The ancient Romans had an expression “panem et circenses” (“bread and circuses”) that accurately described in Roman imperial times what it took to keep people from acting out their discontentment in a society where one half of one percent of 50 to 60 million people controlled eighty percent of the wealth. Bread and circuses was the way it worked. All was well for the 200,000 privileged few, so long as they kept grain doles steady and put on gladiatorial shows and chariot races regularly. Being able to get a ticket to be inside an arena or hippodrome made you feel privileged. The social cost for the great majority of human beings is not hard to imagine. And inexorably, Rome declined and fell.

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Something like a “bread and circuses” effect operates in our country. And the parallels with ancient Rome are dismaying. The gladiatorial violence of football is watched nationwide in stadiums of increasing grandeur. Luxury boxes affording lavish creature comforts for elites have spread from professional stadiums to the college and high school levels. No matter the clear evidence for traumatic brain injury and other damage to the minds and bodies of the participants and the economic exploitation of many student athletes. Entering a stadium on game day initiates a rush that surges with the kickoff and first tackle. The communal solidarity of fans rooting for their team enhances the thrill and comfort and gives a sense of belonging. Increasingly violent forms of martial and beyond-pugilistic arts are performed for audiences in arenas across the country and regularly appear on television.

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But what are the social costs?

The University of Texas at Austin has declared itself “The Joneses” of college sports that other programs have to keep up with. But as top dog, UT has to keep up with itself. Now in planning is a project for the rapid expansion of the south end of Darrell K. Royal Memorial Stadium. Cost in dollars? $140 million. The social cost? Inestimable.

Does UT-Austin have other needs on which such revenues could be spent?

Consider: Since the sub-prime collapse in 2008-’09, the talented and hard-working staff employees who keep UT-Austin running have not seen a decent raise or any increases even approaching the escalating cost of living in Austin. In several years, they have received nothing. This year in the College of Liberal Arts they will get a one-time bonus that disappears from their salary the following year.

The faculty are getting a 1.4 percent raise, including some who were meritorious enough to be nominated for much, much larger raises being redirected by the central administration to at most one third of the faculty.

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We need academic buildings. The UT-Austin administration has reported that postponed repairs to decaying building infrastructure on campus now amount to hundreds of millions of dollars. There is no money for it. Recently the Fine Arts dean inspired mass protests. How? He wanted space for a new high-tech design studio, probably smaller than the aggregate space of head coaches’ offices on campus. He chose to do severe damage to a library collection to get space for The Foundry.

Lorraine Haricombe, vice provost for UT Libraries, explained to the Faculty Council on April 9 that the libraries at UT-Austin, including world-class special collections like the Harry Ransom Center, the Benson Latin American Collection and the Fine Arts, Classics and Geology libraries, have been losing ground as library funding has plateaued in the last decade. UT has the tenth largest collection of books and related materials in the country. But we have diminishing support to maintain it.

Graduate student stipends at UT-Austin are so low now in actual dollars, in relationship to the cost of living in Austin and to the offers of peer institutions, that it is miraculous they are still attracted to the university.

The College of Liberal Arts as a college has eliminated 60 faculty lines in the last eight years simply to fund minimal annual salary increases. We have lost more than 10 percent of our tenured and tenure-track teaching and research faculty.

Does UT-Austin really need a $140 million stadium expansion?

By the way, Debt service for construction and renovation of buildings on campus, including those for athletics, comes out of the UT-Austin operating budget. UT-Austin does not have a separate budget for buildings. So, any debt service paid is money that had to be taken away from spending on student scholarships, faculty or staff salaries, books and equipment.

The so-called “Godzillatron,” a giant video board inside Royal-Memorial Stadium that cost over $10 million in current dollars about a decade ago, has been scrapped. Will its replacement help us to see what is wrong with this picture?

Palaima is a classics professor at UT-Austin and Martinich is a philosophy professor at UT-Austin.