Compared to many of its peer universities that play big-time sports, the financial state of the University of California at Berkeley’s athletics department looks pretty good in some ways. While the Golden Bear sports program is among the 90-plus percent of all Division I programs and the 75 percent of Football Bowl Subdivision programs that do not turn an annual profit, the $7.4 million subsidy it received from general institutional funds in 2008 is actually $1 million less than the median for public institutions with major football programs. But to the consternation of some faculty members at Berkeley, the university’s sports program is running multimillion-dollar deficits — on top of the annual institutional subsidies — that are requiring the university to make short-term loans to the sports program. Not only that, but Cal officials revealed that the central administration in 2007 forgave $31 million in previous loans to the athletics department to cover annual deficits… "Everybody thinks we [play intercollegiate sports] because it brings in big bucks, when that’s clearly not the case," says Brian Barsky, a professor of computer science at Berkeley.

Read full article [here].
by Doug Lederman, Inside Higher Ed.

Posted: October 30th, 2009, by: admin. Categories: . Awaiting Comments.