Updates Fall 2026

The academic term started last week at the University of Louisville and I've returned to teaching after a full-year of sabbatical. This semester I'm offering an Honors seminar on Global Politics Through Film and a graduate (master's level) seminar on International Politics. Sabbatical was wonderful and reinvigorating.

After the departure of a very talented colleague to Boston College, I agreed to co-direct the Center for Asian Democracy through this academic year. I may blog in the coming months about some events CAD will host and Asia-related news. In the near term, I need to recommend edits for the CAD webpage (it is administered centrally by the College of A&S).

To reflect all these changes, I finally edited my "About Me" page on this blog and updated my list of academic publications. Currently, I have several additional potential publications under review at journals, tied to work I completed on sabbatical. All the pieces are about the politics of climate change, which has been my research focus these past few years. 



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Netherlands sabbatical

My wife and I returned from Europe exactly 6 weeks ago today. From January 1 to February 28 I was a Visiting Professor at the Copernicus Institute of Sustainable Development at Utrecht University, working primarily with Rakhyun Kim. I wrote and then recently revised and completed a fairly long manuscript about climate change politics that is currently under review at an international relations journal. Rak and I completed a shorter related piece in late March that is under review in a more policy-oriented outlet. I will be intentionally vague here until the papers are accepted for publication (hopefully). 

Utrecht University was founded in 1636 and the old parts of the medieval city feature an interesting mix of new and old shops and restaurants on narrow cobblestone streets surrounded by canals ....with lots and lots of bicycles. Downtown under the train station there is a bicycle parking facility that is the world's largest with 13,500 spaces! Nonetheless, we found it to be a great city for walking. The artist who created Miffy was from Utrecht and there is a museum devoted to that (I didn't go). 

Chris and I very much enjoyed our time in the Netherlands and I took hundreds of photos. We purchased a Museum Card that granted entrance to an enormous number of cultural sites, which we visited by taking trains, trams, subways, and buses. The mass transit system is terrific and well-integrated though we did have some trouble with train cancellations a couple of times because of ongoing repair work between Amsterdam and Utrecht. 

In Amsterdam, which we visited many times by train, we were especially pleased by the Rijksmuseum (which has a lot of Rembrandt -- see above) and the Van Gogh Museum. We also learned a good deal of Dutch history at the Anne Frank House, the Resistance Museum, and the National Maritime Museum (Chris skipped that one to devote more time to Resistance). Dutch warships were fighting major battles before the US was born. 

     

I can also recommend highly the Mauritshuis in The Hague. It is filled with major works of art by Dutch masters during the era of Rembrandt and Vermeer. 

We also traveled to Den Bosch for Karnival in a light rain and enjoyed a sunny Saturday in Rotterdam where we visited the Depot of Museum Boijmans Van Beuningen. Rotterdam is Europe's largest port and the city was largely rebuilt after being destroyed by bombs in World War II. 

We spent nearly 3 weeks in March in the UK, living in Brighton, the southern coastal town. I'll probably say more about that in a future post. I met with a couple of scholars working at Sussex University and hope that at least one of those meetings leads to productive collaboration sooner or later. 

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Fall Semester?

The President of my university issued a statement Sunday claiming that we are full steam ahead for fall 2020 semester live on campus:

President Bendapudi made the following announcements:

• The University of Louisville will have regular campus operations for the Fall semester.
• This entails students living on campus, learning on campus and online, and faculty and staff working together to advance our mission of teaching, and research, and service. 

Many faculty members have spent part of their day exchanging email and social media messages reflecting unhappiness with this decision. One issue is lack of consultation with faculty and staff. The decision undercut the work of committees that were supposed to meet this week to discuss this issue. The President acted without our input.

If the current situation with COVID-19 does not change, however, then the idea is completely unworkable. And that actually seems kinds of obvious to me. I suspect that University officials realize that public health uncertainty is going to reduce enrollments and tuition revenue, so they are saying something to seem positive and decisive. The latest message is basically PR, appealing to students and parents, as well as potentially gullible media who might report this uncritically. Administrators still have plenty of time to backtrack if the disease prevalence is significant and the case fatality rate (CFR) remains high.

If central administration does not realize this, then I am quite concerned. Universities are kind of like nursing homes, meatpacking plants, ships, and prisons (the 4 places that have suffered the worst outbreaks) in that people are in close proximity to one another for prolonged periods day after day. These are clearly incubators of the disease and some local facilities have suffered outbreaks of half to two-thirds of their populations. If half of the UofL community of 28,000 students and employees gets COVID-19 and the CFR is a fairly conservative 0.35%, then that’s 14,000 infections and nearly 500 fatalities. Even if it’s 0.01%, then that’s 140 deaths.**

No one will risk those lives, I would assume.

Before faculty and students can possibly return to crowded classrooms, the USA needs far more testing for the disease and antibodies, as well as extensive contact tracing --  unless there proves to be some kind of miraculous treatment for the disease in the next few months. The federal government has bungled its response, letting February pass without strong contact tracing and testing in isolated hotspots -- and the problems have only magnified in the subsequent months as testing continues to lag and contact tracing is nearly forgotten.

In short, I’m not optimistic that the situation is going to improve, so I’m not certain how we can possibly plan for anything other than online education.  Given that most faculty in A&S (by far the largest teaching unit) are not paid for work in June and July, any efforts to improve distance education needs to be happening NOW, in May. Exams are over and faculty cannot travel for personal or professional reasons, as many ordinarily would during May.

