[Zungaron]

The ADA already reconciles these viewpoints, by allowing for people who would otherwise be in violation to claim exemption because complying would cause an undue burden. So we shouldn't expect a random person on the internet to pay for captioning 20,000 videos, because that would be (presumably) ridiculously outside their means. On the other hand, it's reasonable to assume that a university that could recently afford a $400 million dollar renovation to their athletics stadium could afford to caption 20,000 videos.

[WillyOnWheels]

It's fun to assume things!

Anecdotal evidence I hear from UC Berkeley employees is that there just is no money to be had. The real solution is spend the money to make the videos ADA compliant. I don't know how much that would be but UC Berkeley isn't interested in spending the amount it would take, whatever it is.

The multi hundred dollar stadium renovation is now, with laser like 20/20 hindsight, considered a disaster. The football team's management has a new scandal every few months. The team's record is abysmal. The theory was that spending money to develop the football team results in greater alumni donations.

In UC Berkeley's defense, the state of California and the legislature is profoundly uninterested in funding the UC system at the levels it used to. The university has to get money from somewhere. Renovating Memorial Stadium was a part of that.

[curun1r]

> The multi hundred [million] dollar stadium renovation is now, with laser like 20/20 hindsight, considered a disaster

Is it though? The Pac-12 distribution per school is over $25m/yr, and despite lagging the Big-10 and SEC, it's only expected to go up. Given the efforts of the conference to launch the new network and compete with those other conferences, it's likely that there's a certain facility level expected of their member schools. If there was any chance that Cal would be dropped from the conference without the renovations, they start to seem a lot more reasonable...a 5-7% APY isn't really that bad.

Also, while fielding a competitive team might have been a nice benefit, there's at least one other significant benefit I see to retrofitting a stadium that sits directly on top of an earthquake fault line. See if you can guess what it is :)

But to your point, it does seem disingenuous to talk about money spent on a revenue-generating portion of the school when trying to justify the need to spend in ways that are revenue negative. Even considering the abysmal record and scandals, the football team brings in money to the University. If I were an AD at a University, I'd be very worried about football-related liability when former players start to experience the effects of CTE, but until those lawsuits start happening, it's natural that Universities will keep spending large amounts of money on Football.

[mathgeek]

> Anecdotal evidence I hear from UC Berkeley employees is that there just is no money to be had.

I think this is missing a trailing "... due to the budget being allocated elsewhere."

[imjustsaying]

>On the other hand, it's reasonable to assume that a university that could recently afford a $400 million dollar renovation to their athletics stadium could afford to caption 20,000 videos.

The blanket assumption that the benefit of captioning those videos is greater than the benefit of everything else that is done with those funds is not reasonable without some really good evidence.

[SilasX]

And yet, it does nothing to a university that simply takes down the free materials rather than pay that much more to host them. That doesn't seem like it's reconciling anything, beyond "yep, we're okay with the absurd implications".