The lively debate engendered by the student fee referendum on the V.O.I.C.E. Initiative to keep The Daily Californian’s presses rolling raises an interesting question: Why such a fervor over $2 per semester for maintaining an accessible source for relevant news, information and debate of campus issues when this is but a tiny fraction of the fees that students currently pay to enable Intercollegiate Athletics to overspend what it generates?
One answer is that few students are even aware that they are personally paying to prop up IA every year. The program has cost the campus $88.4 million from 2003 to 2011, of which $17.8 million came directly from student fees. For decades, UC policy stated that IA must be self-supporting — the same requirement that is imposed on various ancillary campus enterprises such as parking and student housing. But after the campus violated the policy every year for many years, the University of California Office of the President quietly rescinded the long-standing policy on Dec. 16, 2010, thereby authorizing IA to use student fees and other campus funds.
It may be of interest to recall that the ASUC Senate unanimously passed a bill in November 2009 recommending that the UC Berkeley administration stop using student fees to help fund IA; however, the bill was subsequently vetoed by the then-President of the ASUC.
The largest portion of the Student Services Fee funds the University Health Service and the second largest portion of the fee is allocated to IA. Recreational Sports is provided with only about one third of the amount that IA receives from this fee, even though Recreational Sports serves all 35,000 students, whereas IA’s facilities are restricted to about 850 athletes. Therefore, in allocating this fee, the campus is supporting Recreational Sports with an amount per student that is less than 1 percent of the amount per athlete that it is providing to IA.
To be specific, in 2010-11, the campus provided IA with $2.26 million from the Student Services Fee; this works out to about $65 from each and every student.
The campus provides IA with the student fees for it to spend however it pleases. But the bottom line, quite literally, is that IA overspends what it generates and relies on these student fees as well as other campus funds to bail it out every year. Since money is fungible, any $2 million reduction in IA spending could correspond to the elimination of student fees supporting IA.
One particular notion is intriguing as a Gedankenexperiment: The campus provides IA with roughly $2 million in student fees, and IA pays the head football and men’s basketball coaches together roughly $4 million a year (IA records show that private donations accounted for 1-2 percent of the compensation of the head football coach and 3-5 percent of the compensation of the head basketball coach from 2009 to 2011). Imagine instead that the students were not providing these funds, and the coaches’ annual earnings were lower by the amount of the student fees. In this scenario, IA could pay the two coaches about $1 million each, which would still keep them as the only members of the exclusive million-dollar club on the Berkeley campus. Among the thousands of faculty, staff and administrators on the Berkeley campus, there is no one else earning anywhere close to this. All the Nobel Laureates on campus combined earn only a fraction of what each of the coaches is paid.
Perhaps contemplating paying $2 a semester to maintain the student newspaper takes on a different light in the context of every student on campus already personally paying an annual fee of $65 to effectively enable IA to pay a second million dollars each per year to the football coach and basketball coach.
Brian Barsky is a professor of computer science and vision science at UC Berkeley.
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Donations to the athletic department total over 8 million dollars annually. Since money is “fungible” – how does that jive with the notion that only 1 – 2% of the salaries are paid by donations? The only reason there are any donations is that you have teams that are competitive.
The issue in IA is not the football or basketball program – which actually are profitable and fund the other IA programs. The issue is the women’s softball team, field hockey team, gymnastics, etc which do not self-fund. Women’s basketball is the single biggest money loser on campus. We will assume that Barsky is not a racist who does not like the fact that many of the players on the football and basketball team are african-americans, many of whom are the first in their family to attain a college education. But the singling out of those programs for his venom on an ongoing basis starts to make one wonder, especially since those teams are the ones that are creating revenue.
The football team provides for a discounted benefit to those who purchase athletic privilege cards for essentially a season ticket for $100. The cost of those tickets are $400 for anyone else off the street. The annual benefit to the student body is approximately $14 million per year. That never seems to be in the calculation either.
