Reading The Daily Californian article “Cal Athletics receives $10 million donation for programs, infrastructure,” it is apparent that Cal is lucky to have such generous benefactors as Lisa and Doug Goldman. Past donations from the Goldman family supported the Goldman School of Public Policy at UC Berkeley as well as many other centers of environmental and social activism.
It should be noted that the amount of this generous gift equals the amount by which the campus Intercollegiate Athletics, or IA, overspent what it generated last year. It is important to note that the campus does not clamp down on IA’s overspending, but instead the campus provides IA with subsidies from student fees and from the Chancellor’s Discretionary fund – not just last year, but each and every year.
IA has drained campus coffers of over $88 million from 2003 to 2011, funds that could have been used instead to support the university’s core mission of “undergraduate education, graduate and professional education, research, and other kinds of public service.”
On Nov. 5, 2009, the UC Berkeley faculty passed by an overwhelming majority the “Academics First!” Berkeley Division of the Academic Senate resolution that recommended IA t cease its continual violation of what was the existing UC policy (Chapter A-783-1 of the UC Accounting Manual) that set forth IA should operate as a self-supporting auxiliary.
Yet these last few years have seen the IA continue overspending with impunity, in excess of $10 million annually, while telephones were being yanked out of faculty offices in many departments on campus as a cost-saving measure and while the campus library system was being forced to cut 25 percent of its staff over the last five years, as its national ranking, according to the Association of Research Libraries, tumbled from third down to eighth from the 2002-03 to 2010-11 academic years. Even the Chancellor’s Committee on Intercollegiate Athletics admitted in its July 6, 2010 report that “the rest of campus has suffered physically … in real threats to the ability of the faculty, staff and students to learn and to work, such as 63 chronic roof leaks … and antiquated laboratory facilities.”
To respect what the faculty of UC Berkeley recommended when they passed the Academic Senate’s resolution, as well as what was the established UC Policy, this generous gift to the IA should replace the campus subsidies for 2012-2013 school year. This donation should liberate the students from the burden of paying fees directly to the IA that enabled it to overspend what it generates and should free up the precious Chancellor’s discretionary funds to support the core academic mission which is under siege financially. Restoring the campus’s library system which has suffered more than $5 million in budget cuts over the past five years according to the university librarian, seems like a good place to start.
Brian Barsky is a UC Berkeley professor of computer science and vision science.
Contact the opinion desk at [email protected]
Comment Policy
Comments should remain on topic, concerning the article or blog post to which they are connected. Brevity is encouraged. Posting under a pseudonym is discouraged, but permitted. The Daily Cal encourages readers to voice their opinions respectfully in regard to the readers, writers and contributors of The Daily Californian. Comments are not pre-moderated, but may be removed if deemed to be in violation of this policy. Click here to read the full comment policy.
The commenters who try to attack the writer instead of discussing the content of the piece undermine their own position and strengthen that of the writer. I guess they’re not smart enough to realize that.
Thanks for this well-informed and astute commentary. UC Berkeley is lucky to have an independent-thinking, courageous, and outspoken faculty member like Prof. Bartsky; he’s on top of the facts, and he has his priorities straight.
I’m surprised Barsky hasn’t moved to a place like MIT or Cal Tech that doesn’t have Division 1 athletics.
I guess his research isn’t good enough to get a new job.
using the same level of junior high level logic as the others demonstrated here (who can deduce one professor does nothing because of an anti-establishment op-ed), I can also “deduce” that some of these people are athletes who miraculously got in Cal not becoz of GPA.
as Cal alum, i am truly worried about the future of my alma mater
That’s coz the athletes can get in with 2.0 GPA! Not fair to the straight A students who are not admitted.
Read the Daily Cal Letter to the Editor:
Admission of former Penn State football player is flawed
http://www.dailycal.org/2012/08/05/letters-july-29-aug-5/
The very big problem with Barsky’s OpEd is that it is highly biased. It totally ignores the likelihood that intercollegiate athletics brings in more donations to academics than the $10M cost. See the Academic Senate study on this topic at:
http://academic-senate.berkeley.edu/sites/default/files/recommendations-reports/task_force_on_intercollegiate_athletics_final_report_8-30-2010.pdf
Exactly. The real issue is that it creates two different universities: one for the members of the little Olympic development program plus football, and one for everyone else.
No, it’s the other way around. Athletics steals away donor money from the academic program. The donation discussed in this article is a good example.
