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Wednesday, January 03, 2007
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The writer begins... ...by rehearsing some of the very grody details about the way sports-lousy schools operate. For instance, "Ball State's athletic department receives $3.6 million from general university funds, not to mention $6.9 million in student fees." The practice of imposing high mandatory athletic fees on students is disgusting. Students at a number of universities realize this, and are waging variously effective campaigns against it. Fees tend to work in this way: The team's fucking up and losing revenue, so it decides to hire a two million dollar a year coach to save its ass. The student fee goes up by fifty dollars. Or the cost of the school's amazing new stadium just increased by tens of millions of dollars -- as at the University of Minnesota, whose playlot just went up sixteen percent. Add another fifty to the student fee. Of course Minnesota swears none of the unanticipated little extras that have brought the cost of the stadium to close to three hundred million dollars will come from student fees. Do you believe them? I don't. But before they eventually jack up the fees, where does the money they're going to try unsuccessfully to make cover the costs come from? You. Me. That's the beauty of the tax exemption. A professor at Ball State can't help but notice that "We can accredit the football team (in NCAA Division I-A), but not the master's program in public administration... It would take $150,000 for two more professors. It takes five. We have three." This is part of the problem defenders of the whole "sports are about education so the exemption is appropriate" thing have. For the most part, sports does nothing or less than nothing for the academic reputation of a university. To be sure, it keeps everybody happy and stupid, but this is not the point of a university. Ball State's president is totally direct on the subject: "Division I athletics gives you an opportunity to achieve national recognition that you could work 50 years on the academic side and never achieve. When alums come back, they don't sit in an English class. Maybe they should, but they don't." What sort of national recognition does the president have in mind? Ball State is a university, but not a very good one. It has virtually no national recognition as a result. So the president of the university means that Division I athletics gives Ball State a national profile as a sports facility. So in what sense is Ball State a university? And why does it get an education-based tax exemption? |