Posts tagged with interuniversity.
Why are athletics a priority in this fiscal reality?
Canada's collegiate athletics have increasingly professionalized in recent times with money, and now drugs, raising questions about how the system operates and what effect it may have on the academy.
Thankfully, Canada is a long way from the American university model, in which the highest paid university employee is the football coach and the top priority of the university's governing body is the football team. However, we cannot rest on our laurels, especially in light of recent drug-related charges that have been laid against two current and one former member of the University of Waterloo football team, as well as the substantial growth in athletic scholarships at Canadian universities.
The two are completely unrelated, but point to the increasingly competitive nature of varsity athletics at Canadian universities. Sport is no longer an addition to the university experience, in which players play merely for the enjoyment of the sport. They are playing to win and universities are spending record amounts of money to ensure a CIS title for their school.
New athletic centres, high-performance training centres and football stadiums built in the last decade point to the sports arms race heating up.
It continues today, with the University of Toronto's Scarborough campus the latest to impose punishing ancillary fees upon its student body to fund the non-academic ambitions of the university to be a sport powerhouse. In this case, UTSC students have agreed to pay $80 per two-term academic year for the next four years as part of a 25-year $30-million ancillary fee contribution to a Pan-Am Games sports complex to be built on the suburban Toronto campus. The fee increases to $280 per two-term academic year after the last of the students who voted to impose the fee are scheduled to graduate in 2014. (I wonder if students would have voted in favour of the $280 fee if they had to pay it themselves. I strongly suspect they wouldn't.)
While there is an argument to be made that UTSC students are getting a bargain with the provincial and federal governments providing the bulk of funding for the athletics complex as part of their Pan-Am Games contribution, one cannot help but notice the irony of an institution founded to primarily provide undergraduate education imposing a substantial ancillary fee to build an athletics centre at the same time as the University is trying to find cost-savings as it wrestles with its first taste of fiscal restraint since the mid-90s.
Not all universities have diverted their focus and funds towards university athletics. Recent athletic financial assistance (AFA) statistics released by the CIS show some interesting disparities between universities. Trent University is the only Canadian university to not direct financial aid to its varsity athletics on the sole basis of their athletic status, instead granting them financial aid on the basis of their academics and financial need. Nipissing follows closely with only $5,600 in funds spent on AFA. Interestingly, Canada's top spending university on athletic financial assistance is the University of Regina at $509,153. With 267 varsity athletes, the average per athlete is $1,900. University of Guelph with 435 athletes, the most in Canada, spent $102,850 for an average of $236. Overall, Canada's 10,804 university athletes received $9,907,758 in AFAs last year.
The trend in the past five years, as reported and graphed by the CBC, is that many Ontario universities have more than doubled or even tripled the amount of money being directed to AFAs. Some of the fluctuations can be attributed to accounting changes as universities change their books to reflect the increased importance they are placing on the recruiting of and funding for "star" athletic prospects. Nonetheless, even if by an accounting change or an increase in funds, universities are increasingly prioritizing their varsity athletic programs during a time of limited resources and cutbacks to academic programs.
With fiscal reality returning to higher education, now is the time for a serious discussion of the role of university athletics in the Canadian academy. UBC physicist, Nobel prize winner and American academic Carl Wieman lamented: "People just don't realize that college athletics at public universities [in the U.S.] has become so dominant that the governing boards, the presidents, are thinking about the success of the football team first and undergraduate education second." We're nowhere near the distortion of priorities that exist in the United States and need to ensure our universities remain focused on education. With Canadian universities looking to join the NCAA in the next years, the time for an open and frank discussion is now.
Many of the policy issues discussed in this piece are covered extensively on the CIS blog.
Aside: Following the drug charges in Waterloo, there are calls for the Canadian Football League to start drug testing. The CFL is the only North American pro league without a drug testing program. I'm shocked to learn that this has not been happening and it makes me question the credibility of the league.
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funding,
canadian,
cis,
interuniversity,
athletics,
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JOEY COLEMAN