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November 05, 2009, 10:21 PM ET
Berkeley Professors Urge University to End Subsidies for Athletics
Faculty members at the University of California at Berkeley approved a resolution on Thursday calling on the cash-strapped campus to stop subsidizing its athletics department, the Associated Press reported. The resolution is nonbinding, but Berkeley's chancellor, Robert J. Birgeneau, says officials will try to reduce the department's costs. Football and men's basketball are the only two programs that make money; the department received about $7.7-million in subsidies last year and ran a deficit of nearly $6-million.
Comments
1. alleyoxenfree - November 05, 2009 at 11:44 pm
Finally!
2. laoshi - November 06, 2009 at 05:50 am
Go Bears, go!
3. gailhdavis - November 06, 2009 at 08:00 am
Ok- but make sure fb and mbb suffer also. Don't jus thit the 'little guys'
4. jruiz - November 06, 2009 at 09:35 am
"Football and men's basketball are the only two programs that make money"
Same old myth. Such claims are generally due to the way in which athletic depts and universities cook the books. I bet all costs associated with the stadium and arena are charged to the buildings and grounds budget. Security for events comes out of the unicop budget. Miscellaneous expenses from the general budget. Athletic depts have been pulling this stuff for decades.
5. allens - November 06, 2009 at 09:42 am
Sports should certainly not receive any more subsidies per direct student/faculty participant (NOT counting fans as participants!) than any other extracurricular activity.
6. texasguy - November 06, 2009 at 11:06 am
Out of the top 25 schools in the AP college football poll, only three are not state schools ( #6 TCU, #12 USC and #22 Notre Dame). It is is not an accident. Private schools have nobody to bail them out when they run out of cash and have to be more fiscally respnsible than their public counterparts.
7. cwinton - November 06, 2009 at 12:03 pm
Without the subsidy it sounds like the UCB athletic department would be running an annual deficit of $13 million or so. They report having 450 student-athletes (not to mention having new, and I'm sure expensive, training facilities). That amounts to spending almost $30,000 per student athlete beyond their revenues from ticket sales and the like. Like post 4, I'm quite sure there are a number of "off-budget" expenses also supporting the UCB athletic department. And this from a school that I'm sure spends a fraction of the amount that is going for athletics at many other big name programs.
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