The OpEd says that student fees are used so that athletics can overspend its budget. That is not fair. I could care less about football. Why should we have pay for this?
Prof. Barsky really cares about students and teh university and he should be applauded for speaking out about the problems on campus in addition to doing his teaching and research. I wish more professors would follow his lead.
It’s too bad these football fans don’t seem to have much reading comprehension. They are so busy attacking they’ve missed the point that there’s not much to disagree with in this op-ed. Prof. Barsky compliments these donors. He clearly states the facts about how much subsidies athletics gets and about how much the libraries are being cut. Very informative.
Barsky’s freshman seminars are known some of the best courses on campus. It’s crazy to read these kinds of stupid attacks by people who disagree with him.
The donations from the Goldmans highlights the benefits of athletics to the university. Athletics keeps alumni connected to the university. While we just heard about the Goldman’s donation to the athletics department, professor Barsky pointed out that they also make large donations to the school. Many other alumni follow the same pattern. So while the athletics department cost the school $10 million last year, it generated much more than that in donations for the school. However, I am not here to disagree with professor Barsky’s opinion. I think it is time that the athletic department take that last step and make itself self sufficient. UCLA’s, USC’s, and Oregon’s athletic departments are self sufficient, so can Cal. Sandy Barbour just needs to step up and find the revenues to put the athletic department in the black. Notice the three schools in the Pac 12 I listed that are self sufficient? They all have strong football or basketball programs. New Pac 12 TV revenues can help us, but what will really help is to field strong football and basketball programs. They are the revenue machines for athletics, and every university with a perennially strong football or basketball program has an athletic department that is not only self sufficient, but that generates a lot of alumni donations to the school.
I had Barsky for two CS courses and they had more math than any other CS course and he was terrific at making it understandable. Hes a great prof.
Barsky…you could always find a new employer. Please stop trying to tear down what is an integral part of the Cal experience. Loser.
By the way, Barksy gets paid something like $163k a year to teach non-CS classes. He teaches photography and writes pointless articles like this one. How much ROI are we getting from his salary? Maybe we should get rid of him…
The above comment incorrectly asserts that Professor Barsky’s salary is $163K. In fact, it is approximately $161K, according to the Sacramento Bee’s online database (http://www.sacbee.com/statepay/).
-Stephanie Baer, editor in chief and president
ANyone know how much ticket/media rights money that the campus’ sports programs (esp. football) drew in last year? $10 mil may not be that much.
IA pulled in, as a whole, less money than it’s spending. Check out the white elephant on Panoramic for a reminder of what “spending” means.
I asked for numbers, not your opinion on the matter. Still curious.
AnOski, it doesn’t matter how much money came from a particular thing because the point is that athletics loses money even after taking into account tickets, media rights.
I was asking for numbers, not unjustified personal opinions.
AnOski, it’s not an unjustified personal opinion, it’s a fact.
You’re an idiot (fact). Also, every time you comment, you immediately upvote your own comment and I get a downvote (fact).
I wanted numbers, not your uninformed preconception (which, by the way, is not a fact).
Since IA is an auxiliary organization, it doesn’t have to release its numbers. I don’t know if they’re available anywhere, and I suspect not.
But since the campus has to release its budget and expenditures, it is an undeniable fact that IA has received ~$10 million per year over the past several years as a “loan” from the campus, a loan which is then quietly forgiven the next fiscal year.
A $10 million loss is a $10 million loss. I couldn’t give less of a fuck what the percentage of IA’s budget is. There are academic departments and support units that are having to make huge cuts in their spending, and this ancillary amusement is getting millions of dollars per year in handouts when it can’t make its “self-supporting” budget. That ain’t right.
Do you know that Coach Tedford will get a half a million dollar bonus from the university when Cal plays its first game in the new stadium? That’s on top of his 2.5 million dollar salary.
Disgusting–like that drama queen in his Blackhawk fortress isn’t being paid enough.
Barksy is a professor in name only. He doesn’t teach, doesn’t do research, he just finds time to hone his own political obsessions.
http://osoc.berkeley.edu/OSOC/osoc?y=0&p_term=FL&p_deptname=–+Choose+a+Department+Name+–&p_classif=–+Choose+a+Course+Classification+–&p_presuf=–+Choose+a+Course+Prefix%2fSuffix+–&p_instr=barsky&x=0
Berkeley needs a lot fewer faculty like this.
Wow. How much does he get paid? How much of the University’s money is he taking for doing nothing?
