At Berkeley, Familiar Tensions Lead to an Unusual Outcome

When the Academic Senate at the University of California at Berkeley voted last year to strip the athletics department of all institutional support, the nonbinding measure appeared bold but toothless.

What a difference a year makes.

After studying the finances of the athletics department and debating the merits of a broad-based athletics program, the university has announced major cutbacks in athletics. By dropping five sports next year, officials hope to reduce the program’s annual subsidy from $13-million to $5-million by 2014. It’s not the complete elimination of institutional spending on athletics that the faculty pressed for last October, but it’s significant.

In some ways, the results of this outrage are hardly surprising. Tensions between the faculty and athletics often escalate at public universities during times of financial uncertainty, and could surely be expected to rise during a budget crisis as crippling as the State of California’s. But there are several factors, both cultural and fiscal, that make Berkeley’s situation stand out.

The Academic Senate, for starters, is strong and well organized, and the university has a long history of activism. Berkeley’s reputation isn’t bound up in athletic tradition. And the Golden Bears’ broad-based athletics program—before Tuesday’s announcement, at least—offered 13 more sports than the minimum 16 required by the NCAA to belong to Division I-A.

Even more relevant, though, is that the State of California has been in the throes of a major fiscal crisis since 2008. Budget cuts have crippled the UC system, leading to sharp tuition hikes and widespread protests. On the Berkeley campus, in particular, programs that appear to be wasteful or inefficient have faced withering scrutiny.

Whether the athletics department actually is wasteful or inefficient is, of course, the controversial question at the heart of this maelstrom. The numbers at Berkeley would indicate that the Golden Bears aren’t doing so well financially: the program ran a deficit of $6-million in 2009, and its subsidy that year was about $3-million more than the median for all Division I-A programs (and more than twice the median subsidy of other programs in the Pac-10).

While the goal among some faculty members might be zero support for sports, the reality says something different: Athletics subsidies at top programs across the country—Berkeley’s peers—have been on the rise in recent years, and only a handful of programs in Division I-A operate without any institutional support. Only time will tell if Berkeley becomes one of them.