Editor,
On March 18, UNM President Robert Frank included the following accolades for Athletics and coaches in his weekly perspective: “…I know first-hand that participating in collegiate sports builds character, provides essential training for success in the modern world, and develops the individual values of teamwork, self-sacrifice, discipline, and achievement. In addition, our coaches and their staff are incredible role models. Students can learn as many lessons about leadership and life from a great coach as they can from any great professor.”
With the news that UNM men’s basketball head coach Steve Alford has successfully leveraged a $2.6 million per year contract from UCLA immediately after agreeing to a $2 million per year contract with UNM, much of the outrage will undoubtedly be directed at the outgoing coach who stood us up at the altar. This reactionary collapsing of the event onto one individual, however, is both shortsighted and naive. As Frank’s own words above acknowledge, the systematic privileging of Athletics over and above faculty, staff, students and academic rigor reflects a deeply ingrained culture of misguided priorities, of squandered potential, sacrificed like a Paschal Lamb upon the altar of competitive sport.
This entire fiasco transpires as an insult to the myriad praiseworthy faculty members of UNM who remain at this institution in spite of often embarrassingly low salaries. Faculty members who could similarly pimp themselves off to the wealthiest suitor with nothing but their personal prestige and financial gain to serve as their rudder. Faculty members who could easily turn down requests for reference letters, thesis committee appointments and departmental administrative positions in favor of their own self-serving publishing ambitions. Faculty members who, after eight years of teaching at UNM, have to watch as their own doctoral students secure incoming positions at peer institutions with salaries already surpassing their own.
Let us hope that with the surplus created by Alford’s shameful desertion of UNM, Frank, Athletics Director Paul Krebs and the Board of Regents will seriously consider reallocating these funds to retain and equitably compensate the outstanding professors we already have. If the name of the game is “teamwork, self-sacrifice, discipline, and achievement,” then we must abandon this line of thinking that posits that sports and entertainment can ever substitute for the committed mentorship and instruction our faculty members provide for their students, semester after underpaid semester.
Christos Galanis
UNM student
