Berekely Faculty Say "End Sports Subsidies"

[bluebayou]

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Maybe then, unlike now, students studying science, engineering or computer science would be able to play varsity sports.

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<p>Not if scholarships are continued, which means D1. As I suggested earlier CF, it appears that what you are really suggesting is that public Unis drop to the DIII level, and compete with MIT and Caltech, (assuming they could find the travel funds).</p>

[osdad]

<p>Then there’s the space issue (Ok I’m making it an issue). At most (other than ag) schools space is at a premium. Devoting huge swaths of land for athletic facilities when classroom space is jammed into ever smaller parcels seems counter-intuitive. (It’s even worse at most high schools – which were described by a visiting European education professional as “fabulous facilities creating a moat around a shoddy education.”) </p>

<p>If memory serves UCB is land locked. Any new building has to be at the expense of an old one being torn down.</p>

[Bay]

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I would have Michigan and Berkeley spin off football, basketball and in Michigan’s case hockey. The athletes on those teams would not be students, but paid professionals. Students and community members could cheer for the University of Michigan minor pro hockey team and tailgate at the Golden Bears football games.

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<p>Who would they compete against?</p>

[osdad]

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Who would they compete against?

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<p>They might have a shot at the Lions or the Rams. :)</p>

[idad]

<p>They could join UChicago in the UAA along with Brandeis University, Carnegie Mellon University, Case Western Reserve University, Emory University, New York University, the University of Rochester, and Washington University in St. Louis. What is being proposed by some is what Chicago did many years ago when they gave up their spot in the Big Ten conference. (BTW UChicago is the only university to go undefeated against Notre Dame).</p>

[bclintonk]

<p>Michigan give up NCAA Div I sports? Not likely. Not as long as football is paying the bills for itself and all the other varsity sports, men’s and women’s. On the other hand, if their football team doesn’t pick itself up out of this recent mire of mediocrity, they may start to lose their fan base. Then the financials start to change, and all bets are off.</p>

<p>I’m still puzzled as to why anyone would think “spinning off” the financially successful sports would be in Michigan’s interest. Even supporting Div III-level intercollegiate competition without the generous cross-sport subsidies now provided by football would be a net drain on the University’s general fund; under the current arrangement, they get all those other sports at no cost to the general fund. Sure, they could become another Chicago. But why? Their students and alums seem to like big-time sports, by and large. So do the millions of non-student, non-alumni fans around the country and around the world who make the Michigan logo one of the most popular and most instantly recognizable brands in all of sports marketing. Tell me, when was the last time you saw someone wearing a Chicago Maroons sports jersey? For a university to get that kind exposure is a marketing coup; especially when it’s the fans who are footing the bill for it.</p>

[Schmoomcgoo]

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Any new building has to be at the expense of an old one being torn down.

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<p>or ancient redwood trees</p>

[Cardinal_Fang]

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I’m still puzzled as to why anyone would think “spinning off” the financially successful sports would be in Michigan’s interest.

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<p>They’d still get the money! It would be a wholly-owned subsidiary. But they wouldn’t have to pretend football players were students.</p>

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Who would they compete against?

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<p>The same teams they compete against now, all of which would no longer be student teams. This is a general proposal, not a specific proposal for Berkeley and Michigan.</p>

[Cardinal_Fang]

<p>Why is it not considered outrageous that students in the sciences and engineering can’t be student athletes. They’re students, right? They might be very good athletes, right? So why is the system set up so they can’t play?</p>

<p>I was a computer science major and a varsity swimmer. It’s possible, if the universities make it possible.</p>

[Bay]

<p>So you are saying that universities should be in the business of owning and operating professional sports teams? That seems anathema to your values.</p>

[Bay]

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Why is it not considered outrageous that students in the sciences and engineering can’t be student athletes. They’re students, right? They might be very good athletes, right? So why is the system set up so they can’t play?

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<p>CF,
I looked at the Seniors on Stanford’s football roster to see if your assumption holds. It turns out there are 2 majoring in mechanical engineering, 2 majoring in “management, science and engineering,” and 6 majoring in “science, technology and society.”</p>

[glido]

<p>The steel that build the British empire was not forged by merely getting to class and turning in papers on time, but with voctories on the football fields of Exeter.</p>

[Cardinal_Fang]

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So you are saying that universities should be in the business of owning and operating professional sports teams? That seems anathema to your values.

