Wake up to UHart’s problems, DiMauro

Columnist Mike DiMauro writes in his recent column that news that the University of Hartford is considering dropping its Division I athletic program and moving to Division III is “ironic — or suspicious” in light of the university’s men’s basketball team’s recent appearance in the NCAA tournament for the first time in the school’s history.

We can assure DiMauro that, when it comes to Division I sports — perhaps especially at the University of Hartford — irony and suspicion aptly describe the state of affairs, but not for the reasons in DiMauro’s specious tribute to athletes, coaches and “proud Hartford grads.”

It has somehow never occurred to DiMauro — who has apparently been asleep over the last year, only to have awakened for March Madness — that higher education has been in a state of crisis both financially and culturally for many years, that the coronavirus pandemic has only hastened and deepened this crisis, and that universities such as ours (private and tuition driven) are among the most vulnerable.

Indeed, even a cursory investigation would have revealed that dozens of colleges and universities have shuttered over the last five years or plan to do so this year.

It is because of these closings that we are discouraged by DiMauro’s insensitive description of the university’s finances as “alleged fiscal woes.” Perhaps he should have asked former members of the Hartford “family” who were laid off last spring as the university tried to balance its budget in the middle of the worst health crisis the world has seen in 100 years. They could tell him about what it’s like to be “allegedly” unemployed. But he is “suspicious about any report,” so such an exercise would be futile.

Instead, he’s worried about next year’s recruiting class. We, too, are worried about recruiting: Year after year, faculty and staff spend time and energy trying to attract and retain the best students hoping that they will come to Hartford to work with faculty whose salaries rank near the bottom among other institutions in the state. It turns out that all of us (students, faculty, and staff alike) have been subsidizing an athletic department that generates no revenue and basketball coaches whose salaries are higher than any of our faculty and most of our deans.

Maybe DiMauro would agree that we should take time to consider the justice of this state of affairs, but only if such considerations don’t interfere with the recruitment of student athletes.

Would that DiMauro’s slavish devotion to college athletics and the magical thinking that accompanies it translated also to academics. We would love to see more indignation when humanities departments are closed, as has happened at our school, or are threatened, as the classics, religion, and modern language departments are at the University of Vermont.

We wonder what DiMauro’s “friend who knows a lot about Div. I and Div. III athletics” would say about such closures? Perhaps he could brush up on his “bona fides” and offer some explanation as to how it’s possible to call yourself a university after you have gutted arts and humanities, though we imagine it would be as tortured as his math.

A university is supposed to be a place where students and faculty ask challenging questions and follow evidence in order to answer those questions. Of course, DiMauro is suspicious about things like “reports,” and evidence, so perhaps that is hard for him.

Then again, he could have spent a few minutes on Wikipedia (as we did) to learn that there are more than 70 schools in New England that play D-III athletics in conferences besides the NESCAC. Many of these schools (Eastern Connecticut, Western Connecticut, Keene State, MIT) have enrollments larger than the University of Hartford.

In other words, the problem of finding a place to play isn’t a problem at all; it’s just a problem DiMauro invented because he had reached his conclusion before he did any research.

We can certainly think of one good reason to maintain a D-I athletics program at Hartford: the athletes.

In our experience, these young men and women are outstanding students, passionate about their sport and the school. The university made these students a promise, and the moral thing to do is to support them if they want to finish their studies here or transfer elsewhere.

But, we wonder, is it any less immoral to ask students to pay higher tuition, or to ask faculty and staff to accept low salaries, or to ask everyone at the university to deal with austerity measures just so a few students can continue to participate in an activity whose reason for being is no longer clear, if it ever was?