Here’s a faculty resolution on athletics. Read the whole thing.
Highlights:
Only one-third of Cal’s men’s basketball players and one-half of the football players graduate, and Cal’s football graduation rate is near the bottom of the Pac-10 Conference.
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Although it is widely believed that the Department of Intercollegiate Athletics (DIA) earns a profit for the Berkeley campus, its financial statements reveal that
it significantly outspends its revenues every year, depleting precious campus resources.For the most recent 5-year period for which the DIA has released detailed data (2003-08) its cost to campus has been at least $10 million every year except for 2007-08 for which the cost was $7.4 million.
Current estimates for the most recent fiscal year (2008-09) indicate that the cost to the campus is expected to be a record high of approximately $13.5 million and is expected to be even higher for the current fiscal year (2009-10).
The DIA has cost the campus approximately $160 million since 1991.
The DIA is authorized to operate as an Auxiliary Enterprise on a financially self-supporting basis.
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The faculty recommend that
All funding of Intercollegiate Athletics from campus subsidies and the use of student registration fees cease immediately (or as soon as possible to the extent permitted by existing contract constraints).
The DIA cease annual deficit spending and the Berkeley campus not permit Intercollegiate Athletics to spend beyond its actual annual direct revenues.
October 28th, 2009 at 9:56PM
> The faculty recommend that
Wow. Imagine if every university in the country were to put such a recommendation in place.
October 29th, 2009 at 9:55AM
But remember, faculty can only recommend.
October 29th, 2009 at 10:11AM
But haven’t large portions of the serious faculty of most universities held positions like this one for a long time anyway, and with little or no result? That Berkeley’s faculty gives their opinion a kind of formal structure with the resolution seems to me to be a very shruggable occurrence.
October 29th, 2009 at 10:50AM
Maybe not, Brett. They won’t get anything near what they want, to be sure, but with the Knight Foundation report in the background, being covered very intensively in the press, and with California’s budget problems, they may get quite a lot.
Plus, that formal structure, and the significant unanimity and activism it suggests on the part of the faculty, is in fact something new.
As a very high-profile university getting serious about athletics spending, Berkeley could be a model for other places.
October 30th, 2009 at 6:30AM
The budget problems are a real motivator. Though I don’t think any big state universities will actually cut marquee sports, there really may be some restructuring of how they’re financed. The current situation simply can’t go on at a lot of places without an honest separation of pools of funds into "athletics" and "other," rather than the weird subsidy of athletics by student fees and presidential discretionary funds. State legislatures are just not going to PROVIDE that kind of presidential slush fund much longer, I figure.
Student fees are a poser. I’ve always thought that some current, disgruntled student should run for state legislature on a "abolish all athletic fees at our state colleges and universities" ticket.
It would make for a fun legislative campaign in a lot of state capital cities where the local state university is a major feature (Madison, Minneapolis, Austin spring to mind).
October 30th, 2009 at 11:23AM
I can see that this might have an impact on the California schools given that state’s budget crunch. And so it might spark some similar moves in some other states if they face the same economic situation.
I don’t believe, though, that it’ll have a widespread impact in a lot of areas, such as mine own Oklahoma home other and parts of the southwest and southeast where football is a very important thing and where most folks have a robust disinterest in actions taken in Berkeley or by the university housed there, whether the actions are sensible or not (Full disclosure: I share a good deal of that disinterest).
I imagine a response something like this: "Get rid of football? You kiddin’ me? Those egghead flakes out there can do what they want but we *ain’t* gettin’ rid of college football!"