Does FSU pay too much attention to football and not enough to academics? Does Bobby Bowden make too much money? Should the president of the university make more than the coach? The Palm Beach Post says yes to all three. Bowden's boss, Sandy D'Alemberte, says no. Below are reprints of the Post's Aug. 6 editorial and D'Alemberte's response.
"Let's face it," says Martin Terrell, a fund-raiser for the Florida State University Foundation, "if we can take a donor to a game with Miami or UF, that's a big plus."
Ah, yes. Just another way FSU football coach Bobby Bowden earns the $218,441 a year the state pays him. But, however grateful Mr. Terrell may be or not be (his fundraising is academics, not sports), everybody knows that Mr. Bowden is not in the business of improving FSU's image as an institution of higher learning. Mr. Bowden is the state's highest-paid employee because his teams win lots of football games. The Seminoles won the national championship in 1993 and are the consensus No. 1 team going into the 1995 season.
Although you'd never find an FSU fund-raiser trash-talking Mr. Bowden, his program has not been a pure boon to his school. In addition to the coach's salary, FSU last year paid a law firm $400,000 to investigate a scandal involving players on that 1993 championship team. In the most notorious incident, agents treated players to a $6,000 shopping spree at a Foot Locker store -- leading to the joke that FSU stands for "Free Shoes University."
Though five players were suspended in 1994, the $400,000 investigation cleared the $218,000 coach. Surprise.
The drag athletics can put on a university has affected FSU President Talbot "Sandy" D'Alemberte, a former state legislator and past president of the American Bar Association. Last year, Mr. D'Alemberte was embarrassingly passive in the face of proof that athletic director Bob Goin accepted favors from a construction company doing business with the university. Mr. D'Alemberte finally did fire Mr. Goin, who got a $300,000 settlement from Seminole Boosters, Inc. Bad enough that a coach is the state's highest-paid employee. It's even worse that an employee of Mr. D'Alemberte's caliber is skittish about taking on obvious problems in the Athletics Department.
Mr. D'Alemberte's high point has been fund-raising. Incredibly, until 1993 FSU never gave much thought to raising money for anything besides sports. This year, the team Mr. D'Alemberte put together at the FSU Foundation has raised almost $50 million unrelated to sports. That brings FSU to $163.4 million of a $200 million goal. For his success with that team, the state paid Mr. D'Alemberte less than half the coach's salary. Mr. Bowden won the Sugar Bowl, which returned no money for academics.
Sports scandals don't ruin a school academically. Otherwise, University of Florida graduates might have misspelled UF in the 1980s, and University of Miami graduates would perpetually get third billing behind dumb and dumber. But if great coaches made a university academically superior, FSU would have had something like its recently dedicated magnetic research lab not too long after Mr. Bowden started coaching there -- 20 years ago.
Football rivalries are fun. Great sports programs can enhance a university. But value systems need straightening when sports shoes are free, coaches get exorbitant salaries (that don't include money from TV shows and endorsements) and learning falls somewhere in between.
I have just seen the Palm Beach Post's editorial "Real score in college." I greatly appreciate the attention The Post has given to the success of the Florida State University capital campaign. Loyal alumni and friends of the university, many in The Post's circulation area, are responsible for raising about $1 million a week for the past year. Included in the editorial, however, was a criticism of the athletic program at FSU. I write to correct several mistakes.
First, it is true that we pay our football coach very well. When we negotiate a new contract with him, which we hope to do soon, he will continue to be paid well. The Post observed that Bobby Bowden is being paid more than a university president. I must tell you that I believe that Bobby Bowden is worth the salary we pay him in terms of the high quality of program he brings to the university, a program that has been entirely ethical under his 20-year leadership.
As The Post notes, it was embarrassing for FSU to experience the so-called Foot Locker incident, but it is also very gratifying to know that after a full investigation by highly competent outside attorneys, the football coaches and athletic personnel were entirely absolved. This was not a whitewash investigation. FSU took the additional, entirely unprecedented step of asking for investigation by the state attorney's office and other civil and criminal law enforcement agencies in order that those agencies, equipped with subpoena power, could reach the full truth. We did find the culprits -- sports agents who were unconnected with FSU -- and we have seen that those people were prosecuted. Indeed these prosecutions were the first prosecutions of sports agents for inducing student athletes to break rules. I am sorry that some of our students were tempted by these agents, but I am very glad that there was no participation by anyone connected with FSU in that episode.
The Post was also correct when it said that the incident relating to the athletic director at FSU was embarrassing. Bob Goin, our former athletic director, made a mistake. I know at the time that the newspaper wanted me to act promptly to fire him. But instead, I placed him on leave and awaited the completion of all pending investigations. Ultimately, I asked for his resignation, not because I thought he had done something illegal, but because I thought that it was not possible for him to be effective. (A state district court of appeal upheld the Commission on Ethics hearing examiner, who found that Mr. Goin did not intend to violate the law.)
The most important point, however, is that The Post's editorial suggests that athletics do not contribute to the university. The FSU athletic program contributes directly and indirectly. This is due to the consistently high quality of our program and the high character of our coaches and staff. When students take the Scholastic Achievement Test, they may send their score to any three schools they designate as their preferred schools. For several years, there is one Florida school in the top 10 schools: FSU. The university has been third in the nation in popularity. We have looked at other data such as the listing of preferences by those listed in Who's Who in American High Schools. There is one Florida university: FSU, listed just behind Yale.
We have a great student body. Many of the students who have been attracted to us in such large numbers have learned about FSU first by watching our very successful and honorable sports programs. They then look seriously at FSU, and they like the incredible balance we have here: outstanding programs in music, film, theater, dance and the arts, great humanities, social sciences and hard sciences, the only supercomputer facility in the state, the National High Magnetic Field Laboratory and many other features of an outstanding research institution.
With our new athletic director, Dave Hart, I have no doubt that the athletic program will continue to be one of the very best in the country. I hope that it will be scandal-free. I do know that if we have difficulties, we will face up to them in a way that allows us to collect all the facts and to make sound judgments.