After performing well in March and April, UofL is botching its ongong COVID-19 response. .


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** Yes, I realize the case fatality rate is unknown, but see this post for an explanation of my use of 0.35.  I also realize that the population of a university community skews young and that's a population that has a lower mortality rate from the disease.  However, I'm also ignoring the probability that students will transmit the virus to family and community members in their jobs and homes. Louisville is a commuter school and most students work -- at least when the economy is functioning.


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COVID 19 and ISA

Posted March 25: On March 8, I wrote the following note to a colleague who wondered why I was thinking about withdrawing from the ISA conference in Honolulu, scheduled for March 25-28. S/he was comparing the virus to the flu and noted Hawaii's lack of cases at the time. I have slighted edited it to fix typos, add links, and assure anonymity of individuals.
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I understand the flu risk argument and Hawaii’s lack of cases. However, the lack of cases is likely because of lack of testing. The US really dropped the ball on this with delays in preparation, a flawed first test, and an illogical containment strategy. Many experts are now saying containment obviously failed in many communities and it is time to consider mitigation of community spread.

The logic: The doubling rate for known cases outside China is every 4 days. Given the number of deaths in the US (20 now, I think), between 450 and 2000 people likely have the disease already. Nearly 500 have tested positive. The NYT reported yesterday that nearly 2800 New Yorkers are in self-quarantine. There are 76 in Hawaii. The Atlantic Monthly reports that fewer than 2000 people have been tested in the entire US – only 16 tested as of yesterday in Hawaii. If the true number of current cases is merely 500 people right now, we could still have 1 million US cases in 6 to 8 weeks time if the status quo prevails. There are serious concerns the virus could quickly outstrip the health system’s ability to function. This thread is from someone who used to work at CDC as an Epidemic Intelligence Service Officer: https://twitter.com/Farzad_MD/status/1236393626760032257
With testing just about to ramp up, many experts say the number of US cases is about to “explode” as the CDC guy wrote.

I actually have a personal story that illustrates the poor planning** in the US so far:  I had a colleague return from a research trip to Wuhan on December 14. We had beers together a week later at a popular local bar and socialized again together on New Year’s eve. By late January, however, the news coming from China was of such concern that the University required recent returnees from China to spend 14 days at home in quarantine. Of course, for people in my friend's social circle, the horse would have already been out of the barn if he was infected. 

Until this week, no one in Kentucky had been tested for the virus. They’ve tested 14 across the entire state and identified only 1 person with the virus. What scientists don’t really know with certainty is if asymptomatic people could be carrying and spreading the disease. 

That’s really the problem. Who knows?

And the risks are worrisome.

The evidence not only seems to suggest that that virus spreads much more quickly and readily than the flu (because of airborne droplets) – but that it is perhaps 20 times as lethal. I had the flu vaccine in the fall, but there is no vaccine against this virus. Even though the lethality is greater for the elderly, people in my age bracket are still dying at a 10-fold rate. With flu, about 1% of people end up in the hospital with a serious respiratory problem. With COVID 19 it is more like 15 to 20%. That’s largely why the health systems could be broken with a huge outbreak (to flu-like levels of cases).

Mitigation measures are going to become fairly draconian for the US:

Fauci of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases said today on Meet the Press that “You don't want to go to a massive gathering, particularly if you're a vulnerable individual. If we continue to see the community spread go up I think you need to seriously look at anything that's a large gathering.”

Austin, Texas, canceled its annual South by Southwest event. Numerous universities are ending travel outside the CONUS. The Physics people canceled their large meeting in Denver. A friend who works in Department of Energy in DC told me that all work travel has been suspended. Someone tested positive who had just attended the CPAC (Conservative Political Action Committee) conference, where both Trump and Pence spoke.  

The Trump administration is still insisting that we are in containment mode, which means 14 day quarantines. Thus, if anyone at the ISA conference develops symptoms and tests positive, attendees could end up spending weeks in quarantine [Hawaii subsequently ordered all arrivals to the island to quarantine]. Even healthy people from the first cruise ship were quarantined for about a month (2 weeks offshore or in Japan and 2 weeks in the US).

I don’t think I’m especially alarmist.

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** "Poor planning" compared to Taiwan, for example, a democratic partner of the US, which learned about the disease in December and began its countermeasures at that time: "As early as the beginning of December, Taiwanese health officers started boarding flights arriving from Wuhan to check passengers for symptoms before they could leave the plane."

"Poor planning" also in that US public health officials could have immediately starting investigating recent arrivals from Wuhan, China, and finding out if those people, family members, or contacts in their social circle had unusual illnesses in December, January, or February. Top policymakers and members of Congress certainly received briefings about the dangers that early and some were worried: From Senator Richard Blumental (D-CT) after the January 24 briefing the Senate received: “We are far from having this potential epidemic under control. We should be worried and concerned about this potential epidemic as a nation” 

Sadly, it appears the negligence started at the top: "President Donald Trump ignored reports from US intelligence agencies starting in January that warned of the scale and intensity of the coronavirus outbreak in China, The Washington Post reported Friday."


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ISA 2020: Mulling withdrawal

March 25:

On February 28, I sent the following note to a colleague that I follow on twitter.
--------------------------
Dear X:

I saw your coronavirus and ISA tweets. Are you attending? I'm supposed to stay 4 nights and give 2 papers but had delayed buying tickets even before the news about the 2 Japanese tourists. I saw that you referred to Hawaii as a vector and I think that’s true. Somewhere I read recently that Hawaii has about 800 flights per month to/from Asia.

