Forum Post
On February 21, 2023, Von Walden, Glen Duncan, and I delivered a letter to President Schulz, Provost Chilton, and Board of Regents Chair Dickinson describing faculty concerns about the Athletics Budget Update presented as Information Item #1 to the Board of Regents last month. We allowed WSU faculty to view and sign the letter prior to delivery. The letter was co-signed by 261 WSU career-track and tenure-track faculty of all ranks and from all campuses and many extension offices. Given how widely these concerns are shared among WSU faculty, we decided to post a PDF of the letter as a constituent concern. Please read the linked letter if you haven’t already and feel free to add your own concerns and questions as a reply to this post.
The three of us vetted co-signer information to confirm WSU email addresses and to ensure that everyone was a WSU career-track or tenure-track faculty member. If you signed using the google form but do not appear on the list of co-signers, please note that merely means we could not find sufficient information on WSU departmental webpages to confirm your status as faculty. In the very rare cases in which we could not definitively conclude a contributor was a faculty member given the information available online, we erred on the side of caution, and we did not add that person’s name to the list. We apologize if we mistakenly left your name off the list.
Although over 260 WSU faculty signed the letter, we know from conversations over the last two weeks there are many more who are very interested in the administration’s responses to these concerns.
Luke Premo
Department of Anthropology Faculty
Response
Faculty Senate Executive Officers have been notified of this forum post and will respond back once more information becomes available. ~02.21.23
Update: President Schulz’s response can be found here. ~04.11.23
Faculty at WSU are shockingly underpaid and our research is mostly unsupported. We have no set standards for raises other than the percentage given at promotion, so salaries of loyal faculty become grotesquely compressed. Just as an example, for many years, although I had one of the best research and publication records in my department and stellar teaching evaluations, my salary was substantially lower than what I would have made at The University of Tennessee, where the cost of living was far below what it is in this area. Why doesn’t the university pay us a normal salary and allow for real merit raises such as most universities give faculty — because of this absurd athletic budget that impoverishes us all.
The following items might provide additional context for the Open Letter above:
WSU Insider Article: President Schulz Leadership Roles for Pac12 & WSU Athletics
Deseret News: As Pac-12 scrambles to land a new media rights deal, the plot thickens
Deseret News: Who leaked that the Pac-12 was talking to Apple? And why that is important
I want to express my gratitude to those on the faculty senate who are moving this issue forward. The Athletics budget has been a crisis that has long gone ignored. Why doesn’t the business model prevail in this case? Can anyone reading this post think of a corporation that would be allowed to run in the red at such levels and for such a long time? Of course not! Why is this tolerated?
President Schulz did respond to the letter. The response ignored two of the four concerns and fails to deliver on creating a publicly transparent repayment plan to recover the $89.6M internal debt of Cougar Athletics. It is appalling that an administrator can outright ignore 50% of concerns put forth in a letter signed by 260+ faculty. The lack of faculty leverage incentivizes executives to behave with impunity.
The administrators will find ways to ignore and exploit worker ignorance and disunity as long as the workers are disorganized. It is time we faculty workers organize ourselves into a trade union at this university.
As a follow-up to Ananth’s comment, here are two of the crucial issues the President chose not to address in his response to the faculty letter:
1. “Faculty find it unacceptable that the AD budget is projected to grow by 3.6% in FY24 while the entire academic enterprise will take a 6% budget cut. What is the rationale for increasing the AD budget while slashing the operating budget for academics?”
2. “Attachments A and C now include two separate rows for tracking the AD “accumulated deficit”—i.e., internal debt to WSU. The values in these rows differ by many millions of dollars. … We respectfully request that the Administration clearly explain the methodology used to produce such discrepant internal debt values to help us better understand the long-term implications for tracking AD internal debt.”
WSU faculty are still awaiting answers to those important items.
Sincerely,
Luke Premo
The football program at the University of California at Davis, another rural campus with a vet school, med school, and huge amount of funding from the USDA, was a member of NCAA Division II from 1973 to 2003, and then joined FCS Division I in 2004, where they currently remain. Compared to being a member of the FBS (as WSU is), UC Davis’ policy of having their sports programs in 2nd-level conferences has saved them a huge amount of money over the decades, which they have put to good use: their academic rankings have been much higher than ours for decades, even though they actually are a younger university than we are. (Davis was established in 1905 as the “University Farm”, and not established as an actual UC campus until 1959.)
To summarize, WSU should seriously consider dropping down to FCS Division I in football, and to 2nd-level conferences in all other sports as well. Such a move would go a long way towards bringing our sports budget out of the red, and would free up funds to support our core land-grant mission of education and research. If WSU is serious about increasing our academic rankings, and about fulfilling our land-grant mission in service to the residents of Washington state, we should emulate UC Davis and drop down to 2nd-level conferences in all sports.
President Schulz’s response can be found here