Students at UCSD Reject Football

It won’t be “Win one for the Gipper” at UC San Diego.

In the largest turnout ever for an election on the La Jolla campus, students Tuesday and Wednesday voted against allocating funding for a small-college football team.

Student leaders said the issue was sacked so hard this time that it may never come up again.

“In other words,” as one put it, “it’s time to punt.”

A two-thirds majority, or 66.7%, was needed for approval in the referendum. Voting for football were 2,187 students, or 59.4%; against were 1,501, or 40.6%. A total of 3,759 students voted, which is 29.4% of the 12,752 registered--a record turnout. The ballot included several other issues.

Balked at Cost

Matti Siltanen, who writes for a campus humor magazine, led the anti-football forces. He said students balked at the cost. Start-up fees for a Division III program, which would have pitted UCSD against the likes of UC Santa Barbara, were estimated to be as high as $200,000.

Had the referendum passed, students would have paid another $15 a quarter, or $45 a year. The basic student fee--minus books, room and board--is now $518 a quarter. Total cost of attending UCSD per year is about $8,100.

“This is UCSD, not UCLA,” Siltanen said. “If we had wanted big-time college football, we could have gone to UCLA. We wanted to keep the academic environment as is. We want to keep UCSD free of the kinds of academic abuses that go on--often in the name of football--at other schools.”

Misinformation Blamed

Cris Rys, a Warren College senior senator in the Associated Students chapter at UCSD, spearheaded the pro-football cause. He blamed the defeat on misinformation by the media, particularly the student newspaper, the Guardian. He said funding the football program would have meant greater security for all other campus teams--a fact, he said, that students overlooked or weren’t aware of.

“Now all other athletic teams on campus will continue to pay their own costs,” Rys said, “and that’s a shame. The referendum would have upgraded the entire athletic program.”

UCSD Sports Information Director Bill Gannon said the referendum would have sent $10 of the $15 fee a quarter to football. The remaining $5 would have been distributed among 22 teams.

Sense of Unity Sought

Rys, who said he thinks the football issue at UCSD is gone for good, echoed the voices of other students in saying the campus needs a greater sense of unity and a lessening of apathy. He felt football might have provided it.

Siltanen, the anti-football man, agreed with Rys that apathy is a problem, especially at a school with what he called “separate, fragmented colleges looking for a whole.”

“We need something,” Siltanen said, “but football isn’t the solution. I think the drop in school spirit came after the alcohol (restriction) policy, which took effect three years ago. Students need something to rally around, and they clearly don’t have it.”

Siltanen said that lumping all other sports with football was “a fraud.”

“It’s like they were saying, ‘Here’s a big pie, and you can have a piece.’ If the measure had been just football, it would have been slaughtered. Putting all the others in there was their only hope of a broader base of support.”

Dave Marchick, the outgoing student body president, said he purposely avoided taking a stand on the issue. Its defeat seemed to please him in the sense that it won’t, or shouldn’t, jeopardize a future referendum on a student recreation center.

“If people had voted $45 a year now for football, they might have voted no on the rec center a couple of years from now,” Marchick said.