The Crying Man In The Empty Room

'What is it that you do, exactly?'

By Charlie Barnes

The Seminole Boosters raise money to support Seminole Athletics, all sports. We present the needs of the program to individual Seminoles who have the interest and the means to help, and we offer them a range of opportunities to assist in finding those needs.

It's not a terribly complicated process; it's just not as easy as it might sound. Extraordinary amounts of money are needed to properly fund the athletic program, and the Seminole Booster organization is wide-ranging in its efforts to meet those needs. Accurate comparisons are hard to come by, but I would not be surprised to learn that Seminole Boosters Inc. is the most successful intercollegiate athletic fundraising organization in the nation.

The question before us is this: What does the university derive from all this activity? How is the university's mission advanced by a successful athletic program and the entire massive infrastructure required to support it?

What is the University's Mission?

Florida State's mission, and that of all legitimate universities, is to move humanity toward the light and push back against the darkness. It has always been so, since the earliest times thatpeople began to value learning and culture.

Even today the veneer of civilization is more fragile than we want to believe. Before invaders burned the Great Library at Alexandria more than 2,000 years ago it contained an estimated 40,000 volumes. Lost forever, it is said, were records of the entire history of civilization to that point in time. Encroaching darkness is an ancient story but a consistent one, all too familiar to us in 2015.

For the most part, the brightest points of light that we can see from above are the citadels of higher education.

As a freshman at Florida State I spent hours in the Music Library. In that building was a long corridor with rows of doors on either side. Behind the doors were small practice rooms, the walls and ceilings lined with baffles to deaden noise.

I saw a man sitting alone in one of the rooms. He was weeping. He was pouring over a sheaf of papers, an orchestral score. There was no sound but he could "hear" the music as he read, and the eloquence and beauty of it brought him to tears.

I can't do that. I can play a single series of notes but I can't "hear" the magic of an orchestral score in my mind.

Two years ago existence of the Higgs boson, the unfortunately misnamed "God Particle," was confirmed. I asked a physicist at Florida State to help me try to understand just the basics of the Higgs concept. No matter how he tried I was lost. "Well," he said with a shrug, "if you could read the math you'd be able to see it."

And that's the problem: I can't "hear" the un played music and I can't read the mathematics. But there are those who can do those things and much more, and most of them are safely cocooned within our universities.

Yes, our modern colleges and universities have their shortcomings. Academia can be petty and arrogant. And, yes, the maddening hypocrisy of political correctness can generate hostility toward the Ivory Towers. But the work of all those institutions serves to preserve the best hopes of mankind.

The only mission of any university, every university, is to push back hard against the darkness and to protect the light.

Why all this emphasis on private money. Doesn't the State fund FSU?

In one generation the role of the president at Florida State has changed dramatically.

At FSU, the timeline of academic fundraising lagged behind similar efforts for athletics, primarily because the State funded its public universities and the need for private fundraising wasn't as pressing. Seminole Boosters was created in 1951 because the young program needed financing. On the other hand the FSU Foundation, charged with responsibility for raising academic dollars, didn't come into existence until the 1960s.

Florida State was not alone in that scenario. The University of Florida did not launch their first comprehensive capital campaign until 1988. Until the mid-1950s, there were only three public universities in Florida and two of them were in Tallahassee. The first public Medical School class in the State of Florida didn't graduate until 1960.

In the era of the 1960s FSU had around 13,000 students and Florida about 17,000. The State of Florida continued to invest hundreds of millions of dollars expanding university educational facilities and academic support, pouring enormous resources into a relatively few public institutions.

The landscape is much changed now. The financial requirements in support of higher education today are on a scale undreamed of 50 years ago. In 2015, there are a dozen state universities in Florida (if you're trying to count them all, don't overlook New College in Sarasota and Florida Polytechnic in Lakeland). The state is expected to fund 40 public colleges and universities with a student enrollment of 1,208,000!

For Florida State University and our peer public institutions, fundraising is the oxygen that feeds the bellows. The demand is constant and unrelenting.

You can track the timeline at FSU like rings on a tree. Look at the names on the buildings around our campus. The older ones were named for former university presidents or distinguished retired faculty or administrators when private money wasn't the priority. The more recent buildings are named for donors or for the political leaders who made that constructions possible.

How Does a Winning Athletics Program Support the University's Mission?

It is an article of faith among people who really understand collegiate fundraising that a great deal of money comes into public universities through the locker room door. Of course that understanding is not shared by everyone.

