Michael A. Chihak: Athletics rakes it in, while academics must ‘bear up’

University of Arizona donors gave 34% more to athletics than to student financial aid last fiscal year, with athletics getting $24.65 million to financial aid’s $18.34 million, the UA Foundation reports.

At $6.31 million, the difference would be enough to cover one year’s tuition, fees and books for 435 in-state undergraduate students, but not enough to cover the annual salary of one person, the men’s basketball coach.

Donations may continue skewing toward athletics after the university foundation launched a fundraiser to leverage the basketball team’s Final Four season, led by a call for contributions to a “student athlete” fund.

All while academic units struggle to meet the university CFO’s orders to prepare next fiscal year’s budgets with cuts of up to 3% from current spending.

Faculty and staff got raises of 1.25% to 3% last fall. The men’s basketball coach got a 38% raise before his team played in the Final Four; the football coach got 34% after his team went to a bowl game.

Athletics is raking in $87.7 million for naming rights to the football stadium and the McKale Center, almost exactly what it borrowed from the administration and academics a few years ago, with little paid back so far. It also gets at minimum $4.3 million from a mandatory $100 “student athletic fee” that every undergraduate pays annually.

Students and faculty must “bear up” while coaches and the athletic director, who is paid $1.3 million annually, flourish under the “Fuel Wonder” fundraising campaign.

Donors to athletics indeed fuel wonder. The wonder: Why give to sports over academics? A basketball championship over world-class research, perhaps even a Nobel Prize?

In the offing may be a repeat of what occurred 25 years ago, the last time the men’s basketball team made the Final Four.

That year, 2001, Vernon Smith left his job as an economics professor after UA officials would not fund his long-proposed idea for an Interdisciplinary Center for Economic Science. In 2002, as a George Mason University professor, Smith won the Nobel Prize in economics, based on his quarter-century of research at the UA.

A Nobel laureate gone because of money, his knowledge and experience lost to the university. Also lost were the prestige and enhanced reputation that the university would have in a Nobel Prize-winning faculty member.

Considering current spending on sports while academics is ordered to cut, UA leaders appear not to have learned from the Smith experience, if they even know about it. How many world-class professors and researchers will move on, with potential Nobel Prizes in their futures?

Imagine the quality of economist or astronomer or anthropologist the university could get for the $7.19 million it’s paying the basketball coach. It could have all three for that money, plus another four dozen or more at the $132,000 average salary the university pays a full professor.

Instead, it gets to keep one basketball coach, whom university officials scrambled to offer the highest salary ever for a state government employee at the slightest hint he could depart.

Yes, he’s an excellent coach, and his success raises the university’s profile, though mostly for athletics. As far as is publicly known, he didn’t seek a raise, meaning his previously outlandish $5.2 million salary might have been enough. He did want and got more money for his players and assistant coaches and, as one news outlet reported, direct access to the UA president.

All of which keeps athletics top priority at the University of Arizona, while academics will have to bear up.