President’s Response to Athletics Spending

The position expressed in the President’s memo is distressing and does not stand scrutiny.

Theme 1: This is a rhetorical trick and non-sense: mischaracterize the opponent’s position and then attack that. The faculty messages I read didn’t say “We should not have Div. I intercollegiate athletics at WSU”. We said we should not have Div. I intercollegiate athletics at WSU IF WE CAN’T AFFORD IT! It turns out there is Div. IAA and Div. II & III and they have intercollegiate athletics with much smaller budgets, and they get along just fine, thank you very much. (I went to one as it happens.)

Theme 2: Football is only the sixth most brain damaging sport we support, so we don’t need to address the issue. How many damaged brains of 18-20 year olds would make the $2.7 million we are taking from academics to support athletics not worth it? If we only damaged five students for $2.7 million, is that OK? If we add the $3.5 million in research funding, should I then feel OK about damaging those young people so that a flag can be on ESPN Gameday? How about we DON’T spend the money, and we DON’T damage these youngsters? I call that a win-win.

Theme 3: So where is all this money that the social media “likes” have generated? If the social media likes are really equivalent to spendable money – where is it? Its bloody nowhere, that’s where. Because this is not REVENUE! This is opportunity cost – its money we would have to pay in order to have the same impact in the market if we didn’t have that impact on social media. Saying that we would lose that money if we didn’t have football is like saying “If we had green eggs, we could have green eggs and ham, if we only had ham”. If we didn’t have the football we would not have the dollar equivalent of the marketing of the twitter “likes” – but in that case we would also not have spent that money on marketing because we would not have the football team in a Div. I Power 5.

Theme 4: In the future things will be different. Yes. And. So. What? This isn’t about what happens in a future with zero budgetary certainty. This is about an ethical decision to underwrite the debt of the athletic department with academic funds. This is about right and wrong in the here and now. We are saying that our commitment to athletic department is so much greater than our commitment to academics, that we will take $2.7 Million now from academics, which has already cut costs to balance the budget, and give it to athletics, who have refused to cut costs similarly and are relying on revenue to balance their books. This is not even about the amounts of money, its about the act of taking the money.

If we move forward with this without some clear unified statement to the contrary, then the faculty will be accomplices to this decision.

