Battle of the Bulging Budget: Athletics vs. Academics

While Fulmer and Pearl earn millions, students and staff see tuition increases, funding cuts

Athletic Director Mike Hamilton knew the timing was inopportune.

When he released details of multi-million dollar contract extensions for both University of Tennessee football coach Phillip Fulmer and men’s basketball coach Bruce Pearl, the Knoxville community was just beginning to digest headlines announcing $11.1 million in budget cuts to the university’s academic fund.

“The reality is, with the way the economy is right now, there [was] no good time to announce it,” Hamilton says.

Fulmer was awarded a raise of $350,000, bringing his salary to $2.4 million, and Pearl’s salary increased by $300,000, raising it to $1.6 million.

Faculty and staff, on the other hand, will receive a mere $400 one-time, flat-rate drop in the bucket each for the coming academic year, and three academic departments at the university are in danger of becoming extinct.

The UT-Knoxville Athletic Department is one of approximately 5 percent of the 120 Division I schools that operate in the black without drawing from university general funds. Aside from $1 million in student fees given to the women’s athletics program, the department runs all 20 of its men’s and women’s teams using revenue and private donations.

“The athletic department, as a part of UT, [is] self-funding. So anything we do, we have to find the funds for,” Hamilton says with an almost apologetic tone in a phone interview. But that hasn’t kept university faculty and staff from voicing their discomfort with the relatively exorbitant amount of dollars spent on athletics.

“It’s clearly a matter of social preference. What do you value more: education or football?” says John Nolt, the UT-Knoxville Faculty Senate president-elect and a professor in the College of Arts & Sciences.

Comparing the salaries of Fulmer and Pearl with that of Nolt is like comparing apples to oranges because one is a product of its own revenue while the other is state-funded. Don’t be surprised, though, if students get a mixed message and start dropping English 101 to line up for courses in sport management.

The ever-increasing discrepancy between the salaries of college coaches and of college professors has been a point of contention long before July 2, when Fulmer publicly became a new $2.4 million-man. In 1995, Florida State University’s Bobby Bowden was the first college football coach to hit the $1-million mark; just 13 years later that’s the national average at D-I programs. According to numbers released by the American Association of University Professors, a full-time professor at a public university was paid an average of $109,569 last year. (At UT, the median was roughly $5,000 less.)

A 2007 survey of more than 2,000 faculty members at institutions with some of the nation’s most visible athletic departments, released by the Knight Commission on Intercollegiate Athletics, reveals that 72 percent of faculty members say salaries paid to coaches are “excessive.”

“It’s simply supply and demand,” says Hamilton of the meteoric rise in pay for college coaches. “We as athletic directors haven’t turned our heads to the trend. I take it to work with me everyday: Where is this going in the next five to 10 years? Can we afford [these salaries]?”

ENTERTAINMENT OVER EDUCATION:
A LONGSTANDING TRADITION

The question posed by Nolt (“education or football?”) has been answered rather resoundingly in Tennessee. Despite a $1.95 million budget crisis of its own, the UTAD hasn’t experienced much difficulty in selling out the 104,000-seat behemoth known as Neyland Stadium for the upcoming football season — even after Hamilton’s decisions to charge students for football tickets and implement a 6.4-percent increase for season tickets were met with some grumbling.

“We’re blessed to be at a place with longstanding success in athletics, and that didn’t happen overnight,” Hamilton says. “We’ve had stadiums sell out on a regular basis because we have state-of-the-art facilities and are able to keep quality coaches. It’s also critical that athletic success has been a priority of this president and administration, and the one before that and the one before that.”

Hamilton negotiated both Fulmer and Pearl’s contracts, but President John Petersen was kept abreast of the negotiations and approved both.

UT history professor Todd Diacon says he would urge Petersen and the rest of the administration to use the same focus when dealing with the university’s academic budget this October.

“We should all be proud that we have the type of athletic department we have,” says Diacon, who is also the vice provost for academic operations and the faculty representative for athletics at UT. “There are a lot of schools that take from their own funds to keep their athletic teams out of the red.

“Honestly, I don’t think there’s any way you can compare this university’s academics and athletics,” he continues. “But if you really want to learn a lesson from athletics compared with academics, it’s this: the [UTAD] has succeeded by being impeccably administered and making strategic investments that have paid off. I haven’t seen that corresponding strategic investment at the state level for academics.”

A survey of Tennessee residents conducted in 2005 to gauge their perceptions of UT indicates more than 85 percent of respondents say the first association they make with the university is athletics, most notably football. And the same Knight Commission survey that had faculty calling coaching salaries excessive also found that more than half admitted a successful athletic program is vital in the recruitment of prospective students.

According to a department release, the UTAD returned more than $31 million to the general university community in FY 2005-06 and sparked a local economic impact of more than $100 million.

The influx of dollars from increased football ticket revenue and the more than $41 million in gift receipts (and an additional $50 million pledged over time) from donors will cover Fulmer’s new deal, not to mention Pearl’s. A new contract for coach Pat Summitt may also be in the works, according to local news reports, one that could reach nearly $2 million and make her the highest paid coach in women’s college basketball.

