Letter from William Rorabaugh (AAUP Listserv ay UW)
Colleagues –
A couple of points. First, revenue bonds have long been used by UW to build facilities. Parking structures are built with bonds to be paid off with future parking revenues. The Med School K-Wing’s research space was built with revenue bonds to be paid by grant tenants. That one was controversial because there were no identifiable tenants when the bonds were sold. By the time the building was built, it was fully booked. The HUB is being built with bonds to be paid from a student fee imposed by students upon themselves. The IMA was built the same way. Student housing is being built by bonds to be paid from rents. So rebuilding Husky Stadium with bonds to be paid by ticketholders is no different. It is curious that none of these other bonded projects ever created controversy over the bonding process.
Second, the existing stadium has serious problems. The oldest part is 90 years old and in poor condition. Structures do wear out, and sometimes they do have to be replaced. It is not really possible, as someone who does not know the facts suggested in the Seattle Times, simply to continue to use the present facility indefinitely. The list of limitations is long, and I suggest a private tour if you want to see the entire set of issues, which include structural problems for the oldest sections, chronic electrical and plumbing problems, handicapped access, and the inability to use the facility in winter weather due to restrooms that cannot be used in the winter.
Third, UW did consult about joint use of Qwest Field, but the Seahawks control the facility, and they apparently conveyed that they did not want to share control. It is difficult to have a successful team without its own facility.
Fourth, a successful football team is important for the financial health of the rest of the campus. This may be hard to grasp, but it is true. The fact is that UW is one of a small number of universities – only about a dozen – that have had self-supporting intercollegiate athletic programs. The money comes largely from football and men’s basketball. And yes, it is about TV. This money is used to support not just those sports programs but all the other sports programs. If UW has consistently weak football teams, it will become necessary to subsidize sports out of tuition revenue. Now some people may find such a subsidy to be appalling, but in fact it is normal. This kind of subsidy is routinely done at almost all other universities, including such PAC 10 (soon to be 12) schools as
WSU, Berkeley, and Stanford.
Failing to rebuild the existing woefully decayed stadium risks tuition
money having to be transferred to sports programs as is routinely done at other universities. In other words, the project is a self-financed effort to keep tuition going to academic programs instead of to sports programs.
Bill Rorabaugh,
Faculty Council on University Facilities and Services chair
Bill’s rresponse may not be entirely correct. Questions about the level of risk of this large loan as well as questions about the impact of increased debt on the Huskies themselves, need answers.
” Med School K-Wing’s research space was built with revenue bonds to be paid by grant tenants”
Bill is partly correct on this one. K wing was bond financed based not on payments from “grant tenants” (we DO NOT PAY RENT) but expected increases in indirect costs from the SOM. A large part of the costs were, in effect, underwritten by grants from Bill Gates and Howard Hughes who funded new programs locates there. Other K wing tenants were faculty who were already funded but moved to K wing.
In effect the bet here was that more space in the SOM as a whole, would justify the bet. There was actually quite a bit of concern on upper campus about what would happen IF that bet failed. That issue may be all too real if some projections come true about decreases in the NIH budget with a Republican/Tea Party Congress.
“The HUB is being built with bonds to be paid from a student fee imposed by students upon themselves. The IMA was built the same way.”
These loans were repaid by student fees. Unless one imagined an implosion of the UW, those fees were guaranteed and therefore no risk.
In contrast the new stadium is being built on the speculation that an existing business, Husky football, can be grown enough to pay of a $210,000,000 loan from Campus funds. I also believe, based on the 2009 audit of the internal loan program, that this may be the largest such loan the UW has ever made. Moreover, the increase in income is built at the expense of moving STUDENT seating to the endzones.
Third, UW did consult about joint use of Qwest Field, but the Seahawks control the facility, and they apparently conveyed that they did not want to share control. It is difficult to have a successful team without its own facility.
Fourth, a successful football team is important for the financial health of the rest of the campus. This may be hard to grasp, but it is true. The fact is that UW is one of a small number of universities – only about a dozen – that have had self-supporting intercollegiate athletic programs.
Where is the data? I have also read this same claim MANY times. I have also read several studies that claim this is NOT true. One would hardly call Harvard, MIT, Reed, or University of Massachusetts, “unsuccessful” universities. Moreover the current AD claims to be so impoverished that it has cut swimming and does no even offer wrestling or men’s gymnastics. Finally, the hoped for revenue, based on the report to the regents, is only about $14 million dollars, about the amount claimed to pay the interest and perhaps the principle of the loan.
Convincing data on this would require a real balance sheet for the Husky Athletic Department, including ALL costs … rent on the existing facility, indirect costs levied on all other parts of campus, and any special costs associated with this program (police, housing, instruction).
Rorabaugh’s defense of the Athletic Enterprise is typical of some cheering-leading faculty members who equate athletics and academics as if the two were co-equals.
No doubt Husky stadium does have serious structural problems, but so do other buildings on campus, and these other building address more of the academic mission of the campus. There is a world of difference in plumbing problems in a bio-lab,a library or a dorm, than in a football stadium.
“Football is important to the financial health of the university” is true only for those who want to make it so. The football team is mediocre at best. But even if it ranked at the top, this would be less concern to whose vested more in education than watching organized violence. The financial health of the college should be in the quality of its faculty and not its coaches.
“We should be happy that the intercollegiate program is self-sustaining.” This rationale has surpass the mantra of WMDs. It is a statement consistently put forth as a kind of group-think, as if it, in itself. was reason to allow the Athletic Department to always have its own way.
Sports is but one element of the college experience and it is NOT essential to higher education or diminishing inequality. Yet the recruiting academically under-prepared student-athletics for the sole purpose of winning football (and basketball) games continues.
Such issues feed the concerns raised by many about the over-emphasis on college sports and now the Husky football stadium. What is “curious” is that Rorabaugh doesn’t seem to get it.
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