News reports suggest Hawaii hasn't sent any samples from sick people to CDC for tests, so the Hotel/ISA statement about cases is somewhat misleading. Hawaii has quarantined dozens of people (56 as of last Friday). Doctors have apparently forwarded samples from some of those patients and requested CDC tests, but local authorities have said they don’t meet the criteria (because the people hadn’t traveled to Asia, basically). Because of tourism, Hawaii obviously has strong incentives to avoid an outbreak. Then again, they might have perverse incentives to slow-walk information that would imperil their economy. Trump is doing that with regards to the stock market. 

If this disease starts spreading from domestic cases (like the one in California), then Hawaii’s lack of testing makes no sense. Local authorities didn’t even know about the Japanese couple until they had returned home. The incubation period for the disease is estimated at 5 days, though they don’t really know.

Given that the contagion rate has been really high in some countries and the death rate is 2-3% (reportedly 20 times the rate for the flu), this is obviously a serious issue. The hospitalization death rate is around 15%, which would seem to indicate that as many as 20% of patients end up in the hospital. Even a prolonged hospital visit with a ventilator would be terrible.

I’m interested in your perspective as I mull pulling out of ISA.

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RIP: Frank Cross

Sadly, Professor Frank B. Cross of the University of Texas Law and Business Schools has died. Frank was a national debate champion at the University of Kansas (1976), Harvard Law School graduate, former practicing attorney, and long-time professor and scholar in Austin. I will link (here) to his obituary when it is published online. My friend, former KU debater Steve Griffin has posted a short blog entry about Frank's academic contributions -- and briefly notes his long battle with a terrible disease.

Honestly, I didn’t really know Frank all that well, but he was incredibly influential in my life and I am very grateful for the inspiration he provided. Obviously, I should have shared this appreciation with him long before he died.

Frank's influence on my life began when I was a senior in high school. I had debated one semester at El Dorado (KS) High School during my sophomore year -- Kansas high schools only had debate for one semester in those days. Then, I debated my junior year at Charles Page High School in Sand Springs (OK). My father's job had taken us to the Tulsa area and debate allowed me quickly to find a new group of good friends in high school. As it turns out, both El Dorado and Sand Springs were pretty good high school debate programs with young energetic coaches.

Some of my friends at Sand Springs were especially serious about debate. My colleague, for example, was attending the Northwestern University debate institute after our junior year. I wanted to be successful and I'm a competitive guy, so I ended up attending KU debate camp. I had long been a Kansas basketball and football fan and the trip also served as an on-site visit to my preferred college. It made for a reasonable sell to my parents.This would have been summer 1978.

Camp was fun and I really liked the KU campus. I learned a lot, started thinking about debating in college, and met Steve Griffin, who provided some encouragement to me. Most KU debaters, he noted, were former Kansas high school products. Steve had gone to Lawrence High School and would make the semi-finals of the NDT in 1979. That's the Final Four in basketball vernacular.

After the camp, I put my hands on a copy of the Journal of the American Forensics Association article featuring the final national championship debate between the University of Kansas and Georgetown University. That winning Kansas team was comprised of Robert (Robin) Rowland and Frank Cross. They were juniors at the time and followed up their championship with a very successful senior year that ended with a loss in the semi-finals of the National Debate Tournament. Frank and Robin are now members of the University of Kansas debate Hall of Fame. 

For weeks (and months) afterwards, I sometimes practiced reading aloud Frank's second negative constructive speech to figure out if I had the verbal "speed" to debate in college at a nationally-competitive program like Kansas. I also mined Frank's references from the "Malthus was right" argument he made in that debate. His bibliography allowed me to assemble (and understand the complexity of) the argument he was making (against a food aid case) – even though I figured it would not be something I could use in Oklahoma high school debate at the time.

Next, Frank's success as a KU debater shaped who I became as a college debater. As a freshman in Lawrence I took a required debate theory and argumentation class from Robin Rowland, who openly admitted that much of what he knew about developing disadvantages to affirmative plans was learned from years and years and years of debating with Frank Cross. Rowland and Cross were both products of Lawrence High School and had debated together through four years of college. They were friends for decades. Essentially, I learned a tremendous amount of debate skill from Robin, but he had learned a good deal about making attacks on affirmative plans from Frank. Robin also repeatedly emphasized the importance of research and often credited Frank on that front as well.

My ultimate identity as a college debater was largely based on my researching disadvantages to various affirmative plans.

Later, Frank's post-graduate education and career decisions also greatly influenced my life.

From around age 5, I had wanted to be a lawyer. When I discovered that Frank had gone to Harvard Law School after attending KU, I figured that was a viable pathway for me – maybe not Harvard Law specifically, but some excellent (if not elite) law school. It would be wrong to say that it made Kansas a viable choice, because I long intended to attend KU. But it made the pathway thinkable -- Kansas, college debate, good law school, etc.

During my years as a college debater (and then two years as a coach), Frank’s decision to leave private legal practice (and Steve Griffin's parallel decision, I would note) for a career in academia, made me rethink why I thought I wanted to be a lawyer.  Why were these bright guys abandoning the career I thought I wanted -- in favor of academia? In the end, that pathway made sense for me too.

Finally, while I was working on my dissertation in late June 1989, Frank generously allowed me to stay with him in his home while I conducted archival research at the LBJ presidential library in Austin. I remember some wide-ranging conversations with him about politics, academia, law, etc. Most clearly, however, I recall our discussions of how best to assemble a team in fantasy baseball. We were watching the NBA draft on TV and I had discovered his library of  Bill James abstracts in his guest room. Frank could be a very serious scholar and thinker, but he also enjoyed having a drink with friends, talking about sports, and speculating about politics.

