Times are tough at UT as financial troubles are rearing their ugly heads all over campus.
This newspaper has been ridden with headlines detailing budget cuts and program scraps for the past year or so, and just a quick browse of other college newspapers across the country shows this phenomenon is not unique to the 40 Acres.
One unique thing about UT’s budget constraints is the University’s responsibility to oversee the state’s high school athletic and academic competitions. But in the spirit of necessary cutbacks, the time has come for UT to scrap the University Interscholastic League from its list of responsibilities.
UT founded the league, known as UIL, in 1909, when UT was just one of a handful of public universities in a far-less-populated state. At the time, it made sense for UT to invest in regulating these competitions to attract and recruit students.
According to the Texas Education Agency, there are more than 1.3 million high school students in the state. Just a fraction of these students will end up attending UT, and even fewer will end up playing for the Longhorns.
UT is running out of space for its incoming freshman classes every year, as evidenced by the recent decision to cap automatic admission to just students who finished in the top 8 percent of their high school classes.
Furthermore, UIL is a budget constraint for UT. The league’s financial report for the 2008-09 school year states that it received about $10.9 million in revenue. But UIL’s overall expenses totaled over $12.5 million, leaving a $1.6 million deficit.
That money could possibly go to scholarships, a more efficient way to recruit good students than running high school competitions.
UIL is currently under the governance of the vice president of diversity and community engagement. Yet there exists no sign that regulating UIL necessarily adds to UT’s diversity or further engages the University with the community.
High school basketball players may think it’s cool to play on the Frank Erwin Center’s court for the state championship, but many of these students have played on NBA courts before: Playing on the Horns’ home floor loses its luster pretty quickly after that. Actually, it would be quite a shock if many of the participants in UIL competitions were even aware that UT was in charge of this entity.
If UIL were eliminated from UT’s budget, many Texans would undoubtedly go into a state of panic. Disturbing the state of high school sports in Texas by moving so drastically as to dissolve UIL would certainly raise some eyebrows.
But high school sports — most notably football — border on religion in Texas, and the school communities would find some way to organize and regulate their own nonprofit governing body.
Come hell, high water or budget cuts, high school sports will live on in Texas.
Texas is often thrown into a popular competition with California and Florida over which state produces the greatest athletes. Texas has the only high school interscholastic competition agency run by a university.
If California and Florida’s high school sports can exist without the governance of a local university, so can Texas’. High school sports do not need UT’s oversight and money to flourish.
Some sacrifices may arise from the scrapping of UIL, but it is a necessary move. After spending more than a century running this entity, UT has done its part in providing the state a governing body for high school sports. Whatever new agency that would arise after this move would have a great predecessor off of which to base its operations.
It may be unfortunate to see 101 years of tradition slip away in the name of finance, but UT has already set a precedent that tradition is no excuse to stop a good ol‘ program-scrapping.
If the University is serious about saving money and not wasting precious funds on operations irrelevant to its core mission, UIL should definitely move to the front of the chopping-block line.
Avelar is a government senior.
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