CARBONDALE - Lately it's been said of Southern Illinois University Carbondale the athletic tail wags the academic dog.

The phrase became popular on campus after Chancellor Walter Wendler unveiled Saluki Way to the board of trustees last fall. Detractors complained the project was over-developed for university athletics, with plans for a new football stadium and a renovated basketball arena set in place, and held only sketchy afterthoughts on academics, with mere placeholders marking future sites of academic buildings. Complaints were exacerbated by revelations that student fee increases will be used to fund a majority of the opening construction phase for Saluki Way, which includes the building of the stadium and renovation of the arena, along with a new student services facility.

Since November, Wendler has sought a gambit against the athletics-versus-academics argument by showing the campus community exactly where the money is going. According to his figures, the future of SIUC athletics looks modest comparably.

"There is roughly $483 million of total new projects committed between 2003 and 2010. The total athletic commitment is the football stadium at $42 million and the arena at $33 million, about 15.5 percent of the total commitment," Wendler said. "The people who suggest the athletic tail is wagging the academic dog are just wrong."

With a little more than $75 million on the chancellor's books slated for sports facility improvements, Salukis athletics isn't the top investment planned for campus, but it is the second-largest consumer of the dollars planned to be spent over the next several years. The biggest investment is going into academic program enhancements, a total of $137.7 million, according to the chancellor's numbers.

Of that $137 million, $58.6 million is planned for faculty salary increases, $34.6 million for hiring more faculty and roughly $1.75 million each for scholarships in what Wendler calls teaching and scholarly excellence. The list goes on for academics, but the argument that athletics are getting first bid persists. Frankly, Wendler said, it is getting a "little tiresome."

"If any of the spending on athletics is too much, then they should just put their position on the table and say we shouldn't spend a nickel on athletics," Wendler said. "I don't agree with it but that's fine. At least it's out there."

However, that isn't what people have been suggesting, Wendler said, at least to any significant degree.

The student, the athlete and the dollar

Six years ago some of the talk on campus pertained to ending a waning football program; then Jerry Kill arrived. The rest, officials say, is history.

Even with a successful Division I-AA football team now, SIUC Faculty Senate President Robert Benford said some camps still discuss whether the campus should retain a football program - or any intercollegiate sport - not because of failure but because they don't think NCAA athletics mesh with the university's main purpose.

"Should universities be involved in big-time entertainment? Is that the mission of the university?" Benford said.

Benford is currently studying the relationship intercollegiate athletics have with the academic missions of campuses across the country. He cited some of the theses presented by the Coalition on Intercollegiate Athletics, a group of faculty members from Division I-A schools that was set up to examine the relationship between sports and study on college campuses nationwide.

One of the current co-chairs of the coalition is University of Oregon biology professor Nathan Tublitz. He said at many public universities, where capital projects and operating expenses are being pushed off onto the institutes themselves in light of declining state funding, officials are beginning to have conversations about the necessity of athletics and other offerings peripheral to the academic mission of campuses.

"There is a lot of concern about directing limited resources toward a non-essential part of the university mission," Tublitz said.

The coalition issued a report on the future of intercollegiate governance at universities in December. Tublitz said the report was done at the request of an NCAA Presidential Task Force, which has been examining concerns over the relationship between athletics and academics since 2003.

"The governance issue is essential," Tublitz said. "What we have proposed and suggested is that university athletics be governed by the academic arm of the university and not left to be governed on their own or have a reporting structure that doesn't include the academic officers."

Benford said in his last job at the University of Nebraska, he served on an intercollegiate athletics committee that reported to the faculty senate. At SIUC, he said, the similar committee reports directly to the chancellor. In the past, Benford has also expressed concern about the Troutt-Wittmann Training and Academic Center, a $3 million capital gift from an alum that only allows student athletes to use its facilities. He worries such trends are driving a wedge between athletics and academics at SIUC, when officials at other universities are thinking along lines of integration of the two.

"We have a system here that is somewhat antiquated but is moving further into antiquity," Benford said. "I'm an athletics fan; I'm not against it. But when you bring students to campus, they are students first then athletes."

