[Vision2020] UI Athletics Must Pay Its Fair Share

[Love America]

Nick,
You are again attacking the wrong problem; the real problem is a bloated
administration that sucks the life out of the various colleges and
departments within the UI.  Since you have a long history at the UI, why
don't you propose that the administration take a cleaver to itself and cut
itself back to the size it had in the early 1980's?  Remember back then that
the University had roughly 8000 or so students, overhead on research grants
was 23%, and colleges and departments did not pay any "fees" to the central
administration?  That should be the goal of your arguement, not attacking
the athletic department.  After all, without athletics, racial
diversity would be non-existent at the UI; and attempts to maintain gender
equality would probably slip away.

I know that the move to the WAC has been a huge throne in your side;
however, there are far more females attending the UI with athletic
scholarships than in the Big Sky days.  Why do you and the leadership of the
union so despise athletic scholarships?   Why do you fight so hard to
destroy the one department at the UI that is largely responsible for racial
diversity?  So what if the football team has had a poor record in the last
few years; the upside is that the UI has these athletes as students.  The
NCAA stats clearly show that the UI has far better students than
most universities in the WAC, enjoy that and build on that.   Look at the
flip side at BSU, sure they were 12-1 this season, but their football
student athletes obviously are not there for the education and they proudly
admit it.   If the Ada County dominated state legislature wants to keep
supporting BSU athletic greatness at the expense of football players, fine.

Your cause, and the cause of the union, should be to force drastic cuts
within the central administration, that is where the problem really exists.
Stop attacking the one department that is largely responsible for the
diverse student body the UI enjoys.

Happy New Year,
Chris


On Tue, Dec 30, 2008 at 10:41 AM, <nickgier at roadrunner.com> wrote:

> 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/20081231/790879da/attachment-0001.html