The Pull Of Bigtime College Sports

The New York Times featured a story on the pull of big time college sports at universities last Sunday (h/t the Professor):

Ohio State boasts 17 members of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, three Nobel laureates, eight Pulitzer Prize winners, 35 Guggenheim Fellows and a MacArthur winner. But sports rule.

“It’s not, ‘Oh, yeah, Ohio State, that wonderful physics department.’ It’s football,” said Gordon Aubrecht, an Ohio State physics professor.

Last month, Ohio State hired Urban Meyer to coach football for $4 million a year plus bonuses (playing in the B.C.S. National Championship game nets him an extra $250,000; a graduation rate over 80 percent would be worth $150,000). He has personal use of a private jet.

Dr. Aubrecht says he doesn’t have enough money in his own budget to cover attendance at conferences. “From a business perspective,” he can see why Coach Meyer was hired, but he calls the package just more evidence that the “tail is wagging the dog.”

Dr. Aubrecht is not just another cranky tenured professor. Hand-wringing seems to be universal these days over big-time sports, specifically football and men’s basketball. Sounding much like his colleague, James J. Duderstadt, former president of the University of Michigan and author of “Intercollegiate Athletics and the American University,” said this: “Nine of 10 people don’t understand what you are saying when you talk about research universities. But you say ‘Michigan’ and they understand those striped helmets running under the banner.”

 As a domer, I got to see big-time athletics up fairly close.  It isn't too pretty.  I was one of those students to whom sports was a big part of the draw.  Nowadays, I'm reformed, and don't really care too much, but I'll still tune into games, so I'm still part of the problem. 

It is kind of funny that one of the reasons I decided to run for state representative was because a bunch of right-wing idiot legislators (including my representative) were pushing for capping the pay of employees of state universities at no more than the governor's salary (about $160,000 at the time, I think).  They had in mind a bunch of employees making $300,000 to $400,000 dollars (who happened to be doctors at the University Hospital and business professors hired out of the private sector).  When they found out that the highest paid state employee was Jim Tressel, they weren't smart enough to just drop the idea (I mentioned they were right-wing idiots), instead they decided to make a provision exempting football and basketball coaches from the proposed bill.  Luckily, the rest of the legislature wasn't idiotic enough to go along.