ASUO’s Athletics and Contracts Finance Committee voted to reallocate the $1.7 million that previously paid for its student ticket agreement with the University of Oregon Athletics Department at a Jan. 19 budget hearing. After years of negotiation and months of ASUO activism, UO President Michael Schill settled on discounting season tickets for student purchase.
ASUO’s decision to remove all funding from its agreement with the athletics department marks the culmination of a long history of ASUO trying to redirect incidental fee funding toward various programs it believed would more equitably support students.
The I-fee is the mandatory student fee that ASUO directs toward various areas that support UO students, such as the EMU, student organizations and ASUO’s new basic needs programs.
Ron Eachus, who was ASUO president during the 1970-71 academic year, said directing incidental fee funds toward other programming was a “major battle” during his time in office as his administration worked to fund a housing office, a draft counseling office and student organizations like the Black Student Union.
“The people who don’t want it to happen always have the advantage because the student population keeps changing,” Eachus said. “It is hard to sustain.”
Although Eachus’ involvement with ASUO predates the formalized agreement between student government and the UO athletics department, the UO I-fee has supported football for as long as student government has existed on campus.
The current system — a written agreement between ASUO and athletics that delegates a sum of the incidental fee in exchange for a set number of student football and men’s basketball tickets for every home game — has formally been in place since 1987. That’s when ASUO and the UO athletics department negotiated a roughly $1.2 million I-fee payment in exchange for 6,000 “free” student football tickets, 3,583 men’s basketball tickets and admission to all other sports with a student ID card.
The years that followed were filled with negotiation. Ahead of the 2005-06 fiscal year, ASUO and athletics agreed to pay 50% of the tickets’ market value — a rate determined by adding a ticket’s face value price to any applicable donation fees that would ordinarily be incorporated in its sale. This broke down to a little over $1.3 million for 5,650 regular season student football tickets and 2,000 men’s basketball tickets.
Ahead of the 2010-11 academic year, ACFC agreed to a decrease in ticket quantity so athletics could separately sell roughly 1,000 season tickets to the student body at a discounted price. The 2010-11 agreement did not list a set price for these season tickets, but students who purchased them had to pay their share of the $1.4 million that funded the contract as well as their individual ticket costs.
At this point, athletics was giving students 4,445 tickets for Pac-12 football games and 1,600 for men’s basketball games.
“As time has gone by students have gotten a worse and worse deal from the athletics department,” 2014-15 ACFC Chair Andrew Lubash said, “when it should be going the other way.”
By Lubash’s senior year, the agreement had increased to just under $1.7 million. Going into the negotiating process, the athletics department had asked for a 10% budget increase — not in itself an uncommon request, as former ASUO Finance Director Shawn Stevenson told the Emerald in 2015 — and threatened to cut tickets from students if ACFC did not agree to at least 3%.
“From the beginning I was frustrated with that,” Lubash said, “because it didn’t feel like they were negotiating with us in good faith.” He started a petition to foster student awareness and support about the conversations between ACFC and the athletics department.
To Lubash, this struggle also ties into the idea of I-fee autonomy. Student government bodies at public Oregon universities have the power to allocate I-fee money as they see fit under state law — with provisions made for an administrative veto.
“If we’re not allowed to change what we spend the money on, if we’re being forced to spend this money on athletics no matter what, do we really have control over that?” Lubash said. “Because it doesn’t seem like we do.”
Although ASUO ended up paying the same amount for the contract as it had in 2015-16, the athletics department cut 300 football tickets from the agreement and resold them separately as student regular season tickets. As a result, those tickets were unavailable to students who tried to go through the lottery system and instead went to those who were willing and able to pay money to the athletic department on top of the incidental fee, former Emerald reporter and current USA Today reporter Kenny Jacoby said. According to the agreement, full season tickets were priced at $325 and Pac-12 at $300 that year, not including processing fees.
In the 2020-21 agreement, ticket costs dropped to $120 for a full season and $100 for Pac-12 home games — even as the total money ASUO was paying for single-game tickets remained relatively constant.
Ahead of the 2016-17 academic year, athletics adjusted the payment model so that ASUO would now cover 80% of the tickets’ market value, but market value was calculated by just the ticket price rather than factoring in applicable donation fees. This meant the overall price ASUO was paying remained at a flat rate.
In an attempt to smooth over tension, ASUO transferred a sum of $10,000 to the athletics department ahead of the 2017-18 academic year. Jacoby said ASUO was motivated by a fear of athletics leaving the agreement — in which case the Tuition and Fees Advisory Board would likely introduce a mandatory athletics fee to cover the cost of student tickets.
“At this point, they were controlling student tickets,” Jacoby said of ASUO, “and student tickets were a big political thing because it’s a big football school. People want to be able to go to games.” He said if the athletics fee were to exist through TFAB, then it would be TFAB members and not students who would control the number and price of tickets.
