6/2/2011: “Know the O” is the athletic department’s latest effort to pretend that they have some relationship to UO’s academic side. They are going to find a sponsor for 30 second spots on televised Ducks games, to highlight faculty research. Right in between the Bud Light commercials.
8 seconds for “this ad brought to you by …” and then 22 seconds for some faculty to talk about their research. I think that Dennis Howard from UO’s sports marketing Warshaw Center should go first:
“My research shows that the athletic department siphons off tax deductible contributions that otherwise would have supported scientific research and helped build a new knowledge based Oregon economy. The athletic department also encourages donors that might have supported scholarships for low income Oregon residents to instead give to help pay Coach Kelly’s $3.5 million contract. Go Ducks!”
My vote was that we sell the airtime to the highest bidder, and then use the money for research and scholarships. But apparently that airtime belongs to AD Rob Mullens, not to the University of Oregon.
What else did I learn at the IAC? Lorraine Davis still has some athletic affiliation, and she is the go-to person if you are faculty looking for free tickets to a game. Not clear if you can take the tickets and sell them for cash to pay for time on the LCNI scanner – ask me when the football season starts.
UOMatters, first a correction of fact: Know the O is the result of an IAC initiative. In October 2009 the committee discussed a number of possible initiatives to take on, and chose (very clearly) the idea of increasing what is seen and understood about the campus through athletic broadcasts. There is a lot of potential there, not only to highlight faculty and student excellence but to give people a better idea about how we serve the state. For example, a program I know of which brings low-SES students to campus might be worth highlighting (though there is probably as much demand as capacity in that program at the moment at any case, but you get the idea). The athletic department has been supportive, but this would not be happening without faculty following up.
Another fact: that airtime belongs to IMG, not the university. The athletic department sold the rights to it for guaranteed income (then they do not have to hire a team of people to sell advertising to sponsors). The money from that deal does go to the athletic department.
Finally some speculation: suppose we offer to pay Chip $90K, in line with a full professor (though he’s just been here a couple years so let’s make that $60K as an assistant professor). He takes a job at Ohio State or Notre Dame or… For a few years, we send $3.4M to the general fund (maybe more if we also cut a lot of bells and whistles from the football program). But in not too long, the team has a losing record and brings in $25M instead of $45M. We end up cutting sports (probably only mens sports because of title IX), and scholarships (oops – we were supposed to have more money for low-income students) and debate spending general fund money in order to scrape by with minimum Pac-12 requirements (there are minimum numbers of sports, etc). But we certainly don’t send that $3.4M over to academics for very long, because it would no longer be there.
It is probably a sign that I’ve been at the IAC too long, but when I learned they were negotiating with Chip (before the deal was made) my guess based on knowing what other football coach’s salaries are was $3.5M per year. I’m no economist, but sometimes markets aren’t so hard to understand. An economist might suggest this is a coordination problem – all schools should refuse to pay coaches so much. But the NCAA lost a lawsuit to coaches back in the 90’s, resulting in a huge payout, so schools are staying clear of any kind of tampering with the coaching market.
Dev, I’m not suggesting we pay Chip Kelly $90K – that’s your straw man argument, not mine. He’s damn good and even I know it.
I would suggest that we write a real incentive contract for our next AD and football coach though: let them keep 10% of any surplus they generate for the academic side. Their current contracts reward them for spending *more* on athletics and maximizing the subsidy they take from the academic side.
Which is of course what they do. They’re not bad people, they’ve just got bad incentives. Check Mullens’s contract for his “Director’s Cup” bonuses if you want to see a particularly bad example.
As for the “Know the O” campaign coming from the IAC – I don’t know what to say. Is it too late to kill it?