Also what does not seem to be in the calculation is the fact the IA pays the university full tuition for these students – many of whom pay out of state tuition. The fact is that many who get full rides would have to access other university funding sources for their tuition and housing needs if they attended UC Berkeley. In other words, IA provides funding for about 3% of the students at UC, with little in the way of subsidy.
Basically the true meaning of Barsky’s crusade over the past 5 years or so is that athletics has no place on campus; that it is not on par with the true mission of the University. The cost is a canard – the real issue is a prejudicial disregard of anything that he believes is not a true academic pursuit in his view.
Your misleading “facts” are egregious to behold.
From the S.F. Chronicle in 2007 when Tedford was in the midst of his last contract extension:
“To alleviate most of those questions, the initial contract
terms are simple. Tedford’s base salary would jump 34.4 percent, from
$167,500 to no less than $225,000, and his “talent fee”‘ would see a
similar rise from $1,332,500 to $1.575 million. The talent fee is widely
believed to be funded by Nike, which provided Cal with its dashing
array of uniform combinations this season.
SOURCE: http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/c/a/2007/03/14/TEFORD.TMP
In other words, the huge figure you always float around regarding Tedford’s salary does not take into account the “talent fee” paid by Nike–which would reduce the majority of the rest of the number you keep espousing to his base salary.
Last point, if Barsky were king, he would gut our athletics program, which serves one of the biggest female student-athlete populations in the nation thanks to Title IX.
If you didn’t have a biased agenda, you would acknowledge that football and men’s basketball make enough money to be self-sufficient. You would acknowledge that no other event on campus would bring 65,000 alumni together. Why do that when it would severely damage your argument?
Operating in the black as a public school in this era is definitely a concern. But your points of contention are erroneous.
Cal offers an academic environment unparalleled on this earth. Yes, Barsky, people come here for that. But your ignorance regarding athletics’ value just makes you seem small and bitter. I’d respect you a lot more (and others would probably would too) if you would focus your attacks on a solution that helps the Cal community at large instead of some unrealistic, drastic measure that only fits one man’s pipe dream.
Love how an ad for Spring Football Practice is on the right side of the comments. You’re fighting a losing battle, Barsky, and a short-sighted one at that.
Professor Barsky should apply for a position at the University of Chicago if he is opposed to NCAA athletics.
Some of these readers’ comments make assertions based on assumptions that Americans hear from childhood, and which are rarely questioned. However, these claims do not stand up under closer examination. Even the NCAA, whose $845.9 million annual revenues fully rely on the existence of college sports, admits that these assumptions are mere myths. The previous NCAA president advised college presidents to reconsider the amount of money their institutions spend on sports. More recently, the NCAA reported: “Spending on athletics has no relationship to academic quality, and successful athletics teams do not prompt more alumni giving” and “spending on coaches’ salaries and scholarships had no significant relationship to success or increased revenue.”
There are many studies that produce the same result. Readers may be interested in a report prepared for the United States Department of Education Commission on Opportunities in Athletics by Ellen J. Staurowsky entitled “The Relationship Between Athletics and Higher Education Fund Raising: The Myths Far Outweigh the Facts” and the book by former university president, James Duderstadt entitled Intercollegiate Athletics and the American University: A University President’s Perspective (see Chapter 7 on “Financing College Athletics”).
(If anyone would like a copy of the report, please contact me and I will be happy to send it to you.)
I think the ASUC should be able to decide whether to tax themselves with fees and have strong input as to where those fees go.
prof barskey.
You are obsessed with the abolition of IA. Were you never picked on your Junior HS flag football team?
I know you spend an inordinate amount of time trying convince the masses that sports is a waste of time.
Why don’t you do what YOU were hired to do? Teach computer science. You need to spend more time on that, and less time telling us where we should spend our money. I wonder if you could ever get 65,000 to attend one of your lectures?
You obviously don’t understand the culture of America and aren’t qualified to preach to the masses.
