Twenty-point-five million dollars annually. That’s the cap UConn and other Division I schools can now pay student-athletes under the House-vs-NCAA settlement. At a time when many faculty say resources are shrinking, Former UConn Faculty Union President Jeffrey Ogbar said the situation "raises questions for many on campus" about how these athletic payments will affect academics on campus.
Athletics vs. academics tensions
Ogbar said he finds it hard to reconcile the increasing wealth going into athletics with what he sees as declining resources for other university priorities.
“I’m sure the university will say, and most universities will say, that the money allocated to the athletics program is a separate pot,” Ogbar said. “Big picture, many people find it hard to believe that a university that has had shrinking resources for faculty, shrinking resources for graduate programs in real dollars … that a university … can become increasingly wealthy with athletics.”
How the $20.5 million cap works
The new revenue-sharing framework allows UConn to distribute up to $20.5 million a year to its student-athletes. The university has said it plans to allocate $18 million this academic year, with the goal of reaching the full cap over time.
For UConn, where the fall schedule includes football, men’s and women’s soccer, and field hockey, athletes in those programs are expected to be among the first to receive payments. Exact distribution levels haven’t been announced, but UConn officials have confirmed that the school was allowed to start payments to athletes as of July 1.
Student and faculty responses
Ogbar said there is “a lot of grumbling” among faculty and students, especially during budget shortfalls or when faculty salaries aren’t keeping up. He said many feel overlooked when the windfall goes to athletes, even if the dollars come from a different budget line.
“A lot of people expressed concern over the sort of robust funding of athletics and the parsimonious attention given to other parts of the university and faculty and staff who were not in the Department of Athletics,” Ogbar said.
He added that coaches are members of the same faculty union he once led, and that complicates the conversation. Athletic staff are colleagues, but the comparison between multimillion-dollar athletic spending and declining support for graduate programs often sharpens frustrations.
Budget Realities and Shrinking Support
Ogbar said declining support for academic and research functions amid inflation is a serious issue. Faculty salaries, graduate program funding and infrastructure for non-athletic departments have all suffered under flat or shrinking state and institutional budgets, he said.
“The people who determine our budget are not the folks in athletics. It’s the folks in Hartford, and they decide that they want to defund Higher Education in the State of Connecticut,” Ogbar said.
In his view, lawmakers’ funding decisions have steadily eroded the academic side of the university, leaving professors and students scrambling for resources even as athletics thrives.
“I’ve been very proud to see so many of our faculty members, my colleagues, staff, the AAUP union … come out year after year and demand and process a healthy budget,” he said. “ Unfortunately, we’ve lost ground.”
The challenge of perception
For Ogbar, part of the difficulty lies in optics. Even if academic and athletic budgets are technically separated, the sight of athletes receiving stipends in the tens of thousands of dollars while graduate students see dwindling stipends—or faculty wait years for salary adjustments—feeds a sense of inequity.
“It’s a complicated issue, and I do understand,” Ogbar said. “when I was president of the union, I would have to kind of stress that we’re talking about different parts here, and also to stress that the people who determine our budget are not the folks in athletics.”
That explanation, he acknowledged, didn’t always resolve the frustration.
Looking forward: pressure & expectations
As the new system rolls out, UConn faces pressure to ensure the financial health of both athletics and academics. While other schools around the country brace for how these payouts and other federal funding challenges will ripple through their budgets, UConn faculty are already signaling that they’ll be watching closely.
“I would have to kind of stress … that the revenue that is shared hopefully will not eat into resources that could have been used to hire faculty members to support students who are not athletes,” Ogbar said.
