… do not, as this local opinion writer makes clear, add up to a strategic plan. He’s reviewing a just-released document from the University of North Carolina Wilmington.
Here’s the document.
Here’s his comment.
How in the heck are they going to pay for all this?
A school that watched its athletic scholarship donations decrease by half from 2007-08 to 2008-09 has a lot of money to come up with. Paying for Buzz Peterson and his assistants. Don’t forget about Benny Moss, too. Another $600,000-plus to cover the rescinded out-of-state tuition waivers.
Yet, Mehrtens, DePaolo and everyone else at UNCW have been vague and evasive when it comes to the finances. This document continues that trend.
How are you going to increase season-ticket sales by 50 percent over a five-year period?
What incentives would you give prospective Seahawk Club members to increase its roster to 2,015 by 2015 (from 777 earlier this year)?
How do you target alumni to grow endowments by 10-15 percent year?
Are there truly “new sources of funds” to adjust coaches’ pay?
What does developing a three-year budget forecast for revenues and expenditures do to the next two years?
The gap between this chirpy document and the reporter commenting on it reminds UD of all the athletic gatherings she’s attended over the years. Whether NCAA or Knight Commission or any of the other organizations, the feel is that of a dressed for success pep rally.
Many of the people in university athletics don’t seem to know the difference between cheer leading and research, between WE WILL ROCK YOU and statistics. They’re in an orgasmic miasma, panting happily away on the field while their programs curl up and die.
This absurd disparity between self-satisfied DARE TO BE GREAT bullshit and the limp, sketchy reality of many university sports programs is currently captured by Coach Rick Pitino’s testimony at an extortion trial.
Author of multiple dress for success books, Pitino…
Eh. Read it for yourself.
UD spends her life reading novels about how complicated and vulnerable human beings are. She doesn’t hold it against Pitino that he fucked up. She’s attacking the sickening hypocrisy and unaccountability of an industry that’s killing universities.
July 30th, 2010 at 10:10AM
Universities as we would like them to be, not universities as they would like them to be. If public commitment/funding is reduced, the institution must become a business to survive, moving investment from units that do not make money to those that do. No surprise there.
Yes, students are exploited by the imposition of tuition increases and fees to pay for things with little bearing on their education. And they are exploited when they are herded into large sections taught by under-trained underpaid, and under-supervised PTs and TAs, while the tenured faculty looks on with indifference. Exploitation for exploitation, I think I prefer the former, less cynical after all.