The audacity of the fee increase

I don’t think the athletic department is intentionally trying to spit in the face of the campus community.

After all, when athletic director Dick Baddour explained one week ago the need for an increase to the student athletic fee, he was simply doing his job, not to mention displaying his long-admired passion for sports at UNC. And the original proposal of a $100 increase has since been dropped to $45.

But as the Student Fee Advisory Subcommittee reviews the increase this afternoon, it would be wrong not to recognize the audacity of the request in the face of UNC’s continuing struggle to survive in a state of financial crisis.

It’s hard to justify the importance of preserving the current size of the Atlantic Coast Conference’s largest sports program while the rest of UNC — you know, the academic part — is offering 556 fewer class sections and has lost 353 filled positions since June 2008. Next year, 128 more filled positions will be eliminated.

The more than 29,000 students at UNC are paying more for less. Should funding the extracurricular activities of only 800 students be a condition of attendance for everyone?

The current athletic fee of $271.00 is charged each year to each undergraduate and graduate student. According to the fee’s description, it provides students the chance to attend regular season events; additional funding for the operating budgets and coaches’ salaries of Olympic sport programs; and helps maintain athletic fields and facilities.

The fee also “allows departments to offer reduced rates to faculty, staff and students at Finley Golf Course”, but you probably already knew that from taking advantage of the offer so often.

The $45 increase would be devoted to the operational costs of the Olympic sports programs that don’t produce revenue — which are all 26 of the varsity teams that aren’t football or men’s basketball.

Baddour said those operational costs would include things such as coaches’ salaries, equipment and travel.

The Student Fee Advisory Subcommittee’s guiding policies include no reference to athletics. But, it is interesting to note that the policies prohibit fees being used to defray academic and administrative operations. Examples of those “unallowable program costs” include instructor salaries, classroom supplies and facilities operations.

Again, I don’t think the athletics department intends any malice toward the student body as a whole. In fact, half of the original request was intended to support scholarships for student-athletes, which will be affected by the N.C. General Assembly’s recent elimination of the tuition waiver for out-of-state athletes who receive full scholarships in 2010.

But the request is still insensitive to the sacrifices many others at UNC have made.

The last three years have seen roughly $3 million in operational requests from non-revenue sports, Baddour said. If the $45 increase is approved, that would generate more than $1 million a year to cover that average annual budget.

As for what the more than $8 million students already contribute in athletic fees, I’m not entirely sure what they would finance.

Legal fees?