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Students are set to vote on a referendum which will decide whether or not a fee increase should support athletic scholarships.
After a year of discussion, disagreement and delay, the newest grants-in-aid proposal — which would allow UCSD to comply with NCAA athletic scholarship requirements — has been overhauled. While the initial plan would have funded the scholarships from registration fees, the Academic Senate recently endorsed a version of the proposal that would mandate an undergraduate vote on whether to pay for scholarships through a larger athletics fee next fall — a change that may have more impact than the Academic Senate has estimated.
The student-fee referendum would increase the current quarterly athletics fee of $31 per student to a level that would stabilize the department’s budget to run programs, which fell into a $300,000 debt this year.
Extra Innings
Arguments between faculty, administrators and students regarding the deflated budget of the athletics department have drawn out negotiations that began last year.
Vice Chancellor of Student Affairs Joseph W. Watson originally proposed grants-in-aid last spring in order to provide $500 to each of UCSD’s 600 student-athletes, thereby meeting the NCAA Division-II regulation mandating at least $250,000 in athletic scholarships. While the athletics department received a waiver from the requirement for the 2005-06 academic year, NCAA last fall denied Athletics Director Earl W. Edwards a permanent waiver offered to some Ivy League schools.
The original plan drew funds out of registration fees — a funding pool made up of annual student charges — provided by a growing student population; however, the Academic Senate now thinks that students should pay the $6 to $8 per quarter for the scholarships because of increased demands on registration-fee funding and because the program affects student life, according to Academic Senate Chair Jean-Bernard Minster.
Although charging students for programs such as athletics is not uncommon, Edwards feels that the switch is a step backward in an already delayed process.
“In the [registration] fee proposal, you know the money is there,” Edwards said. “It’s done. It’s hard money. That part is over with. My biggest concern is the uncertainty of the funds for the scholarships because now we have to wait and see how the votes play out versus if it were approved the way it were proposed, it’s done and we’d move onto the next chapter.”
A six-member task force spent the summer and fall of 2005 simplifying the proposal, ultimately eliminating a provision allowing outside funding for individual teams — a provision that faced opposition from the Council of Provosts.
Aside from that, however, the committee had no hand in changing the funding mechanism, according to biology professor and task force member Stuart Brody.
Instead, the main effort of the group was to unite competing ideals of faculty members in order to gain maximum support, Brody said. Rather than confronting the complicated issue of social life, the context of the proposal was changed to simply comply with the NCAA Division-II requirement for athletic scholarships.
“Every faculty member had their own opinion on how to improve student morale and that was competing,” Brody said.
On the Sidelines
During intitial negotiations, the Graduate Student Association argued that graduate students should not bear a higher fee burden, since they are not affected by intercollegiate athletics. Some administrators, on the other hand, believe otherwise.
“I think it’s great that [grants-in-aid is] going through the students because [they] should decide on what’s going to impact the student environment,” Edwards said, “But for the administration to put on the table to have it taken care of and then [for] faculty and graduate students to say, ‘Hey wait a minute, that should come from students taxing themselves’ … I kind of question whether that’s in their purview.”
Watson and Edwards said that allowing graduate students to be exempt from fee increases would set a bad precedent, because several services funded by the registration fee — which graduate students must pay — are not used by all students, such as psychological counseling, career services and residence halls.
“That whole rationale was very disturbing to me,” Edwards said. “Just the ability for any one group to say, ‘I’m not going to pay for that because I don’t use it.’ Why do you pick [athletics] and say, ‘I don’t want to pay for that’? I think that’s very discriminatory toward athletics.”
While the impact of GSA’s opposition to the proposal is uncertain, the fact that NCAA programs benefit undergrads more than graduate students influenced senate support for proposal revamps, according to the Senate’s Graduate Council Chair Robert E. Continetti.
Administrators are bracing for the worst case scenario next year, when students may reject funding scholarships with larger fees and the NCAA refuses another temporary waiver.
According to Edwards, the most immediate result of not meeting the Division-II requirement would be probation, during which UCSD would not be eligible to compete in championships. This would pose even more challenges to the struggling department.
“[Probation] is an enormous black eye for the campus,” Brody said. “It would have huge ramifications in terms of recruiting students here, even students who aren’t athletes.”
The Waiting Game
The real impact on the program, however, is proper funding for the department, according to Edwards. While scholarships will place UCSD at the level of other D-II teams, most of the fee money will go toward the operating budget of the department.
“If students vote against the increase in fees, which includes scholarships, we’ll have to make some choices about how to run UCSD athletics,” Edwards said. “We’d have to look at potentially eliminating some [athletic] opportunities either for both genders or one gender. We’d have to make some reductions.”
Regardless of the reasons for the switch in the funding method, Watson embraces the referendum for its symbolism.
“Putting [grants-in-aid] in the hands of the students to decide is a wonderful way of going, and then for the faculty to endorse the student position indicates a true partnership on the campus,” Watson said.
Decisions about the contents of the proposal and the method of funding have not yet been finalized, according to Minster.
“The Senate Council remains concerned about some aspects of the revised proposal, in particular the funding mechanism, but acknowledges the positive aspects of the proposal for the campus,” Minster stated in an e-mail.
A vote on the proposal was slated for this week, but was again delayed until June 8. Until then, communication will continue between members of the senate, administrators, faculty and the A.S. Council before it is presented to the faculty’s Representative Assembly for discussion and voting.
