State Budget (Whenever There Is One) to Ban Funding UC Athletics

The story below somehow got away yours truly on Sunday. But Inside Higher Ed alerted me so here it is belatedly:

Budget plan bans taxpayer funds for UC athletics (Excerpt)

Nanette Asimov, San Francisco Chronicle, June 19, 2011

With a few words in the new state budget, lawmakers will ban spending taxpayer money on intercollegiate athletics – and end a controversy that started when a sharp-eyed UC Berkeley professor found that university officials had changed details of the law. University of California officials acknowledge asking the state to remove athletics from the list of programs required to be “self-supporting and not subsidized by the state,” but say the reason was bookkeeping and not an attempt to pirate taxpayer money meant for academics.

…UC officials insist that no campus has spent state money on athletics in at least 30 years, and that doing so would violate UC policy.

…UC athletics are also in financial trouble. While a number of Cal’s teams – including the baseball team playing today in the College World Series – have been saved from elimination by private donations, four of the 27 intercollegiate teams at UC Davis were not so lucky. Patrick Lenz, UC’s budget chief, called the issue of diverting state money to athletics “nonsensical.” …

Full story at http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/c/a/2011/06/19/BAS71JTBS6.DTL