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$5 million Jock Box endowment

1/17/2012: Looks like B-School prof Dennis Howard is right about how athletic success increases athletic donations, not academic ones. The Rose Bowl win is paying off – for the athletic department. Colton Totland is reporting in the ODE that Robin Jaqua is establishing a $5 million endowment to help pay for the operating costs of the Jock Box. Under UO foundation rules this will produce about $200,000 a year. The latest data on the costs was reported by Greg Bolt in the RG back in May. UO spends about $4,000 in tutoring costs per athlete, versus about $225 for regular students. Regular students foot the bill for the athletes – about $1.83 million a year, total. Why do regular students have to pay for a building they can’t use? Ask Jim Bean, it makes perfect sense to him.

We gave the athletic department the land free, and the only thing they pay for is 2/3 of the operating costs of the building – maintenance and utilities. This endowment is just enough to cover those, so the cost to the academic side will be unchanged. Or maybe some of this money will actually be used to offset what the regular students must pay for the athlete’s tutoring. We’ll see.

4 Comments

  1. Anonymous 01/19/2012

    Incessant Dog again

    This graph is a pretty relevant comparison because it does not include facilities for the
    most part and so represents a fairer comparison
    than previous ones presented in this blog.

    There are important nuances in the figure above.

    If you look at the time period starting really in 2005 and on, the offset between the two curves is constant up until 2008

    over that period academic outright gifts were
    about 1/2 that of athletic outright gifts. This
    does not seem out of line to me.

    I think the tension arises when you get events
    like 2003 or 2010

    in 2003 academics was 1/8 of the athletics
    in 2010 its about 1/4

    but, to be honest, overall this data looks less glaring
    and less unbalanced than I would have expected.

    However, it would, for example, be nice to know how the 10M in 2008 for Academics was actually
    spent or earmarked, or whatever. Possibly that
    money funded the 4% across the board raises
    for all faculty in Nov 2008

  2. UO Matters 01/19/2012

    Dog – it’s the same data. I got access to the CAE database and gave it to the ODE and RG. They just aggregated up the academic amounts.

    I’ve tried to convince the UO Foundation to also report endowment gifts to CAE broken out by athletic / academic, as most other schools do. I got a flat “no goddam way” from Weinhold.

    And these are the people that want to be on the UO Board. They don’t care about us. But at least they don’t hate us, like Pernsteiner.

  3. Anonymous 01/19/2012

    Dog says

    I see
    thanks for the update

    oh they probably care about us at some level
    as long as our teams have winning percentages …

  4. Anonymous 01/23/2012

    Students can sort of use the Jock Box. One of my colleagues is teaching a seminar in there next term, and another taught one in Fall. So there is some general use of the space, albeit nowhere near enough to justify the academic “contribution.”

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