I don’t agree with many of professor Barsky’s ideas about the athletics department, but I will disagree with anyone saying he does nothing. Cal is a research university. Teaching is not the primary function of the professors. Barsky is hard at work on his research projects, which is what the university wants him to focus on.
And the amazing query provided above shows this in-name-only professor is responsible for 6 classes, 4 of them for graduate students. I wonder if you are promoting or hurting his reputation now.
I encourage people reading the this article google ‘Brian Barsky’ or search him in youtube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jhBvMJEQhtY
see what this man is really about, before posting some brain-washed one-sided comments and bashing a professor that does something extra for students outside classroom
Those “6 classes” are a seminar in political photography (hardly a EECS course, no?); a “Supervised Independent Study” that doesn’t meet and has no students; a “Individual Research” that doesn’t meet on a schedule and has 1 student; a “Teaching Practice” that was cancelled; a “Teaching Techniques for Computer Science” 301 course for graduate students (at Cal, these are a way of getting credit for the prep part of being a GSI, and rarely meet) and a “Professional Preparation: Supervised Teaching” class that doesn’t meet and has no students.
But I do agree that most of Prof. Barsky’s work these days is best seen on YouTube, because he certainly isn’t a EECS teacher or researcher.
If you are a Berkeley student, I would assume you are aware of the fact that not all professors are teaching every semester (no?). If you search every professor’s name to look up his/her teaching schedule this semester, you will realize many of them are not teaching any classes this semester. Does that mean they are not doing their job? Hahaha go figure.
(If you want a concrete example I would suggest search for the famous Prof. Filippenko of Astronomy department. His teaching schedule for Spring& Fall 2012 would suggest, by your standard – seminars with 0~5 enrollment, he’s not teaching at all. But well, it’s like an accepted fact that he’s one of the most popular teacher on campus.)
I’m not a student of Prof. Barsky, nor have I taken any of his classes. But I did hear about him teaching CS184 (animation) a little while ago (2011?), and comments on that class I heard are very positive. If you don’t know or don’t understand what his research is about, that’s fine. But that doesn’t mean you can go ahead and say he’s not teaching, he’s not doing research, or “he certainly isn’t a EECS teacher or researcher.”
There are a few distortions here (and ad-hominem attacks on the writer of the editorial as opposed to substance of what he says — disappointing), that I thought that I would clear up. I’m a colleague in the EECS department.
First, as regards 301 courses. In EECS, our 301 courses are definitely NOT make-believe courses where students get credit for GSI prep. They meet every week and students have to do in-class presentations, read papers, do writing every week, and participate actively in in-class discussions. I’ve taught 301 myself, and we actually even get many students from other departments who take our 301 because they get a lot out of it. This is real teaching.
Second, as regards teaching in general. Our department has a very fair and quantitatively balanced system to make sure that everyone is pulling their weight on the teaching side over the years. Prof. Barsky has taught hard-core technical courses before and will do so again. It is nuts that people are attacking a professor at our university for reaching out and offering a popular freshman/sophomore seminar course that leverages his research expertise (optics, vision, graphics, etc.) with something hands-on like photography.
Third, the accusation that he doesn’t do research is absurd. He has a current NSF grant, has papers published regularly in prestigious venues, and travels regularly giving invited talks and keynotes all around the world. In other words, he’s like the rest of us.
Finally, none of these personal attacks have anything to do with the factual contents of his editorial! Or his articulated opinion congratulating IA on getting a nice big donation that should keep them from needing a subsidy from the rest of campus this year.
I’m a former EE grad student, and when I took EE 301 it met for the first 5 or 6 weeks of the semester and then it was done. (The instructor was also supposed to attend one of my discussion sections and critique my teaching, but he never did that.)
Not sure how different the CS 301 is, but for EE 301 I can say that while it wasn’t “make believe” it definitely required far far less effort on the part of the instructor than a technical course.
What does this have to do with the points being made in the op-ed?
Mr Barsky, your remarks are outstanding. It’s embarrassing to realize that Berkeley prefers to support a high tech no expense spared sports arena while patching up 3rd world style classrooms
Would you rather they didn’t patch up the classrooms?
Intercollegiate sports was less than 1% of the campus budget last year. Yet a few faculty continuously obsess about that 1%, because they really don’t have anything else to do, and athletics offends them. Cal student-athletes are relentlessly pursuing a kind of excellence that those faculty can never hope achieve. Unlike their academic world where people bend words until they’re meaningless, the integrity of a measured world record swim or a season-long won/loss record must just burn them.
Give it up, guys. You’re just sad.