Some profs want Cal to stop subsidizing sports
by Achilles on Oct 27, 2009 10:44 AM PDT
22 comments
According to an article in the San Francisco Chronicle, the athletics department is facing multi-million dollar deficits and some members of their faculty want the university to stop bailing out athletics.
via imgs.sfgate.com
Here is the opening of the article:
When UC Berkeley lends its Department of Intercollegiate Athletics millions of dollars to pay its bills each year - and even forgives that debt at times - it's helping a top-tier college sports program beloved by thousands of fans.
But a growing number of Cal academics are disturbed by the practice, arguing that the prestigious research university should not subsidize elite athletes at a time of soaring college costs, faculty furloughs and reduced course offerings.
The faculty, which will debate the issue at next month's Faculty Senate meeting, is not alone. Now the independent Knight Commission on Intercollegiate Athletics - formed 20 years ago by the John S. and James L. Knight Foundation to raise academic standards in college sports - is turning its attention to an out-of-control "arms race" among college football programs competing to pay increasingly high coaches' salaries and other associated costs.
It's pretty fascinating.
I'm actually surprised that a school that sells out its men's basketball games and has its own, on campus football stadium, can't make athletic ends meet. One must wonder if the deal Cal has with Nike is as lucrative as it needs to be -- considering Cal is a ranked football program with a good enough basketball program. Don't misunderstand -- I don't pretend to know anything about their Nike deal or any other revenue source, I'm just speculating based on what I know in general about where funding for athletics comes from.
The whole article is a worthwhile read.
This is a FanPost and does not necessarily reflect the views of BruinsNation's (BN) editors. It does reflect the views of this particular fan though, which is as important as the views of BN's editors.
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The challenge isn't so much revenue
as costs. while football and basketball generate the revenue. we play every single dingle sport, with a competitive team and coaching staff and scholarships, and facilities, and stuff. Now, women’s sports (v-ball and b-ball) have been starting to get some TV time on local cable sports channels, but there’s not much $ in that yet. We are spending a fortune to fix up the football stadium and provice decent facilities for the 10 teams that use it.
Go Bears Go
by Rocksanddirt on Oct 27, 2009 11:09 AM PDT reply actions 0 recs
Like I said ...
I just find this interesting. (I hope it didn’t come off like a pejorative post about the school.)
According to the graphic, women’s sports are not even part of the equation … they are paid for by a special fund. So, the losses are just with the men’s sports?
by Achilles on Oct 27, 2009 11:30 AM PDT up reply actions 0 recs
the graphic is all f*d up.
and I didn’t take it in a pejoritave way. I imagine ucla’s situation is very similar. and since it’s the academic senate (which is a UC wide group) discussing it, any recomendations they make will be to all the different UC’s.
Go Bears Go
by Rocksanddirt on Oct 27, 2009 4:00 PM PDT up reply actions 0 recs
Ummm...
I sure hope it wasn’t anyone at Cal who provided this chart…
The light blue column is supposed to be Revenues…in 2009 it shows 64.9mil.
The dark blue column is supposed to be Expenses…in 2009 it shows 59.1mil.
…and there’s a projected deficit of -5.8mil?
LOL! No wonder they’re having trouble.
But hey, what do I know. I’m just the 800 lbs bruin in the room.
by tasser10 on Oct 27, 2009 11:10 AM PDT reply actions 0 recs
2005 and 2006
Beg questions too
by SuperBruinMan on Oct 27, 2009 11:29 AM PDT up reply actions 0 recs
LOL ...
I just glanced at the graphic when I put it up.
Something isn’t right with it … maybe the numbers are in the wrong column?
by Achilles on Oct 27, 2009 11:31 AM PDT up reply actions 0 recs
The Chron is a rag that is falling apart
since they got rid of all the reporters and editors. now they just have interns and bloggers.
Go Bears Go
by Rocksanddirt on Oct 27, 2009 4:01 PM PDT up reply actions 0 recs
Sounds like our LA Times ...
except they can’t use youth as an excuse!
by snorkeldorf on Oct 27, 2009 5:33 PM PDT up reply actions 0 recs
Not much competition for the Chron in the Bay Area to keep them honest
The Examiner, of course, was sold out to become a free daily, while the Oakland Tribune is (and has been since I started reading newspapers) a joke of a media outlet, and the SJ Mercury News and CC Times merged at some point while I was away, with an apparent drop in quality (from the Times perspective).
by bruinhoo on Oct 28, 2009 2:16 AM PDT up reply actions 0 recs
Athletic Dept Revenue/Expense Breakdown
are available for public universities since they are require to disclose.
http://www2.indystar.com/NCAA_financial_reports/expense_stat/show?school_id=150
by truebluebruin on Oct 27, 2009 4:46 PM PDT reply actions 0 recs
Looking at this and comparing UCLA to UCB
We are operating at an overall (albeit miniscule) profit, whereas Cal is operating at a huge deficit. It seems the Cal Athletic Dept. has some explaining to do since their expenses are way higher than ours on only slightly less income.
by snorkeldorf on Oct 27, 2009 5:51 PM PDT up reply actions 0 recs
A Breakdown of the "heavy hitter" expenses:
(apologies in advance for this crude attempt at formatting a table)
Total____________________Cal________UCLA
Revenue_________________$44M_______$46M
Expenses________________$51M_______$46M
Expense Breakdown________Cal________UCLA
Student Aid_______________$8M________$7.1M
Guarantees(?)____________$2.4M_______$3.4M
Salaries_________________$9.9M_______$7.2M
Support Staff Salaries______ $9.3M_______$8M
Facilities Maintenance______$2.5M_______$2M
Team Travel______________$3.8M_______$3.7M
Game Expenses__________ $1.8M_______$3M
“Other” Operating Expenses__$5.9M_______$4M
by snorkeldorf on Oct 27, 2009 6:17 PM PDT up reply actions 0 recs
well....a quick look about $4M is
in salary differences. In a break down of pac10 football salaries I saw recently the differnece between Cal and Ucla was not very big. I think we pay more for non-revenue assistants and support staff.
you guys pay more for ‘Game Expenses’ but that’s likely due to use of the RoseBowl, and hauling everyone’s tail out there.
