Cal-Berkeley Cuts 5 Athletic Programs

Recently, sports writer for the Los Angeles Times Joe Drape has brought to light that the University of California, Berkeley, will be eliminating five of its intercollegiate sports programs. This is a controversial move because the budgets of academic departments are being cut severely while sports that lose money are still being supported. The university will be saving an estimated $4 million a year from cutting both men’s and women’s gymnastics, women’s lacrosse, and men’s baseball along with rugby. These cuts will have a dramatic impact on 163 student athletes and 13 coaches. Relating this article to the issues in the book, it can be seen that much of the funds made available for intercollegiate sports are being miss-managed. Athletic programs like football are receiving more money even though only 14 of the 120 programs in the Football Bowl Subdivision made profits in the 2008-9 year. Author Joe Drape also reveals that despite this lack of profit, programs in the Football Subdivision have increased their spending by almost 11 percent over the previous year. Similarly, the chapter on intercollegiate sports discloses that college football programs may be the main cause for many issues in sport like gender inequality. It was found in the book that although football and basketball receive sufficient funds due to television rights fees to boost women’s sports, the recent dramatic increase in expenses has not made this possible. Many of the schools with the largest gender inequalities are the ones with football programs. If intercollegiate football was organized and operated correctly, many of these problems could be avoided. Requiring all football teams to have the same budget limits and demanding expense ceilings for all FBS and FCS teams are easy ways to achieve gender equity in college sports. However, this is not likely because most football teams require a roster of 85 + players. “Football is the S.U.V of the college campus: aggressively big, resource-guzzling, lots and lots of fun and potentially destructive of everything around it” (Sokolove, 2002, p. 508). Why are so many universities considered nonprofit, tax-exempt organizations if their sports programs do not require an open and demographic educational experience? If this is not made possible, shouldn’t academic departments be treated like other businesses that are dependent on the advertisement and profit needs of private companies?
Jeff Miller
KIN 332I Sec. 3017