Laptops Required at Wayne State U.

as a faculty member at UF, i can tell you that we are demoralized.  however, i’m not angry at the administration.  the real culprits here are the legislature and the governor who have cut UF’s budget by over $240M over the last 6 years.  there’s only so much low-hanging fruit to take before you have to start making real cuts that hurt.  snarky bloggers (and i refer to Forbes’ Salzburg, not Prof. Potter) spinning half-truths have the luxury of not having to deal with the real problems themselves. 

I don’t look silly:  I am extremely good looking. 

My question, which I asked in the article is — if the money is “two separate pots” then why does the football team carry the University of Florida name? This is bull$hit accounting, and bull$hit education and fiscal policy.

Football brings in millions: it then spends millions. At Stanford, if you read the recent New Yorker (but why would you? You’re too busy watching ESPN) you can see that investing in high tech education brings in billions, suckah. And there are many fewer felony charges to deal with.

You are right, Claire, athletics and academics have completely separate budgets. You could have stopped right there. Characterizing this as a zero-sum game where money for the athletics budget “took away” the computer science department is completely disingenuous (but oh so predictable). So any conclusions drawn from this misguided comparison are not helpful to understanding either curriculum support or athletics funding. I still don’t fully understand why they wished to cut the computer science program but it is not uncommon these days to hear of departments being cut and the former faculty farmed out to “related departments” in the name of efficiency (perhaps a euphemism for running off expensive tenured faculty). We already know that Florida does not need any more anthropology majors.

I share your hope that the existence of athletics on campus would be integrated into the overall “academic mission” (pretty hazy term, however) of an institution and that efforts would be made to show that participation in athletics does provide valuable skills and experiences that promote personal growth and development while in college. To those who say preemptively that athletics can’t teach anything useful, I say you don’t understand the meaning of the word useful.

But, leave Pynchon aside, your ideas for “educationalizing” sports is more a Kafkaesque effort. I don’t understand why you care who starts and who is on the scout team. You can be coached very successfully and still not be on the travel squad, that argument is absurd. Walk-ons are getting zero dollars in support, you know that, right? Football “mission statements”? Sounds like a good set up for a Letterman Top 10 list. What are they going to say “Play the game the right way,” “Honor over victory?” I am fine if they do have a personal mission statement but don’t know what that will mean to anyone. But every team has very specific “team rules” and athletic departments do have mission statements that cover all sports. Most history majors are taking 5-6 years to graduate these days as well and they aren’t dinged the time and energy athletes are during their time on campus. Sure, plenty of college kids work 20-30 hours a week and their time for academics is shortened as well so the classic definition of a college student as a “first time enrolled, 4 year window” graduate is useless for anyone, athlete or not, in today’s higer education. And D-1 football programs do have constant reviews, the NCAA does it on a daily basis. Have you seen the NCAA rulebook that covers rules pertaining to academics and athletics? All athletic departments have periodic external reviews and also have faculty oversight groups that are charged with protecting student-athlete welfare.

Is it all a perfect system of accountability and transparency? Hell no, but then again neither is our “democratic system” of government or any other social institution.

Thanks for writing this.  It is simply astonishing that most universities are known nationally for their football and basketball teams and that our campuses basically serve as farm teams for professional sports, which reap the rewards of not having to support such farm teams themselves.  The place and salaries of coaches in academic life are beyond parody.  How about this for a radical suggestion:  campuses should admit students by the educational criteria they normally would apply, which will vary, and those regularly admitted students should form athletic teams of actual students if they wish to compete for enjoyment in sports? 

A couple of years back at Florida State (as ‘reported’ in The Onion): http://www.theonion.com/articles/florida-state-university-to-phase-out-academic-ope,5425/ 

Oooo…an intriguing thought.  I’ve been having the same sort of argument with myself over high tuition and fees and how much it actually costs to run a university.  Student fees and student activities holds about the same position in my mind.  Now I just have to figure out how to dig in to top-heavy administrative structures, which I suspect is based on politics and fund-raising.

I don’t always agree with TR, but there’s a lot here to ponder. As someone who has worked a lot with assessment and program evaluation, I find the proposal re. evaluating athletic programs to be thoughtful and, well, kind of compelling. Sounds like a great idea to me. What’s sauce for the goose . . . 

I love the assessment model. Clear program learning outcomes, assessed annually, are certainly necessary. But to really make football like the rest of public higher ed, cut the budget annually, and remind those working in athletics that they should feel lucky to do meaningful work. they don’t care about money, right? Even better, cut the state allocation midyear. It’s all about excellence without money, right?

Now there’s a good idea.  Then maybe they would stop paying them so much.

One of the biggest frustrations for anyone who ever tries to track high ed spending – and something that has been covered here, actually – is that even when there are two pots  - there aren’t.  The fact is that operating costs for athletic programs come out of the operating costs for the university – because no matter how much money a program brings in, they don’t do so without a loss.  Maybe the loss at UF isnt in the football program, but its somewhere else.  If you start breaking down the budget closely, there are monies that are shuffled somewhere – travel or stadium costs or insanely high costs for whirlpools in the team rooms that are put in a general budget under the idea of “campus resources.” The truth is that no one but revenue team players can use those, and no one but big Div 1 teams have them. 

The football issue deeply bothers me, and the reason why was pretty seriously illustrated to me today on the way to the IT office, where I had to dodge construction workers for the giant new luxury skyboxes my university is adding to the football stadium despite yet another disappointing year for our team and despite the fact they are now talking about cutting back my health benefits.

This crap with the “two pots” gets trotted out at every University I’ve ever been at when people complain about the glaring inequality in funding and treatment. When did the term “reification” go out of style for academics? Those two pots weren’t born endless and unchanging like that, the budget system was set up by _someone_ for some _reason_. And if people who were in charge at the University and the State government level actually wanted a change, they could change it. Would it be easy? Not necessarily. Would it be complicated? Yes. But the Skycaptain didn’t hand this funding scheme down on stone tablets. 

The fact is the funding schemes universities have now are about protecting the privileges of football players. They’re virile, masculine. Football players are all guys. Professors are obviously effeminate, and an increasing majority of our undergraduates are ladies. Lets not pretend this is because we can’t get someone from the School of Business to sort out the way you’d change a University’s funding arrangment.