As much as culture is a cudgel that disruptions like to use, there is some validity that UMN has a warped concept of academic culture.
The proof of this is that when athletics is brought up to educators, teachers, staff, etc, they all bring out the "they are student-athletes" point, meaning they are students first, athletes second.
What other part of the school gets so passive-aggressively attacked? Are we continually reminded that members of the theater arts program are "student-actors"? Or dance are "student-dancers"? Or music are "student-musicians" or electrical engineering are "student-engineers"? Or education are "student-educators"? No.
The administration and faculty are led by people who want to see the Academics bully the Athletes as some twisted high school revenge obstacle. These Academics are busy prompting open-mindedness wokeness, compassion for their education platforms, but the can't have compassion, wokeness or open-mindedness for athletics fitting in to their community.
Not accepting an societal element in your community is essentially bigotry. Hating on athletes is acceptable bigotry among academia at UMN. They refuse to consider that athletics contribute to the University community. Many hide behind "costs too much" philosophy of expenditures when they have no concept of economies of scale. A larger expenditure could mean a larger return depending on the risk involved. Then they come off as risk averse which leads to being the stereotypical "no fun, stick in the mud" book worm .
This risk aversion also gets them expecting more funds from the state, suckling on the subsidies which are drying up under political conservative and risk averse fiscal politics.
It's not to hard to think that if we had something anything, to be proud of at UMN, like a successful athletic department, that funds might not be so scarce and resistance to funding UMN effort might be less.