INSIDE ON CAMPUS

Palaima probes president about role of athletics vs. academics at UT

By Sue Alexander Greninger, Secretary, General Faculty and Faculty Council

William Powers Jr.

At the Feb. 20 Faculty Council meeting, President William Powers Jr. addressed a lengthy list of questions posed by Professor Tom Palaima (classics). Senior Vice President William Livingston made a plea for putting greater emphasis on humanities in the undergraduate curriculum. Professor Linda Reichl (physics) proposed that female graduate students be granted a one-semester extension of the 14-semester funding limit when pregnancy and child birth slowed progress toward completion of degree requirements.

Athletic program reports
Powers called upon Vice President Patricia Ohlendorf (institutional relations and legal affairs) to respond to  Palaima’s questions regarding athletic program reports, since her portfolio includes oversight of these areas. Palaima said he is concerned that the reports did not address minority athlete academic performance and graduation rates. He said he was “appalled” to read in a New York Times article about NCAA data from major universities that UT was the only institution where minority data were listed as unavailable. He also said he believes it is important to have data on what kinds of courses student-athletes are taking.

Ohlendorf said she was uncertain why the article Palaima referenced did not include data on UT, since minority graduation rates are collected and published by the federal government and the graduation success rates are broken down by minority status on the NCAA Web site. She said one possible explanation might be the small size of the 1998 cohort. She said when the number of students is so small that individual students might be identified, data are not published. She said the overall graduation rate at UT for African Americans was 67 percent for all students and 66 percent for student-athletes. 

Athletic Funding and Oversight Issues
In response to Palaima’s questions about the extent to which UT’s academic administrators monitor the more than $80 million in revenues and expenditures of the athletics enterprise, Powers said the budgets and proposals of all departments, including athletics, are reviewed by the administration and, ultimately, controlled by the Board of Regents. He said football and men’s basketball contribute to the funding of all other athletics programs, but the entire athletics program is financially self-sufficient and does not draw on tuition funds or state support. 

Patricia Ohlendorf

Ohlendorf added that the controlling members of the respective men’s and women’s athletics councils are faculty members. She said when she assumed responsibility for the athletics programs in her portfolio eight years ago, their budgets were not on the regular university budget cycle. She said she combined the budgets of the two departments and largely put them on the university’s cycle, with the same rules and percentages on salary increases as the entire university. The only programs that are “out-of-cycle” are football, baseball and softball, and this is due to the parameters of the seasonal schedules for these particular sports. 

Ohlendorf said $13 million of the $80-plus million in the athletics budget pertains to the Frank Erwin Center, which is not just used for athletics. She said she had asked athletics to manage the facility, and the facility’s annual operations are no longer running annual deficits as was the case in the past.

To Palaima’s query regarding whether athletics pays indirect costs to the university, Ohlendorf said athletics pays about $1.2 million annually as its auxiliary administrative fee to the university.  She said the revenues are used primarily for athletic programs and to pay debt on their various facilities, but a few small payments were made for other programs, including the general libraries and the kinesiology degree program to support the training of sports trainers and the Longhorn Band.

In response to Palaima’s concern that sports success seems to be overwhelming academic success at UT and throughout Texas, Powers said it was crucial that the university attract academically serious students, adding that he believes the admissions office is seeking to meet this goal. 

Status of Faculty Hiring Initiative
Palaima also asked about the status of the administration’s initiative to add 300 new faculty positions at a rate of 30 per year, and its effect on the goal to reduce the university’s student-faculty ratio. Executive Vice President and Provost Sheldon Ekland-Olson responded that in every year except one, when there was a serious budget cut, the planned replacement values have been maintained. He agreed with Palaima that the hiring activity each year had not filled all open lines. One problem has been that a planning figure of $60,000 per new position turned out to be too low, he said.

Ekland-Olson said 134 full-time equivalent positions had been added so far, and the provost’s office has provided additional funds for about 18 more positions, where a college could provide roughly half of the funding. In addition, eight non-tenure track positions had been added in other fields, such as photojournalism.

Ekland-Olson said positions were allocated to about 12 departments specifically to improve the faculty-student ratio during the early years of the initiative. More recently, the funds have been allocated to emerging fields and efforts to “weave” the institution together through cluster hires that encouraged interdisciplinary studies. He said 62 of the positions had been allocated to the colleges of Natural Sciences and Liberal Arts, with another 26 allocated to Engineering and a rapidly expanding interdisciplinary effort involving Engineering, Natural Sciences and Pharmacy.

Palaima said he was still concerned about the “poor funding for faculty and students at UT” and said the student-faculty ratio is 19:1, the same as it had been seven years ago when the initiative began. He also wondered if the athletics program was self-sufficient when the full cost of athletics, including indirect subsidies, were included. Saying the tax deductibility of the sky-box costs approximated fraud in his opinion, he said he believes there is a wasteful opportunity cost to expanding the stadium from 77,000 to 90,000 seats, rather than putting those funds and the ones generated by the sky boxes into undergraduate education. 

He questioned how the president could move UT from “great to greatness,” when the university was not even ranked in the top 20 percent of national universities. He said he believes the president needs to ask the people who are donating thousands of dollars to enhance the football coach’s salary to consider putting the money toward academic programs on campus, such as UTEACH.

Powers said Palaima had raised significant points, and said he believes it is important to be candid about the status of UT Austin. However, he said raising money involves both responding to what donors want and what the university wants. He said some donors have definite ideas about where they want their donations to go, while others can be influenced with regard to the direction of their gifts. He said it was important to realize that athletics does connect individuals to UT Austin.  He said he believes the entire university could learn from athletics because that program was not able to accomplish what it has without discipline, focus, goal-setting and teamwork.

— Editor’s note: This article was excerpted from the full text of the Feb. 20 Faculty Council Report