In the end, I very much appreciate all of those things too.

RIP, Frank B. Cross.

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Scotland!

I've been waiting to receive authorization to share some news. This morning, my twitter feed finally provided the signal:

Pleased to be welcoming @RodgerPayne next month to @dundeeuni to collaborate on Trump, international law, and human rights https://t.co/t93hZQUjDO

— Kurt Mills (@ProfKurtMills) April 24, 2019

After those tweets appeared, I posted one that I had been holding in reserve:

News: Very pleased to have been named a 2019 Visiting Global Scholar by @ISSRDundee and will be collaborating on-site in late spring with @ProfKurtMills on a project: "America First and the Human Rights Regime." https://t.co/GPbGzDOeF8 https://t.co/KJBW810Ogn

— Rodger Payne (@RodgerPayne) April 24, 2019

This pdf has bios of the 5 Global Scholars for 2019.

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More on Athletic Salaries at Louisville

University of Louisville Interim Athletic Director Vince Tyra cut his own salary this past week -- from $1.2 million a year to "only" $850,000. Sports columnist Tim Sullivan notes that this might make him more likely to land the permanent AD job. Readers may remember I commented about the $1.2 million salary already.

In any case, that first linked story above included Tyra's reasoning for slicing his own salary to $850K:

Tyra said that in examining the athletic department's costs, he looked up the salaries of the other athletic directors in the ACC and averaged the top three, which generated $854,000. As a result, he said he asked to have his salary lowered from $1.2 million to $850,000.

Today, I had a back-and-forth discussion with Sullivan on twitter concerning Tyra's status and pay:

To arrive at a salary, he used top 3 ACC salaries for ADs. Ridiculous. They're surely far more experienced. On academic side, we know the private schools pay more.

— Rodger Payne (@rapayn01) February 10, 2018

When the University was increasing faculty salaries a couple of years ago, no one was paid a new salary obtained by averaging the three highest paid comparable position salaries in the ACC. For one thing, UofL salaries were far under baseline school comparisons and the increase only resulted in salaries that were slightly better than before. Faculty in Arts and Sciences are still paid well below their peers -- especially compared to the highest paid ACC faculty, which tend to be at the private schools. And of course those were the last raises faculty received unless they were promoted in rank -- or managed to get a competing job offer.

Sullivan also pointed out that my thinking didn't account for Tyra's business experience. He asked, via twitter, "If Bill Gates wanted the job, would you pay him as an entry level employee?"

I replied:

Would any other Power conference school have valued Tyra's experience at that salary? Unlikely. Also, what is market value of the job? Jurich's pay was clearly major outlier.

— Rodger Payne (@rapayn01) February 10, 2018

Sullivan replied to my first question by linking to a 2010 NY Times article noting that a number of schools have hired ADs from business.

A few anecdotes makes answer maybe. All those hires were also alums, so presumably network capacity played a role. Also, was *Tyra* valued? Guy quoted in piece says 200 applications for these jobs.

— Rodger Payne (@rapayn01) February 10, 2018

As for the market value of the ADs, I found this:

Latest data I could find: "According to USA Today, athletic directors at Division 1 universities whose football teams play in the Football Bowl Subdivision made about $515,000 on average in 2013...a 14 percent increase over 2011."https://t.co/kxeGolJ6ht

— Rodger Payne (@rapayn01) February 10, 2018

So $850,000 per year for a novice AD still seems outrageous to me. I know the data is 4+ years old, but consider this quote from the article: "many of them are paid like CEOs, with many making salaries in the high six figures. A handful even make more than $1 million a year."

Again: Many paid like CEOs. Many in high 6 figures. A handful over a million.

Yet, that has been Vince Tyra's starting salary level.

College Sports at UofL remain broken.


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Truth Decay

By Master Steve Rapport (Tax March SF) [CC BY 2.0 (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.0)], via Wikimedia Commons

Some highly respected scholars are warning that the public sphere is under serious threat -- from the shallow nature of social media, intentional foreign misinformation campaigns, lack of public agreement about basic facts and information, the blurring of the lines between opinion and fact -- and the persistent lying of Donald Trump.

Indeed, the Rand Corporation recently released a report warning that "truth decay," the term they adopt, "poses a direct threat to democracy." Rand authors assert that truth decay can cause "the erosion of political and civil discourse, political paralysis at the federal and state level, and increased risk of individual disengagement from political and civic life."

Next, consider the points recently made by Tom Nichols of the Naval War College, author of The Death of Expertise: The Campaign Against Established Knowledge and Why it Matters. Among other concerns, he sees real trouble in the rise of social media and state actor (especially Russian) bots:

“There is always a market for conspiracy theories, and social media reduces the barrier to entry for people who want to peddle them to near zero,” Tom Nichols, a professor at the U.S. Naval War College and author of The Death of Expertise, told ThinkProgress. “Twitter, especially, is amenable to this, because you can mimic expertise in short bursts, and pretend to know things you could not possibly know, in a way you would never be able to sustain — or that would reveal the utter ludicrousness of your argument — if you had to make your points at greater lengths in a coherent, single article.... 

The negative effect here is that cynicism about information sources will increase as each of these waves [of conspiracy theorists] passes through,” Nichols said. “I think that’s actually the goal of some of the state actors dumping misinformation on the net: to exhaust the readers into paralysis, so that they believe nothing.”

