SDSU Campus in Uproar Over President Day’s Aid to Football

Last Tuesday, a very unusual thing happened in the disorderly offices of the Daily Aztec, the student newspaper at San Diego State University. SDSU President Thomas B. Day walked in, sat down with student editors and talked for three hours.

Normally, Day would have asked the students to come to him. His discussions with the young journalists would have been much shorter, owing to Day’s busy schedule.

However, such considerations Tuesday were secondary: Day had come to enemy turf to plead his case for the university’s financially troubled athletic department.

SDSU’s ambitious athletic program, now nearly $450,000 in debt, has become a center of controversy on the 33,000-student campus.

Pressured by downtown businessmen and school boosters, Day and his administration have kept the athletic program limping along for years with infusions of student fees, state appropriations and--most recently--loans.

Day’s hope is to keep the program living on temporary help until the day the Aztec football team starts winning. Then, he reasons, increased football ticket sales and additional donations from grateful alumni will wash away the troublesome deficit and spill over into other areas of university life.

But some at SDSU say Day’s plan is nothing but a gamble. Some professors and high-ranking academic officials privately grumble that the athletic department is robbing other student programs of the money they need.

Public criticism is just as strong. In recent editorials, the Daily Aztec has dubbed the athletic department a “jock mill” with “budgetary carte blanche.” It has complained that the program is a “financial vacuum” that “sucks up” money from other school needs.

And Wednesday, a committee of faculty members added their complaints by issuing a letter warning Day that his latest plan to shuttle $71,346 in state money to the troubled athletic program looks like “funds being siphoned off into a bottomless pit . . . “

Day says he will continue to bolster the athletic program.

“I believe very strongly that it is better to try and fail than not to try at all,” Day said.

In the early 1970s, no one dared to bad-mouth the athletic program.

SDSU, a member of the Pacific Coast Athletic Assn., was a football powerhouse drawing large crowds and bringing in money that paid its expenses and those of other activities at the school.

Flushed with their gridiron success, the Aztecs decided to take on bigger sports challenges. In 1978, it joined the Western Athletic Conference, which counts Wyoming, Air Force and Brigham Young among its members.

The new competition was tougher than anyone expected. Coaching changes and a new approach to recruiting--grooming freshmen rather than calling on more mature junior college players--led the Aztecs to records like that of 2-9-1 in 1983.

Attendance for home games fell from an average of about 37,000 in 1977 to 18,700 in 1984, say SDSU officials. Despite increased ticket prices, that drop meant that the $138,735 in 1978 average gross gate receipts realized by football in 1978 dipped to $115,475 by last year.

With a similar failing in fund-raising, the athletic program had a $300,000 deficit by 1980. What was once the golden goose had become the ugly duckling and administrators began propping up the program with money that could have been used for other purposes.

The first outcry came in 1982, when Day and other administrators persuaded students to vote for an increase in the fees they paid to support such “instructionally-related activities” as debate, dance and lecture series, as well as athletics.

Administrators promised during the campaign that the ailing athletics program would take no more of the increased fee that it had before the vote--an average of 63% of the money. But by 1983-84, the program’s share had increased to 78%, or $800,000.

Other campus groups resented the increased help for the athletic department from the new student fees, say professors and academic officials who asked not to be named.

And while resentment lingered, Day moved to transfer $160,000 in unused state money to the athletic program last year. He is now considering a similar transfer of $71,346.

That contemplated transfer has drawn sharp criticism from a faculty committee charged with giving Day advice on his budget.

The group issued a letter to Day on Wednesday reminding him that faculty members blame their lack of adequate supplies and clerical help on the fact he keeps moving contingency money to the “bottomless pit in athletics whenever possible.”

“This perception, whether true or not, is unsettling to faculty and contributes an unwanted, divisive influence to the campus community,” the committee wrote.

The committee asked Day to commit himself to a five-year plan to wipe out the deficit.

“The perception is that athletics, because of their fiscal problems, has been receiving more of their share of support,” said James W. Brown, psychology professor and chairman of the faculty committee. “If they are getting more than their share, other areas are getting less than their share.”

The Daily Aztec unleashed another blast of criticism when Day’s administration, citing “cash-flow problems” in the athletic department, arranged for a $200,000 loan from a bank using as collateral the assets of the San Diego State University Foundation, a private, nonprofit organization that traditionally has busied itself with financing research.

Foundation trustees voted 7-2 on Feb. 19 to approve the financial arrangement. Day and his three vice presidents are members of the foundation board.

Day’s reaching into the foundation further ruffled academic feathers. Said one professor: “One of the things that I’m angry about is the foundation goes and floats a loan into the athletic program when really the amount of money that is pumped into faculty research is paltry.”

The SDSU president acknowledges that his faculty is growing nervous about the continuing deficit in athletics, but he said he knows when to throw in the towel.

“I don’t think it is a bottomless pit,” said Day. “It’s got a bottom to it because I’m absolutely committed to not letting that program seriously damage this institution monetarily or any other way.”

In the meantime, he said, he is willing to brave criticism and keep juggling money because an intercollegiate athletic program will guarantee SDSU added recognition from alumni and civic boosters eager to have their own version of Notre Dame on the Pacific.

“There is a lot of public pressure on this institution and on me as a president to hang in there and see it through,” he says.

Part of the pressure comes from the idea that, with one phenomenal winning season in football, the chronic athletic deficit could be easily wiped clean. “If we packed the stadium, we could easily go from a negative $500,000 to a positive $500,000,” Day said.

Another kind of pressure comes from civic groups, such as the Greater San Diego Chamber of Commerce and the Greater San Diego Sports Assn., a nonprofit organization. The chamber is concerned about the city’s image and the association is committed to promoting major sports.

Last year, the association gave the SDSU athletic program $50,000 to ease the deficit, an indication the group is fully in Day’s corner to keep the program limping along.

And an association official said he believes any decision by SDSU officials to scrap or scale down the athletic program would be “terrible.”

“You mean to tell me that the eighth largest city in the United States can’t support one single major college at a major (athletic) level?” said Bob Payne, chairman of the association’s executive committee.

Payne said he realized that it was easy for people to “criticize this anti-intellectual approach” to whether the university should continue to finance the athletic program.

“I think it’s incumbent upon other departments of the university and the other deans to recognize that if there is a successful athletic program that is written up in the papers each day, that that has indirect benefits to every department of the university,” Payne said. “It opens doors, it makes things happen.”

Specifically, those “things” mean money--for athletics and other pursuits. Said one SDSU professor with a background in athletics: “There’s a bromide in fund-raising. It goes ‘Every time USC goes to the Rose Bowl, an alum donates another building to the academic world.’ ”

That was the message Day said he tried to relay to editors of the Daily Aztec last week during his three-hour session at the student newspaper office. He said he tried to give the “big picture” to the “students who run the only company newspaper in this little town.”

“It was my view that they were blowing it (his handling of the athletic program) out of proportion, that they were doing it from a perspective that . . . is very narrow,” he said.

The visit left another impression with the students.

“Let’s be honest about it,” said Aztec editor Stephen J. Curran. “President Day, in my opinion, is worried about the pressures he faces both within and without the university concerning keeping a (NCAA division) 1-A quality program.”

A department chairman, who asked not to be identified, said he and his colleagues have a “love-hate” relationship with the athletic department right now. “If they were winning and the pot was fat up there, nobody would question it . . . There’s a kind of nervousness because they keep seeing the dollars going out.

“How much more are we going to pay before we turn this thing around?”