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Monday, March 06, 2006
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Oh, what a tangled web we weave… …when first we practice to defend huge athletics expenditures at academically struggling universities. However complex the stitchwork, there’s no getting around the fact, for instance, that Southern Illinois University should use its money for urgently needed academic improvements rather than announce grand multimillion dollar athletic (and administrative) projects, as it has done. Many students (whose fees will rise immensely) and faculty (who regard the university as a university) oppose the grandiose “Saluki Way”: Detractors complained the project was over-developed for university athletics, with plans for a new football stadium and a renovated basketball arena set in place, and held only sketchy afterthoughts on academics, with mere placeholders marking future sites of academic buildings. Complaints were exacerbated by revelations that student fee increases will be used to fund a majority of the opening construction phase for Saluki Way, which includes the building of the stadium and renovation of the arena, along with a new student services facility. Cushy new offices for administrative personnel -- that student services thing -- deepen the insult. Everything’s here but what SIU needs: dedicated academic buildings. The Chancellor insists that big academic projects are in the pipeline, but this only begs the question of priority. SIU has an interesting recent history involving athletics. Six years ago, the football program was so rotten many people talked of shutting it down; but then the school brought in some brilliant coach, and it improved a lot. Even so: Faculty Senate President Robert Benford said some camps still discuss whether the campus should retain a football program - or any intercollegiate sport - not because of failure but because they don't think NCAA athletics mesh with the university's main purpose. Not only that, but, you know, if the program could tank as recently as six years ago, it could tank again, couldn’t it? So...to keep that from happening they'll have to increase the coach's compensation package, right? So he won't go away? Imagine the institutional fate of a big university so dependent upon one human being... But say even with a genius at the helm the program slips again. Then you’ve got what a lot of universities have -- poor ticket sales, hemorrhaging budgets, and even more scandals than usual as the athletic staff tries out more and more desperation moves. (Most biggish university athletic programs produce, by UD’s estimate, two to three scandals of one sort or another per year that attract major media attention. You want the list? You don't mind long parentheses? Okay: Coach arrested for drunk driving. Half of basketball squad academically ineligible. Gunplay breaks out among the lads. Desperate grad students cheat in every conceivable way to get their athletic charges through the rigors of Leisure Studies in Our World. Boosters fund bacchanalia in Las Vegas. And so much more.) (UPDATE: Latest example, hot off the press, at the University of Delaware.) The article goes on to note that “at many public universities, where capital projects and operating expenses are being pushed off onto the institutes themselves in light of declining state funding, officials are beginning to have conversations about the necessity of athletics and other offerings peripheral to the academic mission of campuses.” "There is a lot of concern about directing limited resources toward a non-essential part of the university mission," [one of them] comments. Part of what reformers propose is that the traditional independence of athletics from academic governance end: "The governance issue is essential [an advisor to the NCAA says]. What we have proposed and suggested is that university athletics be governed by the academic arm of the university and not left to be governed on their own or have a reporting structure that doesn't include the academic officers." (At Southern Illinois, athletics gets to jump over the entire academic structure and report directly to the Chancellor.) And the vaunted independence of athletics, this advisor notes, issues in such community enriching phenomena as the “Troutt-Wittmann Training and Academic Center, a $3 million capital gift from an alum that only allows student athletes to use its facilities. [S]uch trends are driving a wedge between athletics and academics at SIUC, when officials at other universities are thinking along lines of integration of the two.” |