Fred Abraham

Like most people on the UNI campus and a large part of our community, I was disappointed when the Panthers lost their only game of the football season in a playoff game. The team had a highly successful year and I'm sure they would have preferred going all of the way. I know and like the head coach and have several students on the team. They all feel bad about the loss. However, the defeat does not diminish what they accomplished this year nor, more importantly, the quality of the university. UNI is not measured by the quality of our sports teams.

Rather, it is the accomplishments of our faculty and the entire student body, both while here and after graduation that count.

While some may be unhappy with this idea, universities do not exist for sports. Our goal is to provide a quality education which will enable our graduates to be life-long learners while making the world a better place. Will our students be prepared for the inevitable challenges they will face? Will they be able to adjust to a future world we can only imagine? Preparing students for life is what we are about. It is the curricular programs which define a school, not the co-curricular activities.

Sadly, this is not the way most universities are viewed by a large portion of the population. In general, those schools with high profiles and winning sports teams are thought of as "good" schools.

Test yourself: when you think of schools which provide a quality education, is your judgment based on a careful evaluation of the academic programs or do you use sports success as the criteria? For example, which school do you think has a better public accounting program: Ohio State or University of Wisconsin-Whitewater? Turns out that Whitewater students have consistently outperformed Ohio State students on the standardized national CPA exam for years. Is UNI a better school this year than last because of the great success of our football team? If you believe that, then if they lose more games next year than they did this year, will our school be worse? Of course not. In fact, there is almost no relationship between the results of sports contests and the quality of education delivered.

To be sure, our community is excited and drawn together by athletic success and this has value. But, improved campus morale and self-esteem have little if any connection to improved learning. Like so many others, I enjoy watching a successful sports team at work. To me, our football team was enjoyable and fun to watch not so much because they won but because they played so well. It's the same reason I enjoy a well performed play, a concert by an excellent orchestra, or a good book: I like to see difficult things done right! However, it's all entertainment and not generally reflective of the education we provide. Yet, we continue to spend a lot of money on sports. According to a UNI United Faculty report, the amount of general fund subsidy to UNI athletics has increased 2.5 times faster than increases on instruction. As much as I respect our coaches - I know and like them and what they do - we could stand to focus just a little less attention on sports and more on academics.

On some campuses, administrators have hitched their futures to their sports stars. They argue winning seasons increase donations to the university and attract more students. Unfortunately, this may not be true. In a recent study, Robert Frank, Professor of Management and Economics at Cornell University finds that winning teams do not greatly increase the amount of contributions nor the quantity or quality of student applicants. Further, any increase in donations that does result is to the athletic programs, not to the university as a whole.

Taking a broader view, the future success of our country depends not on sports but on education and training. The rest of the world is racing to catch us and they realize the importance of education in the chase. To borrow a sports metaphor, we need to keep our eye on the ball, and the ball is learning, not playing.

Universities exist for academics, not sports. Their quality should be judged accordingly.