What needs to be observed is the benefits that Football and athletics can bring to the university. What other event can bring 60,000+ alumni and students together in Berkeley? IA provides a way for alumni to remain connected to the University. Through that connection we have generous donors like Haas, Spieker, Fischer, Cronk, the late Warren Hellmen and many more. Each of these men gave to athletics but even more so to the University. A successful Athletics program only draws more almuni back to their alma mater. Given the direction of state spending, we need to draw more support from our alums. So again I ask, what else draws 60,000 people together in Berkeley?
And what is it that the student fees going to IA do? They subsidize the costs of going to the events. Students only pay $100 dollars for SEASON TICKETS to Football and Basketball, where they get the BEST SEATS AVAILABLE! All other games/matches/meets are free to students. In the years spent at memorial there average 6,000 students in the stands. What happens when they are forced to pay market price for their tickets?
Why should I have to pay for you so that you can go to the game cheaper? I’m working two jobs trying to pay to get an education, which is what this place is supposed to be for. I could care less about the football games. If you want to get drunk and party at the football games, fine but don’t make me pay for it! It is totally unfair.
Generous donors give to Berkeley because they want to support education
and research. Athletics takes donations away from education and research.
Have you interviewed all of the generous donors, or do you just assume that those who donate to Athletics do not also donate to towards education and research? It may be more complex than you can understand, but donations are not a zero sum game. Could it be that the donations to education and research made by “athletic supporters” might not be there if they were not attracted to the University by their interest in intercollegiate athletics? Life isn’t as simple as you appear to perceive it to be.
Larry, this is the conclusion of the Knight Commission based on many studies.
I don’t see what’s preventing Barsky from getting a job at a school that truly cares about education over sports like USC?
As for the legitimate concerns of the students over the ever rising cost of education, there would be plenty of money for if governments weren’t being forced into debt by age old schemes of the international banking establishment who want us all to fight amongst ourselves as Barsky advocates, instead of addressing the real problem
We should fund The Daily Cal with Barsky’s salary. Rather than doing his actual job as a computer science professor, he appears to spend most of his time on his anti-Cal sports crusade. He even taught on an entire class on his obsession last semester! Meanwhile, his many editorials have had zero impact because they are filled with unsubstantiated and slanted claims.
It’s time to “Occupy the UC budget”! We’ve all been protesting the cuts and tuition increases but have we been paying attention to the other side of the ledger? How is the administration spending this flood of student money? On expanding undergraduate education? Not for Californians. Demanding input and control over campus spending priorities should be a goal of the campus community. It’s doable and the administration can’t just point the finger at “forces beyond their control”.
The current priorities of dumping on education while uselessly pouring hundreds of millions of dollars down the rat hole of football fantasies is simply obscene if we just stand back and blink our eyes, shake off the dust and see what really serves the intrest of the campus community.
$2 for a great college newspaper or $65 down a dark hole never to be seen again?
While I agree that the athletic department should be self supporting, I think the author left out important information. He focuses on the football and basketball coaches’ salaries, but he ignores the revenue that is generated for the school by these two men. Their programs pay for most of the athletics for Cal, and they bring in most of the alumni donations to sports and to the university. Large donors like Haas are heavily connected to Cal through sports, and this connection helps to get the university donations that they might not normally get. Our donations and revenues would probably increase dramatically if we actually went out and got coaches who demanded higher salaries, but would also bring in even more revenues. Top basketball and football programs generate tens of millions more in revenue than our programs, which more than pays for their coaches salaries.
It is not the coaches who are the cause of student fees paying for part of athletics. It is Sandy Barbour’s mismanagement of the athletic department’s P&L. She should have fixed things long ago so that the athletic department is self supporting. If she could raise hundreds of millions for the refurbished stadium, she should have been able to eliminate the need for the students to have to pay fees to support athletics.
Thank you for you comment, I_h8_disqus.ikely to be true upon closer
examination of the financial statement that is linked above. Note that
only a small fraction of athletics expenditures are allocated to
football and basketball, and that is the way the accounting keeps the
expenditures from exeeding the revenues. Does it seem right that
football and basketball together account for only 2.5% of medical
expenses, 7.4% of administration salaries, 14% of fundraising, and not
even 1% of facilities cost? Where are stadium maintenance costs?
