Last Friday's Daily Californian editorial "The Sports Scapegoat" misses the point of faculty criticism of the university's subsidization of Intercollegiate Athletics (ICA).

The fundamental issue is not whether athletic teams are valuable to the campus, or whether they should receive funding, but that the level of funding that they receive is outrageous and irresponsible given the level of cuts that have been applied to every other aspect of student life on this campus. It's fine to fund some portion of ICA using student fee moneys, but there is an astronomical difference between the amount of money given to student groups and the money given to ICA.

The numbers given in the Oct. 28 article "Campus Loans to Athletic Department Criticized" are staggering. The campus forgave a $34.1 million debt from intercollegiate athletics in 2007. Are you serious?

Can you think of any student group or academic unit that would be allowed to acquire an almost $35 million debt, and then have it forgiven (i.e. paid for) by the university (and by extension, student fees)? That's in addition to the almost $14 million in funding that ICA received last year, and over $10 million for each of the past five years.

Where in this do we find anything close to resembling the "self-supporting" model that the administration claims ICA possesses? In last Friday's piece, the editorial board writes that "If it's justified that UC Berkeley Model United Nations receives students' fee money, why wouldn't the same logic hold for the nationally ranked women's crew team?" That would make sense except that last year UCMUN received a little under $7,000 from the ASUC. We're talking about a difference between thousands and millions.

The ASUC as a whole has a budget of roughly $1.6 million annually (and that's including all of its expenditures, not just the allocations to student groups). That's less than 1/10th of the annual funding for intercollegiate athletics from the university.

Furthermore, student organizations as a general rule do not receive any of what little funding they have directly from the university (except through grants, and in special cases such as the Cal Band-which is itself direly underfunded), but through the ASUC, which has its own $50 annual fee, separate from the student registration fees that go to the Regents. This brings up a very important piece of history. In 1998, after the university took the ASUC to court over $2 million debt, the ASUC ended up surrendering its financial autonomy to the ASUC Auxiliary, a university office that was created to manage its finances. The fact that ICA went into a debt over 17 times as large as that of the ASUC's and that the university paid it off, no questions asked, is nothing short of an outrage.

The facts are in: ICA has lost upwards of $171 million since 1991. Its not simply an issue of ICA "trimming its budget," they need to fundamentally rethink their model so that student fees are not responsible for subsidizing these programs to such an extreme degree. Of course there's a value to student athletics, just like there is to every other aspect of student life, but if Athletics Director Sandy Barbour is serious when she says that "We are all in this together and the pain must be shared," then intercollegiate athletics needs to actually share in the cuts.

The pending 32 percent student fee increase, if it isn't stopped, will result in middle-income students dropping out of UC Berkeley because they aren't able to pay the cost, or force them to take out unreasonable loans to pay for their education (that they will be paying back for years to come).

System-wide cuts to teaching staff (lecturers and GSIs) are making it harder for students to get the classes they need to graduate in time. The UC Board of Regents are proposing to lay off almost 2,000 workers throughout the UC system (to say nothing of the layoffs and furloughs already occurring).

In light of this situation, it's ludicrous to subsidize intercollegiate athletics to this degree, and ultimately the UC Berkeley administration is being irresponsible and needs to be held accountable for allowing this to occur.

Tags: DEPARTMENT OF INTERCOLLEGIATE ATHLETICS, UC BERKELEY