If you’re not up to date on the battle between athletics and academics, you’re missing a great show.
About the turn of the century, an opinion began circling the nation that collegiate athletic departments were overwhelming the academic side of the institutions. The Knight Commission of Intercollegiate Academics was founded and created a report called “Keeping Faith With The Student Athlete.” A decade later, the group released a record report, “A Call to Action: Reconnecting College Sports and Higher Education,” which included a subsection titled, “The Arms Race.”
Well, this took off like an unwanted guest of Bob and Doug McKenzie (must watch “SCTV” or “Strange Brew” to get this simile). “Arms race” quickly became the buzz phrase for critics of collegiate athletics.
“What you’re watching is the tip of the iceberg,” said University English professor James Earl in a Jan. 2004 Emerald news article about the announced $180 million price tag of a new basketball arena. “You’re just watching the arms race at work.”
Complaints surfaced at the University soon after it announced a $90 million renovation of Autzen Stadium, along with a $14.6 million indoor practice building. As University Senate president, Earl made it a point to return the University to its mission based on academics and “catch the horse (apparently college sports is the horse) and put it back,” he said at a Feb. 2001 panel and open forum.
And in this corner, wearing the green and gold trunks, Bill “The Swoosh” Moos.
Moos became Athletic Director in 1995 after a dream football season that ended at the Rose Bowl. Since then, Moos has run the place on the principle that any press is good press: $300,000 Manhattan-based billboards, odd football uniforms that are ridiculed nationwide, large deals with ESPN and other sports networks for coverage, etc. And Why?
“There is no hidden agenda: it was Washington that I wanted to go head-to-head with,” the Washington native said in a 2003 Seattle Post-Intelligencer article. By all accounts, Moos was successful. Oregon is currently the most attractive and successful sports program in the Northwest, with a little help from its friends. In the same article, Dennis Howard, head of sports marketing at the University, said he believes that Nike Co-Founder Phil Knight has donated over $100 million to the University Athletic Department. Before Moos’ reign, Knight was barely connected to Duck sports.
For the past seven years, distressed faculty have thrown punch after punch. The Senate passed a symbolic resolution against the University’s lack of focus on education and cut a $2 million subsidy to the Athletic Department. It also criticized the University administration for making the athletic “O” – a combination of Autzen and Hayward Field – as the official logo of the University and re-scheduling the Civil War football game for the weekend before finals.
But nothing phased the now self-sustaining Oregon Athletic Department, and it continued to grow.
Earl took his frustrations national and joined critics of collegiate sports, including NCAA President Myles Brand, who was University president before being replaced by Dave Frohnmayer, who hired Moos a year later to build the program to what it is and then asked Moos to step down in November with a $2 million buyout, which prompted Earl and biology professor Nathan Tublitz to publish a letter in the Register Guard, signed by 89 other faculty members – again denouncing the University’s “preoccupation with athletics.”
Just when you think it couldn’t get any better, the University hollers “Stay the Course!” and then replaces Moos with a donor who paid for most of the buyout and is chummy with Knight (whose donations have recently halted), with the main goal to raise over $100 million for a new basketball arena.
And in the most recent events, in a guest column printed in the Emerald on Wednesday, University student Ty Schwoeffermann called the Athletic Department slave-owning privateers who are “putting student athletes to work on the plantation fields.”
If you’re as enthralled by all the excitement as I am, stay tuned for the next episode.
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