Cliff Kubiak was a chemistry professor at Purdue University in the 1980s and ’90s when the Boilermakers produced a handful of basketball players who went on to NBA careers.

He marveled at the athletes’ skills and the way their teams produced a spirit of camaraderie on campus.

Kubiak didn’t, however, get to know the players first-hand.

“I never, ever had them in my chemistry classes at Purdue,” Kubiak said with a chuckle.


Now a highly regarded professor of chemistry and biochemistry at UC San Diego, where he has taught since 1998, Kubiak is making this point: The student-athletes at Purdue and other schools who play NCAA Div. I athletics are not always the same as those at UCSD.

Kubiak says he usually has about a dozen athletes from all walks and sports each year in his freshman chemistry class.

“The 600 student-athletes we have are just basically really impressive people,” Kubiak said.

That was an important distinction in December when the UCSD faculty was asked to approve the university’s move from Division II to Division I. The students in May overwhelmingly voted in favor of a fee increase that will fund the Tritons in Div. I.


Amid concerns by some on campus that UCSD might lose its academic way amid big-time college athletics, a majority of the faculty voted in favor of Div. I. Needing a simple majority, 457 faculty members voted in favor, giving the measure a 62-percent approval among the 736 who cast ballots.

Kubiak has been the faculty’s liaison to the athletic department for eight years, and though he worked to provide information to both sides of the debate, he publicly supported the Div. I initiative.

“Obviously, there are pros and cons, but the faculty ended up respecting what the students wanted,” Kubiak said. “If the students want it, who are the faculty to say no? And I think that was the right call.”

In getting the faculty’s approval, UCSD completed the second phase of what Athletic Director Earl Edwards calls the “trifecta” of the process to move to Div. I. Next up is being accepted into a conference, and UCSD has applied for inclusion into the Big West, a nine-school league that includes four UC schools, four Cal State universities and Hawaii.


Big West Commissioner Dennis Farrell said a decision on UCSD’s application to join likely will be considered and voted on by mid-March. At least seven of the nine schools, represented by their chancellors and presidents, need to vote “yes” to accept the Tritons.

“Let’s just say I’m very hopeful,” Edwards said. “I don’t want to say anything more than that, because when you talk about votes you never know what’s going to happen.

“It’s primarily a California conference, and they don’t have a school in the San Diego market. It’s a huge market. And when you throw in our reputation as one of the top universities in the world, those things make me very hopeful.”

Farrell said he couldn’t speculate on the outcome of the vote.


“Typically, the presidents and chancellors are a very collegial group,” said Farrell, in his 25th year as commissioner. “If someone has a real major problem with it, they will flesh it out. I don’t think in the time I’ve been with the conference we’ve ever had a membership vote that wasn’t unanimous. You hate to have someone have real hard feelings.”

The considerations for the Big West schools regarding UCSD are fairly well defined. Farrell said the conference has operated very smoothly with nine members since Hawaii became the most recent member, in every sport but football, in 2012.

The Big West has a three-tier television deal that includes ESPN, Fox Sports Prime Ticket and ESPN3 that accounts for half of its men’s basketball games being televised.

Though experiencing a downward ebb this season, the conference had four men’s basketball teams ranked in the top 100 in RPI in 2015-16; Hawaii’s women’s volleyball team made it to the NCAA Elite Eight in 2015; three different baseball teams have made it to the College World Series in successive years.


So the conference doesn’t see UCSD bringing a huge, immediate upside – as it did when San Diego State and Boise State considered joining when those schools thought they were headed for the Big East in football.

“In the sports that are important to us I think we’ve got a pretty good reputation nationally,” Farrell said. “So I don’t think the pressure is there for us to move (to expand) if we don’t want to. It’s not going to make us look bad.”

Farrell said one other negative consideration -- though it’s mostly a short-term issue – is the possible effect on RPI ratings for the other Big West schools as UCSD adjusts to being competitive at the Div. I level.

The positives, according to Farrell: “Definitely, the strong academic reputation of the university, and the fact UC San Diego is very much like our other university members in terms of its academic mission. There’s also the San Diego media market. I’m not sure what kind of splash UCSD has in the market, but there’s potential there. And opening up the San Diego market from a recruiting standpoint would be a positive.”


On UCSD’s campus, before the faculty vote on DI, not all were bullish about moving up from Div. II, where the Tritons have competed successfully for 16 years.

A group of faculty members against the change put out an email citing their concerns about the “spectacle” of Div. I sports. They encouraged their peers to read the book, published in 2000 authored by Murray Sperber, “Beer and Circus: How Big-Time College Sports Is Crippling Undergraduate Education.”

“There is a concern that we would change our academic standards,” Edwards, the athletic director, said. “I don’t believe the faculty members who are opposed understand the distinction of Div. I without football. They are envisioning us becoming Michigan or UCLA, and that’s not going to happen.

“The major distinction is that there’s a big financial commitment when you go into football. You have a big commitment to make so you’re not going into the red.


“I want to emphasize that we’re very happy to keep our academics the way they are. We’ve become a public Ivy League (school).”

Said Kubiak: “There aren’t going to be two types of students at UCSD – athletes and non-athletes. I think that helped people get a little more comfortable with this stuff.”

As the faculty adviser for athletics, Kubiak has seen first-hand the kind of athletes the school attracts. He said the overall GPA of student-athletes equals that of non-athletes, while female athletes have a one-quarter point higher GPA than the overall student population.

Kubiak recalls a former starting soccer goalie who was a chemistry major. During the season, he’d arrive to find her working the lab at 7 a.m. He worried she was burning herself out. Then he checked her grades; she was pulling a 3.98. She went on to medical school and now is a doctor in San Diego.


“She’s an incredible human being, and I’ve met a lot like her,” Kubiak said.

“The student-athletes are committed and focused. They have all of these time management things they learn. I’m a firm believer that our students are getting two educations, in the classroom and on teams, learning to work with other people.”

tod.leonard@sduniontribune.com; Twitter: @sdutleonard