This has been a bad week for UND Athletics (as well as the university in general) and, I’m afraid, it’s only going to get worse. The financial shortfall that UND has to shoulder (as do all other universities in the state) is not a small fee and certainly couldn’t be discarded or eliminated through an act of creative accounting. This is real and these two programs, women’s hockey and swimming & diving are now the banners for the event.
But I digress, the fate of the sport. Women’s hockey was a visible lamb to sacrifice towards the gods of finances, not because they wanted to make a statement against women’s sports or Title IX or anything, but because no one goes to the games despite the amount of money being spent building the program. No offense to the swimmers and divers but, had they just cut that program only those in the program would really have cared in the big picture. Hockey is the most visible sport in Grand Forks and cutting the women’s program certainly did open some eyes, even though many of those open eyes don’t go to games.
What’s even more hurtful is that these cuts didn’t need to happen. The sad truth is that, in this case (the budget of ND’s universities) the best thing for the entire system would cost a lot of people their jobs. North Dakota is simply too small to support as many public colleges and universities as they do. The right thing to do would have been to close all but the four largest public colleges and universities in the state (Bismark State, Minot State, UND, and NDSU) except maybe keeping NDSCS due to its concentration on trades. They should also gut satellite campuses altogether and put more money into remote classroom technology. If they did this, the overhead would decrease to the point where I doubt they’d have to do much cutting at all at the four major universities. And there’s nothing saying that Mayville or Valley City State or Bottineau etc. couldn’t try going private.
The reason why this doesn’t go this way is because it is politically unpopular and economically (especially for the towns in which the closed campuses would sit) destructive. It would potentially do to Valley City what the towns of the Wild West would face if the rail line passing through town were to be shut down. Ghost town. However, BSC, MSU, NDSU, and UND would flourish and potentially be able to hire some of the laid off staff, though certainly not many.
In the end, though, these two athletic programs are simply the more visible cuts to a university that must cut nearly 25% of their budget across the board.
I will support the #neverendthefight program and hope they can save the program, but I do not have high hopes.
That’s my take.
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