Also, this nebulous category reported expenditures that exceed the
official total stated for the football program and reveals subsidies
of $10 million from the Berkeley campus.
The claim that football and
basketball turn profits seems unl
Please note that it is not correct to say that hundreds of millions of
dollars have been raised for the refurbished stadium. The fact is that
this is being built with hundreds of million dollars of borrowed money
– and there is another half a billion or so of interest that will need
be paid on top of the repayment of this debt. This huge financial
obligation should be integral to any discussion of
the cost of football.
Thank you for you comment, I_h8_disqus. The claim that football and
basketball turn profits seems unlikely to be true upon closer
examination of the financial statement that is linked above. Note that
only a small fraction of athletics expenditures are allocated to
football and basketball, and that is the way the accounting keeps the
expenditures from exeeding the revenues. Does it seem right that
football and basketball together account for only 2.5% of medical
expenses, 7.4% of administration salaries, 14% of fundraising, and not
even 1% of facilities cost? Where are stadium maintenance costs?
Also, this nebulous category reported expenditures that exceed the
official total stated for the football program and reveals subsidies of
$10 million from the Berkeley campus.
Please note that it is not correct to say that hundreds of millions
of dollars have been raised for the refurbished stadium. The fact is
that this is being built with hundreds of million dollars of borrowed
money — and there is another half a billion or so of interest that will
need be paid on top of the repayment of this debt. This huge financial
obligation should be integral to any discussion of the cost of
football.
Brian, I will partially disagree and say that at least football makes a profit. Even if we charged all the non-program specific direct facilities costs and medical costs to football, they would still be profitable. I would also wonder if much of the non-program specific revenues are more related to football than the other sports. I think cutting football salaries would just lose us more money in revenue than we would gain from cutting the salary expense.
I guess it may be taboo for you to point it out, but the real salary issue is with women’s basketball, then other women’s sports, and then other men’s sports. The women’s basketball and other women’s sports revenues don’t even cover the coaching salaries, and unlike football and possibly men’s basketball, increasing women’s sports salaries won’t bring an even greater increase to revenues generated.
What it comes down to is that our athletic director needs to make athletics a break even business so that we have student fees going to things other than athletics, and I think a strong football team is the best way to do that.
If the students don’t vote for a $2 increase in fees for the Daily Cal, it isn’t athletics fault. It is the Daily Cal’s fault. If a school paper can’t get students to shell out $2 a semester to save the paper, then the paper is failing to meet the needs of the student population.
I_h8_disqus, you omitted the over $13 million for the “Administration salaries” line item, of which only 7.4% is allocated for both
football and basketball together. Also, 40% of the non-program
specific revenues are not generated but are in fact subsidies (“student fees” and “institutional support” line items). Rather
than communicate back and forth in these comments, if you contact me we
can discuss it to be sure that both understand the details.
Thanks for the offer, but I think we have a pretty good idea that the cost of running the athletic department is larger than the revenues generated. That is why the students have to pay up. The only point I was trying to make is that I believe investment in salaries for football and men’s basketball are helpful by 1) generating more profit for athletics, because better coaches will win more and bring in more revenue than the additional cost of their salaries. 2) creating a bond with alumni that brings in donations to the university that are greater than the cost of the salaries.
Outside of the football and men’s basketball coaches’ salaries, the athletic department needs to take a serious look at their other costs. I can’t make an argument that those costs are helping to make the athletic department self sufficient.
I normally hit delete when I read ” Barsky on athletics”, but for some reason I didn’t this time and I was pleasantly surprised. In the past when Barsky complains there is a knee jerk reaction like…lets cut the women’s lacrosse team. Nice plan, that will save us a bundle. Let’s cut the teams which cost the least and have the highest GPA’s. Don’t reduce the expense of the sports of the millionaire coaches who coach the minor leagues of the NFL and NBA, cut the little sports to keep the Barsky’s at bay. Once again, nice plan.
