Should universities like EMU, who will likely never have a profitable athletic department, be pioneers in higher education by distancing themselves from the current collegiate athletic model? Do people come to EMU because they identify with their football team, or because they are looking for a quality education at an affordable price?
College life and athletics have been tied to each other since Yale and Harvard’s boating clubs competed against each other in 1852. One-hundred-and-sixty-two years later, the collegiate sports environment has metamorphosed into something quite different from two Ivy League rowing teams cutting through the waters of Lake Winnipesaukee, New Hampshire.
As TV money pours into power conferences’ coffers, small things like geography are forgotten. This is fine for football teams who travel across the country by plane six times a year. But in the Big Ten how does Nebraska’s track and field team make the 1,289 mile trip to compete against Rutgers on a Tuesday night? Can Boston College’s women’s golf team charter a bus the entire 1,500-mile excursion to play the University of Miami in their ACC clash? These small nuisances do not stop larger conferences from continuing to gobble up their smaller brethren while competing against each other for the ultimate prize – money.
The demand for excellence from college athletic programs only increases, and casualties continue to mount. Brady Hoke was fired as the University of Michigan’s head football coach Tuesday, and by many accounts he was beloved within the university and graduated nearly 90 percent of his players. U of M’s athletic director, David Brandon, resigned earlier in the year after criticism mounted because of the football program’s lack of success and the corporate atmosphere he brought to Ann Arbor. This win above all else attitude is not unique to U of M as colleges have become all too willing to be professional sports’ minor league system.
In places like the University of Michigan, this does not matter as much as it does in places like EMU. U of M athletics brings in more money than it puts out. However, smaller schools such as Eastern continue to play catch up. EMU recently approved a $48 million financial aid package for the 2013-14 academic year, with $8.98 million of that total slated for athletics. That is 18.7 percent of the total package going to student athletes, while student-athletes only account for approximately 2 percent of the student population attending EMU.
Furthermore, there is not one team at EMU that is financially self-sustaining. Would EMU be better served investing the entire Athletic budget into academics, or is collegiate athletics as integral to a Liberal Arts education as an art history class?
What would happen to EMU if they no longer had a football team? Would donations to the EMU Foundation diminish noticeably? Would prospective students choose to go to Western Michigan University or Central Michigan University instead? Or would the University be upgrading buildings instead of installing new stadium seating?
While colleges continue to chase ESPN TV dollars, these questions will go unanswered and more and more students will graduate from mid-major universities with more college debt than ever before.
I hope they enjoyed the football games.
