The teachers have been getting the short end of the stick for a long time now.

I remember a highschool teacher saying the students were never the reason she was frustrated. It was the administration.

This idea sounds a lot more appealing when nobody has to specify which services they think should be cut.

Everything athletic.

> [Cut] Everything athletic.

Yeah, but then the sports fans would cry "Cut everything musical". The band members would argue "Cut everything on stage", and the drama society would return with "Cut all the sports".

FWIW, I don't think that sports should have a large place in tertiary educational institutions. It is the activity that has minimal positive impact on education, and largely negative educational impact on those people who play sports.

While everything else at university leads to some sort of learning, sports leads to the opposite - blind and uncritical tribalistic support of the university team, purely because "That's our side". That sort of thing results in blind and uncritical tribalistic support of politics later in life.

We want fewer "I support $FOO because I'm part of the $GROUP that must support $FOO", not more.

In Europe historically no university has such a large body of sports/teams/etc. You can do without. But of course there are other factors here, like branding, broadcasting fees and the like that would make it very hard to get rid of now.

Maybe so but in the United States athletics have been a big part of universities for a long time; it is a relatively recent phenomenon that they have been surpassed by professional leagues. I don't think I even agree that there's no benefit to students from having them.

I suspect that wouldn't even be a financially positive decision for universities.