This time I agree with Brian. Why do we to pay coaches 3-4 million? Why does the athletic director make more than the chancellor? Why not have all the sports we have now and just tone the whole plan down. What will happen, we’ll go one and done in the NCAA basketball tournament, or we will only be able to reach a lower tier football bowl game…we have learned to live with this and the sun still comes up.
I agree with Barsky. It is time to hit the reset button and IA salaries. If expense cuts are needed, the cut should come from high end sports and salaries.
What you forget to point out, Professor Barsky, is that the salaries by the coaches are market driven. Their salaries are relatively conservative compared to other coaches in the profession (Nick Saban makes over 6 million per year). You also fail to take into consideration that IA is by far the most visible and marketable part of the school. Not only does it bring student-athletes to the schools, but regular students are attracted to the environment and prestige a successful IA program brings. I do agree that IA needs to temper its spending, but that problem is far spread across the country and the argument is not as one sided as you present it.
The Berkeley campus attracts top students and faculty due to its reputation for academic excellence. Only the most sports-crazed fan would argue that Berkeley’s intercollegiate athletics was a bigger draw.
Nick Saban is the coach at a school which is a joke academically. Is that the market in which Berkeley should compete? Berkeley compares itself to Harvard and MIT and those schools don’t pay their football coaches anything like these kinds of salaries.
Thank you for pointing out this out.
I personally believe that if we are $65 dollars is spent on Intercollegiate Athletics, we shouldn’t continue to fund other institutions that are not utilized by the whole of the student body.
For anyone who wonders what else Brian Barsky may do on campus, I suggest you run a google search on him and his publications. The amazing thing is that in addition to his research and teaching, he has managed to stay on top of the Intercollegiate athletics (IA) situation, and patiently dig away to get at facts and figures about spending on IA previously concealed. What he has achieved is extraordinary. He should be honored, not reviled. If you disagree with him, then you should forthrightly explain why you do, instead of attacking him because the facts he has seem to undermine the argument for subsidies for a program of which you approve.
I just wish the spending was more transparent. Even the student fee committee doesn’t seem to know where all the funds are allocated!
It benefits all of us for the whole student body to see the Daily Cal. I think it makes sense for us to pay a small amount of student fees to support our campus newspaper and to have sports facilities that everyone is allowed to benefit from. I definitely do not think such a large portion of our fees should go toward facilities only a small portion of students are allowed to use.
The trouble is that only a very very small percentage of the student body is allowed to benefit from the intercollegiate sports facilities, and the money we’re spending on them is very disproportionate to the benefit we get out of them. I wouldn’t mind so much if it were spent on the RSF or Intramural Sports (teams I can, you know, join..) instead.
Does Barsky ever do any actual work around here? Teach any classes or do any research? Or does he just use his salary to complain about athletics?
Do you ever take the time to look up from your books and educate yourself about what the administration is doing with your money?
Wow, an informative and well-researched article, yet two students feel the need to insult the writer rather than inform themselves. And to think that UC used to be a great university.
I dunno, perhaps he just relaxes in his office, but then this page seems to have lots of research so, yes–he definitely does do research and teach, which BTW, a quick search on Schedule.berkeley would confirm that…
http://dl.acm.org/results.cfm?CFID=96539242&CFTOKEN=26740609&adv=1&COLL=DL&DL=ACM&Go.x=0&Go.y=0&termzone=all&allofem=&anyofem=&noneofem=&peoplezone=Name&people=Brian+Barsky&peoplehow=and&keyword=&keywordhow=AND&affil=&affilhow=AND&pubin=&pubinhow=and&pubby=&pubbyhow=OR&since_year=&before_year=&pubashow=OR&sponsor=&sponsorhow=AND&confdate=&confdatehow=OR&confloc=&conflochow=OR&isbnhow=OR&isbn=&doi=&ccs=&subj=
Yeah, there’s lots of pretty neat stuff in there!
Because I like football more than the bias daily cal. I wish my student fees would stop funding ethnic studies
But then what would the football players major in?
You got me there
Was reading the article, then I saw it was written by Barsky so I stopped
So that way you can ignore the facts!