By George BeresFor the Beacon
Kids in Springfield have been shooting baskets for more than a month. But football refuses to give up. The many football bowl games now played in winter remind me of how college sports have changed for the worse since I was part of them.
Most of my professional life was as a sports information director at Northwestern University, then the University of Oregon. I savored it back in the 1960s and 1970s. I'm grateful to be out of it now because excessive hype and spending have ruined college games.
Effects are evident at Oregon and Oregon State, as every fan in Springfield should know. No better example can be found than the reason the Ducks and Beavers changed the date of their annual windup football game this year to December. That's a week later than earlier slated. Why?
The Oregon campus newspaper, the Emerald, explained weeks ago: look no further than the conflict between funding higher education and underwriting costs of varsity athletics. That took a turn at the UO when two former heads of the UO Faculty Senate and the University president went at it in the local press like wrestlers battling for a pin.
The professors -- Nathan Tublitz, Biology, and James Earl, English -- alleged that out-of-control spending on varsity athletics damages students and faculty. The response was that the school's fundamental principle is not money, but that athletes are students first.
Then came the Emerald bombshell. It reported that Oregon-- tempted by a large rights payment from a TV network-- got Oregon State to join it in violating their six-year old resolution to not schedule a football game near finals week. The agreement was to avoid game distractions for athletes and other students going into finals.
At the insistence of ESPN-TV, they agreed to play this fall's game, Dec. 1, just before start of exams. It's the result of Oregon, with OSU approval, moving the season's wind-up game back to accommodate an ESPN request that shifted Oregon's Nov. 10 game with Arizona to Thursday, Nov. 15. That prevented playing the Civil War game on its original date. It required an inactive Saturday, which was an ironic disaster for the Ducks when they were upset in Tucson in the mid-week game.
The money issue has festered since it was announced Bill Moos, athletics director until last year, was resigning, but also was getting a goodbye gift of $2 million. Such payments are part of severance when someone is asked to leave, not when one chooses to leave.
Lying is not foreign to college sport. I know from experience as a sports information director, when I, like my colleagues nationwide, would inflate heights and weights of players in media guides at requests of coaches. That was trivial, and sharp sportswriters saw through the subterfuge. Not trivial is the lying suspected when Moos departed early.
Some close to the program suggest the change was at the demand of a major donor and alumnus, Phil Knight of Nike, whom Moos occasionally challenged. The suspicion is fueled by how the Nike multimillionaire used his influence a few years ago to counter the UO becoming part of the Worker Rights Consortion (WRC), which monitors employee relations of corporations, including Nike.
Knight threatened to renege on his promise of millions for expansion of Autzen Stadium unless the University withdrew from the WRC. If you're part of Labor, as I once was in the IBEW, you'll understand such a management ploy. Within weeks, the State System of Higher Education ruled it was illegal for its schools to be in the WRC. Then Knight came waddling back to alma mater with his Nike gold nuggets.
The issue transcends sports. It reveals the growing threat to independence of higher education everywhere from corporate donors who feel they can assert their will on schools because they bought that right with big donations.
One can understand state schools turning to corporate donors for money as state aid diminishes. Citizens are thankful for that generosity-- but not when donors see it as license to exert their will on academia, as in hiring and firing coaches and directors.
Some feel schools are becoming Corporate U. If so, that would solve all financial problems. But it would mean destruction of academic integrity, which-- as the Emerald alerted us-- already has begun.
(The writer is former University of Oregon Sports Information Director.)
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