Arms race on funding

By Walt W. Lilly

To the editor: I read with interest the statistics cited by Don Kaverman, Southeast Missouri State University's athletic director. What strikes me about the comparisons made between expenditures for Southeast's athletic programs and others in comparable institutions is just how much money is actually spent on athletics in colleges and universities like Southeast nationwide.

I suspect if you polled faculty members at institutions which provide major subsidies for athletics, you would find uniform support for reducing those subsidies and spending the savings in academic programs. Certainly, I as a faculty member feel that way.

However, I am also receptive to the arguments made by the administrations of institutions like Southeast which claim that the presence of an athletic program at the Division I level contributes to an overall view of an institution's quality. That view, held by prospective students, is critical in the competition for students that exists between Southeast and its direct competitors such a Southwest Missouri State University, Murray State University, the University of Missouri and Southern Illinois University.

Students often tell us that they choose a school on the "quality of the academic programs." However, truth be known, students know very little about the quality of those programs, because they don't have the tools to measure that quality. So it comes down to a perception of quality that is built on the whole image of the university.

It is hard to imagine that athletics do not contribute to that image. The universities that most directly compete for the same students as Southeast all have Division I athletic programs. The costs for being a Division I school escalate on a yearly basis, and the institutions routinely meet those escalating costs.

Southeast did that in this fiscal year. The subsidy went from $3.5 million last year to $3.8 this year, despite an overall budget crisis. Southeast was not alone.

What this all amounts to is a situation where presidents of small Division I institutions are afraid to cut athletics for fear of some potential loss in the general student recruiting game. I don't blame them.

The only thing worse than managing an institution in a budget crisis is managing one that is losing enrollment. This reminds me of the Cold War arms race.

The cost of that arms race was enormous and ultimately destroyed the nation with the poorest economy. Is there a lesson here for institutions like Southeast? Perhaps.

One lesson should be clear, however. Until those who foot the bill for athletics (students, their parents and taxpayers) demand that the escalation of the athletics arms race stops, it will continue unabated to the detriment of the primary mission of higher education.

Walt W. Lilly of Cape Girardeau is a professor of biology at Southeast Missouri State University.