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I want to emphasize two things that Chair Monter said. First of
all, this was an incredibly difficult decision, it was a painful decision for me and for the
Board of Trustees. We are well aware of the long tradition of Hofstra football. We know
that we are making a transition difficult. We will try to ease it, but for our students,
our student athletes, and our coaches, and so on. So there’s no joy in this whatsoever;
there’s a lot of pain in it. But nonetheless, we were all absolutely certain that this is
the right decision for So let me explain to you why. First of all,
I want to emphasize that this is not a cutting of our budget. It’s not that we’re going
to eliminate football and spend less money. This is a strategic reallocation of those
resources. In a sports program which, after exhaustive review, we concluded, did not bring
benefits and could not bring the benefits that you would think, that you would want
of a national highest level athletic program to us. Two, our number one priority, which
is to academic measures and that would mean we are using the savings for academic initiatives
and for, most importantly, for more need based scholarship aid to a broader group of students.
So let me tell you what this is not. This is not a reflection of an economic crisis
at Hofstra. I can’t blame it, and I wouldn’t blame it, on economic straightjackets at the
university. We are doing very well. Every institution has been affected by the economy
to some extent, but we have done remarkably well. We just got our A credit rating reaffirmed
by standard emporas and Moody’s. We are in the middle of two construction projects;
a ten million dollar renovation of what used to be the Jets facility into an interim medical
school facility, and a seven million dollar expansion and refurbishment of a Physical
Fitness Center for all of our students. A new medical school is coming on line in the
fall of 2011. We will be building a brand new medical school building for a hundred
million dollars and so on. This is not any financial crisis at the university, it is
simply¦but that said, no institution can afford to do everything, no matter what the
return is, and what we decided in this situation was, under a normal cost-benefit analysis,
didn’t make sense to continue our football
program. Our football program has not produced, as I said before, the benefits that one would
expect from a top level , highest level athletic competition. And one of the main reasons for
that is that we do not play at the highest level. We do not play in a bowl conference,
so there is no national coverage, in the football championship series, what used to be called
1AA. There is no pot of gold at the end of the rainbow. The people who win the championships
lose just as much money after they win the championship the next year as they did before.
Three of the last four years, Appalachia state was the champion. Last year, Richmond was
the champion, and I don’t think too many people will remember that in terms of the
lack of national coverage. So, in a sense, this subdivision of football is football purgatory.
You need to spend a lot of money to be competitive, but there are none of the benefits that a
robust athletic program produces. And in fact, at Hofstra, this program did not produce significant
support from any of our constituencies. It did not produce financial support. In 2008
and 2009, Hofstra University expended a net after al l revenues are considered, a 4.5
million dollars for this football program. And that number, the net, and that accounts
all ticket sales, all gifts, all income on endowments, which after 69 years is about
a 400 thousand football endowment which produces 5% a year which comes nowhere close to meeting
the 4.5 million dollar shortfall. So it hasn’t been supported financially, it’s a significant
amount of money. The attendance has been very disappointing over the years. It’s a thirteen
thousand seat stadium, we average five hundred of our students per game. And that includes
the cheerleaders and the dance club and the pep band, all of whom are great, but when
you substitute all that, it does not have a broad student interest. I mean, we have
12,500 students, we have 4,200 students on campus, the tickets are free, absolutely free,
and we can only average 500 students per game. We have 172 season tickets to football for
a thirteen thousand seat stadium. We have 750,
by the way, season tickets to basketball in a much smaller arena, that only seats four
thousand or five thousand or so. So, people have voted on this in terms of their financial
support and their attendance for it. And as I said, it just hasn’t generated the national
media that we wanted to get out of it. So,
it’s a simple cost-benefit analysis. We believe, and the board believes, most importantly,
that the benefits that we were getting back from this simply weren’t worth 4.5 million
dollars a year and rising, and that we would be better off reallocating these resources
to other purposes. Academics are our first priority. Athletics are important, but academics
is our first priority. So, we have a new medical school coming up on line, we need to take
advantage of the opportunities it offers. We need to increase our undergraduate and
graduate sciences. That requires more faculty lines, more laboratories, more research. We
need to take our engineering program, which is now just a program, and raise its profile
and turn it into a school of engineering. We need to create a public health program
and ultimately a school of public health program. And all of those resources, that every year
, four and a half, and then it would have been five million a year, and then it would
have been 5.5. All of those resources, instead of going into a football program which doesn’t
generate any significant interest will go into academics. And the other purpose, as
I said before, is that the saved funds will be used for need based scholarships. And I
have to tell you, in this economy and in the foreseeable future, we are just sad every
time I hear a good student say I really want to go to Hofstra, it’s my first choice,
but I can’t afford it. I can’t afford it. My parents can’t afford it or I can’t
afford it. Or students who are here and have done well who say I can’t stay here
and graduate. I’d love to stay here and graduate, but the debt load is too high, I
can’t get loans, so we need, Hofstra University, we need to keep good students and spread it
out over many students by increasing our need based aid. So those will be the two purposes
that these saved funds will go to. And the last thing I want to say to you is that this
in no way diminishes the fact that we believe a robust athletic program is extremely important
to Hofstra University. In fact, we want to play at the highest national level. We are
keeping, and have no plans to drop any other sport. We are keeping our 17 teams which don’t
play in a lower division in 1A as football does, but at the highest level. That will
require a continual investment a year, an investment of 18 million dollars. I mean,
we are committing 18 million dollars a year to have a first rate athletic program. And
this also has no reflection on the team or the players or the coach. This doesn’t have
to do with how they’re doing, what kind of a job they’re doing or whatever. They
have made us proud, they’re all good people. This has to do with a built in structural
weakness which requires the expenditure of tremendous sums with no cap in sight for very
little return. Thank you.