Additionally, consider the following claims from Allan Lichtman, an American University History Professor who earned a measure of fame in fall 2016 for predicting that Donald Trump would win the presidency. In 2016, even as he was making his prediction, Lichtman warned that Trump posed a danger to America (and potentially to the accuracy of his prediction system):

[Trump]'s a bit of a maverick, and nobody knows where he stands on policy, because he's constantly shifting. I defy anyone to say what his immigration policy is, what his policy is on banning Muslims, or whoever, from entering the United States, that's certainly a factor. But it's more his history in Trump University, the Trump Institute, his bankruptcies, the charitable foundation, of enriching himself at the expense of others, and all of the lies and dangerous things he's said in this campaign, that could make him a precedent-shattering candidate.

Lichtman noted at the time that "the two candidates have been repeatedly fact-checked by independent sources, and his lies vastly outnumber hers [Hillary Clinton's]." Indeed, Lichtman predicted at the time that Trump would be impeached in office. He has subsequently authored a book The Case for Impeachment outlining 8 possible reasons for Trump's impeachment.

More recently, the scholar has extended his critique: “He [Trump] has shattered reality itself,” said Lichtman, the American University professor. “There is no such thing as reality in the world of Trump.”


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Athletics: Follow the Money

Two weeks ago, I blogged about "Papa" John Schnatter's widely publicized comment that "Until you fix athletics, you cannot fix this university." As I wrote, local journalists and University of Louisville leaders reacted to that remark as if they did not see any problems with Athletics -- and could not conceive of them.

For example, in today's Louisville Courier-Journal, Athletics Board member Bill Stone was quoted offering "praise and support for [Athletics Director Tom] Jurich's leadership and said that other areas of the university are what needs fixing."

'Oh my god, our athletic department is the envy of the country," Stone said. "... We need to put our effort into University Hospital and bring that health care facility back to where it was, where it was the place of choice. That's where we need to spend our attention, not on what works.'

Local radio personality Terry Meiners was also puzzled: “'His comments at the board meeting made zero sense to me,' Meiners said. 'And I mean zero-point-zero.... Everybody’s a little baffled with this one.... I grew up here,' Meiners said. 'I’ve seen the difference in the growth of the school starting Day 1 with Jurich. It’s as if he’s built an entire civilization that we were thirsting for in our community.'”

Despite the apparent bewilderment of local elites, my post referenced some potential areas of concern and linked to several of my previous posts on the topic. Additionally, in the interim between the first story and today's, reporter Tim Sullivan did some research:

Stephen Clark, a tenured professor who has spent 18 years at U of L, perceives Jurich not as “invisible” but “untouchable.” 

“Athletics is truly untouchable at this university,” Clark said via e-mail. “It has a different set of rules than all the schools within the university. That goes for things such as ‘conflicts of interest’ particularly. 

“... While athletics means so much to a university, the athletic director and coaches should be under the control of the administration of the university and should operate under parallel guidelines. I don't think that's true at U of L.” 

Student Body President Aaron Vance, whose office entitles him to a seat on the Board of Trustees, seconded Schnatter’s vague statements in a post-meeting tweet: “Papa gets it,” Vance wrote. “Something we have all been thinking here for years.”  

...The U of L Athletics Association operates independently of the university’s general fund and boasts at least 15 straight years of balanced budgets, but its spending patterns could be seen as extravagant in those departments with tightening belts and by those students dealing with rising debt.  Monday, Vance's Twitter feed included a copy of a 2011-12 student government resolution urging U of L to abolish its $50-per-semester student athletics fee.

This week, Athletics is firing back. Yesterday, as the C-J reported, Associate athletics director Kevin Miller "presented an information sheet detailing the amount of money the athletics department provides to the university and vice versa." First, Athletics did recognize that some of their costs are borne by the rest of the University:

According to the document, the athletic department receives a total of $7.344 million in benefits from the university and U of L student fees. Those benefits are $3.263 million in expenses, mostly related to the costs of utilities at the sports facilities; $1.323 million in gender-equity funding; $829,900 in assistance to boost student-athlete academics; and $1.928 million in student fees ($50 per student per semester). 

What about the other side of the relationship?

In turn, athletics reportedly accounts for $30.6 million in tuition, room, board and books for the university due to the presence of student-athletes, managers, spirit groups and the pep band at the school, according to the information sheet.   

The athletic department also provided $4 million to the U of L general fund ($2 million in 2013-14 and $2 million in 2016-17), according to the document.

I have previously mentioned the relatively paltry sums (a few million dollars) that Athletics has provided during particularly difficult years for the University. In reality, those mostly offset the student fees they collect.

The $30.6 million is a more interesting question. Does Athletics subsidize education for all of those students, or does this figure include funds paid by students enrolled in the University? I suspect the latter since the 2014 and 2015 Athletics audit posted online revealed only about $13 million in total athletic scholarships.

So what is missing from the figures Athletics provided yesterday?

First, if the discussion is going to consider revenues collected by one institution thanks to the spending of the other institution's students, then UofL should receive credit for ticket sales to students (and alumni). I haven't seen a breakdown focusing only on students and alums, but UofL athletics collected about $27 million in ticket sales in 2015. For 2016, media reports placed those revenues at just under $30 million.

