By Vincent Safuto staff writer
April 24, 2003
Dear Mr. Frank Brogan,
Congratulations on your new job as president of Florida Atlantic University. How's the new house? Nice?
Considering how many kids won't get a shot at FAU thanks to the FAU Foundation's generosity to local builders and contractors, you'd better like it.
Anyway, as an alumnus of your new employer (Class of 1994), I thought I'd give you some advice. You probably won't take it since university presidents never listen to anyone who tells them anything they don't want to hear, but hey, your college taught me the news business and I'm working in it and my boss occasionally gives me space to vent, so here goes.
You'll be swinging the budget ax soon. I know, it's tough to fire all those nice smart people and reduce class sections, but that's the peril of being a leader.
My suggestion to you for the first place to cut is sports. Specifically, FAU football.
OK, now that the building has stopped shaking, hear me out. Your predecessor, Dr. Anthony J. Catanese, did a lot for the university. Even I'll give him that. But he also insisted that FAU needed a football team in order to be a real university. A well-chosen board looked at the pros and cons, and decided that the campus would melt into the ground if it did not field a team on the gridiron.
The fact that FAU has not become a power in basketball didn't faze them, though I must admit the baseball team is pretty good. Still, colleges make their sports reputations in football and basketball, and the decision was a slam dunk.
Several years and millions and millions of dollars later, FAU has a football team, but needs a place to play. And the bottomless pit of cash that donors promised to support FAU football disappeared when the Nasdaq crashed.
FAU's future in football is as a well-paid, easy-to-crush patsy for powerful teams from colleges established when Teddy Roosevelt was president.
That's the reality, unpleasant though it might be.
If you cut FAU football, it'll make the cuts that follow easier to bear. And maybe alums such as myself, who refused to open our wallets to help FAU, will be more inclined to do so when we know our money won't be wasted on athletics but used to make the college better.
It's not easy, I know. The athletic department's faces will droop, football coach Howard Schnellenberger probably will have a screaming fit and the Fighting Owls' defensive line might pin pictures of your face to their tackling dummies to inspire them, which might even make the team better.
Colleges all over the country are making hard choices, and being the pace-setter by eliminating an expensive sport that costs much and delivers little to the college will show that you can make the tough choices.
For the sake of FAU and its future, please make the choice to eliminate football first.
Thanks for your time.
Vincent F. Safuto is a copy editor for the Press Journal. Reach him at Vincent.Safuto@scripps.com.
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