It’s a lot of money and you’ll get jack.

The Sports and Activity Facility fee would cost you a whopping $132.32 a year at $33.83 per quarter, including Summer Quarter. Only a small part of that would go to putting artificial turf on Rob Field and Storke Field and making them accessible to intramural sports teams for the entire year. The rest of the cash would go to building new swimming pools and tennis courts for the intercollegiate teams and refurbishing the baseball, softball and track facilities. If you’re not on those sports teams, this won’t do anything for you.

The fee’s supporters claim that better sports facilities will attract better athletes who will win championships which will somehow increase the value of your UCSB degree. Bullshit. Can you imagine yourself in a job interview 10 years from now and hearing your employer say, “Ah, UCSB. Great men’s water polo team.”?

Sports facilities are usually paid for by either the university or alumni associations. UCSB doesn’t have alumni interested in paying for a prettier baseball field, and the university isn’t interested because it doesn’t think it’ll enhance the university’s prestige.

UCSB would pay for these facilities if it thought it would do a thing for its reputation. Anything that enhances the university’s prestige means it’s easier to hit people up for donations to the school. The fact that the administration doesn’t take these facilities seriously enough to buy them should tell you exactly how much they mean to the value of your degree.

The intramural fields need work, but we shouldn’t pay for the rest of this crap.