My University Values Football More Than Education

Walking to my office in Folsom Field, the University of Colorado football stadium in Boulder, I pass the new $15-million scoreboard-video screen towering into the sky above campus. The screen is 130 feet wide and 36 feet tall, perched atop 10 sections of the south side of the stadium. One of the largest in the NCAA, it highlights all the play-by-play action of the Buffaloes football team, and, according to Sports Illustrated, has made the University of Colorado (CU) “a top destination for fans and athletes” and helps “enhance one of the best game day atmospheres in the country.”

Making the university attractive undoubtedly was the administration’s main driver when it hired former NFL star Deion Sanders to lead the struggling football team. By all accounts, Sanders loves it at CU. And why wouldn’t he? He has a five-year, $29.5-million contract, and the Champions Center where he works is a stunning, five-story, state-of-the-art building that cost $181 million. The center houses an elite, world-class program in sports medicine and sports performance, indoor practice field and track, Olympic-quality training facilities, lockers, weight rooms, and gleaming office spaces.

I wish I could say the same about the CU where I work. I am a nontenure-track writing professor, one of the 51.9 percent of the faculty on this campus who are paid to teach — not do research, but actually teach the young people of Colorado, the nation, and the world who are hungry to learn. I have been teaching full time for 23 years in the university’s Program for Writing and Rhetoric. In the corridor where my office is located, under the 50-yard-line bleachers of Folsom Field, the linoleum is scuffed, beat-up looking, and has been patched with a metal sheet. One of the acoustic ceiling tiles has been punched out, exposing an array of water pipes. A ceiling light is busted, and the white, cinderblock walls give the path to my office the feeling of being in an underground bunker. The waiting area for students is filled with an odd assortment of abandoned office chairs. When students find my office, they always express surprise. “You work here?” they ask. “I had no idea this place existed.”

As a nontenure-track professor at CU, it often feels like I do not exist. I teach four classes a semester, do committee work, administrative work, and website management. I design engaging classes and syllabi, write letters of recommendation for students, serve as an adviser on honors theses, and spend countless hours meeting with students outside of office hours, helping them draft and revise their essays. To do this, I usually work seven days a week. Each class has 19 students, and during a given semester, I grade approximately 1,825 pages. Then, there are the host of student mental-health issues I face. I also serve as a de facto counselor encouraging students, holding them accountable but also assuring them they’re doing OK.

For all this work, the average salary of a nontenure-track, associate teaching professor in my department is $62,789 a year. Since I’ve been at CU a long time, I make a little more than this. But as an experienced associate teaching professor with a Ph.D., two published books under my belt, I earn 80 percent of what a starting tenure-track assistant professor makes. Meanwhile, at U.S. research universities, the average salary for associate teaching professors in English is $67,743. To put our paltry salaries into perspective, a local K–12 teacher with a Ph.D. in the Boulder Valley School District makes between $98,000 and $137,000.

Being overworked and underpaid takes a toll. “I just can’t take it anymore; it’s unsustainable,” a colleague recently told me. Once, when my wife and I took our two young children to the zoo, I sat at an outdoor table near an orangutan exhibit and graded papers. My children often think of me as the dad working downstairs in the basement. I have skipped family events, and I have postponed and missed out on time with friends. I am not alone in this. All nontenure-track faculty suffer through similar experiences. Many of us teach during the summer or find a second job during the semester to pay for expenses. We live paycheck to paycheck and have little savings. Like many Americans, we are one emergency away from financial trouble.

Over the years, my colleagues and I have repeatedly approached administrators to explain our frustration. All to no avail. Various deans and provosts have expressed sympathy and lauded the work we do, but their words sound as sincere as Vladimir Putin telling the world he wants peace in Ukraine. “The university has no money,” they tell us.

Yet the University of Colorado at Boulder continues its two-decades-old infrastructure frenzy unabated, constructing new buildings and renovating old ones. For instance, a fancy hotel and conference center for $130 million is rising on Broadway, a main thoroughfare through town on the west side of campus. Hellems, an academic building that houses the English, philosophy, and history departments and other humanities programs, is being renovated for $105 million. Construction is set to begin on two new residence halls that will cost roughly $116 million each. Last year, the university announced it is breaking ground this fall on a new academic building that will be the new home of the chemistry and applied-mathematics departments at a cost of $175.4 million. I could go on, but the toxic smokescreen is obvious.

The university builds at a debilitating human cost that breeds resentment. Throughout my career, I’ve received countless emails, cards, plaudits, and even hugs from students who say I helped change their lives, that I showed them skills that helped them on their career path, that I helped them discover who they are. This affirmative, mentoring relationship with students is what keeps me going. Moreover, my colleagues feel the same way. We have stories to tell. We teach not for the money, to get rich, but because we are called to teach and because we connect with students. Consequently, it’s hard not to be awed and angry every time I walk past that new, high-tech Jumbotron on the way to my office. I love CU, but looking up at that steel tower, I feel like an invisible, second-class citizen in a country that never bothered to imagine what I do.

In March 2024, faculty received an email from the administration that stressed the university’s need for transformation and resilience in tough times. The email referred to deficits and the “hard financial realities” many large universities face. “The good news is,” it said, “that CU Boulder is facing these headwinds from a fiscally sound position. However, to avoid the struggles faced by our aforementioned peers, we must act.” Besides that the message mirrored countless other messages we have received over the years from department chairs, deans, provosts, chancellors, and regents, my first response was: “What monkey tricks do you want us to pull out of our asses now?” From my position down in steerage, it appears the university is already in motion — but not in a direction one would call transformational.

CU’s athletic director, Rick George, gambled when he brought Deion Sanders to Boulder, and every indication is that he won big. According to the Boulder Daily Camera, the university has experienced a massive revenue increase — to the sum of $90.6 million — because of excitement surrounding Sanders and the football team. Ticket sales have increased by $20 million, while donations to the Buff Club, the leadership giving program attached to the CU athletic department, have increased by $7.8 million. Merchandise sales have increased 51 percent, and national media coverage has exploded. In addition, donations to the university are up more than $2 million, and student applications have increased 20 percent. Beyond the university, in 2023, CU football games generated $113.2 million for the city of Boulder’s economy. I have joked with friends that I should jump on the bandwagon and increase my own revenue stream: I could sell access to my office each fall whenever the football team was in town. For a small fee, I could give two or more lucky people the key to my office, and they could spend the night there. The next day, right before game time, they could trot down the stairs and pop out of the door amid thousands of cheering football fans.

Joking aside, if the CU athletic department is awash in cash, none of that money has trickled down to the academic side of the university. Will it ever? Will CU ever put aside its obsession with big-mojo infrastructure? I have my doubts. The university privileges entrepreneurial research. It loves its big-time sports programs. Meanwhile, it pays lip service to how it fosters the growth and development of young people. It employs an army of staff to run a sophisticated marketing apparatus full of enthusiastic campus tours, meet-and-greets, how-to seminars, and videos meant to help students navigate their undergraduate experience.

But if the university is sincere in its desire to educate, it should reward those who work most closely with students, training them to think and write, mentoring them, and encouraging them to care about and consider deeply the life choices they make. Teachers like me are the trained professionals and content specialists whose primary role at the university is to develop citizens, leaders, and human beings who can empathize, problem-solve, visualize connections and networks, and imagine a better tomorrow. My question is: Has the university forgotten its purpose?