[Vision2020] UI Athletics Must Pay Its Fair Share

[Donovan Arnold]

UI has an athletic department? How can you tell?
 
Best Regards,
 
Donovan

--- On Tue, 12/30/08, nickgier at roadrunner.com <nickgier at roadrunner.com> wrote:

From: nickgier at roadrunner.com <nickgier at roadrunner.com>
Subject: [Vision2020] UI Athletics Must Pay Its Fair Share
To: vision2020 at moscow.com
Date: Tuesday, December 30, 2008, 11:41 AM

Good Morning,

This my radio commentary for Radio Free Moscow (KRFP 92.5 FM) for tomorrow AM. 
The UI budget office has been closed for the holidays, so I still need to gather
more data.  For example, I would like to know the total number and amounts of
the scholarship that UI departments offer their students. 

Visionaries may be interested in "Back to the Big Sky," a column that
the UI union president and I did back in 2005.  It can be found at
www.home.roadrunner.com/~nickgier/bigsky.htm. 

Happy New Year,

Nick Gier

This is Nick Gier, the Palouse Pundit and state faculty union president,
talking about the UI financial emergency and the athletic department.

At the December 16 Faculty Council meeting, UI Provost Doug Baker was asked to
defend the break that UI athletics receives on an administrative fee that all
department pay to the central administration.  Baker's response was that our
teams could not possibly succeed without this favor.

For years our departments have performed very well, far better than men's
football and basketball, all the while experiencing frequent budget cuts and
paying the full 8 percent fee on all external funds. 

UI athletics only pays 3 percent of its external funds to the central
administration. For FY2002 the athletics paid no administrative fee at all,
claiming that it had to reach gender equity goals.  Many other departments could
have presented equally persuasive reasons why they too should be exempt.

For example, auxiliary services and facilities management generate lots of
external funds, and they could very well argue that their salaries, 19 percent
of which are below the poverty level, should rise before they are required to
pay the administrative fee.

In the spring of 2005 then President Tim White, even though a faculty committee
recommended a $300,000 cut for athletics, chose instead to fire 27 staff
employees in the physical plant.

While most UI employees have gone without pay raises, the athletic director
enjoyed an 8 percent raise for FY09, and a salary line for football coaches, who
have lost a record number of football games, also increased 8 percent.  

In a response to the December 16 Faculty Council discussion (The Daily News,
Dec. 17), the athletic department defended its low administrative fee by saying
that it returns $2.5 million back to the university in "the form of
tuition, fees, room and board for scholarship students."  Many other
departments, however, do the same with their own scholarship funds.

If the implication of this claim is that athletics makes money for UI, then
this is clearly false.  For FY09 the athletics department estimated that it
would take in $2.1 million dollars in student fees in addition to a $3 million
direct subsidy from the Legislature.  

A national study concluded that only nine athletic programs are able to
actually return money to their respective academic programs. Contrary to
conventional wisdom, winning athletic programs do not increase alumni funding.
As a Vice President at the University of Notre Dame says: "There is no
empirical evidence demonstrating a correlation between athletic department
achievement and alumni fund-raising success." 

Winning football teams at Wisconsin, Michigan, UCLA, Texas, and Washington
correlate with a low ranking of 126, 128, 134, 136, and 144 respectively on a
national alumni giving list. Coming from Oregon State, President White once
boasted about how much money its winning football team brought in, but in FY05
the OSU athletic department had a $4 million deficit.

In the fall of 2005 the Faculty Council turned down a faculty union request for
a four-step phase out of the $3 million subsidy for athletics.  For most of the
1980s there was no such subsidy and the Vandals won five Big Sky championships.

The union's goal this time is much more modest: a simple request that
athletics pay its fair share of the administrative fee. University Budget
Committee member Jim Murphy agrees: "If my department in has to give 8
percent, then everybody else should pay 8 percent too."





=======================================================
 List services made available by First Step Internet, 
 serving the communities of the Palouse since 1994.   
               http://www.fsr.net                       
          mailto:Vision2020 at moscow.com
=======================================================



      
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: http://mailman.fsr.com/pipermail/vision2020/attachments/20081231/4c287def/attachment-0001.html