Not all students or alumni attend games, of course, but many watch those events on television or listen on radio. UofL Athletics has been collecting significant sums from direct TV deals and shared payments from the Atlantic Coast Conference: about $13 million in media rights fees and $7 million from the ACC. That's $20 million more thanks to students, alumni and other fans of the University's teams.

UofL Athletics also collects about $29 million in contributions from donors. As I've blogged previously, some academic research suggests that those donors might otherwise give to the University if Athletics was not asking them for cash.

Finally, there is the matter of the University of Louisville name. When individual UofL athletes depart the campus, a few become stars in the NBA or NFL and help their franchises collect big profits. Presumably, the players are rewarded with lucrative salaries.

However, the largest portion of former UofL basketball players (which is UofL's most lucrative sport) toil in relative anonymity in development leagues or foreign leagues. The players are presumably more skilled and experienced once they leave campus, but they no longer generate nearly the same revenues for their new programs. UofL fans cheer these players, and pay for tickets, sweatshirts, and TV ads, precisely because they wear the cardinal red of the local sports team and perform their feats on local courts and fields.

Does UofL Athletics pay the University for this association? No. Instead, Athletics collected $23 million in licensing and royalties in 2013.

Literally, Athletics rakes in tens of millions of dollars annually thanks to its affiliation with the University.


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ISA 2017

Harbor view from Hyatt Regency

I attended the 2017 ISA conference in Baltimore this past week. It's enormous and I have ambivalent feelings about it. There are 75 to 80 panels at a time, with at least 5 people usually on each panel (4 or 5 papers is typical on "regular" panels, plus a chair/discussant). Lots of people complain about under-attended panels, but many show up for roundtables featuring prominent scholars in the discipline.

I managed to see a few old friends from academia and from the "real" world. I visited a brewpub and a craft beer bar, walked around Camden Yards, and took the commuter train to DC in order to do some work tied to my job as department chair. Soon, I'll try to upload a few pictures with this post.

Pictured below left: the Babe Ruth statue outside Camden Yards and the beer menu from The Brewer's Art last Wednesday night.

Saturday morning, I presented a paper on "Trump and American Foreign Policy; A Threat to Peace and Prosperity?" I've uploaded it to my Academia.edu page and my Research Gate page. I'm grateful to Fabrizio Coticchia for his helpful comments. I'm not sure what to do with the paper, but Fabrizio had helpful insights about Silvio Berlusconi that seem directly applicable to Trump and about the literature on political "outsiders" who assume executive power.

If anyone reads the paper and has comments, please send them along. Also, I'm genuinely looking for ideas about what to do with it. At minimum, it has prepared me for teaching about Trump in class.

Note: "The Voice" TV program was conducting auditions just around the corner from my hotel and near the conference. I've included a photo of the line:

The Voice auditions

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The UofL Foundation President

University of Louisville President James Ramsey resigned this past week, though he offered to continue serving in that capacity through the end of the academic year (at the same generous level of compensation he had been receiving). The Board of Trustees declined to accept that offer and he was immediately replaced by an interim President, Interim Provost Neville Pinto -- a choice apparently mandated by the University's "Redbook".

The day after this occurred, Ramsey reported to work at Grawemeyer Hall as President of the University of Louisville Foundation. For those not paying close attention, it has largely been the UofL Foundation that has paid Ramsey millions of dollars annually over the past few years.

The Foundation's bylaws make clear how every member and officer of its Board of Directors is appointed. The University President is automatically a Director; thus, Pinto presumably replaces Ramsey as a voting member of the Foundation Board when it next meets in September. Some Foundation Board members serve because they are UofL Board members. The Foundation bylaws make clear that once a person is no longer serving UofL in these capacities, the person is no longer a voting director on the Foundation Board.

The President of the Foundation is a Board-elected one-year position that does not have to be filled by a director. The Foundation Board could end the relationship with Ramsey almost immediately, as reported by WDRB reporter Chris Otts:

Ramsey acknowledged Thursday that because he resigned from the university, the foundation board can terminate his employment with no financial consequences.  But he said he hopes to convince the foundation directors to keep him on.

Note going forward that it is very unusual for any American Foundation leaders to earn more than about $130,000 annually. Indeed, Foundation leaders who are paid even $190,000 are in the 90th percentile for the position. Also, the IRS looks askance at very high payments to salaries for non-profit leaders. From section 4 of that linked IRS publication on Governance:

A. Executive compensation. A charity may not pay more than reasonable compensation for services rendered. Although the Internal Revenue Code does not require charities to follow a particular process in determining the amount of compensation to pay, the compensation of officers, directors, trustees, key employees, and others in a position to exercise substantial influence over the affairs of the charity should be determined by persons who are knowledgeable in compensation matters and who have no financial interest in the determination. Organizations that file Form 990 will find that Part VI, Section B, Line 15 asks whether the process used to determine the compensation of an organization’s top management official and other officers and key employees included a review and approval by independent persons, comparability data, and contemporaneous substantiation of the deliberation and decision. 

James Ramsey was very well compensated as a University President, but it is hard to see a case for continued generous compensation as a mere Foundation President.

Leadership Disarray

All of the administrative changes mentioned above are somewhat clouded by a Kentucky court-imposed injunction yesterday ruling that Governor Matt Bevin's newly constituted UofL Board (the one that accepted Ramsey's resignation earlier in the week) is NOT the University's Board any more. The Board that Bevin claims to have dissolved (as opposed to firing, which would have been illegal without a hearing for each trustee) is again THE UofL Board. Of course, it is short several members as it has been since late March when the Governor argued (persuasively) that the Board in place at the time violated state law because it had too little minority representation. The University apparently again has a Board in place that has refused to act on personnel issues (tenure and promotion cases, new tenure track hires) since late March because of its lack of minority representation.

