OCAAUP Annual Meeting: Nov. 3-4-4

NCAA expert B. David Ridpath to give keynote address

The 67th Ohio Conference AAUP Annual Meeting will be held at the Renaissance Columbus Downtown Hotel on November 3-4, 2017.

B. David Ridpath (pictured), NCAA expert and professor of sports administration at Ohio University, will deliver the keynote luncheon address on Saturday, November 4: “Shaping Policy and Practice in Intercollegiate Athletics: A Study of Student Fee Resource Allocation for Athletics and its Effect on Access and Affordability of Higher Education.”

In addition, speakers from “UnKoch My Campus” will give a workshop that Saturday afternoon: “Pushing Back on the Power of Private Donors: Strategies for Building Your Chapter & Protecting the Academy.”

UnKoch My Campus is an organization founded by students and activists that exposes the influence of the Koch Brothers in donating money to institutions of higher education in order to push their own agenda and economic interests. UnKoch My Campus’ presentation will highlight Ohio colleges and universities and offer suggestions for ensuring transparency, accountability, and academic integrity at your own campus.

Moreover, members who are able to attend the Friday reception and dinner will have the opportunity to meet State Representative Kathleen Clyde (D-Kent), who is running for Ohio Secretary of State.

The preliminary agenda is available here.

We hope you’ll join us in Columbus for an informative event. It is a great opportunity to network with faculty from around the state. Registration costs just $25. Click here to register.

Education First Report Highlight: Athletic Subsidy

All but one Ohio university heavily subsidizes athletics

In our next few e-mails, we will be highlighting sections of our latest Ohio Higher Education Report: Education First.

To begin, we will focus on an issue that we find catches many by surprise, and is appropriate for this e-mail given the above-mentioned guest speaker and topic at our Annual Meeting: the subsidizing of university athletics.

Only Ohio State University has a self-sustaining athletics’ departments; in fact, OSU makes a profit on athletics each year, mostly on account of its men’s football program. But OSU is the anomaly. All other Ohio universities take heavily from the academic side of the institution to cover its deficit-running athletic programs. See the chart above. 

We hear frequently from university trustees, presidents, and other administrators that athletics is the “front porch” of the university. In other words, they justify athletic subsidy because they believe it promotes their institutions to the rest of the world. But we take issue with money being siphoned from the academic side at a time of increasingly scarce resources and massive student debt.

If academic departments have to live within their means, why shouldn’t athletics?

Read more about this issue in our report.