I'm suspicious when I hear or read a sentence that begins, "Studies have shown…" Our society is burdened in far too great abundance with aplethora of pseudo academic studies produced by political think-tanks, agenda-driven activists, corporate PR flacks, and self-important polemicists. Tell me any point you wish to make and I will produce a study that conclusively supports your point of view.

Professionals in our business - the business of raising money for collegiate athletics - are sometimes confronted with snide comments to the effect that winning intercollegiate athletic teams have little or no effect on institutional academic fundraising. "Studies have shown it" don't you know.

Those studies are wrong. However, one of the insistent voices clamoring otherwise is author Rick Telander, sports columnist for the Chicago Sun-Times. Typical of others who share his views, Telander reasons that the entire income big-time schools make on their sports programs goes back toward sustaining the program itself and none of it flows to the host institution. He sneers at "the fans and their $100,000 land yachts", as if they are all yahoos who care nothing for the institution's greater mission.

It is as if Telander is describing a large landscape as viewed through a keyhole. That view is disingenuous and belies the truth. The truth is that many of the fans he so despises make separate and distinct gifts to their universities' academic and athletic programs. Many major donors to Seminole Boosters also makes contributions to the FSU Foundation.

Yes, the financial requirements of a first rate Division I athletics program continue to increase and schools struggle to keep up with sharply rising costs. Using Notre Dame as an example, Telander posits, "If a philanthropist is going to give to the library, it is because he loves books, not buttonhooks … Big time sports and support for learning have nothing to do with one another."

He's wrong, but even if that were accurate it is only true for a small number of schools. Telander's examples include Notre Dame, Tulane, SMU, Southern California, Harvard, his alma mater Northwestern and others - all of them private universities with very long histories of fundraising independent of appropriations from state legislatures.

One obvious counterargument to Telander's hypothesis lies in the fact that so many more schools are now racing to start football programs. Florida State's game attendance was up this year as was the ACC overall, but critics have pointed to a slight decrease in the overall average attendance at college football games. Some if not all of that might be explained by the rush on the part of so many small schools to begin or reinstate football programs. The excitement of a new program may fill a 15,000 seat stadium, but that small number will bring down the average of all stadiums.

FSU is a state university only one generation removed from the era when there was full state funding of all academic programs. Like all the other public state universities in Florida we have had to learn how to raise the money from private sources - money that will make us a more exceptional university.

Harvard is 379 years old with an endowment north of $36 billion. So no, they wouldn't fret over a losing season. But it should be noted that the Crimson went undefeated this year, 14-0. Did you know that MIT also plays football? The Engineers went undefeated as well in 2014, 9-0. If it wasn't important to Harvard and MIT, these schools wouldn't field teams. From Berkeley to Baton Rouge, from Boston to Birmingham, happy alumni are generous alumni.

A strong sense of identity is key to university fundraising. Most of us look back on our salad days with deep fondness, and in some ways the campus is our time machine. Where Westcott stands is the oldest continuous site of higher education in Florida. There have been many changes, but on a spring day the core of the campus still looks, feels, smells the way we remember.

Seminole athletics creates a powerful emotional infrastructure. It exerts a sort of gravitational pull, seducing alumni back to the beautiful campus they walked in their youth. Seminole athletics is the picture window through which the nation views the greater good work of Florida State.

Every dollar the Boosters raise, every dollar that you contribute, directly supports the advancement of our university's mission.

University Center was a public-private partnership conceived and speared-headed by Seminole Boosters. The impressive DeVoe Moore Center houses five separate colleges of the university. The Dunlap Student Success Center was completed with funds wrapped inside a larger gift to Seminole Athletics. The massive CollegeTown innovation is also an initiative of Seminole Boosters. CollegeTown serves to draw more and more alumni back to the campus and from greater distances.

Envision it this way: Seminole Boosters and the FSU Foundation are separate elements of the same team. They're like the offensive and defensive squads in football. Except in this case most of the starters play both ways. Let's call the FSU Alumni Association our special teams. They don't raise money directly but they back the plays of the fundraisers and they have much to do with boosting overall team morale. President John Thrasher is the head coach, and Vice President Tom Jennings, Athletics Director Stan Wilcox and President of Seminole Boosters, Inc. Andy Miller are the assistant coaches who coordinate and execute the overall team logistics.

No, I cannot hear the unplayed notes nor can I read the math. But it's not necessary that I be the one to do it. There are intelligent, sensitive people on this campus who can do all those things and much more.

It's all about gathering strength to repel the darkness and move toward the light.

And what better symbolic manifestation of that hope for humanity can there be than three fiery torches?

And one burningspear…