University of Oregon:
Much Worse than Ironic
UD'd already gotten a heads-up, from one of her readers, about high-profile faculty discontent with campus athletics at the University of Oregon, and she was pondering how to post about it, when she found this, in The Oregonian. It's written by two former presidents of the faculty senate, and co-signed by ninety other senior professors. Excerpts:
The recent announcements of a $2 million buyout of the contract of Bill Moos, the university's athletic director, and a $4 million learning center solely for athletes are deeply troubling. ...[W]e find it increasingly hard to tell whether the University of Oregon is an academic research and teaching institution devoted to the education of our state's students, or a minor league training ground for elite athletes. Academic departments struggle to make ends meet because of repeated budget cuts, but the president allows lavish spending by the athletic department. These actions have consequences for our students and faculty, and the university's academic stature.
The hard numbers:
The primary losers are our students. The university provides scholarships to several hundred student-athletes, many of whom do not meet admission requirements, yet we cannot find sufficient financial aid to help Oregon's neediest high school students. The athletic department spent more than $1 million from 2003 to 2005 on recruiting, including $140,000 for a single weekend for 25 football recruits. The same $1 million would pay for 62 talented biology, journalism or art students to attend the university for a year, or 15 students for four years.
Students are affected by poor resource allocation in other ways. Class sizes have grown since 2000 because of a 20 percent increase in undergraduate enrollment, without an equivalent increase in full-time faculty. Students are closed out of classes because there are not enough faculty to teach them. Graduate students, the life-blood of a research university, have dropped by 10 percent since 1970. Instead of hiring new faculty and attracting new graduate students, the university has devoted scarce resources to boosting the number of athletic coaches and staff by 25 percent since 1994.
...The Biology Department today has 20 percent fewer office staff than in 1997, but 20 percent more students. Since 1994 its annual budget has increased by 47 percent, from $2.7 million to $3.96 million, while the athletic department's increased by 224 percent, from $18.5 million to $41.5 million. The average cost to teach a student in the biology department this year is $705; the cost per student-athlete in the athletic department is over $92,000. The head coaches of football and men's basketball together make more than all 30 full-time tenure-track biology professors.
Faculty salaries at UO are the lowest in the American Association of Universities. Ancillary support services for teaching and research are fast disappearing. New and current faculty members are being lured away by other institutions. Many faculty now pay for classroom photocopying, business phone calls, and even students' books. Meanwhile, the athletic department furnishes its offices with leather sofas, pays its coaches multimillion dollar salaries, charters private jets, etc.
Our academic reputation is declining. UO's 2004 four- and five-year graduation rates, at 36.4 percent and 56.7 percent respectively, are significantly below our academic peers and near the bottom of the Pacific-10 Conference. Oregon is the only Pac-10 school to be recently downgraded by the Carnegie Trust from the top to the second tier of national research universities. The 2007 US News and World Report college ratings rank us 120th in the country, the best among Oregon public universities but still mediocre. Our overall graduate program ratings are lower than 20 years ago. It is worse than ironic that our academic rankings are dropping as our football rankings rise.
The over-emphasis on athletics extends even to fundraising. The university's $600 million capital campaign is on target to raise $200 million for athletics (not including possible donations for the planned basketball arena). The Oregonian reports that this percentage for sports in a capital campaign is the highest in the nation -- in fact, more than double the national norm. The university has a responsibility to ask donors to support academics first, before donating to athletics.
Finally, there's the athletic program's generosity:
Many people think athletics makes money for the university, but that is not true. At Notre Dame and Ohio State, the athletic departments gives back more than $10 million every year to education -- but at UO, not a penny. A few years ago the faculty asked the athletic department to add a mere 25 cents to football and basketball tickets, to be earmarked for student scholarships. They refused. We asked that a small percentage of every donation to athletics be earmarked for education. The administration refused. All athletic revenues and gifts go entirely to the athletic budget, which has been growing four times faster than the university's.
Oregon's president has Stage III jocksniffery.
Yet, as with Michael Adams at the University of Georgia, and Robert Bruininks at the University of Minnesota, we must not allow our revulsion at the sight of this condition to avert our eyes from its full horror. We must, like UO's faculty, stare it boldly in the face. Until we stare it down.
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