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<p>I’m saying universities ARE in the business of owning and operating professional sports teams and they ought to admit it.</p>

<p>I’m glad to learn that at Stanford, engineering students can play varsity football.</p>

[Schmaltz]

<p>“voctories on the football fields of Exeter.”</p>

<p>Not to mention the victories on the fields at Eton. After decades of working with all sorts of people from all sorts of places, let me put forward the idea that having played team sports (eg. football, baseball, basketball, not track, swimming, or figure skating) gives people valuable experience in doing things that aren’t glamorous for the good of the group, instead of things just their own personal joy.</p>

[Cardinal_Fang]

<p>There are two different questions here. First, should colleges have sports teams their students compete on? I say, YES! Sports are fun to play. People like competing. People like watching sports.</p>

<p>Second, should colleges run minor-league football and basketball teams, with pretend students who have special lower admission requirements and special perquisites not available to other students? I say, NO!</p>

[hops_scout]

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who have special lower admission requirements and special perquisites not available to other students? I say, NO!

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<p>The question is can you definitively say that those athletes are receiving those “special treatments” and no other group of students does?</p>

<p>I’m not in agreement with the NBA rules which has led to some of the problem in college basketball.</p>

[Cardinal_Fang]

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The question is can you definitively say that those athletes are receiving those “special treatments” and no other group of students does?</p>

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<p>Yep. There’s a large body of research showing exactly that. For example,</p>

<p>[Amazon.com:</a> Reclaiming the Game: College Sports and Educational Values (9780691123141): William G. Bowen, Sarah A. Levin, James L. Shulman, Colin G. Campbell, Susanne C. Pichler, Martin A. Kurzweil: Books](<a href=“http://www.amazon.com/Reclaiming-Game-College-Sports-Educational/dp/0691123144/ref=ntt_at_ep_dpt_5]Amazon.com:”>http://www.amazon.com/Reclaiming-Game-College-Sports-Educational/dp/0691123144/ref=ntt_at_ep_dpt_5)</p>

<p>“Bowen and Levin demonstrate repeatedly that recruited athletes get preferential treatment in admissions despite lower SAT scores, underperform academically throughout college, choose easier majors and graduate at a lower percentage”</p>

<p>"After studying prestigious and very selective schools like the Ivy League universities and smaller schools like Amherst, Williams, and Wesleyan, Bowen and his co-author concluded that athletes enjoyed substantial and unmerited advantages in admissions, tended to relatively underperform academically, and actually had a negative effect on campus life. There conclusions were assailed, sometimes with some force, on the basis of limited data samples and reliance on anecdotal information.
In the present book, Bowen returns with a considerably expanded dataset and a number of new analyses. The effect is to overwhelmingly confirm the prior conclusions. While one could probably find defects in some of the individual analyses, Bowen and Levin have done so many evaluations reaching the same conclusions that it is inescapable to conclude that they are correct. For example, they analyze data from 3 groups of schools with differing admissions policies towards recruited athletes and find a strong correlation between the relative advantage enjoyed by recruited athletes and academic underperformance. "</p>

[ThisCouldBeHeavn]

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They’d still get the money! It would be a wholly-owned subsidiary. But they wouldn’t have to pretend football players were students.

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<p>They would get significantly less money, depending on how large a salary the best players could command. I suppose that wouldn’t be a huge issue though if they no longer fielded competitive teams in the other sports, as you propose.</p>

[bclintonk]

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@Cardinal Fang

There are two different questions here. First, should colleges have sports teams their students compete on? I say, YES! Sports are fun to play. People like competing. People like watching sports.</p>

<p>Second, should colleges run minor-league football and basketball teams, with pretend students who have special lower admission requirements and special perquisites not available to other students? I say, NO!

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<p>OK, but most schools are going to have trouble paying for all those competitive sports you want. In the first place, I doubt there would be a very big market for “minor league” professional football and basketball if the current relationship with the college or university is reduced to the school owning a for-profit professional franchise. Alums wouldn’t care about it as much, students wouldn’t care about it as much. You’re right, in some ways the current athletic scholarship system resembles that, but as long as there’s a requirement that the athletes be enrolled as full-time students in good academic standing, it provides a sufficiently close connection to the life of the university that students and alums continue to feel it’s “their” team. Not so a minor-league professional enterprise; who cares about that? Who cares about minor-league baseball? A tiny market of the hard-core sports addicts, not nearly enough to support the 100,000+ crowds and big television audiences that big-time college football now draws. So there go the financials.</p>

