Athletics board creates subcommittee

The Portland State Intercollegiate Athletics Board (IAB) decided on Tuesday to create a subcommittee that will review increased allocation of the student fee to the Athletics Department’s budget, concluding a process that began when the Student Senate and the Student Fee Committee recommended a study in early March. 

 “I don’t have enough information to decide whether or not I think the Athletics budget should be cut, stay the same or increase,” said Sean Green, student member of the IAB.

Green and SFC Vice President Mart Stewart-Smith joined the IAB in March, after the Senate and the SFC discussed the increased Athletics budget during the annual budget review.

The Athletics budget, which now totals $9.4 million, has increased by 65 percent over the last four years. The 2010–11 budget totaled $7.9 million.

“We need to get our priorities away from athletics,” Student Senator Jake Fenske said at the debate over the SFC’s drafted budget on March 8. “The money going to the Athletics Department is pretty outrageous.”

President Wim Wiewel later said, “Athletics is a very important part of the student experience. I would like to have more of our students enjoying athletics, and then I think people would find it less problematic to pay for it.”

The Senate created an ad hoc committee that met in the weeks following the debate to review the budget, but the group concluded that the information necessary to craft a recommendation couldn’t be generated before the budget was due back to the SFC.

Torre Chrisholm, director of Athletics, said that the university’s assignment of the Peter W. Stott Center to the athletics budget accounted for much of this year’s increase.

“One of the questions is, ‘Why is the budget coming up like that?’ Well, the university is saying, ‘OK, you’re going to be running the Stott Center,'” he said.

But Stewart-Smith said that funding of the Athletics has long been increasing.

“There’s a broad increase over two decades,” Stewart-Smith said. “This budget has increased more substantially than any other fee-funded department.”

The ad hoc committee brought to the Senate the idea of a committee that would report back to the SFC this winter, and the Senate and the SFC unanimously approved the suggestion.

The IAB, learning of the idea, wrote a memo claiming that the group would be redundant, violating the PSU Faculty Senate’s constitution, which prohibits duplicate committees.

“They said that the scope that’s being described by the study should fall within their purview,” Green said.

The memo, written by institutional research director and IAB Chair David Burgess, encouraged students to apply for spots in the IAB.

“We have had difficulty in the past securing student participation and suggest that this is a process where SFC and IAB can work together to promote the desired oversight,” Burgess said.

Green and Stewart-Smith joined the IAB at the beginning of April.

“When the students showed up, I was thrilled,” said Robert Lockwood, criminology professor and IAB ex-officio member. “One of the challenges has been to increase student involvement.”

A subcommittee of the IAB was proposed because Green and Stewart-Smith felt that the IAB’s once-monthly meetings wouldn’t be the right venue for specialized research.

“Obviously, there’s not enough time,” Green said on Tuesday. “You guys have a lot on your plate.”

Lockwood, the member of the IAB with the most tenure, has served on the board since 1984. He said that topics at meetings range from athletic wins and losses to how the program is doing generally.

 “At this point, it’s looking like most of the work will be done by Sean [Green] and myself,” Stewart-Smith said. “Some members of the IAB have been around forever and aren’t gung-ho about it. They don’t see the budget study as an immediate problem.”

On Tuesday, IAB members pressed Green to sharpen questions for the subcommittee. Geology professor Scott Burns said, “When you’re a scientist, what you’ve got to do is have your testable hypothesis in the beginning. All we’re asking for is a starting point.”  ?