Atlanta
Research universities and Division I athletics programs wrestle with enormous gaps in resources—and employ similar hard-nosed tactics to try and overcome them.
That observation, delivered during a wide-ranging discussion on the economic issues facing college sports at the NCAA's annual meeting here, came from J. Douglas Toma of the University of Georgia's Institute of Higher Education.
Fervent aspirations to race ahead, whether on the football field or in the research laboratory, set the tone at many universities, Mr. Toma, an associate professor, said during a presentation on Tuesday. And even though critics of spending in college sports often point to such aspirations as being out of place in the context of higher education, academe has adopted many of the same practices, he says.
The "return-on-investment mentality" is evident in several key areas, he said. Administrators go to great lengths to land star faculty members and winning coaches who, in turn, bring in valuable research dollars and ticket revenue. And the aggressive recruitment of top students and talented athletes triggers a race to enhance amenities and facilities.
But even though the ambitions may be similar, the disparities can be striking, he says, drawing on research presented here that also appears in a chapter he contributed to a recent book, The Business of Higher Education (Praeger Publishers, 2009).
Taking the University of Michigan at Ann Arbor and the University of Wisconsin at Milwaukee as examples, he noted that both are classified as "research institutions," by the Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching. But Ann Arbor is in the category's top tier, and its spending on research is 20 times greater than that at Milwaukee, Mr. Toma found.
In athletics, the gap is no less significant: Of the 330 universities in the NCAA's Division I, Ohio State is tops with an annual athletics budget of around $100-million. But programs on the bottom end of the division—the University of North Carolina at Asheville, for instance—have athletics budgets that amount to just 3 percent of Ohio State's. Even the 75 or so programs in the major athletics conferences don't come near Ohio State; some have budgets that are just a third or so of the Buckeyes', according to Mr. Toma.
"These are significant differences, yet we put everything together," Mr. Toma said.
"We do this in higher education generally, and we do it in athletics," he said. "I would argue it does everybody a disservice. We're comparing not just apples and oranges, but apples and bananas and elephants."
Comments
1. 11159995 - January 13, 2010 at 11:38 am
Well, even at the wealthiest universities, the priorities are askew. E.g., the operating subsidies that universities provide to their presses generally are not higher than what they pay as salaries to their assistant football coaches. There is also no correlation between what universities spend on their athletic programs and what they spend on their university presses. Ohio State, which has a very small and underfunded press, is perhaps the most extreme example (though, of course, some top tier research universities, like Maryland, have no presses at all). One would think that scholarly publishing-which, after all, is crucial for the career advancement of faculty not to mention the lifeblood of new scholarship that finds its way into classroom instruction-would somehow loom larger in university priorities than the support of an entertainment business that has little to do with the university's core mission.
-Sandy Thatcher, past president of the Association of American University Presses, 2007/8
2. mbelvadi - January 13, 2010 at 11:50 am
Thanks, Mr/Ms Thatcher, for mentioning the most critical phrase utterly missing from the article: "the university's core mission". While the appropriate qualifiers are carefully provided, the intent of the article (or perhaps the speaker the article writes about) seems to be to give an overall impression of athletics as being "just like" academics with the implication of being a further justification for athletics having an equivalently appropriate role in our institutions at all. The careful reader, catching the qualifiers about the similarities being in very specific areas like recruitment tactics, might say, "so what"? Read carefully, the article says nothing useful at all. It's only when read carelessly that it might accomplish what I peronally think might have been intended, which is a strike in the battle over whether high-cost athletics belong in research universities.
3. johntoradze - January 13, 2010 at 01:39 pm
Hutchins. University of Chicago. 1929 - 1951.
"The one thing which drew more attention than any other, of course, was his elimination of varsity football. Hutchins heaped scorn upon schools which received more press coverage for their sports teams than for their educational programs, and a run of disastrous seasons gave him the trustee support he needed to drop football in 1939."
4. johntoradze - January 13, 2010 at 01:43 pm
U of Chicago under Hutchins had some 50 Nobel prize winners as alums, including: James Watson, Werner Heisenberg, Enrico Fermi, Murray Gell-Mann, Milton Friedman and Saul Bellow.
5. dpsinha - January 13, 2010 at 02:18 pm
Gosh, this must explain why Chicago is so much better than Stanford and Harvard.