<p>As for the non-revenue sports: look, schools are NOT looking to take on a bigger financial burden out of their general fund. Story out in today’s Chronicle of Higher Education says even mighty Stanford, with one of the richest and most successful (across all sports) athletic programs in the nation, may have to drop some non-revenue sports because its football team hasn’t been able to fill up the stadium consistently. Take away the football team, and there go all non-revenue sports. Convert the Stanford Cardinal football team to a minor-league pro team—the Palo Alto Programmers? the Silicon Valley Dot.commers?—whose only connection to the university is that the university owns a 100% equity stake in the for-profit enterprise, and the football crowds dwindle to, what, maybe 5,000 per game at the outside? Who wants to pay to see that? Even if you let them keep the historic name, or perhaps made them pay a fee to the university for the rights to use the name. Silly. Won’t work. Won’t happen.</p>

<p>Here’s an excerpt from the Stanford story (sorry, no link, it’s proprietary):</p>

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. . . *t’s been a challenging year for the mighty Cardinal program. Layoffs and nearly $8-million in budget cuts have cast shadows on a department accustomed to sunnier times. Those fiscal realities have prompted some number-crunching —and soul-searching—over whether the university can, or should, continue to field 35 athletics teams.</p>

<p>The stumble, triggered by severe losses in the once-$500-million athletics endowment, came as a surprise to many observers. Not only was it among the first major athletics departments to feel the pain of the recession, it is the most envied program in college sports.</p>

<p>“If it can happen to Stanford,” Bob Bowlsby, the university’s athletic director, says in a rare interview, “it can happen to anybody.”</p>

<p>The Pac-10 power is hardly alone in its fiscal nail-biting. Dozens of athletics departments have cut teams, halted capital projects, laid off employees, or otherwise trimmed their budgets in the last year. And while Stanford is unusually reliant on its sports endowment, it is still among the wealthiest and most successful athletics programs.
But the Cardinal aren’t in the clear just yet. Mr. Bowlsby says he hasn’t ruled out the possibility of cutting athletics squads should the financial circumstances call for it.</p>

<p>With an annual operating budget of around $75-million, Stanford is surpassed only by Ohio State University in fielding the largest number of sports in Division I-A, the NCAA’s most competitive grouping. (Ohio State’s budget for 36 sports, by comparison, tops $100-million.)</p>

<p>When Mr. Bowlsby announced the budget cuts this year, he said eliminating teams would come only under the most dire circumstances. Nine months later, though, one big question lingers: In a still-sluggish economy, is it realistic for an endowment-dependent program that struggles to fill its football stadium to offer such an expansive menu of sports?</p>

<p>“I’ve tried to be as forthright with our coaches as I can,” Mr. Bowlsby says. “The discontinuation of sports is, by far, the course of last resort.”</p>

<p>But when coaches ask if he thinks the economic picture will ever reach a point where cuts are unavoidable, he is cautious.</p>

<p>“I can’t unequivocally say, ‘No, we’re not going to ever get there.’ I’d be less than honest if I said that, because I just don’t know,” he says. “We have to constantly look at issues of sustainability. So how many varsity sports we have and what level we support them at is, I think, a fair question.”

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[bclintonk]

<p>A bit more on Stanford’s athletic department financial woes:</p>

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Athletics hasn’t been the only place on campus to cut back. In an aggressive attempt to rein in expenses, Stanford has laid off nearly 500 people and frozen 50 faculty searches as the university’s endowment, valued at $17.2-billion in July 2008, dropped almost 30 percent. By comparison, Harvard and Yale Universities have cut 275 and 100 positions, respectively.</p>

<p>Private donations, which helped build Stanford athletics into a dynasty, have cooled considerably from the boom years. Last year the department was $2.3-million shy of an $8.5-million annual goal. And even though the football team has done well this season, ticket sales are still not as robust as Mr. Bowlsby would like.</p>

<p>A new $100-million football stadium opened in 2006 in the same spot where the old stadium stood. It seats 50,000, but there are always empty seats. The university has drawn an average of 36,276 to its home games this season. “We’re working on putting butts in the bleachers,” Mr. Bowlsby says.</p>

<p>Money from television contracts helps, and there’s more of it thanks to the football team’s recent success (after going 1-11 in 2006, the program has a winning record this season). But TV revenues can’t solve everything. The Pacific-10 Conference doesn’t have media-rights deals anywhere near the magnitude of what the Southeastern and Big Ten conferences have negotiated.

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