As when it has been rejected by UCSD students in the past, a move to D1 is highly contentious, with strongly held opinions on both sides of the issue. Thus I fully appreciate a fellow alum’s passionate recitation of talking points from the Division I marketing plan. I also appreciate the attempt to invalidate an opposing view or question one’s commitment to an institution in the absence of precisely the same student experience as the claimant. Be that as it may, given that there are both current students and undergraduate alumni who oppose the Division I move, the asserted uniform infallibility of direct knowledge is perhaps somewhat suspect.

Even as a mere grad student, I found supportive and engaging communities in and outside my discipline, through intramurals, student orgs, and elsewhere. The many connections I made with grads and undergrads alike were immeasurably valuable, and thus my experience of UCSD did not correspond to the persistent meme of a tragically inadequate existence that can only be remedied by attending Division I sporting events. Maybe I was just lucky. Maybe I got out of my time at UCSD what I put into it. Maybe had I been an undergrad here, my life would have been as spiritless, dreary, and fractured as the D1 proponents contend.

Of the schools I’ve attended, UCSD is the only one I genuinely consider to be my alma mater, which is in marked contrast to the University of Florida, a Division I powerhouse at which the sports culture isn’t just pervasive, but utterly dominant. I did go to games, but with friends I already had; the sort of partisanship and us versus them mentality that’s intrinsic to the intercollegiate athletics arms race created little more than a superficial sense of community. To the extent that I feel any connection to UF, it is because of the lasting friendships I made, not the athletic events I attended.

Since the founding of this university, we have set a course for ourselves that challenges the traditional approaches of much older schools. We explicitly opted not to be too anchored to the past. Our competitive advantage is that we try the unique approach, we experiment, we play by different rules. I accepted at UCSD over higher profile universities with better “brand recognition” because it was distinctive in its very forward thinking, interdisciplinary focus; the university felt comfortable, personal, and genuine, something that UF’s overzealous, feel good boosterism could not manufacture or replicate.

What I found here was a gutsy and fearless school that deliberately chose to differentiate itself from the path taken by older, more established institutions. This created an agile and flexible environment that has paid off hugely in building an academic reputation on a par with schools that have been working at it for 100+ years longer than we have. It’s satisfying to see the conventional wisdom about what makes a university successful turned on its head by the pioneering trajectory UCSD has pursued. It’s why, for example, we’ve never left the #1 position in Washington Monthly’s influential ranking of schools that contribute to the public good. How ironic then, that in spite of the imaginative philosophy that has differentiated us from our peers and made us great, we now ponder the premise that the path to greatness is to be like everyone else. The genuine Triton approach to solving the issues we face, be they student life or alumni engagement, is to explore new, innovative trails rather than trudge down those rutted by hundreds of years of tired, old feet. Tritons are leaders, not followers. We don’t repeat history, we make it.

But much of what I’ve said here comes from the strong feelings I have for the university I think of as home and about which I care deeply, so I’ll close with an appeal not to emotions, but one based on actual empirical data: http://www.knightcommission.org/collegesports101/chapter-8. While it’s worth reading both the summary article and the referenced studies, the following excerpts are of particular note:

“Rigorous studies of the subject, however, suggest that there is no significant institutional benefit to athletic success. In a 2004 report for the Knight Commission, Cornell University economist Robert H. Frank, after reviewing the extant scholarly literature, concluded any links to football and men’s basketball victories and increased applications and the SAT scores of the applicants “is small and not significantly different from zero” (Frank, 2004).”

“In a report on about 50 university programs that reclassified from Division II to some subset of Division I, the authors found that:
* Programs that stepped up from Division II to Division I spent more than they took in, experiencing “an average deterioration in net operating revenue” of more than $1 million each;
* Schools that switched divisions did not generally tend to experience a significant increase in enrollment, although some did;
* Student fees – and, so, institutional subsidies – increased considerably as programs moved from Division II to Division I;
* Switching to Division I increased alumni giving earmarked for athletics, but there was no evidence it helped general alumni donations (Orszag & Orszag, 2005).”