From CalMatters: CalMatters is suing the second UC campus — UC Berkeley — in as many months to force the institution to release financial data on how much its student athletes earn from name, image and likeness deals. The suit, filed last week in the Alameda County Superior Court, is nearly identical to the one the nonprofit news outlet filed against UCLA in August. In both cases, the campuses refused to divulge how much they pay athletes after a national legal settlement last year that permits U.S. colleges to compensate their athletes directly. “We are reviewing the complaint and are going to decline comment at this time,” wrote Janet Gilmore, a spokesperson for UC Berkeley...
...Campuses can direct up to $20.5 million to student-athletes. At UC Berkeley, that pool of money is made up of athletics revenues, philanthropic funds, and “some campus funds,” the school’s chancellor, Richard Lyons, wrote last year...
CalMatters spent almost a year seeking the data from UC Berkeley. It filed numerous California Public Records Acts requests to public universities across the state. Several campuses offered paltry data in response. Others, however, produced at least partial records, indicating that the payment records and contracts the newsroom seeks are public records, the lawsuit said. For example, UC Riverside reported that it provided its male athletes about $200,000, including multiple payments to the men’s basketball team, plus $70,000 for its female athletes.
A Congressional Research Service paper noted that the new name, image and likeness payment era raises questions about federally mandated sex-based fairness in university sports... UCLA and UC Berkeley’s athletics programs were in the red in 2024-25, despite using their endowment or general fund dollars to subsidize their budgets...
Full story at https://calmatters.org/education/higher-education/2026/09/nil-california/.
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