Focus on sports detrimental to UF competitiveness

Ninety-three thousand fans thunder; ESPN cameras litter the sidelines, broadcasting the game to millions more; white, blue and orange Tebow jerseys, Polos and Gator football shirts pepper the crowd like a UF seasoning.

You’d think that such a momentous event, repeated more than eight times a year in Gainesville alone, would rake in dollars for the university like fall leaves, but that is not the case. To cover the costs of stadium maintenance, athletic scholarships and facility improvements alone, UF is left with only a small excess of revenue compared to the university’s total expenditures — revenue that can’t even be spent at the university’s discretion because the athletic department has its own board.

Where, then, does UF get its money if not from sports? State funding? Tuition? A secret money tree forest deep inside Paynes Prairie?

In fact, none of these pulls the majority of the financial weight. Instead, donations — stored in a 501(c)(3) nonprofit foundation endowment — constitute a huge majority of the university’s figurative wallet. And although that money, too, has restrictions — a spokesperson for the foundation told me donors restrict 99 percent of all donated money — it is all either invested or spent on improvements felt directly by students.

So how does UF’s endowment stack up among other public universities? Poorly, depending how you look at it. We rank 17th among public universities in endowment size, but only three of the 16 schools above us have larger student populations. This means our endowment per student is significantly smaller than nearly all of those schools.

For a university competing to be the best in its class, that position is mediocre.

It means that, compared to other top public and private universities, UF students get less access to the latest technologies, delayed departmental developments and less money toward research, the wellspring of future donations. For perspective, UF ranks 23rd among colleges in research and development spending, far behind several top public universities like the University of Michigan, which ranks second while maintaining highly competitive athletic programs to boot.

This problem, if we can call it that, may lie in our university’s brand. We are known primarily and sometimes exclusively as a top spot for football and basketball — an SEC school and little else. While our ever-shrinking acceptance rate is well-documented among college hopefuls, our prominence in research resides somewhere in the shadows, due in large part because of how much attention our athletic achievements garner. As a result, our academic accomplishments are not touted nearly as often or as loudly as they should be.

To be clear, I’m not suggesting we spend less on sports and abandon athletic competitiveness in favor of some Harvard equivalent moonshot. Ohio State and Michigan both outrank us in research spending and endowment size by decent margins — $10 billion versus $1.5 billion in endowments compared to Michigan — while faring better on the football field in recent years.

If we want to exceed these universities and others academically — and we should — we need better academic engagement with donors. Large donations of $100 million or more, referred to as “transformational,” don’t roll in for sports, but for areas like cancer research, and donors need to be as aware of the progress we pioneer in academia as they are of the progress we pioneer on the field.

To UF President Kent Fuchs’ credit, this has been his stated goal since taking office. But we’ve seen little gains in the first year of his tenure — no “transformational” donations and a vacant position for director of Donor Programs.

We often hear that action bends to the will of the dollar, but our university spends too little time harping on that which would yield it the biggest returns. Next to tournament victories and national championships, we should be shouting about our breakthroughs in archaeology and physics — on Facebook, Twitter and especially in the ears of donors with deep pockets.

Champe Barton is a UF economics and psychology junior. His column appears on Fridays.