That threat of a mandatory fee through TFAB almost materialized this year when ACFC completely defunded the agreement between itself and athletics.
With student tickets up in the air, UO Vice President of Student Life Kevin Marbury asked the ASUO senate at its Jan. 27 meeting to consider transferring part of its stake in the EMU to free up money to fund its proposed basic needs programming.
Marbury presented a more formalized plan at the senate’s annual budget bonanza meeting that Saturday. The proposal asked that ASUO transfer a lump sum of roughly $2.3 million from its surplus to cover the ticket costs of all students currently enrolled at UO and “actively support” the implementation of a $29.50 mandatory athletics fee through TFAB.
The senate unanimously voted against the proposition, with a number of members restating their shared belief that ASUO should not be the body paying for student tickets in favor of essential programs like housing subsidies.
Schill and ASUO senate President Claire O’Connor negotiated another proposal, which she brought to the floor in the form of a senate resolution at a Feb. 2 emergency meeting. The proposal again called on the senate to support a mandatory athletics fee, this time also requesting $1 million out of the $1.7 million that would have gone to the athletics contract in the 2020-21 academic year. Schill’s letter also proposed a student advisory board for the fee.
“I’d like to commend you on ASUO’s ideas for new programs and look forward to working with you over the next several months to make them a reality,” Schill wrote.
The resolution also fell short of majority approval, but this time with eight of the 21 senators voting in favor. “At the end of the day, a lot of us just couldn’t sign off that we supported that mandatory fee,” Travers said.
Lubash said he supported this year’s ASUO’s choice to redirect the athletics ticket money to basic needs programming. “Budgets are all about values,” he said. “When we spend money on something we’re basically saying this money spent on this thing is more important than anything else it can be spent on.”
From there, ASUO organized. It hosted a handful of student forums, reached out to the UO senate for its support in the form of a motion, started its own petition and encouraged students to testify against the proposed athletics fee ahead of the March board of trustees meeting where trustees would approve ASUO’s and UO’s budgets.
UO spokesperson Saul Hubbard told the Emerald via email that Schill chose to move away from establishing a mandatory athletics fee after hearing from students and faculty.
“But he also made clear that he did not think it was appropriate for athletics to fund the tickets,” Hubbard said, “given that the department is running a deficit in the tens of millions of dollars this year because of COVID-19 and all athletic department employees have taken salary cuts — pain that has not been shared by employees of the university more broadly.” According to projections shared at the board of trustees meeting, the UO athletics department will lose $63 million this year.
Although financial data for the 2020-21 fiscal year is not yet available, a $45 million revenue was projected for 2020-21 at the board of trustees meeting. In recent years, the UO athletics department has operated on a budget of roughly $130 million in revenue, making the student ticket money less than 2% of its total funding.
Jimmy Stanton, senior associate athletic director for communications, said the $1.7 million from ASUO went to support the UO student-athlete experience and gameday operations. However, due to the pandemic, ACFC did not pay for the athletics contract for the 2020-21 academic year. ASUO is currently working to refund this money to students.
Instead of replacing the ASUO agreement with a similar mandatory fee, Schill proposed a plan to provide students with 5,000 season tickets for a discounted fee of $100 — a price consistent with that of a “Pac-12 Package” for football under the most recent ASUO and athletics agreement. Schill said he will subsidize the agreement by paying athletics $1.2 million out of UO’s licensing revenue.
“Only students who view premium athletic events as a critical part of their UO experience will have to pay to attend those events,” Marbury told the Emerald. It’s a significant change from the ASUO agreement’s lottery system, which ASUO senator and ACFC member Jenna Travers said was one of the driving factors in ACFC’s initial decision to defund the agreement.
“We had issues with the fact that students paid this fee and then couldn’t get tickets to the game,” Travers said. Under the agreement, everyone who paid the I-fee contributed to the athletics tickets, but only 65% of students made use of the agreement according to data provided at ACFC’s athletics budget hearing. Travers, like other ACFC members, said she saw this as a huge inequity.
While the distribution of these tickets is still being worked out, Schill’s memo at the board of trustees meeting implies that single-game tickets for football and basketball may also be an option for students going forward. Marbury said all other sports will be free to UO students.
As Schill and the athletics department figure out the details of student tickets, ASUO is working to plan for its basic needs programs. Its budget passed at the board of trustees meeting “with the caveat that each proposal would need to be reviewed to ensure they meet university policy and procedures before implementation could proceed,” Marbury said.
One of the oldest available editions of the Daily Emerald available in it's archives is shown here, dated Feb. 26, 1916. According to the Emerald archives, the mandatory UO incidental fee has supported football for as long as student government has existed on campus. The ASUO Athletics and Contracts Finance Committee has voted to reallocate $1.7 million that was previously used to pay for student tickets as part of an agreement with the UO Athletics Department. (Will Geschke/Emerald)
