Dive Brief:
- Faculty at Wright State University are up in arms over a $1.6 million budget increase for athletics as every academic department is seeing cuts and dozens of faculty positions are being eliminated, according to Inside Higher Ed.
- School officials are justifying the increase, saying if you consider that athletics has overspent its budget every year, forcing it to spend within the actual allocated amount will net a decrease in spending for the department.
- Faculty maintain that revenue generated from athletics is low — men's basketball, the most popular sport, doesn't even half fill the arena most of the time — and faculty are demanding that extra money be put towards student scholarships.
Dive Insight:
The struggle between athletics and academics is one which many campuses face — it is a particular struggle for those schools, like Wright State, which remain in lower-level Division 1 conferences, where the cost to play is higher than the share of TV and licensing revenue they hoped to see. Supporters of maintaining sports programs will argue athletics is the front porch of the institution, helping to drive enrollment and fundraising efforts. Detractors, like Paul Quinn College President Michael Sorrell, say the returns don't justify the social and economic costs of maintaining athletic programs.
Most would agree that athletics take priority over academics if one must yield, even more so for the most competitive programs. But administrators should take note of the optics and morale damage associated with asking faculty to fudge grades or go lighter on athletes; or worse, they may be asked to take pay cuts or take on more sections of a course because colleagues have been terminated while the athletic department is spending out of control. And, considering only a handful of programs actually make enough to run the program in the black each year, administrators may want to think about dropping down a division or cutting programs, as unfathomable as it may sound, to help balance the books.