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stever
Joined: 16 Nov 2004
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 Posted: 05/06/07 9:16 pm ::: Schools axe men's teams, but don't take it out on Title IX. |
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http://www.usatoday.com/news/opinion/2007-05-06-edit_N.htm?csp=34
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Colleges — among them JMU, Rutgers University, Ohio University, Butler and Clarion — are cutting back on sports programs for many reasons, including tight budgets, the primacy of football and a decline in the proportion of men attending college.
The worst that can be said about Title IX is that it compounds these problems while succeeding in providing opportunities to female athletes (such as the estimable Rutgers women's basketball team that reached the NCAA championship only to be slurred by shock jock Don Imus). To label Title IX the lone culprit is to give state legislatures a pass on their obligations to finance higher education and to give colleges a pass for their infatuation with big-time men's sports. |
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Michael
Joined: 23 Mar 2006
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| Posted: 05/07/07 8:26 am ::: Re: Schools axe men's teams, but don't take it out on Title |
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| stever wrote: |
http://www.usatoday.com/news/opinion/2007-05-06-edit_N.htm?csp=34
| Quote: |
Colleges — among them JMU, Rutgers University, Ohio University, Butler and Clarion — are cutting back on sports programs for many reasons, including tight budgets, the primacy of football and a decline in the proportion of men attending college.
The worst that can be said about Title IX is that it compounds these problems while succeeding in providing opportunities to female athletes (such as the estimable Rutgers women's basketball team that reached the NCAA championship only to be slurred by shock jock Don Imus). To label Title IX the lone culprit is to give state legislatures a pass on their obligations to finance higher education and to give colleges a pass for their infatuation with big-time men's sports. |
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Obviously written by someone who knows nothing about sports, especially college sports. Football and MBB are given the bigger budgets and tend to draw the most attention (leading to contributions) from the alumni and because those are the programs funding everything else. Taxpayers and legislatures should have little to nothing to do with the sports programs because most are not allowed to use general university funds to pay for the Athletic department, so he is way off base there too. So it comes down to 2 things, tighter budgets due to rising expenses mean programs must be cut, and Title IX means those cuts have to come on the men's side 95 out of 100 times.
Michael
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pilight
Joined: 23 Sep 2004
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| Posted: 05/07/07 8:42 am ::: |
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"Rising expenses", indeed. The logical thing to do would be make cuts in the programs that are creating the higher expenses, i.e. football.
The great majority of programs use general university funds. They have to, because they're not self sufficient. Maybe 25% of D-I schools can support their athletic programs independently, far fewer can do it in the lower divisions.
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Michael
Joined: 23 Mar 2006
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| Posted: 05/07/07 8:57 am ::: |
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| pilight wrote: |
"Rising expenses", indeed. The logical thing to do would be make cuts in the programs that are creating the higher expenses, i.e. football.
The great majority of programs use general university funds. They have to, because they're not self sufficient. Maybe 25% of D-I schools can support their athletic programs independently, far fewer can do it in the lower divisions. |
Do you make cuts in the program making you money, or in the ones that just suck up millions with little to no return? If you make cuts in football, you start to fall behind your peers, causing more losses, and revenues drop, causing you to have to make more cuts. Saying something like that puts you in a class as clueless as the initial writer. As for only 25% of the schools being self sufficient, a lot of states legally ban monies from the general fund being used in the Athletic department, so I don't think your figure is accurate.
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RedEqualsLuck
Joined: 28 May 2005
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| Posted: 05/07/07 5:24 pm ::: |
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making cuts in football -- what kinds of things would you cut and what wouldn't you cut?
Would you cut housing the team in a multi-star hotel the night before a game?
Would you cut the last 5 or 10 schollies -- ie, the "worst" players in order that the best wrestlers might compete?
How much money do the cut programs save a university? I wonder -- 8 programs at Slippery Rock were threatened (3 womens/5 men). When sued, they were restored at a cost of $300,000 or so.... how much is spent on a football program?
How come UofMD can fund programs without sacraficing "minor" sports?
As for raising money -- where does that money go, what does it subsidize and how does that look across ALL college programs w/football teams.
Can you point to actual numbers that support your assumption that football, which cost SO much of the budget, brings in enough in donations to offset/rationalize the initial cost? 'cause we know that all but 2 or 3 athletic programs are in the red (as noted Dr. Brand).
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LTF1
Joined: 13 Mar 2007
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| Posted: 05/11/07 8:58 am ::: |
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"To label Title IX the lone culprit is to give state legislatures a pass on their obligations to finance higher education"
Do state legislatures have an OBLIGATION to fund ATHLETICS in college? I think not. Athletics are NOT academic higher education, any more than playing baseball in the minor leagues is. If I had it my way, I wouldn't fund intercollegiate sports whatsoever. To pretend that collegiate sports are "higher education" is just a farce. I would much rather see the US adopt a club approach as they have in Europe. |
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RedEqualsLuck
Joined: 28 May 2005
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| Posted: 05/11/07 9:34 am ::: |
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| LTF1 wrote: |
"To label Title IX the lone culprit is to give state legislatures a pass on their obligations to finance higher education"
Do state legislatures have an OBLIGATION to fund ATHLETICS in college? I think not. Athletics are NOT academic higher education, any more than playing baseball in the minor leagues is. If I had it my way, I wouldn't fund intercollegiate sports whatsoever. To pretend that collegiate sports are "higher education" is just a farce. I would much rather see the US adopt a club approach as they have in Europe. |
I would disagree to a degree, if I may -- excluding the minor-league football and basketball teams that have developed at some schools, there is, or at least SHOULD should be, an educational mission behind all activities offered at an institution. If they haven't thought through it -- or have no clear pedagogy -- then they're idiots.
There's been a tension between the "educational" purpose of sports (Pam Gundy (sic?) wrote an interesting book on the use of basketball/team sports during the industrial/mill transformation as a way to break the solitiude and independence of farm life into the timeliness and group think of factory work)... There's a reason many men and women executives were athletes... (side note: I believe female athletes are the highest graduating demographic at the university level).
Anyhooo... back to my wandering point -- the educational mission of sport in school creates a tension that age old -- what is the PURPOSE of sport. Competition/excellence vs. participation. It was one of the arguement used by the WDNAAF to ban interscholastic basketball tournaments -- they didn't want women's sports to become like the men's side - full of gambling and cheating and wacko academics and a win at any cost mentality. And that was in the 20's and 30's. 
Executive after executive talk about what they learned from playing sport -- from being part of a team, winning/losing, setting goals, pushing yourself, etc. etc. etc. You know, it's that those other 320,000 athletes are learning.
Perhaps we'll move to what people have been talking about -- pull elite athletes out of school sports and have a separate track for them. Give the NCAA BCS schools a limited anti-trust thingy and let'em run like a real business. It would be interesting to see what happens...
I don't know enough about the European system -- don't they run off of clubs after a certain age?
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