Let’s take a few comments from a recent Inside Higher Ed interview with Charles T. Clotfelter, author of a new book about big-time university sports.
[T]he ingredient that gives big-time sports its remarkable staying power is quite simply support from the top – the university’s trustees or regents – who want to have competitive teams. Period.
Doug Lederer, who interviews Clotfelter, notes what happened when Clotfelter asked universities “who sat in their presidents’ boxes and received complimentary tickets to games.”
Fully half the public institutions with which you filed open-records requests turned you down or gave you useless information. My favorite, from Berkeley: “The public interest served here by protecting the identity of major or potential donors, and thereby increasing the likelihood of acquiring financial support for the university, outweighs any incidental interest served by disclosing who those individuals are.”
Clotfelter, Lederer points out, calls for “ending the tax exemption for donations to commercially driven college athletics programs.” Why? Clotfelter responds:
The income tax deduction we have for charitable donations is usually justified on the basis that these gifts go for socially virtuous purposes like education or community service. In contrast, much of the work of contemporary college athletic departments is purely commercial. Were they not attached to a university, these departments would probably be classified by government statisticians in the entertainment industry, alongside amusement parks and minor league professional teams. So, based on the traditional justification of the charitable deduction, gifts to enhance the commercial enterprise simply don’t qualify.
Trustees, regents, donors, anonymous presidential box sitters, anonymous complimentary ticket holders — what’s missing here?
Oh yeah. Students, parents, faculty, and taxpayers.
Disgusting enough that absurdities like Auburn get tax breaks for being amusement parks; even more disgusting that these schools are run for the amusement of the people at the top.
March 25th, 2011 at 8:49AM
“I was sitting here thinking, I wonder if Alabama and Ohio are cutting their universities?…I would venture to say that Alabama and Ohio have not cut their state appropriations to their major universities….You know why? Because those fans won’t let their legislators do it, ” University of Minnesota Regent Johnson, March 11, 2011.
Obviously untrue, but unchallenged at the Board Meeting…
QED