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Nancy Cantor knows big-time collegiate athletics. From her time as provost at Michigan to her stint as chancellor at Illinois to her current post as chancellor at Syracuse, she has dealt with the constant battle of fielding sports programs that are both successful on the field, off the field and on the books.

She sat down for a half-hour interview with The Daily Orange on Tuesday to talk about the state of Syracuse's athletic department. This is a partial transcript of the interview. Her answers have been edited for length and re-arranged in a different order. Listen to more of the interview at dailyorange.com.

Daily Orange: Is there a sense that the next few football seasons are a little more crucial?

Cantor: Absolutely, without question. But every season has been crucial. But yeah, absolutely. Everybody has been pretty clear about that. And part of that is frankly it's really important to the community, to our alumni, to the student body. I get on the one hand complaints about, 'Why do we give Athletics any money?' and on the other hand I get complaints every time we lose a game.

It seems like everything Athletics has done lately is going smoothly, but if football could just get going, the department would be in much better shape. Is that the sense you have?

I do, actually. I'm pretty optimistic. Yeah, I really do. They've been able to balance their budget, but again under (Responsibility Center Management) using reserves is exactly what we expect places to do.

Is Athletics viable going forward?

I think that going forward we have the same challenge with Athletics that we do lots of our units on campus that don't have lots of different revenue sources. And that is we've got to keep an aggressive fund raising profile so that just what (Athletic Director) Daryl (Gross) is trying to do in, for example, he didn't build the (new basketball) practice facility until he knew he could raise enough money for it. That's one big challenge.

Do I think it's viable going forward? Only if we can keep raising money. We've got to turn around football because it's one of our main revenue (sources). We can't put it on the backs of the rest of the institution any more than we are and do what we are doing, what we always did (subvention). I think that it will be very important to build really strong women's programs. I think ultimately that women's ice hockey…here we are in the Northeast with lots of young girls doing ice hockey in schools, certainly in the region, and a lot of men getting interested in men's sports. We have a facility like Tennity. I think we could really generate some things.

The notion of is it viable. Is it always a challenge? Absolutely. Could we ever sit still and think it's easy to mount this level of Athletics? No. Do we always have to look for efficiencies? Absolutely. Those are hard decisions. Mounting ice hockey couldn't be done at the same time as preserving swimming. Those are hard decisions. Not that they're in a one-to-one. We didn't close swimming because of ice hockey. We closed swimming because it would've taken a huge facility.

So I don't think it's straightforward by any means. But I also think that a vibrant intercollegiate athletics program, held to high standards - and that's something I care more about - is an enormous burden to an institution. It's very important to our region. We don't have a lot of professional sports teams in our region. This means a lot to our region. That's important to us because it keeps the quality of life around here up.

Athletics spent $1.2 million of its reserve fund to balance its budget in 2006-07 and expects a "comparable" situation in 2007-08. While you said RCM encourages centers to use their reserve funds, you can't use them each year.

No, you can't, exactly, and that's why we watch carefully, and Athletics has been very good about that. They've really husbanded that reserve over the last few years, especially because we knew with football revenues down, there was going to be real pressure on them. There's no getting around it, as you said. Football revenues are down. We hope that turns around. We believe it will turn around.

Programs have weathered this. I remember at Illinois the same kind of thing when they went for several seasons and then turned it around. Big-time programs are just very dependent on and sensitive to the ups and downs and their revenue-generating sports.

Both (chief financial officer) Lou Marcoccia and I, and the board of the trustees, watch very carefully to make sure Athletics keeps a reasonable reserve because they're going to need it if something goes wrong in a facility, our whole athletics program goes down if you don't have a reserve to pay for it. So for example, they're doing renovations to Tennity to be able to put in the locker room and all that. They're going to use the reserve fund for that. They have to have that because again we're not going to pay for athletic facilities. They're really either doing fund raising as with the Carmelo Anthony facility, or they're using carryover reserves.

Why is subvention at the level it is at Syracuse?

The thing to think about Athletics is that the vast portion of its portfolio, namely the non-revenue generating Olympics sports, and all of the women's sports. And this is going to be a very important point - all of the women's sports, are at this point (non-revenue). We hope ultimately they might be revenue-generating, like basketball might, women's lacrosse might.

The comparable thing would be the library. You always have to, quote, subsidize a library, or a museum, or parking services. This may sound odd to you, but parking services has a huge subvention relative to (its revenues). We would never want to charge what you'd need to charge to break even on something like that.

The point of this, is really simply to say, the aim of RCM is to be able to make all of our decisions - it wasn't to not have subventions - was to make our decisions transparent. For example the Maxwell school doesn't enroll separately all of its undergraduates because it's a part of Arts and Sciences. But it's a fabulous school, and you would want that subvention to be there.

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