Some members of the now reconstituted UofL Board served also on the Foundation, by the bylaws of that institution. They had already been dismissed, so the operational status of both entities is in disarray. The judge issuing the injunction did state that the ruling would not change actions Bevin's Board had taken, such as accepting Ramsey's resignation. However, Bevin's Board had not approved a proposed 5% tuition increase and the old Board had explicitly rejected that proposed increase back in early June.

The University is in the new fiscal year without a firm budget and clear notion of the cost of tuition. Classes start in four weeks. Without a tuition increase, planned faculty and staff pay raises could only be funded by deeper cuts in other University budgets -- or perhaps Foundation contributions. Many jobs will likely be eliminated if additional cuts are needed. The inability to operate is a disaster and Government Bevin could prolong this disaster indefinitely by failing to add members to the old Board. Based on his immediate reaction to the injunction ruling, Bevin's office plans to appeal the ruling.

Foundation Leadership and Accountability

The University of Louisville Foundation is an important supplemental source of University funding, particularly vital in a time of crisis. Should the Foundation retain James Ramsey as President in this time of need?

I blogged several months ago about the poor performance of the University's endowments . My spouse told me that my posting had been linked by friends and colleagues on Facebook -- and that some commenters there criticized elements of my argument. Some of the criticisms were certainly valid. After all, I compared University endowment performance to my personal investment performance, which has hinged on a "buy and hold" (and reinvest dividends) strategy that did not include withdrawals for spending.

The University needs asset growth in order to spend, but the overall endowment doesn't really need to grow as long as the investments are generating sufficient revenue to fund spending needs. The University needs to average 5.5% annual growth in order to fund endowed spending -- and then more than that to pay Foundation operating costs (including apparently millions of dollars in payments to top University leaders).

Note that President Ramsey and his supporters have often defended his performance as a fundraiser for the University, so a lack of growth in the overall size of the endowment either indicates that he has not really raised lots of new money or that the older investments have performed poorly.

As President, arguably, Ramsey had a leadership role for both tasks. Indeed, this is probably where I should have directed my criticism several months ago. The Foundation President seems like an appropriate person to hold accountable. According to the Foundation bylaws, the President:

...shall be the Chief Administrative Officer and General Manager of the Corporation.  He shall, in addition, perform such other and further duties and have such powers as are usually performed and possessed by similar officers of like corporations, whether stock or nonstock. The President is authorized to execute any instrument of writing for the Corporation and to act for it under any agency contract or agreement it may have with any corporate agent which at any time may be holding or administering any of its assets or endowment or trust funds; any such agent may assume that the President has authority to bind and act for this Corporation.

How has the Foundation/President performed managing its money -- or hiring the right managers to oversee Foundation funds?

I'll answer that question with an anecdote, but the story involves an endowment that is one of the largest in the College of Arts and Sciences. The Department of Political Science, which I have chaired since January 2012, includes the Center for Asian Democracy and an Aung Sun Suu Kyi endowed chair in Asian Democracy. The CAD and the chair are actually funded by two endowment accounts. One account was a late 1990s "bucks for brains" state-funded personnel line that was originally funded at $1 million or more. The other is a $5 million grant from the U.S. Department of State.

Those grants and endowments date back to at least 2006. This is ambiguous because the "bucks for brains" account is older and may have previously been tied to a different endowed chair. As a result, when Political Science inherited the account in 2006, the endowment was worth about $1.5 million. The State Department monies arrived at Louisville in 2006 and were vested for a spending policy one year later.

The $5 million 2006 grant from the Department of State was worth only $4.113 million as of December 31, 2015. That's a key date because the University uses it to decide a spending policy for the following academic year. After a decade managing $5 million, the Foundation managed to lose (or spend) over 15% of its value.

Oh, and this wasn't simply because the endowment was created just before the Great Recession. As recently as December 31, 2013, the endowment was worth $5.066 million.

The DJIA closed at  16576.66 on December 31, 2013. On the same date in 2015, it closed at 17425.03. The stock market grew a bit more than 5% in that period, which is somewhat disappointing and obviously below the 5.5% annual return threshold needed to allow a full spending policy and preserve principal. However, the CAD endowment lost a substantial portion of its original principal, well beyond the spending policy.  Incidentally, the DJIA closed at 12463.15 in 2006, meaning the DJIA is up about 40% during the entire period of the CAD's existence. A well-managed account likely could have preserved almost all of the principal and achieved a sizeable chunk of a 5.5% annual spending policy. A well-performing investment might have managed to increase the size of the account and the annual spending policy.

Clearly, University of Louisville Foundation investments have not been especially well-managed over the decade in question. Is the President of that entity going to be held to account?

What are people tied to endowed personnel lines supposed to do going forward?

The CAD endowment returned insufficient funds this year to pay even the endowed chair salary. Last year, CAD additionally employed a staff member to manage programming, two postdoc researchers, and a graduate research assistant.

Again, who should be held responsible for a decade of poor performance?

Given that endowments were down in 2015, James Ramsey personal assets grew substantially more than the Foundation's assets. And that's just based on his payments from the Foundation.


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Digital Activism

For years, I've been interested in the possibility of political activism and public deliberation on the internet. As department chair, I recently hired a former graduate student, Matt Evans, to teach an online course on "Political Activism in the Digital Age."

