Just a few more thoughts on the background of the University of Hawaii’s missing concert money.
Yesterday I mused about athletics existing on a different planet from the rest of the university system. Well, it’s been that way for a long time.
I dug into this about 15 years ago in a series, “The Money Game,” which ran in the old Honolulu Star-Bulletin. It peeked behind the curtain at money and wheeling-dealing that set the athletic program off from the rest of the campus.
Here’s the lead from the first story in the series:
Money from sponsors and booster clubs was deposited in 39 special accounts at the UH Foundation, where it could be spent without restrictions that normally apply to state agencies. Miscellaneous expenditures from these accounts amounted to $1 million during the year ending June 30, 1996, according to a financial summary presented to the Board of Regents.
University records show that Associate Athletic Director Jim Donovan, with day-to-day control over all UH athletic facilities and its $12 million annual budget, spent nearly $50,000 from one account last year on expenses that included:
• Meals and entertainment at Gordon Biersch, Hooters, Moose McGillycuddy’s and other spots.
• At least $1,768 for greens fees, food and drinks while golfing during a two-month period.
• $1,400 to play in charity golf tournaments benefiting other groups.
• $100 for a framed photograph delivered to a helpful United Airlines reservations agent.
• Champagne, flowers and other gifts sent to corporate executives or marketing representatives.
• Cigars from Don Pablo Smoke Shop.
Donovan denies any wrongdoing, although he acknowledges that some people may disagree with his spending decisions.
There’s lots more reported in that series, and you may want to browse through it.
I’m sure it’s somewhat different today. More money. Bigger stakes.
Back in 1997, when the series was published, I had an unusual experience, and an educational one, I suppose. My own newspaper editorialized against the series, poo-pooing the questions it raised. Turned out Jim Donovan was a personal friend of the Star-Bulletin’s editor & publisher, who came to his friend’s defense by staking out a public position on the editorial page.
So the whole free wheeling money thing is part of the background that we need to know more about.
Then there’s the whole governance mess. Who is in charge of athletics?
The NCAA has rules which say the Manoa chancellor, as the top administrator of the campus where the athletic program is lodged, should be in charge. And UH reported to the NCAA that the chancellor was firmly in control, as the rules require. But there were lots of questions about whether that was the reality, which were discussed here late last year. The evidence seemed to show UH President Greenwood’s office was calling the shots, and the chancellor was relegated to a minor role, certainly not setting policy.
It isn’t hard to see how this confusion over governance may have created lots of wiggle room for athletic department officials. After all, most departments on the Manoa campus report to the chancellor, but athletics seemed to have been getting their direction from the president’s office. It isn’t hard to see that this card could easily have been played to create an unusual degree of autonomy down there in athletics.
And now, according to a report on Hawaii News Now last night, we know that UH lawyers reviewed the concert contract, and the VP/CFO of the UH system (remember, this is all at the system level, not the level of the chancellor and the Manoa campus) authorized payment of the $200,000 via wire transfer. Once again, the athletics department was able to leapfrog the chancellor’s office and get approvals directly from the president and the system.
Greenwood said she didn’t know about the concert. Hard to believe, but possible. All part of this package.
And now it’s all come home to roost. How unfortunate.
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Ian, the NCAA (which I have opposed openly since 1965) is no end all. They are unreliable and inconsistent to the max,. Not very legal and terribly capricious. Look at Penn State scandal unfolding today.
I think justice would be better served with Judge Roy Bean presiding,
The FBI has informed University of Hawaii officials that it can find no trace of the school’s money in a Florida bank account said to be involved in a bogus Stevie Wonder fund-raising concert for UH athletics, UH sources told the Star-Advertiser today.
(shaking head and laughing)
Let me make a case for the elimination of spectator sports at public universities.
European universities, as far as I know, generally don’t have spectator sports. They do have club sports. If you want to play soccer or tennis, you join a club and go play it. Chinese universities don’t have any sports at all (they have math and engineering instead). This is normal in those societies, and their universities do not seem to be evolving into the form of American universities, in terms an obsessive focus on sports.
A comparison of sport with religion is useful in terms of its corrosive effects in the public realm.
In the United States, there has always been an unusually strong presence of religion in the society — within the private realm. Because the US was a refuge for so many dissenting religious groups, and because there are so many various religions in the US, there emerged a kind of ethos that no particular religion should become the state religion. Religion can, and supposedly SHOULD inform the value system of a politician. But directly importing the strictures of a particular religion into the laws of the state has always been forbidden in the US.
What is just as insidious, or perhaps even more insidious, is the importation of a religious way of thinking into the public realm in areas that have nothing to do with religion or morality.
One sees this, for example, in debates on mass transportation, where politicians will say things like “I believe in the bus system”. But mass transportation systems have absolutely nothing to do with belief, they are a matter of geography and demography and energy issues and so forth; not only are each of these issues amazingly ambiguous, but they are also in a constant state of change. What has happened is that religion has been on the wane in the West for centuries, so politicians import notions of good and evil into the political realm (“buses = good, cars = evil”, or “buses = evil, cars = good”) as a kind of surrogate religion. So we end up with politicians being very self-righteous on issues that they actually know little about. Worse, there seems to be a built-in hypocrisy to this ideological orientation, where the most passionate politicians (and professors) don’t actually live according to their own so-called “beliefs” (e.g., those who are most pro-bus never actually ride the bus themselves, and never will).
The same is true of sport. Sports is great, but it does not belong in the public realm. And what is worst of all is the importation of a ‘sports way of thinking’ into the political realm. Politics is a realm of inquiry, and it is messy, complex and ambiguous and has permanent, serious consequences. Sports is an escape from this, and is the opposite of it. So when a ‘sports way of thinking’ is imported into politics, what we end up with is a President like Ronald Reagan. It’s fantasy. And it also has overtones of the extreme right-wing.
Here is an extract of a text by Umberto Eco from 1994 entitled “Eternal Fascism:
Fourteen Ways of Looking at a Blackshirt”.
http://www.themodernword.com/eco/eco_blackshirt.html
Eco writes:
This seems to suggest that there are always tendencies out there in society that reflect an extreme right-wing orientation, disconnected from any explicit ideology or political party.
Here’s the list:
The focus of Ur-Fascism on action, conflict, heroism, elitism paradoxically mixed in with an anti-elitist resentment (and a sense of being unique and special mixed with a feeling of inadequacy), passive spectacle and tribalism, as well as a disdain of intellectualism and diversity make it a natural fit for college sports (and perhaps with a small-town political culture).
Here is the documentary “The Architecture of Doom”, about the Hitler’s political aesthetic.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ttq7w-nS2g4
Much of that aesthetic can be found in Leni Riefenstahl’s Nazi propaganda film “Olympia”, which was a documentary of the 1938 Berlin Olympics. Sport as public spectacle is the embodiment of Ur-Fascism.
The right-wing loves privatization, but not when it comes to sports. Sports needs to be pushed out the public realm to make way for democracy.
The state should not support spectator sports, it should only support physical education.
(I think that the United States has the right idea when it comes to the Olympics. American Olympians are supported strictly through private sponsorship. However, I think that Olympic policy is wrongheaded in the exclusion of professional athletes from the Games, because Olympians actually are professionals when one considers their income from endorsements.)