Over the past decade, outright donations for the University’s current operations routed to athletics have increased threefold, while similar gifts to academic divisions have seen barely any growth.
According to data retrieved from the Council for Aid to Education, a New York City-based nonprofit established to conduct higher education policy research, the University’s Department of Intercollegiate Athletics received $5.6 million worth of outright donations in 2000, increasing more than 200 percent to $18.1 million in 2010. Donations to academic divisions during the same time period increased less than 12 percent from $4.3 million in 2000 to $4.9 million in 2010.

These trends imply that donors have become more apt to support construction of sports facilities and athletic training than classrooms and scholarship programs, and this — as some critics worry — could severely undermine the University’s academic mission.
To make matters worse, research from a University business professor suggests that undefeated football teams and the ensuing athletic hype they propagate cripples academic giving at all levels.
University sports marketing professor Dennis Howard has examined this relationship for more than a decade and provided an in-depth analysis of the trend in a 2004 Sports Marketing Quarterly article, coauthored with Jeffrey Stinson, a University Lundquist College of Business Ph.D. candidate at the time.
In the article, the two business experts attempted to answer the question, “Does the improved performance of athletic teams influence both types of giving (athletic and academic) to educational institutions?”
The researchers examined data sets from all donors gifting $1,000 or more between 1994 and 2002 to the University’s Annual Giving Program, and concluded: “In (an) era of increasing athletic success at the University of Oregon, more alumni give more to athletics, suggesting that alumni giving may indeed be influenced by athletic success.”
In what Howard alluded to as an indirect aftereffect of the Duck football team’s trip to the 1995 Rose Bowl, the number of alumni donors who gave money to athletics in 1994, 297, increased dramatically to 962 in 2002.
“It was clear that the Rose Bowl gave our athletic program a big lift in terms of interest and enthusiasm,” Howard said in a recent interview.
As to why donors have become predisposed to earmark their gifts for athletics in recent years, Howard suggests that contributors simply like the perks.
“It’s called a donation or a contribution … when, in fact, as we have discovered in our research … it’s a transaction,” Howard said. “It has nothing to do with giving back to the University or a philanthropic motive. It is purely and simply a commercial transaction in which the individual in paying for tangible benefits: better seat location, access to the Autzen Club amenities. All of those things are driving those transactions.”
The 2004 study concluded that even non-alumni are more likely to donate to athletics in the wake of successful sports seasons, redirecting much-needed funds away from flagging academic resources.
According to CAE’s Voluntary Support for Education, an annual survey of private giving to colleges and universities nationwide, total gifts to the University topped $88,472,541 during the 2008 Fiscal Year, increasing to $99,538,521 in 2009 and further to $120,639,480 in 2010. These contributions encompass several different gift types, including future assets called deferred gifts, capital gifts given to build facilities or bolster endowments, and outright gifts of cash, securities or property used to meet current demands for liquid capital.
Because the data available from CAE only encompasses outright gifts, the trend of how contributed money is divided between athletics and academics remains unclear.
The UO Foundation, the University’s main fundraising entity, has gone to great lengths to keep its comprehensive donation profile private, going so far as hiring an attorney last year to net the Foundation an exclusion from the Oregon Public Records Law.
When a University professor tried to appeal the Foundation’s reluctance to publicize its records to the Oregon Department of Justice in May 2010, Frederick Batson, the Foundation’s attorney, wrote a letter to the DOJ demanding the Foundation’s privacy and amenity from mandatory records disclosure.
“This is not a close call,” Batson wrote. “The Foundation respectfully objects to the Attorney General’s office exercising any public records authority over the Foundation …”
University junior Jesse Gehrke worked at the Annual Giving Program, the University’s main academic fundraiser, during the 2009-10 academic year and noticed donors’ reluctance to support academics when tempted with the fringe benefits afforded by athletic contributions.
“There is a trend among alumni to give more frequently and more generously to athletic funds, despite such an overwhelming need for academics,” Gehrke said. “Supporting academics means supporting an idea, whereas an athletic donation is something a donor can see and enjoy. Supporting a scholarship is an abstraction, but the implications for society are far more important.”
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