sorry, more athletics overhead subsidy

10/18/2011: I’m tired of this too, but there’s big money at stake: About $3.2 million a year. More than the $2.8 million faculty raises will cost, more than the $2.4 million Frances Dyke spent remodeling Johnson Hall, more than the $2 million we spend on the Jock Box, more than the $1 million extra we’re now spending on the campus police.

Thanks to the Internet Archive’s Wayback Machine, I’ve now pinned the date for the decision to give athletics this $ multi-million break to sometime between Dec 2010 and Oct 2011. The old rate plan is described at http://web.archive.org/web/20101229003844/http://ba.uoregon.edu/content/department-assessments while the new plan, with the special athletic department only discount, is at http://ba.uoregon.edu/content/department-assessments. The special deal for athletics is the only big change. Yesterday I asked VPFA Frances Dyke, whose office is in charge of setting these rates, if she had any documents explaining this. Her response:

This switch was made sometime after April 2010, when Jamie Moffitt was appointed to clean up the athletic department’s finances. It looks to me like she cleaned them up by passing costs off to the rest of the university.

Given the OUS rule that the procedure used to set these rates must be “Auditable – recalcuable based on documented principles and procedures” I’m guessing that somewhere there is an explanation better than “I do not.” So I’ve asked Ms Moffitt to search her files for the documents. We’ll see what comes up.