Rutgers faculty sue university regarding transfer of $100M into athletic dept
Give it time and I wouldn't be surprised to start seeing many University professors start to go after their school's athletic program for a whole host of reasons.
As other schools lay off large numbers of faculty and staff while subsidizing their athletic departments, this issue is not going to be isolated to Rutgers.
Hmm... haven't we been told, repeatedly, that college sport budgets don't affect the rest of university operations?
That is only at Michigan. (And possibly a couple others, i can't remember exactly). Most universities support the AD.
I think it's true for most of the big football schools. Also, success in football tends to result in "hidden" financial benefits like increased donations and applications.
This wouldn't apply to Rutgers though.
The thing about Michigan that is unusual is that we actually charge the AD a full tuition bill for athletes, whereas I think a lot of schools just waive it off. I guess in that sense they're supporting athletics.
yea; but there's a discount for General Studies majors...
I can’t find it now, but I’m ESPNs article on coaches taking pay cuts (Harbaugh and Howard took a 10% cut) they had a table that also showed the % of university funds that go to the athletic department. Their updated article I don’t see this table. Anyways, for U of M it listed 0.1% of the athletic budget coming from the university. So it’s not 0, but it’s close.
A better question is how much (percentage, not absolute) of the AD revenue (mainly the TV money, gate tickets, merchandising, and concessions) actually goes back to the university instead of sitting in the AD or used to propagate the sporting arms race?
Interesting.
Me thinks Corona might have the unintended consequence of revealing who is the tail and is the dog when it comes to academics vs athletics at many colleges.
Whichever is more important, they both play a role in the success of the institutions. Athletic department branding is a massive advertisement to draw in students and donors. I wasn’t a U of M athlete, but without athletics, I might not even have gone to college. Also I partly wanted to go to U of M for grad school so I could go to football games.
At non blue chip schools there has been a long standing question as to whether sports programs aid the academic side, in terms of enrollment. Is a student more inclined to go to Rutgers vs an alternative school because they have D1 football and basketball? How about to Western Michigan University, or EMU? Would a prospective student choose say CMU over EMU (or furnish your own examples), if EMU dropped football?
That's not exactly right.
You can still have football. Hope College, Grand Valley State, Ferris, Olivet, etc all have football -- they just have it at Div II (fewer scholarships) or Div III (none).
But anyway, the question has already been answered: the two most successful second-tier public universities of the last 10 years, in terms of enrollment, are Grand Valley (Div II) and Oakland (none) in terms of football. Students do not care.
Sure and I greatly over-simplified the question. I'm somewhat familiar with Mount Union (D3) and football is a huge part of the fabric of that school and I'm sure, does to some degree help enrollment. My question was an honest one and I did not presume what the answer is.
When I was choosing Michigan, the fact of big time football and basketball on campus was a positive factor in my decision to go there, but that is several generations ago, and I was just wondering how today's generation sees it.
People choose their college for lots of reasons, and I doubt tribal affiliation to sports teams is the principle reason. I went to Michigan because it fit where I was living and it’s a damn good union card. But, as I grew up in the area and was already a fan, I would have rooted for them regardless of where I went.
Good.
But faculty have brought this up for years at schools (see any Eastern Michigan University board meeting on the budget over the last decade). That's not the problem, and I'm not sure if the courts will want to intervene.
It will only change when regents and trustees gets off the butts and realize, "You know what? Cutting faculty, lecturers and staff while raising tuition isn't a great idea when we are transferring tens of millions of dollars every year for the privilege of saying we are a Div 1A school. What were we thinking?"
This is such low-hanging fruit for politicians, of both parties, but I guess people are afraid they'll be the person the killed Div 1A football for CMU and prevented them from going to the Beef O'Brady's Bowl or whatever.
There's also the argument that sports, particularly football, help bring in more donations to the school. I'm sure it's true, but the numbers are unquantifiable. There's also the issue of donation dollars going to the AD that might have gone to the school anyway.
The MAC has a rule that all members have to play in their football conference. That's because otherwise several of their members would probably drop down to a lower division. The financial crunch brought on by the pandemic might be what forces them to change.
I completely agree with your last point. Most college presidents are primarily fundraisers. Killing FBS, or D! football would make their job harder, even if they needed to raise less money.
I think that many trustees ... do not really think of universities in this way. The football team is cool; they like the nice box, whatever. (Do you think T. Boone cared half as much about education at Okie State as he did about the team?) Alternatively, they are laser-focused on $$$ metrics. That's the language they speak, and therefore they'll do a lot to protect a possible revenue stream and are delighted to cut things that aren't revenue streams in the same way.
Trustees, to a remarkable extent, have their own priorities and views, many of which don't necessarily align with the academic mission of the school or what the majority of the school community wants. By and large trustees are very successful businesspeople or people in finance; they aren't professors / involved in day-to-day education / people who feel deeply invested in ~thoughtful and outstanding undergraduate education~ as a concept. Stephen Ross wants a nice business school and a winning football team, I don't think he really cares much about the educational experience more broadly.
I think that academics are also remarkably bad at pitching compellingly to trustees / do not take it that seriously compared to the athletics department. Unfortunately, that's a necessary skill.
(n.b. that this suit is sort of fascinating. Rutgers' is known as having a very strong academic union, so we'll see how it goes / how it impacts professor-adminstration relationships.)
(n.b. 2: this is a political story about who gets power in America. universities don't have to be run by finance people and I think -- but for the fact that that's how you get lots of $$$ from them, which universities need -- nobody would defend the state of affairs today.)
