UMS leaders made right moves for sensible athletics

When you want something done, go straight to the top, to the person or people in charge.

The old axiom was never proven more sound than earlier this week when the University of Maine System Board of Trustees and UMS Chancellor Robert Woodbury formed and adopted a policy to govern athletics at system institutions.

If you want to see how effectively a complex situation can be addressed, flip now to page 15 in today’s NEWS and read through the letter written by Woodbury. The text gets about as close as is humanly possible to identifying and solving the bushel basket of problems that go with keeping the business of college athletics sensible these days. Particularly in Orono, Maine.

All seven UMS campuses have their problems with respect to athletics. But it is at the big campus, the one with the $5 million athletic budget, where the problems are getting the most attention by a media which, as Woodbury correctly points out, “reflect and feed a national preoccupation all out of proportion to the central mission of colleges and universities.”

To Woodbury’s charge, I, and I’m sure most state media outlets, must plead guilty. I also point out the media is charged with providing you with all the information you can stand (and then some) when it comes to institutions where public money is spent, not to mention where athletes represent the state in which we live.

My purpose today, however, is not to address Woodbury’s letter point by point. Rather, it is to comment on the one area I believe constitutes a real breakthrough in the UM athletic department’s dilemma of fighting rising costs with a shrinking state-funded budget.

Tuition waivers.

Instituting tuition waivers – eliminating the cost of tuition from each athletic scholarship – accomplishes two things immediately. It relieves the pressure on the athletic department to raise more than a million dollars a year to pay for scholarships. And it delivers the message that the university recognizes, really for the first time, there is tangible value to a student-athlete’s contribution to the institution.

According to UM Athletic Director Kevin White, tuition waivers will cut scholarship expenses nearly in half. This comes at a time when the athletic department is, out of desperation in the face of budget cuts, becoming more aggressive in looking to outside sources to provide funding for scholarships. These outside sources include boosters clubs, donor organizations, and commercial sponsorships.

Look around the rest of the country, to other institutions, and you find it is universities that rely heavily on outside sources of revenue which get in trouble more often with the NCAA. Yes, Maine can and should continue to seek contributors. Only now, thanks to the trustees tuition-waiver policy, the element of desperation has been removed. The athletic department can be more selective, more prudent.

By implementing the waiver program, the board of trustees and the chancellor are keeping the athletic department under the institution’s wing. Rather than telling it to go fend for itself, they are saying “we recognize your value.” This action can’t help but keep athletics more closely aligned with the “central mission” of the university, as Woodbury states.

There is, however, a price to pay for tuition waivers. The portion of the scholarship money the athletic department no longer has to raise also no longer ends up deposited in the university’s coffers. This translates to a potential loss of revenue for the university of $600,000 or more a year.

Woodbury said one solution to this loss would be to admit more students who are paying tuition, enough to cover the difference. The loss could also be covered by increases in the comprehensive fee.

Some will argue this is unfair. I would argue it is the price of maintaining a competitive, well-controlled Division I athletic department.

Tuition waivers form only one part of the multi-faceted plan for athletics laid out by the trustees policy and Woodbury’s letter. If you read through the chancellor’s work, I think you’ll agree he has addressed a difficult problem with insight and skill.

Stepping in and guiding athletics was not a politically popular task for these people at the top of the UMS leadership ladder. Yet they tackled the job head-on and with obvious effort. They are to be commended.