Response to 12-09-20 Schulz Memo

• Page 1: The president begins his response by acknowledging that he has no issue with the perspective offered by the majority of comments submitted to the Faculty Senate Blog. Further, he states, “it is important that faculty colleagues feel that they have been consulted, that they could give contrary opinions without fear, and that we continue to be transparent with our fiscal decisions (even if people disagree)”. This is a straw man argument – the thesis of the faculty argument is that there is no compelling data to support the diversion of central funds away from academic programs and the research enterprise to intercollegiate athletics as a key strategic means to increase institutional visibility on a national scale in order to ultimately increase student enrollment, student retention, and to the benefit of all WSU students, faculty, staff and communities. The counterargument that a key strategic means to increase institutional visibility on a national scale is to invest in academic programs, the research enterprise, community outreach, and the like. Investment in the tri-partite mission of WSU is the key mechanism that will benefit all WSU students, faculty, staff and communities. Indeed, the importance of and support for our land-grant mission was touted as a critical component of our D25 initiative.
• Page 2: The president states he “solicited information from a variety of sources – including individuals in academic affairs, enrollment management, the WSU Athletics Council, and intercollegiate athletics”. This is obviously a biased sample that is more likely to endorse support for intercollegiate athletics. However, the president did not solicit information from the most important stakeholders at WSU – the students! In addition, he did not solicit information from faculty and staff. Thus, the information provided in his response does not offer unbiased results that can be used to draw reasonable inferences about the association between support of intercollegiate athletics and key metrics such as student enrollment and retention.
• Page 2: The president states that “only academic reputation and financial considerations rate higher than social and extracurricular activities as the reasons why students choose the colleges they attend”. This is an important piece of information, and it provides additional evidence that investment in the academic reputation of the university is the most important mechanism for increasing enrollment, not investments in intercollegiate athletics. Once again, the premise of the faculty argument is that investments in academic programs, the research enterprise, and community outreach are the activities that will produce the greatest return on investment.
• Page 3: The president disputes that there is sufficient evidence causally linking CTE to “concussion or brain trauma from participation in football …..”. While this may be true, the nature of the problem – CTE and impact sports – does not allow true experimental studies under controlled conditions. Indeed, as was the case for the Advisory Committee to the US Surgeon General on Smoking and Health (1964) linking cigarette smoking with health problems, the science base relies on non-experimental studies. Contrary to the president’s assertion, the large body of evidence being accumulated satisfies several of the criteria used for causal inference, including strength of association, consistency, and biological plausibility, among others.
• Page 4: Despite attempts to attack the scientific evidence to dispute causal linkages between CTE and impact sports, the president uses unscientific, anecdotal evidence, including social media “hits”, to support his claims that there is data demonstrating clear financial benefit to the academic mission of WSU through membership in the Pac-12. This “data” does nothing of the sort.
• In addition to the use of non-scientific, anecdotal data, in his rebuttal the president provided two studies to bolster the case to support investments in athletics, one on the so-called “cinderella effect” from March Madness runs and the other using a national data set to explore reasons why students choose to send their SAT scores to certain colleges. Neither of these studies provide any evidence to support said claims. For example, results of Pope & Pope (2014) only “suggest that students can be affected by events that do not change the quality of costs of a school but that capture a student’s attention”. More telling, the authors state in their conclusion that “perhaps increasing the number of guidance counselors and providing information in other ways may improve student welfare by helping students make better informed decisions on where to attend college”. This point is highly relevant to the discussion at hand because the authors subsequently state the obvious limitation of their results – that the analysis was done in a “revealed preference” setting where we simply observed the choices made by college applicants and related these choices to the timing of college sport successes”. Collier et al. (2020) report a correlation between increased freshman enrollments for private schools two academic years after a Cinderella run in the men’s NCAA basketball tournament. Importantly, the authors note in their conclusion that the effect (my note – the use of the term “effect” is inappropriate as it denotes causality, the term “correlation” or “relationship” is appropriate here) is small and relatively short-lived. Further, they note that the findings are “likely driven by the fact that these Cinderella teams are generally smaller, less well-known schools”. Thus, these findings are not at all generalizable to WSU.
In summary, President Schulz failed to provide a robust, defensible response to the Faculty Senate in his memo dated 09-December-2020. I conclude by addressing a final point that was buried at the end of his memo. In discussing how his current proposal to include the annual Pac-12 membership dues in the University’s membership budget was “standard practice at WSU prior to 2011” fails to address one of the critical problems he inherited upon his presidency, one he rightfully addressed immediately, namely the unchecked use of university reserves for intercollegiate athletics (among other activities) that created a massive budget deficit that we only very recently clawed our way out of. Let us learn from our past mistakes lest we repeat them.

I briefly read Schulz’s reply concerning the moral issues involved. My comments on such short notice are:
1) He made a good argument for eliminating women’s sports. (However, I don’t believe the numbers he gave; they need scientific scrutiny.)
2) He ignored the issue of joint damage – that damage has been known for years and it is life-long debilitating in many cases. In fact, back in the 1960’s my father, an orthopedic surgeon, refused to let me play football because so many of his patients had football-related joint damage. My father played intercollegiate football out of financial necessity.
3) You would think that our president would look up what happened to intercollegiate boxing. Universities had the good sense back in 1962 to drop that sport due to brain damage even without knowledge of CTE.
4) The battle is not fair; he obviously had other people search for information favorable to allowing CTE to continue and to question its validity. That argument has been debunked and was corporate driven due to the huge financial risk associated with on-the-job disability law suits. As single faculty, we cannot take the time to research CTE in depth, nor are the resources given to us to do so. The issues, medical and legal, are indeed complex but fundamentally we ask our athletic students to put their cognitive and physical abilities at risk without paying them anything.
5) The answer is a sham provided mostly by corporate thinking people that lack any sense of decency. It also has a bit of racism attached to it given the high proportion of people of color that play football (and boxing).
6) I guess he missed a major fallout of the pandemic. The future of academia will be very different from what it has been. The financing of entertainment, at the expense of learning and research, is a bad choice for WSU, Washington State, the USA, and the world. We are a state- and tuition-funded institution fully capable of delivering great education and that is what makes us attractive. The state funding allows for us to have better and more faculty enabling us to be competitive against private institutions of higher learning, e.g. Trump University😊. We need to examine his position that attracting students who come to WSU because we offer football entertainment is a questionable strategy. We need to attract students who would come here because of the quality of our faculty and the fine educational opportunities we offer.
7) It is clear that the administration has too many administrators who can take the time to develop a misleading response letter; I would vote to cut our administrative staff by one third then split the savings, half to academic pursuits and the other half for scholarships to poor underrepresented students.