Student disagrees with peers concerning Big East exit fee payment

I respectfully disagree with my friends Emily Ballard and Ross Lazerowitz’s petition suggesting that the Syracuse University Athletics Department pay the entirety of SU’s Big East exit fee.

SU runs on a financial system called Responsibility Centered Management. Essentially, RCM breaks the university up into multiple divisions, each of which is responsible for its own budget and finances. This was instituted roughly a decade ago to give more control to each of the university’s many units. In this system, a unit that excels financially is not punished by a less financially sustainable unit, as they are somewhat separate entities.

Athletics is not like a traditional unit and has stakeholders beyond its employees and athletes. This is at the heart of my belief that the broad university should shoulder the cost of the exit fee.

While the actions of one school or college may not directly affect the status of another, athletics is an entirely separate beast. Our student athletes (and their accompanying scholarships) use resources from all of the schools of SU. Add in SUpercard funds, tutoring services, housing stipends and other perks, and it is clear that athletics is not a silo that operates on its own.

Let’s look back a decade ago to when we won the NCAA Men’s Basketball national championship. After winning this championship, applications to SU rose 12 percent. While a national championship is certainly not the only factor contributing to the rise in applications, it certainly put our beloved school in a previously unattainable national spotlight.

We call our players “student-athletes” because academics should be their first priority. We need to recognize that this is simply not just an athletic decision.

The Atlantic Coast Conference is a better conference because it offers benefits that the Big East cannot match. As a student at SU, in the ACC I will have access to library resources that were previously unavailable in the Big East. If I should choose, I can also take a course at another ACC institution simply because Syracuse is a member. The list of perks goes on.

In athletics, it is only natural to compare members of a conference to one and other. I believe that the members of the ACC are better than those of the Big East.

If the entire university is willing to share in the upside of our move to the ACC, then the entire university should share in the costs of getting there.

Respectfully,

Michael Smith
Master’s Candidate
Whitman School of Management