Overall, giving in fiscal 2012 totaled $51,737,551 in support of academics, mainly for current purposes and endowments. Athletics programs received $55,950,231, which included significant support for expansion of the Len Casanova Center. The university received 43,295 gifts and pledges from individuals, companies and foundations.
This is a continuation of a long trend in the increasing crowd-out of academic giving by sports, first documented at UO in 2004, by UO business school professor Dennis Howard:
Both alumni and non-alumni show an increasing preference toward directing their gifts to the intercollegiate athletics department-at the expense of the donations to academic programs. Sperber’s (2000) assertion that giving to athletics undermines academic giving is strongly supported.
This has if anything worsened over time at UO. (Link to data source here.) 8/23/2012.
Add in the $60 million or so for Knight’s Football palace, and less than a third of giving to UO was for academic purposes.
Right so does this chart include Nike/Knight donations? It would be interesting to see this chart also produced excluding the Nike/Knight donations. How much is that skewing the graph? It’s kind of a given that this donor is not going to switch horses. I’ve often thought that there was a the big lost opportunity in building the Jock Box as a stand alone elite project, instead of leveraging that gift to build a more inclusive student resource center with an athletic wing.
Just more proof that UO’s highest priority is athletics and winning at any cost….