7/22/2011: That’s the question a former Board of Regents president is asking, in Iowa:
All university revenue should come into one pot, and every department should have to justify its spending. The University of Iowa takes in $66 million in athletic revenue, but that doesn’t mean the department should have the unsupervised right to spend that. How can it justify paying the women’s basketball coach a sum more than three times the revenue of the sport? Why shouldn’t it return $10 million to $15 million to the general fund? Is it right that the four highest-paid state employees are coaches at Iowa and Iowa State? (One way of looking at it: The Iowa athletic department spends about $100,000 per athlete every year.)
The student editors of the student paper agree:
Some may view the idea of demanding more from a successful athletics program to be counterintuitive. Critics will call it “punishment” or claim there is no way to share revenue without hurting current athletics operations. But all at an institution should understand it’s their responsibility and job to operate in real-world economic realities. For the University of Iowa, that means being as cost-effective as possible on a campuswide level.
The entire Gartner op-ed is interesting – maybe too interesting:
The pleasant-sounding concept of “shared governance” should be scuttled. Shared governance once meant that faculty ran curricular matters and administrators ran management matters. Now, faculty political leaders insist they should help manage the institution — but woe to the administrator or regent who wants to have a say in the classroom.
The concept has outlived its usefulness and is a roadblock to planning, to change and to effective administration. It institutionalizes mediocrity, stymies change and intimidates presidents, and it is a misuse of faculty time and energy. Professors should teach or do their research. Presidents and provosts and deans should manage. Regents should govern.
I’m glad this former Iowa regent looks so old. 95% of what he proposes would have UOMatters gnashing its teeth.
I’m glad this former Iowa regent looks so old. 95% of what he proposes would have UO Matters gnashing its teeth. The other 5% would have the entire state of Oregon (except maybe Beaver fans) up in arms. Phil Knight would probably withdraw all further support. The old regent would probably find himself tarred and feathered by Duck fans.
His proposal to stop student binge drinking?
One solution: schedule required courses for Friday afternoons and Saturday mornings.
About as realistic as expecting an athletic director to give up money.
The Iowa regent makes absurd claims about the subsidy per student at the Iowa public research universities — that it is something like $17K per year per undergraduate.
But go here to this nice compilation of statistics, in Fig. 13. It is nowhere near that, it’s closer to $7K. Sure, if you include the state subsidy to the medical school, etc. you might come up with his absurd figure.
http://www.deltacostproject.org/resources/pdf/Trends-in-College-Spending-98-08.pdf
This former regent sounds like a crank with an ax to grind. He’s supposed to be a businessman, but evidently, to make the most charitable interpretation, he doesn’t understand the first thing about the college budgets in Iowa.
Also look in that figure at where Oregon is both in total spending per student, and state subsidy. Near the bottom on both counts.
He’s the Tony Van Vliet of Iowa