Megan McArdle:
5. The corollary of #4 is the end of universities as research centers. As I've noted before, tenured academics has worked a great scam. They've managed to monetize peoples' affection for regional football teams, and their desire for a work credential, and then somehow diverted that money into paying academics to work on whatever they want, for the rest of their lives, without any oversight by the football fans or the employers. While I'm sensitive to the complaints of conservative critics, I think that by and large, it's a very good thing. But it's not a viable business model in cyberspace.
First of all, most athletic departments lose money. And by 'most' I mean 'almost all.' For those that don't make money, they're subsidized by the rest of the university. Those that do almost always keep their funding entirely separate from everything else (successful football teams pay for scholarships and fellowships in non-revenue sports). So almost literally zero dollars go from athletics to academics.
And as if this weren't enough, one would then be forced to wonder how colleges swung their finances prior to having football teams. Or, for that matter, if Harvard/Princeton's football team is so terrible, why are their endowments so large? Perhaps because this is a really terrible argument. Perhaps it's supposed to be cute or amusing, but mostly it makes it sound like McArdle doesn't understand much about university funding.
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