50 cents or so) for tickets to all athletic events. The purpose of the surcharge would have been to provide additional financial support to the university’s academic mission: books for the library, scholarships for the needy and even a few more teachers. The administration dismissed the recommendation without comment, and the Senate (like its ancient Roman counterpart) returned to its favorite pastime: passing vacuous resolutions and pretending to itself that someone was listening.

I bring this up for two reasons. Once again the Tuscaloosa community is convulsed with anxiety and anticipation over the hiring of an athletic coach. The university jet will be gassed up and dispatched, at a cost of $10,000 per hour, on recruitment missions throughout the United States. Deep-pocketed donors will be delicately massaged by oleaginous administrators schooled in the artisanship of the shakedown.

Meanwhile, local merchants will ponder the important question of whether or not to discount Shula-era memorabilia or hawk it for a premium as mementos of a hoped-for but failed effort to the restore the Augustan Age of Bear Bryant’s football imperium.

The question we might wish to ponder is this: What if the Senate-proposed surcharge had been accepted, sending a small (but significant) signal that the academic mission of the university is important enough to be noticed every time people go to a football game? What if donors were not encouraged to write a check for the athletic program without simultaneously earmarking a part of their donation for buying library books? And finally, what about this: The university corporate jet is sent on a recruitment mission, not to locate the next Dalai Lama-like incarnation of the Bear, but to hire the very best Latin scholar in the world?



My second point is related, and has to do with how the public weighs and assesses the standing of the institution. Everybody knows the football team’s ranking; they follow it with devotion tantamount to religious fervor. But do they know how the University of Alabama’s library -- without doubt the core symbol of commitment to education -- is ranked?

Here are the sad facts. Alabama is one of the 113 members of the Association of Research Libraries, which yearly compiles internal rankings. In 2004-05, the last year for which statistics are available, the University of Alabama ranked 94th (out of 113) in support staff, 98th in total expenditures, 83rd in total volumes, 73rd in current serials and 103rd in total items loaned, a measurement of the library’s use. In other words, the university ranks in the bottom 20 percent (or lower) in every measure that counts and has for decades.

Or consider how we stack up in direct comparison with other institutions.

We cannot, and never will, achieve the status of a Harvard, but consider the magnitude of the difference: Harvard with 15,555,533 volumes in its library, and the University of Alabama has 2,518,290. Would a regional comparison turn out any better? North Carolina, a state university, has 12,569,823 books, and our next-door neighbor, the University of Georgia, has 11,013,976. Even by the traditionally low standards of the American Southeast, Alabama ranks in the bottom half (or lower) in every category, even when we control for student population.

Faced with losing seasons, year after year, and substandard performance in every measurable category, would the people of Alabama tolerate a football program that stacks up as badly as the library at its “flagship" institution? Of course not. They would do precisely what the administration of the university is doing right now: selecting the next man in the “who’s going to be a millionaire" coaching contest, and then spending whatever it takes to expand and upgrade the facilities to attract the best players. Fifty million or so for a stadium expansion is not too much, is it? But what about giving the library a similar shot in the arm?

The point is that we never do that in our academic programs, and the result is (and will continue to be) a matter of the athletic tail wagging the academic dog.

The test, as I said, will come when you read in banner headlines on the front page of The Tuscaloosa News that President Robert Witt and his entourage have boarded the university jet and left to plead with and pay oodles of money to the world’s best classicist to come to the university and teach.

Or better yet, we will know we’ve gotten our priorities straight when people quote and compare library rankings to each other on their coffee breaks. Or maybe we’ll know we’ve gotten someplace when, instead of the stadium’s via sacra of giant bronze statues of mostly dead coaches, we line the path the library with marble busts of the university’s greatest scholars. All of this will take intellectual leadership, not management and marketing skill, on the part of the university’s administration.

Don’t hold your breath.

Charles W. Nuckolls is a professor in the Department of Anthropology at the University of Alabama. Reach him by e-mail at [email protected].