Athletics Will Donate Part of Ticket Sales to Library

At Duke, that is. From Libby Sander in the Chronicle, 5/12/2011:

Deborah Jakubs, vice provost for library affairs at Duke University, was at a dean’s retreat one Saturday in February when she fell into conversation with the university’s athletic director, Kevin White. The two agreed that they should find a way to connect their worlds.

A few weeks later, Jakubs got a phone call from athletic officials—who had been contemplating where to invest in the academic side of the university—with a proposal. What if the Blue Devils donated $1 from every ticket sold at home sporting events to a special fund for the library system? …

Starting this fall, a dollar from every ticket purchased at home games for baseball and for men’s and women’s basketball, soccer, and lacrosse games will go into a fund for the library system. Football tickets will become part of the venture in the fall of 2012.

Here at UO, the athletic department has repeatedly ignored calls for some sort of payment from athletics towards academics, despite the evidence that increasing donations to the athletic department come at the expense of donations to academics. Nathan Tublitz and Jim Earl have been making proposals like the one Duke just implemented for years.

In fact, UO Provost Bean is currently taking $2 million from the general academic fund – tax and tuition money – and spending it on athlete only tutoring and Jock Box operations, as Greg Bolt revealed in Sunday’s Register Guard stories. The coaches want the money for higher salaries, and no one in the UO administration has the stones to say “No: first you pay your bills.”