I had lunch with a member of our faculty athletics committee. According to the NCAA, 20-some DIAs operated in the black last year. That’s up from the teens a few years ago. However, this count is based on numbers that excluded capital costs and included university subsidies. His best guess is that 5-6 BCS schools consistently have their DIAs in the black, funded through men’s football and basketball. The other sports are consistent losers.

A Swarthmore professor told me about her experience shutting down the football program there some years ago. (It may be back; I don’t know.) First the proposed funding was cut, and the football coach said “If that’s all we get, we won’t _have_ a football program!” and then his bluff was called. She told me she received death threats from septuagenarian alumni who, of course, had never played football.

On the other hand, perhaps the problem is that Cal’s football team has never won a mythical National Championship. Look at other public schools like the University of Michigan; theirs is an athletic program that is self funded and in the black because, despite their current woes, a historically dominant football or basketball team brings in money that can fund stadium renovation and women’s lacrosse teams.

Congratulations! Maybe you can lead the rest of us out of this NCAA/CFA/BCS darkness.

And congratulations to Michael on getting this passed. Here’s hoping your adminstration listens, but I’m betting they won’t.

What force does the passage of the resolution have?

Good luck to you. The tail has wagged the dog for a very long time now.

The arts have historically been well-represented at the land-grant schools that are also the state’s comprehensive university (Cal, Nebraska, Illinois, Minnesota, etc.) The arts have historically been the poor relations at land grant schools that grew into comprehensive universities from an agriculture/engineering background (Kansas State, New Mexico State, Oklahoma State, that other school in Texas, etc).

Here on our campus, the master plan called for a performing arts center to be constructed in the 1980s. Our regents cancelled it, saying an Aggie school doesn’t need a performing arts center. So here we are in 2009, a comprehensive university with growing drama, music and dance programs and we have an improvised theater, a good small recital hall (600 seats) but no large venue for opera/large scale theater, etc.

This sounds tongue-in-cheek, but I think reflect some sociological reality of universities. Universities exist in a broader society, and there is little in universities that appeals to many elements of the broader society. Sports and vocational training–and to a lesser extent the natural sciences–are about the only aspects of universities that make sense to the voting and funding constituents of universities. (Funding constituents, for state universities, include the legislature.) The business community, in particular, values vocational training, and views athletics as useful vocational training. (Smart jocks do very well in corporate America.) Critical inquiry and preservation of high culture are not particularly valued outside the universities.

A private university can choose to ignore the voting constituents, and maybe can find alternative funding constituents. A public university cannot. In a democracy, I’m afraid that football is a necessary evil.

BTW, I just looked at the list of schools ahead of the Golden Bears in the BCS rankings. You may be right that “not a single person in this room would jump to any one of them at his or her current salary” but there might be one or two in engineering who would consider Georgia Tech, since his/her current salary in Berkeley would be worth 10-30% more in Atlanta. Yeah, I know, it’s still Atlanta and not Berkeley, but you shouldn’t paint with such a broad brush. It’s unbecoming.

Good luck killing the DIA subsidies. I don’t have the slightest interest in waiting for an “arms treaty” across the athletic division; cut it unilaterally and let the big sports descend a division or two.

If the athletics departments have promised to be self-supporting, but aren’t, the least they can do in this fiscal crisis is take cuts — primarily big-ticket — comparable to what other areas have taken. Best would be to drop the subsidy outright.

(Oh, and the chancellor’s statement about being the best is simply full of sh*t. If he were insisting on being the best at everything then he wouldn’t have slashed the academic side as he did.)

College Sports, Inc., by Murray Sperber. Written in the early 1990s, as I recall, Sperber’s investigation (he was a sports writer) revealed that after the top 10-20 schools in basketball or football performance, most sports programs in college in those areas of sport lose money for the institution. And not to put too fine a point on it, but the University of Chicago stopped its organized sports back in the 1930s. It’s academic quality and prestige has not suffered in the least.

As a Rutgers alumnus, I have watched with a wary eye its vast increase in its sports budget and I wonder, apart from the name recognition among younger people out here in the West, whether it has really translated to anything that an academic outreach might not be accomplishing more efficiently, money and growth wise.