Go Bears Go
by Rocksanddirt on Oct 28, 2009 11:31 AM PDT up reply actions 0 recs
This kind of leads me to something I've been thinking of for a while
Some UCLA athletic programs are tight on money, while many of our facilities are below par. We also have many more teams than most. Would it make sense to cut, say four programs (two men’s, two women’s so as not to run afoul fo Title IX) and reallocate that money to the rest of the programs so they can better succeed and improve? We have so many programs, more than almost any other school that I sometimes wonder if that holds us back because the pie is being cut so many ways. Just a thought.
by Ryan Rosenblatt on Oct 27, 2009 4:53 PM PDT reply actions 0 recs
To make a significant difference ....
you’d have to cut four programs with pretty hefty budgets – and I’m guessing those would likely only include some of our most successful programs.
Personally, I would be inclined to keep as many sports as we can from here on out and let each sport share a small load of the sacrifice vs. a few programs making the ultimate sacrifice. We seem already to have made drastic cuts (e.g. Men’s/Women’s Swimming). These lean times will pass.
by snorkeldorf on Oct 27, 2009 5:45 PM PDT up reply actions 0 recs
I Agree
We are a university whose purpose is to turn out educated, well rounded students.
Therefore, we should offer a diverse, if not profitable, sports program for the benefit of our students, if not our pocketbooks.
sjh
by Class of 66 on Oct 28, 2009 6:42 AM PDT up reply actions 0 recs
I don't fault the principle
Kids are supposed to be getting an education. It seems to me that this education includes the entire college experience, and that includes getting crazy on Saturday morning, and carrying that craziness through the end of the game. I disagree with the concept that intercollegiate (or intramural) sports is not part of the overall educational curriculum.
But how much does or should that experience dictate policy? Mrs. Fox 71 went to a teeny school in the midwest (enrollment 1200) and her education included going to football games. I don’t think the coach had a seven figure salary, and there was no Nike contract involved. But that part of the college experience that we get (or got) as Bruins is no different from what kids at smaller schools get.
Every school wants its big revenue producing sports to produce enough revenue to pay for badminton, etc., but when the athletic department operates at a deficit, then there is a problem. It’s easy to point at a coach who’s being paid more than all the professors in the econ department combined and say that’s the problem, and of course that’s correct in a sense. We crunched some numbers here in the past to justify paying our new head coach (still unknown at that point) much more than we paid CTS, based on the assumption that a real coach would put more fans in the seats and generate revenue, etc. Apparently the costs have gone out of control at Cal, and I can’t say that I blame the pointy-headed guys in the ivory towers for saying that priorities have become skewed.
The best example of this of course is just$c*. where everything (including integrity) takes a back seat to winning at football. There, of course, integrity in academics has also been compromised, because no one there is willing to criticize the athletic program.
by Fox 71 on Oct 27, 2009 7:14 PM PDT reply actions 0 recs
If you believe that athletics are part of the college experience and a piece of its mission...
Then I’m not sure how different this really is than say the Microbiology dept subsidizing the Linguistics dept in the College of Letters and Sciences.
by insomniacslounge on Oct 27, 2009 8:42 PM PDT reply actions 0 recs
Don't look at this from the perspective of a Bruin.
A friend of mine is sending her son to Reed College because it has a strong program in some particular thing that her sone is interested in. He’ll have the full blown college experience, but his team’s football coach (and I’m not even sure if they have a tootball team) won’t be making 6 or 7 or 8 times what the number one teacher in the Linguistics department is making.
There are lots and lots and lots of colleges throughout the country, but only 50 or so coaches making the enormous bucks. I was an econ major, so I have no conceptual problem whatsoever if a person maximizes profit on the sale of his or her services in the marketplace. Who can blame OJ2 for going to just$c* when the pay he got was that high?
My point is that a linguistics professor at Cal has a valid beef if Tedford’s salary and the expenses of his program are greater than the revenue generated by that program. If revenue exceeds expenses, then the professor’s dispute becomes something out of Das Kapital and not Wealth of Nations.
by Fox 71 on Oct 28, 2009 4:58 AM PDT up reply actions 0 recs
I should add one other note
I totally left out the notion that most aspects of the college experience generate no revenue directly. I can’t imagine what the cost is for keeping UCLA such a beautiful campus, but I have no doubt that it’s a pretty massive number. That expense shouldn’t be cut, in my opinion, because the serenity of that campus is part of the whole thing, too. And the particularly good music theory teacher. In a macro sense, the decisions on those sorts of things are probably guided by Adam Smith’s unseen hand, but in a micro sense I don’t think it works that way. A school’s leaders have to decide what expenses will just be accepted as a cost of running a university.
by Fox 71 on Oct 28, 2009 5:05 AM PDT up reply actions 0 recs
the general donations to the university are enhanced substantially
by a successful athletic program. Not just donations to said athletic program.
The question becomes really, what should the subsidy be to ensure that one’s program is successful enough to help with fundraising, but not a drain on resources that are maybe better used elsewhere.
Go Bears Go
by Rocksanddirt on Oct 28, 2009 11:34 AM PDT up reply actions 0 recs
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