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Show Athletics Or Academics Sporting Proposition The University's policy toward intercollegiate athletics ath-letics should be re-evaluated. In favor of athletics it must be said that intercollegiate intercolle-giate sports adds greatly to campus life. The football team deserve: particular congratulations on a very successful suc-cessful season. While some argue that athletics detract from the intellectual purposes of a university, we find little evidence evi-dence of this. Athletes must be satisfactory students or lose their eligibility and many of them are excellent students. While many athletes are on very lucrative scholarships, scholar-ships, most of them could make more money if they spent the time and energy on part-time jobs. While some charge that athletes are privileged, musclebound and stupid, it seems to us that none of this is true. In fact, our athletes seem to us to be both personally and as a group, an asset to the University. But big time athletics costs too much. Last year, the University Athletics Department spent a whopping $606,979 not' including private donations. dona-tions. A great amount of this money, $319,160, came from eate receipts. Another $84,805 came from such things as concessions, food sales and radio and TV. But the Department receives $113,765 from the University's Uni-versity's general fund for coaches' salaries. (And this is just for coaching; the pay for teaching physical education educa-tion classes comes from the physical education budget.) This amount is just a little bit less than the appropriations appropria-tions for the philosophy, minerology and zoology departments de-partments combined. Besides, about one-half of the money students pay in student body fees goes to athletics, $50,000 per year. Last year, athletics on this campus exceeded its budget by $29,250.77, for an all-time record debt. This amount had to be made up out of the general fund. While, with the Liberty Bowl bid, the department should show a surplus this year, it probably won't erase last year's loss, say nothing of the accumulated red ink of the past seven or eight years. Our department is cheap compared to many. During the debate on whether students should have to pay for admission to football and basketball games, it was revealed that the Utah student pays less than half the average cost per student per year of the WAC. To offset this, students are now charged admission to games and large blocks of the choicest seats once reserved to students are now sold to paying non-University spectators. The prospects for students is paying pay-ing ever-increasing amounts of money for increasingly bad seats, and fewer of them. There is no doubt that the Athletic Department needs more money if it is to have continuing success. The physical facilities, for instance, are terrible, and the department generally spends less than the schools which we compete against. Prospects for the University Univer-sity are increasing costs or declining success. Besides being short on money for first-rate teams, Utah is short on talent, and many, if not most, of our best competitors are recruited from out of state. But according to one downtown sportswriter, the local sports fans like to see winning teams but they also like to see local boys play, and considerable enthusiasm is lost among paying customers when University games amount to a group of athletes from California who happen hap-pen to go to school at Utah playing a group of athletes from California who happen to go to school somewhere else. The University is supported by a poor state and a stingy Legislature. We have to split what funds are available with a number of other institutions which have more friends in power and therefore get a greater proportional share of the money. President Fletcher has experssed a desire to make the University one of the top ten state universities in the country. If he is to succeed, almost every academic department will need a considerably increased budget. In the end, the University must choose whether it will compete with other good schools in athletics or in academics. -And the days are past when the greatness of a university was a function of the won-lost record of its athletic teams. |
