What the Rich Are Doing With Their Tax Cuts–Buying Football Stadiums and Fumbling Higher Education

This morning I turned to the sports section to catch up on the latest football scores and also to sort out what has become one of the more exciting pennant races in history. In the midst of the stories about whether the Mets would manage to pull it out on the last day, whether the Yankees had a chance against Cleveland, and the complex mathematics of a potential National League playoff, I found a column by the the New York Times Selena Roberts, who seems to always have something interesting to say.Today the story she had to tell involves Heisman trophy winners, Swift Boats, ivory towers, Rutgers University’s football team and a storm gathering over America.Roberts’ column detailed how T. Boone Pickens–he of Swift Boat fame–has basically bought the Oklahoma State University athletic department. According to Roberts:
About 90 percent of the nearly $300 million Pickens has given to O.S.U. has been earmarked for sports. About 100 percent of the Cowboys’ coaching decisions are all but approved by Pickens.
Buit as always, Roberts has a larger point to make. She reports:
The Chronicle of Higher Education released a report last week that detailed how gifts to 119 of the largest athletic departments in the country have, in some cases, tripled in recent years, but donations to academics have remained flat.
The Chronicle Report makes for sobering reading, yet another example of the misplaced spending priorities of the richest Americans. “Let the rich decide what to do with their own money,” has been GOP gospel since Andrew Carnegie brought it back from Homestead carved into a steel ingot lathered with the oil of John D. Rockefeller.
America’s colleges and universities have always served as a gauge of these priorities since their rich alums decide for themselves how to earmark their gifts for the alma mater that sometimes first admitted and then passed them through with their gentleman’s “C” in the hopes of someday reaping the reward of that largesse. My own alma mater, which shall go nameless because it is far from shameless in this game, even openly debated whether to recruit more rich students. The word from campus is that these well-heeled undergrads are referred to as “trustee scholars” after the ones who advocated this policy.
Obviously, since the first tower later to be covered with ivy was erected, colleges have sought money from their richest graduates to help defray the cost of a new library or science building. In return the alum who forked over the most cash often had his or her name placed on the front of the building. There isn’t a campus in the land that does not have some building whose name is lost to history because the rich donor is no longer remembered–which when you think about it is kind of a cruel joke.
According to the Chronicle’s report, however, rich alums have made a major change in their spending habits since George W. Bush handed them a wad of extra cash with his tax cuts. Instead of investing in science buildings, endowed professorships, or scholarships, the Bush beneficiaries have been following the lead of the president who once “owned” the Texas Rangers baseball team and putting their dough into athletics.
In 1998 athletics gifts accounted for 14.7 percent of all contributions. By 2003 sports donations had reached 26 percent.
What is truly staggering is the AMOUNT of dough involved. The Chronicle estimates:
Between 2002 and 2007, colleges in the nation’s six premier athletics conferences raised more than $3.9-billion for capital expenditures alone.
The country’s largest athletics departments and booster clubs raised more than $1.2-billion in 2006-7, a Chronicle survey has found, with some programs more than tripling their annual gifts in the past decade.
Over the next few years, big-time athletics programs hope to raise an additional $2.5-billion for new buildings, the survey found.
Given the recent debate over the Children’s Health Care Insurance Program, it would be a no-brainer to suggest where these dollars might have gone, but even if we restrict our analysis to higher education, the impact of putting jocks over scholars has already had serious consequences for higher education–and by implication–for the future of America.
Bruce Flessner, a fund-raising consultant quoted by the Chronicle, notes one consequence:
They were the guys doing the golf tournaments, and no one took them seriously. Now they’ve pushed themselves front and center, and they’re eating a big slice of the philanthropic pie.
Ruitgers University professor William C. Dowling has been a vocal critic of this new emphasis on big time athletics, a move that has had a large impact on his own campus which made a conscious decision to nurture highly-ranked football and women’s basketball programs. His new book Confessions of a Spoilsport details not only the impact on Rutgers, but other schools as well.
