'It was open season on Vanderbilt on Sept. 9, 2003, when chancellor Gordon Gee eliminated the athletic department and put all sports under Student Life and University Affairs along with intramurals, fraternities, sororities and the student health center.


... Fast forward four years and nine months, and Vanderbilt is basking in the afterglow of several championships. The baseball team clinched its first SEC title since 1980 and followed that by winning the SEC Tournament on Sunday.

The Commodores (51-11) are No. 1 in the nation. They are the first Vanderbilt men's team to ever be No. 1, but they are the third Vanderbilt team to reach No. 1 since Gee's radical move. The women's golf team was No. 1 in 2004, and the women's bowling team won the national title last month in just the third year of the sport.

Vanderbilt does not have an athletic director or an athletic department, but that has not seemed to hurt the school's sports. The men's basketball team reached the Sweet 16 this past season. The women's team won the SEC tournament and reached the NCAA tournament. Seven teams have been nationally ranked this spring alone --baseball, both basketball teams, bowling, women's golf, women's lacrosse and women's tennis.

... [It's estimated that] Vanderbilt has saved about $1.5 million a year because of the morphing of the athletic department into Student Life and University Affairs. Four fundraising positions just for athletics were scrapped. Most athletic department employees remained, but they took on other duties. The director of facilities, for example, oversees the football stadium as well as the intramural gym.


... "It's about making athletics more a part of the university, and not serving as a farm team for the NFL," [said one campus observer].

"We proved you don't need an athletic department that is isolated and segregated and separated from the rest of the university and acting as its own entity in some arms race for facilities," he said. "We performed surgery on that model. We removed the athletic director and the athletic department. We treat athletics the way we treat physics. What we did was get rid of a lot of mid-level bureaucracy. Our dollars go to student-athletes and coaches, not to a lot of assistant athletic directors and other bureaucratic nonsense." ...'