… for the SUNY system, you can see why one of its most important campuses has decided to dump degree programs in three languages (French, Russian, and Italian), as well as programs in classics and theater, rather than cut back on sports.
A SUNY professor points out in the local paper that Berkeley and Hofstra, among other schools, have cut back on athletics, and in some cases eliminated certain teams.
As at so many other schools, the state bails out Albany’s deadbeat sports program with millions of dollars every year:
[The] $4.27 million that athletics is receiving from the state [should be] redistributed to cover academic-related expenses.
If those savings do not sufficiently address future academic budgetary needs, athletics should be downsized before eliminating academic programs and compromising the educational mission of the university.
Another professor points out the exquisite uselessness of college sport to the well-being of the college:
[The] bump in applications from successful college sports teams is primarily seen from students who prefer “beer and circus.” They are not serious about their studies and, as a result, add little to the intellectual climate on campus. Likewise, while donations increase, they rarely benefit the university’s academic mission since they usually are targeted toward athletics.
SUNY Albany’s thought or sports decision, brazenly occurring mere months after SUNY Binghamton’s outrageous, expensive, basketball scandal, tells you all you need to know about the disintegration of this university system.
But hey. It’s not as if New York is an important state.
And SUNY Albany, a perennial Party School front-runner, has a reputation to maintain.
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A SUNY Albany student suggests another cutback:
[E]xercise some sense when admitting students. Stop wasting money on [campus] posters telling me that UA students don’t get drunk every weekend to the point that their brains become an etch-a-sketch. I’ve lived in the student ghetto. I’ve seen your students drunk at 3 a.m. in the middle of the road screaming at the top of their lungs because they think they have the right to walk drunk in a busy road. Your posters are full of lies. Stop admitting students who are going to drink themselves to death and you can save a lot of money in the budget on those stupid posters.
November 17th, 2010 at 9:42PM
Brandeis biologist Gregory Petsko has written “An Open Letter to George M. Philip, President of the State University of New York at Albany, as his regular column in Genome Biology.
Read and understand.
http://genomebiology.com/2010/11/10/138
March 17th, 2011 at 6:57AM
[…] I note here, SUNY has dumped programs in French, Russian, Italian, classics, and theater, rather than cut back […]