User:Amerique/UC Essay

There was an article in the NYT a while ago that discusses tribalism in relation to identification with, and within, a university, as manifested by rituals and traditions surrounding varsity teams.[1] It is interesting (but not surprising) that most Wikipedia articles on university athletics, not to mention articles on universities themselves, often reflect these ideologies and neglect the economic (or even "intellectual") aspects of their subjects... Other than vandalism, many of the edits I've seen anon IPs make to these articles are attempts to add their names to the alumni rolls. However, there is a wide degree of difference in how personal identification with a particular university's "brand" is a function of intercollegiate sports. (The University of Chicago and Johns Hopkins come to mind as places where where students have a lot of "school pride" but where athletics takes a back-seat. These places would seem to be the exception, not the norm, within the US, however, other than places with no "school spirit" at all.) With regards to state universities, this difference may be most concretely explored by examining the voting positions students take regarding funding referenda for their athletic programs. Within the University of California, consider the respective situations of the athletic departments at Davis, San Diego, Riverside and Irvine. In a time of dramatic system-wide fee increases of up to 90% over the past decade, [2] the students at each of these campuses voted for additional fee increases to support their respective sports programs. Students at Davis [3] [4] [5] made the biggest sacrifice, voting for additional fee increases of up to $173 per student per quarter (a total of $692 per year) to fund the transition to NCAA Division I and for the construction of new athletics, health and recreational facilities. San Diego students [6] also made a significant investment to fund scholarships for their athletes to remain eligible to compete at DII, at $78 per student per quarter. ($312/yr) Conversely, Riverside's decision to move up to DI back in 1998-2001 [7] was voted in rather more cheaply at $35 per student per academic quarter, and Irvine's 1999 vote for a "Campus Spirit" fee to re-establish men's baseball and start women’s water polo and women’s golf teams only cost students $33 per quarter. [8] Contrast all these scenarios with the situation at UCSC, where most of the students consistently vote against large-scale funding referenda for their DIII programs [9], although they voted in a $5 per student per quarter fee for intercollegiate athletics in 2007 [10]. (Oddly enough, at UCLA, where even though the football coach earns approximately twice the annual salary of the UC president:[11], students there don't pay itemized fees to support athletics. Sports there is primarily funded by sales of UCLA merchandise, so UCLA students get the recognition athletics provides "for free," essentially, though I am not sure if student fees paid to ASUCLA contribute to varsity athletics or not. They definitely have in the past, although probably not on a referendum-basis. John Wooden used to work for ASUCLA when he was first hired at UCLA.)

All the UC campuses, with the exception of UCSC and Riverside, are well regarded by a majority of Californians:[12]. Campuses that are already well regarded, without wide-spread popular recognition of their athletics programs, would have less to gain in terms of public perception from their sacrifices for athletics. Among all the UC campuses, Davis probably had the least to gain, in terms of increased public awareness and the generation of additional revenue streams, from its tremendous investment. Davis has a longstanding regional rivalry with CSU Sacramento, but Sac State is not that competitive and further maintaining, rather than significantly expanding, the proceeds and recognition value generated by that may be all they can expect to get out of the transition to DI. San Diego, on the other hand, has a more dynamic regional economy that may support a higher-scale intercollegiate rivalry, if UCSD were to add a DI football program and enter into competition with SDSU. That would probably require a tremendous investment on the part of UCSD students, and while this potential rivalry might not match the scale or the intensity of the UCLA-USC rivalry, the economics of Davis/Sacramento could provide a baseline model for forecasting how the economics of a UCSD/SDSU rivalry could work out. Developing a football program would generate more economic activity in the city and popular interest in both of its major public universities. UCSD, primarily due to its location, would seem to be in the best position to reap rewards from any large scale investments in athletics, in light of which the route they've chosen seems especially conservative, or alternately, timid and utterly lacking in self-confidence. Given UCSD's circumstances and overall academic development, they should have entered DI competition long ago, especially given that several UCs of lessser standing, without any hopes of developing locally-supported, self-sustaining sports programs, have been competing at DI since the 1970s. (Irvine and Santa Barbara)

As the Santa Cruz and Riverside campuses are "last" in terms of public perception, their students would stand to gain "the most" from investments in athletics, but they seem to have respectively voted for non-optimal or even backfiring positions. While UCSC's teams consistently win at DIII (their women's rugby club team even won a DII title a few years ago), and though the majority of students there can afford extra fees to support athletics, [13], they defeated two large-scale funding referendums comparable with those that passed at UCD and UCSD. Like UCSD, UCSC also has a potential rival in CSUMB, (Imagine "the Battle of Monterey Bay," between "the Slugs and the Otters!") but CSUMB has already left DIII behind to play at DII, though the school just opened in 1994. (And CSUMB seems to be doing this, and building new athletics facilities to boot, without hosing the students down through excessive referendum fees.) Anti-growth "keep Santa Cruz weird" politics at UCSC may be inhibiting progress in this area, but by choosing "not to pay (much)," UCSC is in effect shooting itself in the foot, in an area of public recognition that it could easily excel at, but that is their loss. Riverside's students, although they tend to come from poorer backgrounds than those at UCSC, voted their teams to a level of competition at which they were entirely untested and, history has shown, unprepared for. Their teams were inconsistent at DII and eight years into DI their athletic facilities and profile are still more comparable with most DII schools.[14] For their four or five first round appearances in the DI finals they could have won a DII national title in the past decade. Also, by moving into DI, the Inland Empire lost the potential for an interesting local rivalry in men's basketball to develop between UCR and CSUSB. In the 1990s, a brief rivalry flared between the schools that harbored potential for affecting DII national title contentions, if it continued. [15] That could have drawn more otherwise apathetic locals into the bleachers at those universities, but now UCR men's basketball rarely finishes higher than last in the Big West, while CSUSB made the final four in DII last year, playing in front of empty seats. Oh well.