IU's sugar daddy

Remember the Boston Tea Party? It's time to throw the tea in the harbor again.\nIf you missed the news, I'll fill you in: Our notorious athletics department, after implementing the student athletic fee and running a budget deficit for years, wants to spend $55 million that it doesn't have! \nSo who pays for most of this? You guessed it: We do! Whether it's through ticket prices, memorabilia purchases or eventual alumni donations, the current and former student body will pay. Collectively we are IU's sugar daddy. Without us, IU would be "living in a van down by the river."\nAnd yet, what do we get for this? When we raised a stink about the athletics fee, IU eventually removed it -- along with it the athletics department took away 500 student seats at basketball games and raised the price of tickets. \nWe've been told to look through rose-colored glasses and see that "athletics actually had ... a very, very good year financially," according to Kathleen McNeely, IU's executive director of Financial Management Services. So, OK - if it was such a good year, how about using some of those savings to lower ticket prices? Or maybe refund the student athletic fee? \nDon't get me wrong. I love Hoosier basketball and soccer, and coach Hep seems promising. What I find intolerable is the athletic department's cockiness regarding its financial woes. I did not sign up to be Director of Athletics Rick Greenspan's sugar daddy and foot every bill.\nThe trustees have shown that they don't give one whit what we think: They've given us no voice in the search for a new president ; they pulled our alumni coaches at Little 500 ; and they're talking about hiking tuition rates (again!). We're just a bottomless piggy bank to the athletics department. When those who pick up the tab -- the student body -- no longer have a voice, it amounts to taxation without representation.\nWith the civilized avenues closed to us, we must resort to some sort of action. We cannot boycott games; that would be treachery to our athletes. IU doesn't have a harbor, let alone any tea-bearing ships from the East India Company anchored in that harbor. It would be environmentally unfriendly to burn Rick Greenspan's office in effigy.\nIt seems to me that we are, for the moment, powerless. But it won't always be that way. When we become rich and famous alumni, guess who comes looking for our money again? I, for one, will not donate one cent to the IU Alumni Foundation, the Varsity Club or any other IU affiliate that supports the athletics department. When it comes time to donate, I'll give directly to elements of IU to which I am actually grateful and indebted: the chemistry department, African studies or the College of Arts and Sciences. But when it comes to the athletics department, I've already grudgingly given two $30 donations, and that's all it's going to get from me.\nAnd perhaps a few crates of tea dunked in the Jordan River.