A?number of things came to mind as I watched Jim Calhoun, head coach of the Connecticut men’s basketball team, devolve into a Neanderthal last spring after being asked by a “freelance reporter” whether, as Connecticut’s highest paid state employee, he was planning to return a portion of his contract to assist the state with its budget woes.

However, in the interest of relevance, Calhoun’s inability to best a reporter at the game of “who can appear to be smarter than a trained monkey ” is used here only to provide an anecdote to illuminate the area in which the realms of sports and politics overlap. Not in the sense of whether being a football fan affects how one will vote or whether “Ping Pong Diplomacy” (that is a Wikipedia page worth taking a look at) really works, but rather the politics of certain aspects of sports — in this case university sports.

This comes in many forms, ranging from whether college athletes responsible for bringing in millions of dollars in ticket and merchandise sales for their respective universities should be provided salaries to the more general issue of how much importance should be ascribed to varsity athletics in a university setting. However, the most pertinent of such debates to the average student are the student ticketing policies put in place for major sports such as football and basketball.?

This discussion quite obviously comes in light of Monday’s football student season-ticket online debacle in which I spent more than an hour watching my computer screen countdown from 60 only to start again after it reached zero. An exhaustive discussion as to whether the specific system the University of Wisconsin athletic department adopted was the best alternative available will be left for sports pages and blogs. It is worth noting, however, that it should not be incredibly difficult to predict the amount of traffic that a first come, first serve policy of season ticket distribution is likely to bring.? And also, that it is not at all difficult to purchase additional server capacity. Yes, UW spokesman Vince Sweeney, I understand that servers with capacities comparable to those used for recent Miley Cyrus concerts were being used but that doesn’t lend any justification to the athletic department’s failure. Maybe I’m out on a limb with this one, but it seems like there may be some serious differences between online purchasers of tickets for a Disney star’s concert and college students buying uniformly priced and strongly demanded football season tickets.

Regardless of practical objections to the student-ticket policy, the question still remains whether the athletic department’s practice of limiting the amount of available tickets to well below the number of students who would purchase them and selling them on a first-come, first-serve basis represents an honest and principled method in regard to the interests of students. A few people I have talked to in person and some who have commented online find it appalling that in a stadium that seats more than 80,000 any student is refused the opportunity to buy season tickets. This appears to me to be a serious consideration.

It is taken for granted that our athletic department should be able to limit, in circumstances that do not require it, the amount of students who can receive student season tickets. This is so, even though students are essentially responsible for the popularity and even existence of any given university sport.?

This past year I had a conversation with a UW faculty member who had previously sat on a committee responsible for outlining the overarching purposes of varsity sports at our university. I think the experiences of this professor provide useful insights into the issue. Within the committee, this professor informed me that the consensus from which the group worked was that UW athletics primary purpose was to make money for the university.

This makes sense, and is to an extent quite obvious. While sport does carry some amount of inherent value, it is clearly outweighed by the value it has as a fundraiser of sorts to the university, in theory providing greater resources to boost campus accessibility, prestige, or both. When you consider the amount of money potentially lost by allowing every student season tickets in the light of the actual purpose of university athletics it seems only logical that it simply is not a reasonable option.

This is not to say, however, that our athletic department may act as a business with no restrictions. Because of the indispensable relationship it holds with the students, who are responsible for its existence, it seems necessary that those students must be accommodated in a serious way. In principle, I think this adds up to the notion that in the case of football student tickets, any student who seriously desires to see their team play seven Saturdays every year should be given a reliable method by which to get them relatively cheaply?as a result of their own action.?This will not include every student. We all know plenty of people who don’t deserve to get tickets and won’t make much of a sacrifice to get them. But it should include those students with a?serious?grievance had they not been able to.

Basically, students who really want the tickets and are willing to act accordingly should be able to get them.

Not only would a policy such as this insure that the athletic department honored its responsibility to students on campus, it could do so while effectively limiting the size of the student section, which would boost profits.

For all intents and purposes, it appears as though the system in place now would fit this principle quite closely, more so than previous systems in which a lottery is used. Accordingly, assuming the athletic department can figure out a way to get their online ordering system to operate in a manner such as this, rather than randomly rewarding people who attempt to log on to the site at differing times, it is headed in the right direction. All in all, this looks like one test our athletic department may actually pass.?

Alec Slocum?([email protected])?is a senior majoring in philosophy and legal studies.