Elite college athletics will have no gods before it. Just ask Vicky Triponey, former head of student affairs at Pennsylvania State University. Triponey is one of a very few people who dared to confront the venerated football coach Joe Paterno. Triponey locked horns with Paterno over the matter of who should discipline miscreant football players. Needless to say, Triponey was vilified. According to a CNN report, she was told she was too aggressive, too confrontational, that she wasn’t fitting in with “the Penn State way.”
In the wake of the report outlining now recognized systematic failures to protect children from the sexual predation of Jerry Sandusky, Triponey could have easily settled into a chorus of “I told you so.” She didn’t. Instead she told CCN “There’s no joy.” She said she found solace in the public recognition of Penn State’s “culture of reverence for the football program,” as the report phrased it, and that it is “ingrained at all levels of the campus community.” To be clear, it is perfectly fine to like football, to be an avid fan and to cheer for whichever team your heart delights. Unfortunately, at Penn State, the idolatry of big time college athletics provided the smoke screen for unspeakable cruelty to children. Sandusky’s predation was clearly recognized by several Penn State athletic department employees.
Apparently, the “Penn State way” included decades of complicity enabling a monster to repeatedly hurt children. People have attempted to minimize Paterno’s centrality in the cover up. We will likely never know just how much Paterno was involved in keeping things quiet. What we do know is that the allure of elite athletics too often trumps the central purpose of universities. Apologists and defenders routinely claim that fatted athletic programs are “cash cows” for the colleges that host them.
According to the Knight Commission on Intercollegiate Athletics, only eight athletic programs at public universities broke even or had net operating income each year from 2005-2009. They were the University of Georgia, Louisiana State University, The Pennsylvania State University, and the universities of Iowa, Michigan, Nebraska, Oklahoma, and Texas at Austin. University of Georgia Professor David Scuggs (a Knight Commission consultant) clarifies: “For almost every other university, sports is a money-losing proposition. Only big-time college football has a chance of generating enough net revenue to cover not only its own costs but those of ‘Olympic’ sports like field hockey, gymnastics, and swimming. Not even men’s basketball at places like Duke University or the University of Kansas can generate enough revenue to make programs profitable.”
Scuggs says that to bridge the revenue gap, most schools, “…rely on what the NCAA calls ‘allocated revenue.’ This includes direct and indirect support from general funds, student fees, and government appropriations. In other words, most colleges subsidize their athletics programs, sometimes to startling degrees.”
Independent reporting for Pine Bluff & Jefferson County since 1879.
Over the period 2005-2009 institutions with Football Bowl Subdivision programs have seen athletic subsidies rise by 53 percent at the median, according to the Knight Commission. During the same period, spending on education and related functions rose only 22 percent. There are similar gaps at other Division I institutions.
If the main purpose of colleges and universities is to educate people, then this trend must desist. When we get so blinded by adoration of elite athletics, we lose sight of the real goal line. Colleges don’t exist just to extend high school varsity athletics. They exist to impart knowledge, broaden perspectives and teach skills.
Athletics is not mutually exclusive from these goals, but neither can they be permitted to push other departments and program out of the nest — especially under the myth that they are revenue generators. The tragic events at Penn State only serve to remind us how bad it can get when priorities become so one-sided and distorted.