Next time, fly coach
The Wall Street Journal has just published this interesting story about Arts and Sciences professors at Columbia complaining about a lack of adequate funding for their research and sabbaticals.
Missing from the story is the fact that most tenured faculty teach almost no classes and give nothing back to Columbia unless you count their books about arcane subjects that only 20-30 people on Earth will care about, let alone read.
The fact that these haughty academics don't even mention improving the undergraduate student experience is no accident. They don't give a damn about them and the fact that they're the ones paying the bills with the ever-exploding tuition money is even more of an inconvenient fact for these pseudo socialist phonies.
But this story worries me in light of the fact that athletics generates big donor money and I am convinced that not all of it goes where it's intended to go. This is not a wild conspiracy theory, because the same issue plagues Columbia College. The previous two CC deans basically bolted over disputes about how much of the College-generated money, (via tuition and alumni donations), somehow finds its way over to the Arts and Sciences treasury.
Athletics outperforms just about every other division of Columbia when it comes to fundraising. If you remember the results of the last two online "Giving Days" you'll know what I mean.
Whatever I think or you think about the Athletic Department's performance, it deserves our support to keep the money and donations it generates in house.
4 comments:
And that fact, re the relative financial contributions of athletics, is a lever which has never been adequately deployed with the administration.
It's classic academic snobbery; take the money but disdain the source.
Former athletes are the largest consistent providers of contributions to the College and the U.
There is always a one-time whale dropping 100M every few years, but year in and out, it's the old jocks.
I don't follow your logic, Jake. How does it support the AD to give it money, if that money is siphoned off to the Marxist zone?
I too remember the happy results of the last two "Giving Days."
But I'd also like to know if there's any genuine research that truly shows that former athletes and athletics fans are the most loyal of givers to their Alma Maters. Accompanying folklore at Columbia, incidentally, has always stoutly maintained that the most generous of former athletes are in fact rowers.
Chick: my point was we need to make sure the money, or at least more of it, isn't siphoned off.
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