That money will also pay Hamilton’s salary and the salaries of the UTAD’s more than 250 other employees.

“I don’t dispute the fact education isn’t valued at the level that it should be,” Hamilton says. “Sports have an unbelievable place in the United States. It’s unique where it is placed in society more here than in any other country.”

Which is why Diacon says he can empathize with Nolt and his fellow professors.

“There’s no doubt it’s demoralizing when two coaches get raises that are almost more than any other official makes on campus,” he says.

But, although he insists a financial comparison is “apples to oranges,” Diacon is adamant that academic and athletic success can coexist at UT as it does at other top-tier universities.

While the Vols finished 12th in the Associated Press top-25 college football poll, UT barely broke the top 100 in the U.S. News and World Report’s annual academic rankings. Peer institutions such as Georgia, Ohio State, Kansas and Texas were all ranked ahead of UT in both categories.

“I’d say if you stop anyone on the street and ask, ‘Do you not want students to get an education?,’ they’d say, ‘no,’” Diacon says. “But when you get into how to pay for that education, you get different answers. And, historically, Tennessee has not supported higher education.”

Despite Hamilton’s hesitation about the announcement of coaching raises, Tom Smith, president of United Campus Workers, the union for UT’s faculty and staff, says the athletic versus academic public debate couldn’t have come at a more opportune time.

“This is a really bad year for higher education, an election year at that,” he says. “It shows where priorities currently are. We have not received the necessary consideration from the state or the administration to really fund the institution at the kind of level it needs to be, and we need to force candidates to go on record about higher education.”

Despite Gov. Phil Bredesen touting massive fiscal improvements to education in his January State of the State address — it was to represent 30 percent of his total budget for FY 2008-09 — he was forced to backtrack in May following one of the most rapid economic downturns in recent memory.

To deal with sharply declining revenues, nearly $56 million were deducted from higher education even though earlier projections had higher ed gaining nearly $67 million.

“UT is such a large financial undertaking, and in dealing with the appropriation process of the budget, the economy just dropped out of sight,” says Jim Vaden, chief fiscal officer for the Tennessee Higher Education Commission.

UT’s athletic department is the lone public university in the state that doesn’t pull from its academic fund to stay afloat, but UT-Chattanooga will need $4.3 million and UT-Martin $3.9 million from general funds, not counting student fees, to keep their athletic departments running in 2008-09.

Of the $21 million in cuts to the UT system, more than half of that has been slated for Knoxville. If it wasn’t for the athletic department at the flagship campus, Vaden says UT students and faculty could’ve faced an even worse scenario.

“People would have a difficult time believing this, but we held the tuition increase down [to 6 percent] when there was serious talk of double-digits.”

SOMEONE’S GOT TO PAY

Providing an affordable education and keeping the state’s best and brightest at home is a task Nolt says has become less burdensome with the benefit of the HOPE lottery scholarship, which Bredesen still managed to improve by $28.1 million for FY 2008-09. Approximately 500 athletes at UT are on either a full or partial scholarship, which cost the UTAD more than $7 million last year.

The state, according to Vaden, explicitly asked universities to tighten up operations and not lay the financial burden on students. And that’s something the state tends to do, says Nolt, which is a problem he wants addressed.

“I think we could make a bit more than a 6 percent tuition increase,” he says. “This university has become more of an upper-class institution. The median income for a student’s family is in the $90,000s. The public doesn’t understand that the HOPE goes to the family of the students, not to UT. It increases the amount of quality students, but it doesn’t help us out.”

UT Interim Chancellor Jan Simek recommended the phase-out or closure of the Department of Audiology and Speech Pathology in the College of Arts and Sciences, the Industrial and Organizational Psychology graduate program in the College of Business Administration and the dance program, a minor concentration in the College of Education, Health and Human Sciences.

The proposal also called for the elimination of 44 unfilled faculty and staff positions campus-wide.

“There’s just more interest in athletics than academics,” says Vaden of the estimated 16 states implementing or proposing cuts to higher education, according to the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities. “I still have children in school, and I don’t send them to watch football games. There are people that have never been associated with Knoxville who love to come and tailgate, but could care less about the Department of Audiology and Speech Pathology, which helps a lot of handicapped children.”

Nolt says the Faculty Senate has been told across-the-board cuts are to be avoided at all costs, and one, if not all three, of the proposed department eliminations will likely occur.

“The state’s funding structure is regressive, and it takes a large hit when the economy is this bad,” he says. “We need a state income tax. I’m not saying that would fix the problem, but that would certainly help. I know the governor is for giving to higher education, but the economy right now is pretty stark and he doesn’t have much of an option.”

Whether or not Fulmer and Pearl’s raises are justified by conference championships and national titles remains to be seen. But football and men’s basketball alone will generate some $15 million in revenue, and, win or lose, Fulmer’s salary will surpass $3 million by 2014 while Pearl’s will hit $2.5 million, barring an unforeseen coaching change.

“If you go back through history, there’s always been a push-pull,” Hamilton says. “I recently read an old newspaper that wrote: ‘Sometimes academics and athletics are together, and sometimes they grind against one another.’ It’s telling because that could’ve been written a couple of weeks ago, but it was actually written in 1920.”