Does anyone even really care about football beyond the top half of the P5? I feel like the P5 need to venture out on their own away from the NCAA. Believe me I get it. I worked as an S&C coach at UMaine, Quinnipiac, et al. All were non P5 programs. While Quinnipiac has nice facilities for hockey and basketball, they don't even have football and do not generate profit. I don't think too many fans would miss UMaine's football program either. The whole system just needs to be more transparent. If the football programs are raking in cash and paying for other things at the university, so be it. If they are in the red and also not very successful, it's time to think about a different approach.
I think too many schools are blinded by the possible wealth they see in big time athletics. The article wasn't exactly clear on what happened at Rutgers, but I'd guess Rutgers felt good about laying off staff and continuing fund transfers to the AD because they see the AD as a growing revenue stream which from a checkbook standpoint may make sense, but I think it shows cracks in the facade that academics remains more important than athletics in the same way that having football practice but no in-person classes does. This is a 'when push comes to shove' moment for some of these universities and I think we're seeing that maaaaybe athletics has a higher standing against athletics than universities would like to admit
Rutgers is in line to get a full share of Big Ten TV revenue for the first time next year. It's a big factor in their AD's budget so things were looking up for them just a few months ago.
The relationship between schools and their athletic departments has always been a tenuous love/hate. I believe there have been letters from Michigan's President complaining about athletics as early as 1906 posted on the blog before.
Each school (or school system) has their own nuances, but here is a very generalized view of how athletic funding has evolved.
Many decades (a century) ago, athletic funds were incorporated into the overall school budget because it was a form of providing physical education for the student body. This was considered part of providing an enriching experience for students. All of the land and facilities were paid for by the school or donors because the entire student body utilized the facilities. Competitive sports started to evolve and the facilities needed to evolve. The student body still had access to the facilities to further their physical education and the sporting events became entertainment for the student body and also a link to the local community for the school. Most of the funds were still incorporated into the overall school budget. As competitive sports continued to grow, the AD's wanted more and more money to keep up. This caused a riff between athletics/academics/administration. AD's did not like being beholden to the administration because they wanted to compete and win. Academics didn't like money being given to athletics. Administration had to find balance which means no one was happy with them. The solution? Athletics needed to become more self funding. Athletics could do what they wanted and it was not at the expense of the academics. But...development (donations) became a problem. Donors like to decide what their money is going to. Now the administration was still stuck in a battle and they put the donors in the middle. Please give to academics and also please give to athletics. Putting the person with the money to give in the middle seldom is a good thing. This whole time competitive sports continues to grow and all of this revenue starts showing up in athletics (TV deals, conference deals, branding deals, etc). Now the AD's are very happy because they have for the most part become very self sufficient. Administration is happy because athletics has become fairly self sufficient. Academics are not happy because almost none of that money is coming back to the school. AD's take all of this money and create their own community embedded on the campus and most of it is not accessible by the general student body. Athletics has now almost completely detached itself from the school, except for donor's. The battle to gain donor dollars still rages on. The tenuous balance between athletics/academics/administration still rages on.
When you look at that history, one thing is very clear, while athletics can be very positive for a school. Tie to the local community, entertainment for students on campus, global brand reach, etc. Very few athletic departments (if any) bring in money for the academic part of the school. In most cases, it is still a cost not a revenue for the rest of the overall school budget. Even at Michigan where the AD pays the school for the cost of the scholarships, that is a net $0 for the school.
TL:DR: No matter how many dollars you see associated with an athletic department, it is costing the academic side of the school some money one way or the other. Is it fully made up in other ways? Maybe, but two of the three factions on a campus (academics/administration) will never be happy with athletics.
As a teacher and adjunct professor myself I'd expect an explanation why I'm being laid off whereas Schiano is getting a raise during a pandemic and it's likely there won't even be a season.
My daughter, and apparently dozens of other grad assistants and front-line staff were fired at WMU two months ago. They fired zero vice presidents and zero coaching staff as far as I can tell.
As previously mentioned, they are also outright refusing to share anonymized, aggregate athlete/coach testing results and won't commit to sharing test results for the aggregate campus population when they resume classes next month.
This, IMO, is all wildly fucked up.
That sucks—sorry to hear it.
From the description of the lawsuit, it sounds as if it is a public records case designed to obtain certain documents. So if the plaintiffs get them and they are embarrassing to the school, they can publicize them and see if that puts pressure on the school to act. Beyond that, it doesn’t seem as if the professors as employees have standing to challenge how the board and administration chooses to spend Rutgers’ money, whether it is wisely spent or not.
Exactly. The suit is an attempt to compel information disclosure, nothing more. It remains to be seen what the union tries to do after they get the information, assuming they prevail in this simple action.
Rutgers has an Athletic Department?
Do you have evidence to back up this hypothesis, OP?
There are a few scrap remnants of ancient texts that refer to a Rutgers athletic organization... beyond that it is mostly just legend and myth passed down through generations of New Jersey expatriots.
100M at RU? Having been to their softball facility a couple times, I can't imagine that program uses up more than about $1-2k/month for everything from staff salary to the chalk for the lines on the field
Very interesting.
*Rutger
It looks like Rutgers football tended in the past to generate around $3 million in profit per year on about $28M in revenue (i.e., $28M in revenue, $25M in expenses). The article doesn't list a breakdown of the purported $100M, but that is far larger than yearly football expenses.
Of course this year, things are highly unprofitable, but --
If they want the profit once football gets going again, they have to decide if it is better to keep it going, have a bigger loss now, then a quicker path to profit once things start up; or make cuts now and a longer path to profit once things return.
Which way is best depends on several things, such as how long covid will depress profitability, the cost of letting people go and rehiring vs. keeping, etc.
https://www.nj.com/rutgersfootball/2017/01/did_rutgers_football_turn_a_profit_in_2015-16_look.html