Thorns and Roses for Oregonian's PERS inequity scoop

"Top PERS payout: $41,342 a month"

There's a story to "occupy" your mind and your conscience.

And the top pensioner is none other than Mike Bellotti, the former University of Oregon football coach. What's that say about values at Oregon's, ahem, "institutions of higher learning"?

Why is it there's a whiff of Phil Knight to all of this? "I'm a billionaire. Why shouldn't Bellotti be one too?" On the state dole, no less....

How will this tale of greed register with all those Duck graduates saddled with debt and unable to find work? It's enough to drive a person to demonstrate and occupy a campus. Oh, wait, that was happening, even before The Oregonian broke the story.

Talk about "higher education."

Too much of the text of the Oregonian story is about how very, very, very difficult it was for the newspaper's attorneys to wrest from PERS the damning data about the top-most pigs at the PERS trough. Yes, it is outrageous that PERS fought tooth and nail to hide the list from the public. And yes, it is great that The Oregonian the Salem Statesman Journal fought back and prevailed.

But try to find in the story something about how it came to pass that Bellotti and a bunch of other high-paid state employees (many OHSU professors and administrators) got such largesse. It's not in the story.

Who is responsible for such inequity? It's not in the story.

How do they justify it? It's not in the story.

Will it be reported on later? One would hope.

Related: The Huffington Post has listed the University of Oregon on the top-ten list of campuses with the worst professors. Could that have something to do with what football coaches are paid in Eugene and what professors aren't?

Could it be that the more competitive you are in the NCAA football, the lower you fall in academics?

And, if so, is Stanford the exception that proves a rule? How so?

Just askin'.....

Campus culture clash: Scholarship and Athletics

Be careful of the metaphor you choose. It can put a lock on your mind.

Take the case of NCAA Division I college sports and how the University of Oregon’s athletic program was described in a New York Times story today.

The story displays a parade of useless metaphors all trying to address a serious problem.

At UO they have a star quarterback, Jeremiah Masoli who has been suspended from the football program after pleading guilty to burglary. (He stole a computer, even though the football program lends laptops to players free. Steal a computer when you can have one for free? And this guy's on a SCHOLARship?)

Then we have the handshake agreement to pay the departing athletic director Mike Bellotti a cool $2.3 million to leave. This sounds like something that might happen at a high-stakes poker game or in golf match between very rich executives. But on a college campus?

There’s more. The University must make bond payments on a new $227 million basketball pavilion. Here a little context is in order: The University of Oregon’s faculty is grossly underpaid and tuition is skyrocketing.

Go figure.

And somewhere lurking in the background is one Phil Knight, NIKE gazillionaire. The story doesn’t delve into the NIKE influence, but clearly Phil lives by his own rules — and he applies them to UO.

Back to the push and pull in the Times story. The quotes from critics of UO athletics frame the issue in metaphors that lock out solutions.

“It’s time for the athletic department to do a little soul searching on how they can serve the university,” said one professor. “The athletic department is out of control here.”

Implied answer: search your soul, serve the university and get things under control.

Also, take three aspirin and go to bed.

A sports psychologist, tipsy on metaphors, says, “We have reached a tipping point. You have to have this homeostatic balance — you can’t just run athletics as an entity by itself. What I think is important is that the University of Oregon is a unique place — most alums and most donors want to see a healthy balance. They want to see a school jump up in the academic rankings and not just see a top-five football team. We are really at a crossroads. I would hope the new administration would see this as a new opportunity and not a Band-Aide.”

Band-Aides, tipping points, homeostasis, healthy balance, crossroads. Got that?

Let me try a straight-forward metaphor.

What we have on this campus — and all NCAA Division I campuses to some degree — is a clash of cultures.

The cultures don’t belong in the same place. They are at odds. They have utterly different goals and values.

Football is mass entertainment, not education. Education is learning, not spectator entertainment. Sure one can, and should, have elements of the other, but that’s where it ends.

Wide receivers “learn” how to run pass routes; physicists and lit majors should get a some entertaining exercise. A little Frisbee perhaps? A jog through an academic glen?

But that’s about it.

Let's stop pretending that high-profile, televised, hyper-commercial, monetized athletics as anything to do with higher education.

Just note the tension in the term “athletic scholarship.” Note the absurdity of calling a collegiate sports rivalry “The Civil War,” which, as students of history know, was a great national tragedy. Note how supposedly educated adults behave like buffoons at athletic events.

Note that this weekend we have headlines screaming that a Portland high school backetball star, Terrence Jones, has chosen to go to the University of Washington, where he will receive a full ride “scholarship.” We all know he will use the Seattle campus/stage as a stepping stone to the professional sports fame. Call me crazy but my guess is that he will not leave the great University of Washington versed in history, literature or philosophy.

Where are the best high school students going? And why don’t we, the general spectator public, care? Why isn’t it news? And will these scholars receive full-ride scholarships? And why will they stay and graduate? And what are their chances for employment out of college? Will they command the same seven-digit salaries that the likes of Terrence Jones will?

Two cultures. Different values. Worlds apart.

The universities, their administrations and their alumni need to choose one. They can’t live in both at once.

The answer is a “National Athletic Association” minus “Collegiate.” It’s where young, talented athletes go to prepare for the professional leagues. If those NAA teams want to locate in college towns and wear college colors and even be “sponsored” by the local university, fine.

But let’s not conflate the two.

Misplaced Values

Let the record show that the highest paid public employees in the state are not its public health doctors, not its Supreme Court Justices, not its university presidents and certainly not its governor.

No, the highest paid state employees are the football coaches at its Division 1A universities. They make more than twice as much as the university presidents.

Defenders argue that the football programs are self-supporting, with revenues coming from fans, patrons, broadcasting rights and commercial deals.

But critics like me say it’s a question of values. If you love your university, in the name of wisdom, truth and knowledge, give to its professors and students.

The whole collegiate sports scene has gone over the top, distorting the perception of our universities and their values.

Fortunately, many on the campuses are fighting back. The Coalition on Collegiate Athletics is one of the groups leading the charge.

Here's some of what they are up against.

We learn today — another day of dire economic suffering across this land — that the University of Oregon has agreed to have its new coach-in-waiting, Chip Kelly, make $7 million over five years, plus bonuses of an undetermined amount.

According to this morning's Oregonian, the Duck’s current coach, Mike Bellotti, raked in more than $1.9 million last year. (Be sure to read the comments after The Oregonian story for the flavor of fan support.)

Kelly’s and Bellotti’s bonuses require higher math to determine. They are tied to ticket sales, numbers of televised games, participations in Conference and BCS champions, regular season victories, coaching honors (question: is there an honor for most grotesque compensation package?) and final national rankings.

Oh, and there are incentives for graduation success rates, academic progress rate and scholarship student grade-point averages. Presumably these are measured by grades on the transcripts of “scholar” athletes and not on the old transcripts of the coaches themselves. (“Hey, coach, what was your GPA?”)

A modest suggestion. The universities of this state should follow the example of Honda, which has announced that it is dropping Formula One racing because of the hard times.

With more and more kids unable to pay for college, it’s time to dump football, at least football that has become nothing more than entertainment and has zilch to do with education.

Quick math. If it costs $30,000 for a year’s tuition at a state university, then the pay of just one head football coach (think of the salaries of a whole staff of them) would pay the tuition for 50 students now unable to go to school.

It's time for a values shift regarding what our universities really stand for and why we should support them.