Me: “I go to UCSD.”
Anyone outside the San Diego area: “Oh, the party school?”
“No, that’s SDSU.”
“Oh, the Catholic school.”
“No, that’s USD.”
“Oh … what school did you say you were from again?”
Wouldn’t it be grand if you could go anywhere in the country and say “I go to UCSD” only to have someone yell back “Go Tritons!”? Yeah, that would be nice. One way in which many schools have achieved that goal is through televised Division I sports.
Before I go further, I must mention that many people with much more knowledge about this situation than I have argued that UCSD isn’t ready for Division I due to a number of obstacles. They note that transitioning to Division I will have start-up costs in the tens of millions of dollars. We’d need to recruit more athletes (through almost $1 million in annual NCAA-required grants, according to the NCAA’s bylaws). We’d need to hire coaches, staff and maintenance crews. And UCSD is years away from being entirely Division I.
That being said, however, there are some advantages that may not have been considered or given proper weight.
Here’s the background: The Academic Senate (your professors) has been fighting tooth-and-nail to prevent any movements in athletics from hurting academics. In 1998, when UCSD made the transition to Division II, the Academic Senate balked, allowing the move only if it meant “no athletic scholarships, no scholastic variations in admissions and no use of general funds,” a 2002 Guardian article reported. Only recently has the organization softened its stance and approved a “grants in aid” proposal, allowing for some athletic scholarships to meet NCAA’s Division II requirements.
One of the primary concerns which has prompted the Academic Senate’s hard-line stance is that moving to Division I would hurt UCSD’s academic reputation. Obviously, that would be bad.
There are two ways in which moving to Division I could hurt UCSD’s academic reputation. First, the required $1 million in athletic grants could mean $1 million in fewer academic scholarships or reduced academic program funding. It could, yes. But a dollar given to athletics is not necessarily a dollar taken away from academics.
The fact of the matter is that people love sports. It’s unquestionable in American society. If UCSD officially announced that it wanted to initiate the process of transitioning to Division I but didn’t have enough money, I firmly believe the students, alumni and wealthy donors would rise to the occasion. Irwin and Joan Jacobs recently donated $120 million (over time) to build UCSD a school of engineering. Raising $1 million from numerous sources for the required athletic grants would send a powerful message about the community’s desire for Division I and its willingness to work for it. Such a gesture would help ease the worried minds of Academic Senate members and demonstrate that athletics are not necessarily parasitic.
A second concern expressed by administrators and Academic Senate members is that a Division I athletic program would require UCSD to recruit and admit a bunch of stupid, talented athletes. Such a change in admissions would hurt the school’s average GPA, they say, and athletes would take admissions slots which should have gone to academically qualified applicants. I agree.
If UCSD wanted top-notch immediate championship teams, then perhaps this would be a problem. But to achieve quality athletic teams in the molds of Stanford and UC Berkeley, which don’t admit dumb athletes and yet maintain competitive Division I teams, we would only admit athletes with intelligence on par with the student body at large.
This will probably not make us immediate champions, but as the program grows, it will attract more and better athletes with greater intelligence, much like Stanford and Berkeley. This plan may not win us any championships in the near future, but it will allow us to sleep at night.
Furthermore, Division I sports might actually bolster UCSD’s academic reputation. Here’s how: In politics, you’re unlikely to vote for a candidate you’ve never heard of. Similarly, high school seniors aren’t likely to apply to a school they’ve never heard of. Great sports teams give their schools exposure and because of that, attract the very students UCSD is looking for: minorities, lucrative out-of-state students and diverse international students.
By sending UCSD teams to compete in televised matches with schools in the northeast, southeast, and midwest, students who had never heard of UCSD will research the school and apply to it because it maintains superior academics. The exposure granted by televised sports is quite possibly the most effective form of outreach available, drawing an untapped market of intelligent students from across the country, perhaps resulting in an increased campus GPA.
If we start now, move gradually step-by-step, and try to get the NCAA to work with us as they have in our move to Division II, then by the time they graduate, perhaps next year’s freshmen will be able to see their Tritons defeat, say, the UCLA Bruins. And on that glorious day, millions across the country will open up their newspapers and read the headline: “Tritons Defeat Bruins.” Their collective reaction at that time will be a perplexed: “Who beat the Bruins?” But not the next time. Next time, they’ll know our name. They’ll know the UCSD Tritons.