The term "student athlete" raises ire among some as an elitist idea that suggests the athletes should be held in separate regard from the students. However, it's not unheard of that both athletic and academic excellence can go hand-in-hand. Each of the Big 10 schools is also rated among the top universities in the country by the U.S. News and World Report's annual survey of American colleges.

SIUC rehab professor and graduate council chairman John Benshoff said it is often easy for big schools to have support for both sports and academics.

"I think the two can coexist," he said. "Perhaps one of the differences here is when running a big time academic institution, like the University of Pittsburgh, big schools like that are able to do it all. They get people to donate a basketball arena to them, but they can also get people to donate billions of dollars to research. At a school like ours it's always going to be a balance."

When game time begins, academics aren't forgotten. Benshoff said a major award he won for his research was announced during a recent basketball game. He wasn't at the game, he said, but he found out later when an alum who was there approached to congratulate him.

A matter of priorities

Ed Ford, vice president for graduate school affairs with the SIUC Graduate and Professional Student Council, said the issue doesn't have to be strictly about athletics versus academics but about setting priorities for universities. He said having both successful sports and academics in place doesn't curtail the argument of what campuses should be stretching to do as dollars get tight.

"Relatively prestigious institutions tend to have both A and B, but I think you would have a hard time making your case because you have strong athletics you will have strong academics," Ford said. "Everything that the universities are doing outside academics, that takes away from the central mission. So, you could make the case that if a place like the University of Michigan wouldn't have all these huge athletics programs they might have even better academics."

Ford said priorities on campus are central to the argument over Saluki Way and to some students' consternation the initiative is being kicked off with brand new athletics facilities in the opening phase instead of classroom buildings. It is particularly concerning to students who have been at SIUC a while and have seen problems with follow-through on major initiatives, he added.

"I would also say for the most part, since Chancellor Wendler has been here ¦ once he says we're going to do "x" he makes every attempt to follow through with it," Ford said.

And Wendler has said he is determined to see Saluki Way completed. He often notes SIUC has the dubious notoriety of having the worst athletics facilities in both the Missouri Valley Conference in basketball and the Gateway Conference in football. Yet Wendler said that problem exists within the larger spectrum that the entire campus has been neglected in improvements for nearly 40 years. The chancellor speaks as adamantly about bringing new and improved classrooms to campus as he does building a new football stadium. Moving all the sports facilities to the southern half of campus, as the Saluki Way plan calls for, clears the central part of campus for construction of new academic buildings for the future.

SIUC Athletic Director Paul Kowalczyk said almost every other school in both athletic conferences has enacted some kind of improvement to its facilities in the past several years. He said if SIUC wants to be a great university overall it can't ignore anything, including athletics.

Granted, he said, the argument that pits sports against study is common, but SIUC is unique in one respect.

"We happen to be in a situation in this institution where the bill has come due for everything at the same time," Kowalczyk said. "Sure, it's bad timing, but something needs to be done. You have to see this as an investment in the future of the university - for all of it."

Kowalczyk said no one is leaning toward the day when athletics overtakes a university's mission to teach, particularly at SIUC, where there are few realistic prospects the sports program will stack up to Big 10 status anytime soon.

"We're not Nebraska, we're not Ohio State and we never will be. We're not trying to take over the university, we're trying to work in concert. We can feed off each other and use each other's positive qualities.

"I think people who fail to see that don't get the big picture," Kowalczyk said.

The big picture, said SIU President Glenn Poshard, is the Carbondale campus' overhaul doesn't begin with Saluki Way; it began with initiatives that were part of the original 2001 Land Use Plan. It included a student health center, which is now complete, the Transportation Education Center currently planned for construction at the Southern Illinois Airport and renovations to Morris Library, which started earlier this year.

The only athletic portion of that plan was a new women's softball field. In the end, the major portion of Saluki Way will be academic, Poshard said.

"I don't see it as athletics versus academics," Poshard said. "It's athletics and academics together that continue to make our university an exciting place to be both athletically and academically."

caleb.hale@thesouthern.com

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