How do you define surplus? Is the athletic department’s primary value as a potential revenue generator for the general university (or at least something with no cost by any measure) or as a program with intrinsic value? If the campus determines that it has no intrinsic value, then we should shut it down. I don’t want a revenue-generating useless appendage. But as a former NCAA athlete myself I’d say there is intrinsic value (as some measure you can look at what other campuses are willing to pay as a measure of value – my alma mater MIT well over $10M, same for Cal, OSU at least $6M, etc). So even if you call $2M in academic services for student-athletes a subsidy (which is honestly debatable), it looks like a pretty good deal when you do a market comparison. But I don’t buy the premise that the “subsidy” should be zero in any case.
There is also a significant donor relations component here. As you allude to, the athletic department wouldn’t be able to generate the revenue they do if they weren’t given some very large gifts. There are athletic departments which send over money – mostly in the SEC where there is a combination of 100K seat stadiums which sell out and a huge media deal. But the U of O does not fit the profile – we would be where OSU is (millions in general fund monies for athletics programs, not just academic support) without those huge gifts. Those gifts were meant exactly for competitiveness in the Director’s Cup etc. If we ran the athletic department as a revenue generator for the general fund, those donors would rightly say “I gave you money for this program, and you took it and put it elsewhere.” Don’t pretend for a moment that Phil Knight wouldn’t walk away forever at the very least (which some might welcome, but we have an obligation to fulfill promises made to him, especially in light of his long history of generosity.) And if we could go back in time and “have some spine”? He would have responded to an ultimatum of the form “If you want to donate $100M to the athletic department, then you have to donate to low-income scholarships too” with a “buh-bye -I’m not interested in dealing with people who don’t value my gifts- I’ll give another $100M to Stanford (or whomever) then.”
So shifting the “surplus” you allude to would be effectively shifting donor money rather than shifting expected athletics revenue – not the way to run donor relations.
As for Know the O, it is probably not too late to kill it, but “I don’t know what to say” would not be a reason. Hey, I’d love for hundreds of thousands of people to want to watch me explaining why there are infinitely many prime numbers rather than watch a bunch of guys in tights and helmets chase an ellipsoid around, but that’s not what the options are. The options currently are twenty seconds at a time of Oregonians learning about the university at no expense beyond production of the pieces, or nothing of the sort. If you have a better option I’m all ears, and will happily put it at the top of our agenda.
In all seriousness Dev I would love to hear the 22 second version of your research agenda. I’ll post it, and I’ll try one of my own. Audio or video, your choice. Hell, let’s make it an open call – we can post ours and then invite more.
The proposal wasn’t necessarily about research agendas, though it could be in some cases (who doesn’t get the point of research on cancer or…?). But in much less than 22 seconds I can say “the U of O math department is the smallest department at a public university to be ranked as a Tier 1 program by the American Mathematical Society” (I have said this many times to prospective graduate students) and then say something more about how this fits with our university identity of excellence at a personable scale. If I really want to make a point that the audience will understand, I could say that by the numbers of positions open, it is more difficult to get a faculty position in a Tier 1 math department than it is to make it to the NFL. (Perhaps not terms some would appreciate, but an interesting line to think about.) Or in a few months we could make a plug for tools our department is developing to help parents, teachers and others who work with kids in Oregon know what math they need to be doing to ultimately be college-ready – that would be my favorite idea.
UO Matters, I meant to ask: how is Lorraine the person to ask for free tickets? While there are cases where faculty do get free tickets, for example if they are honored at an athletic event, are handing out an honor (e.g to an Academic All-American), are administering final exams for a traveling team, or are one of many who receive tickets at one of the thank-you events open to all faculty, it would be inappropriate if tickets were passed along to individual faculty in no such context, especially if that individual faculty were on the IAC.
Good question Dev – I’m mystified by the fact that Lorraine still has a position at UO and showe up at the IAC meeting. I thought the golden parachute Frohnmayer had written for her expired at the end of 2010.
But maybe she got some sort of special deal from Mullens after that? Travel expenses for away games, free tickets, and some other perks? Who knows – hardly the first thing of that sort to go on across the river.