Quote:
Originally Posted by Lzen
jAZ,
I'm still not sure why you are arguing what you are arguing. WTF would an athletic conference care what money is in a candidate's research budget? How does that help the athletic conference. As we all know, money drives the world. And I doubt those research dollars that school gets is being given to the athletic conference.
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You have it backwards. At it's core, the question isn't about what helps the athletic conference. That assumed the Universities exists for their football teams. It's the opposite.
It's a question of what benefits the University as a whole. I read an SI article a few years ago talking about the rebranding of the Pac-10 just after Larry Scott arrived. It was interesting and helped me realize how important the associated images are to the brand of a University.
At the top levels (President, Chancellor, Board of Regents), just like at Coke and Apple, brand is the most valuable asset the organization owns. It's about recruiting the top talent (students and faculty) which drive the quality of the acadmics, the rankings, which in turn drive the research budgets which in turn drive the overhead generated from research which in turn has a massive budgetary impact.
Research, today, is MUCH more important to the university than sports. My advisor teaches a class for incoming PhD students. He founded my Department at the UA 40 years ago. Last week he asked us why research is so important to the University. Then went into the explanation of the 33% overhead calculation.
But it didn't really click until he explained the history.
At the UA, back when he came 40 years ago, state tax dollars paid for 95% of the University budget. Today it's down to about 15%. The rest of the money is generated from 2 places... higher tuition and research funding.
Higher tuition generally makes it harder to attract students. Attracting talented students is key to attracting talented faculty (it goes both ways) which combined are how you attract more research funding.
That's why research is so important.
And back to the brand of the Pac-10...
SME's report concluded that to its target audiences to the east and west, the Pac-10 needed to exude West Coast-cool. It needs to remind people that the Pac-10 footprint is home to innovators such as Google, Nike, Microsoft and Apple. It needs to remind people that the Pac-10 is home to some of the nation's elite universities. It also needs to remind people that the Pac-10 wins -- a lot. The league has claimed 388 NCAA titles, more than 150 more than the second-place Big Ten.
That's not only the needs of the conference's sports teams. It's the same need of the individual Universities. It's brand is a big part of the thought process of why students attend a University.