At the last meeting of SDSU’s senate, Vice President for Business and Financial Affairs & Chief Financial Officer Agnes Wong Nickerson gave a presentation on the budget situation, and the picture is not pretty.
The shortfall in California’s budget is expected to grow from $38 billion to nearly $73 billion. Consequently, the California State University will not get its promised funding. Instead, 5% will be “deferred” until next year. (What happens if the budget crunch continues into next year was not addressed).
The consequences will be enormous. One-time funding to address deferred maintenance is now off the table. So the roofs will remain leaky, the elevators creaky, and buildings will continue to deteriorate. Over half of SDSU’s buildings are more than 40 years old, and 48% are in “below average or worse condition.” Electrical, ventilation (heating, air conditioning, fans, chillers), and plumbing deficiencies will continue. The library’s funding will remain anemic.
Because the CSU is still expected to meet its obligations, such “as enrollment growth, Graduation Initiative 2025, NAGPRA (Native American Graves and Protection and Repatriation Act) and Title IX compliance,” SDSU will start incurring its own budget deficit, because even with a tuition increase, costs will exceed revenues.
Consequently, Wong Nickerson told the Senate, “We will be required to make resource decisions to balance the budget.” While SDSU is in a better position than other campuses, the university is now responsible for “$25 million (recurring) in unfunded general compensation increases, and will also be responsible to fund over $5 million (recurring) in additional compensation costs such as service increases and higher minimum lecturer salaries over three years.”
“All divisions,” Wong Nickerson concluded, “will be asked to develop a multi-year plan to address the budget shortfall.”
But the day after Wong Nickerson gave this sobering presentation, we learned that one division — Athletics — is immune to cutbacks.
The San Diego-Union Tribune reported that SDSU has signed a new contract with the head basketball coach, Brian Dutcher, whose salary will make him the highest-paid employee in the CSU system: a whopping $2.3 million. Dutcher will earn roughly four times more than the highest paid president in the CSU system, our own President Adela de la Torre, who makes roughly a little more than $500,000:
“The fully guaranteed five-year deal will pay him $2.3 million retroactively for this season … Dutcher’s contract comes with $100,000 annual raises up to $2.7 million in 2027-28, its final year.”
What can possibly justify this kind of expenditure when the CSU system is facing all sorts of financial woes?
Athletic Director John David Wicker explained Dutcher’s eye-popping salary by claiming he’s worth the money when “you look at the value to the overall institution and the CSU system. Just the month of March and April last year was worth $402 million in brand enhancement.”
Now, by “brand enhancement,” Wicker does not mean that the university actually received $402 million, a sum which could easily erase SDSU’s budget deficits. Instead, this is the value placed on “the number of new people who visited the website, the number of articles that were written about San Diego State.”
Who came up with this number? According to the university’s chief communications officer, La Monica Everett Haynes, “our earned media software partner.” She did not specify the partner’s name, how much this outside consultant was paid, or how they came up with this number. Does this number have any reality? Or is it simply a fiction? A subjective judgment not amenable to concrete evidence? Kind of like Donald Trump’s valuations of his net worth.
The only concrete result of this “unprecedented” media coverage was a spike in applications. But while more applications is a good thing, especially since many other CSU campuses have to deal with declining enrollments, the question is, what will these students find once they get here? And here’s where the gap between the financial resources the Athletics department enjoys and the rest of the university becomes starkest.
As Wong Nickerson reported, spending on all aspects of the university will be cut to meet the budget shortfall. Deferred maintenance projects will be delayed. Tenure-track hiring will be cut back even further, requiring yet more reliance on adjunct lecturers. Class sizes will continue to balloon. Top-tier universities, such as the Ivies, Carnegie Mellon, and Duke have very low student-teacher ratios, such as 6:1 or even 3:1. The student-teacher ratio at SDSU, on the other hand, is 24:1. Only 30% of classes have fewer than twenty students. The budget shortfall will only further erode the quality of education.
As Everett-Haynes says, the basketball coach’s outsize salary will be paid mainly through outside sources “through auxiliary revenue and Mountain West conference revenue dollars — not state or student tuition fee funds.” Which raises the interesting question of who exactly Dutcher works for: the university, or outside entities? More importantly, “these dollars are set aside specifically for self-support within the Athletics program and are not dollars the university is able to use for instruction.”
And that’s the point. While the rest of the university has to deal with budget cuts and deteriorating infrastructure, the basketball coach gets a seven-figure salary. And the money the basketball program generates does not subsidize instruction. It does not support the academic mission, which is supposed to be the prime mission of the university.
Or is San Diego State university really an Athletics program with a side interest in academics? Is the tail wagging the dog? Because it certainly seems like it.
Peter C. Herman is a professor of English literature at San Diego State University. He has published books on Shakespeare, Milton and the literature of terrorism, and essays in Salon, Newsweek, Inside Higher Ed, and Times of San Diego. His latest book is “Early Modern Others: Resisting Bias in Renaissance Literature” (Routledge).