Here's the course description, for students who might be interested in enrolling over the next month:

How do we change the world? 

Over 100 years ago, Henry David Thoreau answered this question by suggesting Americans should vote with their whole ballot. This means utilizing the better part of politics – the aspect that could change the world in the face of impossible obstacles through all those activities outside the realm of voting called activism. 

Political Activism in the Digital Age – an online political science course in Fall 2016 – examines activism through the concrete tactics of activists in groups and social movements within and outside of the US. Rather than work through overpriced textbooks – an oxymoron – the class will draw on readings, videos, and other material accessible through Blackboard to empower students to change the world. For more information, contact the instructor Dr. Matt Evans.

Since it's an online class, students don't have to live in Louisville to enroll. Indeed, the instructor lives and teaches in Arkansas.


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UofL Board and Debate

Earlier this week, Kentucky Governor Matt Bevin picked a new Board of Trustees for the University of Louisville. As I blogged two weeks ago, Bevin recently disbanded the old Board in what appeared to be a brazen use of executive power given Kentucky statutes regulating the way Board members are supposed to be appointed and removed. Moreover, the committee that nominated the new Board members may itself be illegal because it lacks diversity. 

For those following from afar, I should note that the old Board's paralysis this year was initially triggered by a lack of diversity. It was not diverse and needed additional members to make lawful decisions. Governor Bevin could have fixed that problem any time since March simply by appointing new minority Board members. But he didn't. 

This post, however, isn't about the legal or political processes. Instead, it is about the nature of academic debate and the difference between faith and opinion on the one hand and knowledge on the other.

One of the newly appointed members, Douglas Cobb, has received special scrutiny for his controversial contributions to public discussion almost from the moment he was named to the Board. Cobb had an active twitter feed that was deleted shortly after he was named to the University's Board. However, the account feed survived long enough for various local reporters to notice that Cobb used it to deny mainstream climate science and evolution. He expressed anti-LGBT views and called for the firing of various University coaches and officials because of sports scandals (but not exactly these scandals). There's more:

Cobb, who is an elder at Louisville’s Southeast Christian Church, has also devoted attention on Twitter to issues involving Islam and terrorism, and gay, lesbian, bisexual and transgender issues, questioning fairness policies and quoting Bible verses.

In a tweet two years ago, Cobb said that when Nigerian-based terrorist group Boko Haram kidnapped as many as 200 school girls it was practicing a version of Islam that "is orthodox Islam." In another 2014 tweet, Cobb cited a biblical verse to say that being gay and Christian were “incompatible terms of identity.”

In various tweets referenced in the media stories, Cobb dubbed climate science a hoax "invented by the progressive left" and said it reflects a "socialist line."  He tweeted, that "the same people who are lying to you today about global warming have been lying to you for 150 years about evolution."

Perhaps because so many of Cobb's tweets reference the UofL athletic program, sports columnist Tim Sullivan wrote a piece today defending Cobb's contributions to debate about various issues, including controversial science and public policy positions Cobb staked out in his twitter feed. 

Still, debate is healthy. Public institutions warrant scrutiny from a wide range of vantage points. On some levels, appointing trustees whose points of view are likely to cause conflict is preferable to the intellectual lockstep of unquestioning cronies. Hard as it is look past Cobb's harsher opinions and judgmental attitude, his presence should prompt all constituencies to pay closer attention to board proceedings.

Given U of L's recent history, which has included federal charges of fraud, an FBI investigation into the misuse of funds, an NCAA probe of recruiting irregularities involving strippers and prostitutes, and disproportionate pay packages for administrators, it’s fair to ask whether the board should have been even more sharply divided and more inclined to challenge the status quo.

Plus, Cobb is bound to offer some dissenting opinions that will enliven local discourse and provide deserving pundits with fresh material on slow days.

What Sullivan ignores here is the difference between knowledge and rational debate on the one hand versus ideas grounded in faith and opinion. Cobb’s views on LGBT issues, Islam, and gender diversity apparently emanate from his faith. Fine. He’s entitled to his personal religious perspective, but should that faith play any role in influencing the future of a public University? Keep in mind that this same public University has been praised for being one of the most LGBT-friendly campuses in the South. Moreover, the University’s mission statement is committed firmly to diversity.

As for climate science and evolution, Cobb “debates” by referencing conspiracy theories and offering political slurs. The current mainstream scientific understandings are built on mountains of evidence, analysis, and peer-reviewed empirical research. Scientists can be wrong, but their errors should be identified through rigorous scientific processes. 

Oh, by the way, social science works in the same way and I’m quite confident our Middle East and Islamic Studies faculty could dismiss his dubious ideas about Boko Haram and Islam in less than 5 minutes of class time.

So far as I can see from the quoted tweets, Cobb has not contributed one meaningful idea to any active scientific debate in the wider public debate. It's not difficult to understand why this is so. Climate change, for example, has long been mainstream science with very little dissent in the scientific community. Journalists were partly to blame for any public perception of controversy because coverage was horribly misleading. Additionally, Exxon and other wealthy funders are also to blame as they invested substantial sums in propaganda to create public doubt about climate change. 

Oddly enough, Cobb’s business acumen, referenced by some supporters to defend his appointment to the Board, is supposedly tied to his work as an investment entrepreneur. Yet, I wonder if his right-wing politics cause him to miss some larger truths about green investment opportunities? 

Oh, and readers might want to know about a potential economic conflict of interest. UofL is invested in Cobb's firm, Chrysalis Ventures. 

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