From the recent job postings, it looks like the Ducks are scheduling a major increase in fundraising effort, just as Mike Andreasen’s UO Advancement Office finally gets its academic fundraising efforts rolling. This is really bad timing. This is the time when the Duck fundraisers should be directed to shift…
Posts tagged as “athletics subsidy”
9/17/2015: Move it along professor, nothing to see here. Really?
From: “Thornton, Lisa” <[email protected]> Subject: Public Records Request 2016-PRR-078
Date: September 17, 2015 at 11:04:14 AM PDT
To: [email protected]
Reply-To: [email protected]
09/17/2015
Dear Mr. Harbaugh-
Records responsive to your request made 9/15/2015 [for a copy of the instructions to the auditor showing what he will examine, etc.] are exempt from disclosure under ORS 192.501 (37). However, the university has chosen to provide you with the preliminary objectives of the upcoming athletics risk assessmentt, which you can find below.
The Objectives
• To gain an understanding of the athletics program in order to identify inherent risks.
• Identify systems and processes along with related controls that are intended to mitigate these risks.
• The results of this work will be used to develop a multiple year, risk based audit plan.
The office considers this to be fully responsive to your request, and will now close your matter. Thank you for contacting the office with your request.
Sincerely, Lisa Thornton, Office of Public Records
The DOJ’s Public Records Manual says, regarding ORS 192.501 (37):
Enacted in 2011, this exemption allows, but does not require, public bodies to decline to disclose documents and information related to audits of the public body (or audits the public body is conducting with respect to other public bodies) while the audit is ongoing. In order to qualify for this exemption, the auditor or audit organization must be operating under “nationally recognized government auditing standards,” and the audit must still be ongoing. An audit is ongoing when it has not been abandoned, and the final audit report in accordance with nationally recognized government auditing standards has not been issued. Note that this exemption expressly states that it “does not prohibit disclosure of a draft audit report that is provided to the audited entity for the entity’s response to the audit findings.”
9/10/2015: Page down for latest email from UO auditor Brenda Muirhead.
5/20/2015: Audit of athletic dept risks due this fall – and another cut to Duck subsidies?
The last audit cut the subsidy for the Ducks by $555,227, recurring. How much will this one save?
9/14/2015: UO announces $115M in research funding for 2014-15 Interim VP for Research Brad Shelton’s office has just released the 14-15 fact sheet here. $103.5M in federal grants: The University of Oregon has more than doubled its research funding over the last twenty years to a total of $114.6 million in sponsored projects…
9/12/2015: Andy Greif has the game preview in the Oregonian here – though not the financial details. Maybe UO still hasn’t responded to that public records request. Last year GSU won 1 out of 12 football games, and brought in just $654,347 from ticket sales for football and basketball combined. So their athletic…
But Mullens claims the Ducks get no subsidies. At least they’re arguing over the right thing. Someday the PAC-12 ADs may even start doing something to help out their universities with that new TV revenue. Just kidding, we know they’ll spend it all on raises for themselves. Adam Jude has…
Update: UO’s public records office has been sitting on the RG’s request for documents about the championship bidding process since June 15. PR log here: 4/16/2015 update: IAAF sells 2021 Track Championships to Eugene w/o public bidding The BBC has the surprising news here: The 2021 World Athletics Championships will be…
No, of course I’m not talking about basketball coach Dana Altman – he’s a lost cause. I’m talking about women’s volleyball coach Jim Moore. RG columnist Austin Meek has the story here: On paper, Moore acknowledged, the task looks daunting. According to financial documents filed with the U.S. Department of Education,…
From the Athletic Department’s July 2012 planning document, full pdf here:
That’s the closing line from LCB Prof. Dennis Howard’s Op-Ed on Duck Athletics and UO, in the RG on Sunday and online here. The RG comments are pretty interesting as well. Prof. Howard and I had a panel discussion on athletic funding at the Eugene City Club in June, there’s more on that…
7/11/2015 update: Matt Prehm has an interview with Duck spokesperson Craig Pintens on basketball tickets, here:
The Ducks averaged just 6,209 fans per home game during the 2014-15 season, ranking seventh in the Pac-12. It was the lowest figure since 1992 when an average of 5,819 fans attended games at McArthur Court.
… The Athletic Department operates on zero funding from the University of Oregon [Yeah, sure it does], and so every penny can sometimes count. That’s why when Oregon decided to slash prices across the board – a 34-percent slash on average – was such a difficult decision.
The Athletic Department is reporting a near 90-percent season ticket renewal rate from last season, and while that’s well above the 80-percent renewal norm for the basketball team, it’s still a huge financial hit with the slashed prices.
… With a better marketing plan of the program, ticket costs slashed, and a better non-conference schedule Oregon is seeing early returns pay off.
No, actually this isn’t paying off. I’m no economist, but if you cut prices 34% and sales only increase by 10 points on a base of 80 – lets call that 13% – total revenue will drop. As it did. And as explained below the basketball program is now losing millions – even if you ignore the sunk costs of the $13.5M Knight Arena bond payments.
And it seems that they are prepared to lose more millions to avoid the embarrassment of having the country’s most expensive college arena sit half empty. Meanwhile, the millions in hidden subsidies from the academic continue – including the $450K we pay athletics each year for the Knight Arena land.
