Known as the “grease trap” or “drip tray” or “Spill tray” of employment, the University Athletic department is one of the things that needs to be eliminated from the university in totality.
Why?
University athletics is like an addictive drug to the administration. They see it as easy mode, a way to attract tuition-paying students to the university and attract donations from wealthy alumni. These elements are unhealthy and damaging to a University ecosystem. Students who choose to go to a university for the sports team diminish the quality of instruction and education overall for all their peers. Furthermore, they receive a degree and dilute the power and respect for that degree once they go out into the world and show that the university accepts them. It’s better to not rely on that stream of revenue at all.
Alumni who have become wealthy have done so not via merit, because nobody becomes wealthy via merit. They also didn’t do it by following the rules – that is also not how it’s ever accomplished. By accident they have achieved a high level of success, making one decision instead of another, or moving an investment here or there. Most of it is just taking advantage of a market opportunity, something that a degree has a very, very low percentage in assisting. The idea that they became wealthy because of their degree is a non sequitur. It’s never researched very hard by any university.
Relying on these two sources of revenue makes the University lazy. It doesn’t have to look in the mirror and say, “What is our social value? What good do we bring to the world?” Instead, they define the good through alumni donations and new student applications. We are popular; we have wealthy alumns; we must be good. A more challenging approach would be to try to run a university without sports, and without taking money earmarked for sports.
A university without athletics will survive the coming superstorm of admissions and enrollment. Gen Z students don’t care about the athletic team except as a distant sort of entertainment when desperate. Instead they are interested in trying to help the world, trying to understand others, and genuinely learn something. This is quite a bit different from the Boomers and the Gen Xers that are funding intercollegiate athletics now out of a sense of masculine desperation as they age.
A university that would eliminate athletics would thrive, avoiding all the oversight and expenses of having these terrible athletic coaches, staff, and players on campus. They would be able to angle those resources toward study and collaboration spaces. They would be able to focus on the hard question of what to learn and why. No more nonsense. The university is often now the program that athletics sponsors. What the hell are we doing?