Dowling reserves special wrath for the boosters–the well-heeled donors like Pickens–who are the heart of big time college athletic programs. A couple of D-1 athletes I know tell me the locker-room nickname for these creatures is “jock sniffers.” Dowling isn’t quite so graphic, but he is equally damning. In an interview with the Chronicle, he mentioned his research into booster clubs:
What you hear is an anti-intellectual subculture incredibly sensitive to anything they perceive as a threat to their control over the university. They can’t spell. They punctuate badly. They’re obscene beyond belief. But they do know that they own the university, and they’re not about to give that up.
In the same interview, Dowling described the impact on the campus of Rutgers’ decision to go big time:
Top New Jersey students have begun to avoid Rutgers in droves. The brightest students on campus are transferring out at an increased rate. Admissions standards are dropping. The school is now drawing students whose idea of “college” is drinking beer and painting their faces before football and basketball games
This issue, as Dowling himself notes, is not about whether colleges should have athletic programs. Speaking as the father of a son who was a four-year letter winner playing college basketball, I can testify that the experience was invaluable for him. As he would probably say, the issue is how those rich people are choosing to spend their tax cuts.
Every dollar diverted from academics to build yet another stadium or buy new uniforms like the ones my local University of Minnesota team wears that makes them look like lemons–which symbolizes the program itself–is a dollar that might have gone to provide a deserving student with an academic scholarship, bring to campus a Nobel prize winner instead of a Heisman trophy winner, fund research that might find a cure for AIDS, unravel the complexities of the American economy, better understand why Woodrow Wilson decided to enter the First World War, invent the next YouTube or Google, or create a poem or piece of music that will reach areas of the mind where touchdown passes cannot penetrate.
The dirty secret behind the shift in alumni contributions comes from a report from the Education Trust. It found:
Between 1995 and 2003..flagship and other research-extensive public universities decreased grant aid by 13 percent for students from families with an annual income of $20,000 or less, while they increased aid to students from families who make more than $100,000 by 406 percent.
Another equally ominous development was noted by the National Academies report, “Rising Above the Gathering Storm,” which might be likened to higher education’s equivalent to the famous “Nation At Risk” study of K-12 education in the 1980s. The report’s executive summary states:
In a world where advanced knowledge is widespread and low-cost labor is readily available, U.S. advantages in the marketplace and in science and technology have begun to erode.
If you want to know the possible consequences of this take a walk through the academic buildings of a big time sports university on a football weekend. As the sounds of cheering and blaring bands drift though open windows, your footsteps echo in the deserted corridors as you walk past empty classrooms and deserted laboratories. Even the library is free of all but the most devoted of students, most of whom are probably graduate students. The other students are all at the game or partying. This may not be that unusual for a Saturday even at a D-3 top-ten academically-ranked college, but imagine if it occurred on a Wednesday–which is not out of the question given the demands of sports television programming?
And in one of the luxury boxes that now are a feature of even college stadiums a group of rich alums toast the success of their team with thousand dollar bottles of wine and catered gourmet food–all courtesy of one George W. Bush and his generosity–AND the Democrats and Republicans who helped to write the checks.
After the game, a black man will sweep up the remains of their party and try to recall the dream he once had of going to college.
Tagged with: Andrew_Carnegie • athletic_boosters • Bush_tax_cuts • college_athletic_departments • college_athletic_donations • college_football • confessions_of_a_spoilsport • education_trust • future_of_the_Democratic_Party • George_W_Bush • google • GOP • heisman_trophy • Hillary_Rodham_Clinton • Iowa_caucuses • John_D_Rockefeller • national_academies • new_york_mets • New_York_Times • No_Child_Left_Behind_Act • okalhoma_state_university • recruiting_rich_students • rising_above_the_gathering_storm • rutgers_university • Rutgers_womens_basketball_team • swift_boat • T_Boone_Pickens • william_c_dowling • Woodrow_Wilson • yankees • YouTube












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