Meanwhile Coach Altman has also succeeded in driving away the UO student fans:
… Based on numbers given to me by [Duck PR flack Craig Pintens], the average student attendance for this season was 989 per game. Last season, they were 1,539. In 2012, it was 1,541. In 2011, it was 1,574.
5/15/2015: UO could save $3M a year by shutting down basketball, mothballing Knight Arena
7/1/2015: In the RG Letters, here:
UO athletics should share its bounty
I don’t often agree with Bill Harbaugh, but I must admit he and Dennis Howard made a very good point in their June 26 talk to the City Club of Eugene. The University of Oregon Department of Athletics should be contributing more directly to the UO general fund for academic support.
When I was UO provost and senior vice president (1994-2006), I reached an agreement in 2000 with then-Athletic Director Bill Moos that athletics would not be subsidized from the general fund and would become fully self-supporting.
Before that, the general fund subsidized athletics to the tune of more than $1 million per year.
I assume that agreement is still being followed. If it is, the UO program is one of the few among public universities that’s self-supporting, a laudable situation. Since then, UO athletics has flourished and is now in a position to give back to the university that gave it life and has supported it through many lean years, from the 1960s through the 1990s.
I believe the suggestion that 10 percent of the Athletic Department budget be returned to the general fund is reasonable, and certainly affordable for athletics. That shouldn’t be construed as a “gift” to the UO. All athletic facilities stand on land owned by the university. (Matt Knight Arena was paid for at least in part with Athletic Department funds and is technically owned by the university.)
A 10 percent fee for the use of the land, and the UO name, seems eminently reasonable to me.
JOHN MOSELEY
Moseley was Provost when the 2004 Task Force agreement was signed. As he notes, it called for an end to subsidies. From what I can tell those subsidies did end under Moseley’s tenure as provost. But millions more crept back on the books under provosts Linda Brady and Jim Bean, and Scott Coltrane did nothing to deal with them as Provost, or as Interim President.
6/26/2015: Can we make big-time Duck sports work for UO?
Diane Dietz has the story on the Eugene City Club’s Friday talk with myself and LCB professor emeritus Dennis Howard, in the RG here. Please consider posting comments there. Some ideas that came out of the panel:
… Put the fund-raising personnel the athletics department employs and those the university employs under the same managers, Howard said. Collaborate instead of compete for contributions, he said. Do joint pitches for athletic and academic gifts. “We could do it so much better,” Howard said.
Harbaugh agreed, saying, “It would be really good if we were all in this together and the athletic department was trying to help the rest of the university.”
Harbaugh suggested the university take charge of the athletic department budget centrally, with university financial officers doling out the annual budget and the university absorbing any excess — as is done now for other UO departments.
Or, go a different direction, and cut the Athletic Department loose, encourage it to raise as much as it can and take 10 percent of revenues to pay for academic scholarships.
If scholarships were tied to wins in that way, UO professors would get their pom-poms out, he said.
Thanks to the City Club and organizers Karen Wyatt and Marty Wilde for hosting this discussion. We had a good turnout and what I thought was an interesting discussion and questions. Audio should be posted on KLCC in a day or two here. From the Eugene City Club website:
The Future of Collegiate Athletics at the U of O
Downtown Athletic Club, 3rd Floor Ballroom
… Many in the community say that the fondness for Ducks teams and other world class sporting events contributes to a sense of community pride and brings people together in a unique and spirited way. Others express concerns about the exploitation of student athletes say that the resources expended on athletics come at the expense of academics and other community resources.
Considered an international authority on sports finance, Howard was head of the Marketing Department for the UO Lundquist College of Business before becoming its Dean. He has held various positions at the UO for more than 25 years, with one five-year break to head the graduate program in sport management at Ohio State University. His PhD is from Oregon State University.
Harbaugh has a Phd in Economics from the University of Wisconsin-Madison. He’s been an economics professor at UO since 1995, and has edited the UO Matters blog since 2009. His research on the neural foundations of charitable giving has been published in Science, and featured in the New York Times. He has been on UO’s Intercollegiate Athletics Committee since 2011, and this June 3rd he was elected as the UO Senate VP and President-Elect on a platform that included a call for a new UO Task Force to fix the broken relationship between Duck athletics and UO’s academic side.
City Club members will engage the speakers in a Q&A session after the presentations.
Today’s devastating Civic Stadium fire prompted me to look at the agreements between UO Foundation CEO Paul Weinhold, UO Presidents Frohnmayer and Lariviere, and Duck Athletic Directors Bellotti and Mullens for the UO Foundation guaranteed loans that financed PK Park, which became the Eugene Emerald’s replacement field. One interesting clause shows that UO is…
Rob Moseley has the news here: By Rob Moseley Editor, GoDucks.com A strong spring fueled by NCAA championships in men’s and women’s track & field propelled the Oregon athletic department to a school-record 13th-place finish in the 2014-15 Division I Learfield Sports Directors’ Cup standings, as announced Thursday. The Directors’…
Oregonian sports columnist John Canzano has the story here: Oregon will tell you that it regularly conducts its own education and training sessions for athletes. One of them, it was recently revealed, included a presentation to Ducks football players by an athletic department staffer on how Russian prostitutes working for…
The UO administration and foundation do a much better job of hiding their jock subsidies than UC does. The story in the Cincinatti CityBeat is here: Robin Hood in Reverse How universities force working-class students to pay thousands of dollars in hidden fees to athletic departments awash in red ink: This…