It certainly is welcome news that Kansas Athletics plans to pass on to Kansas University academic programs $40 million of expected revenue from a proposed Memorial Stadium expansion.

However, the decision to pass more athletic revenues along to academics also raises an obvious question: “What took you so long?”

Assuming that the leaders of KU’s athletics department didn’t just have a spontaneous epiphany about sharing more of their wealth with academic programs, what was behind this week’s decision?

Given the timing of the announcement, one obvious possibility is the influence of KU’s new chancellor, Bernadette Gray-Little, who has signed off on the project that will go to the Kansas Board of Regents for approval later this month. In a news release about the gift, Gray-Little said, “I’m pleased to support this project because of its unprecedented $40 million investment in academics.”

We added the emphasis on the word “because,” which seems like a significant word in that statement. It seems to imply that without the money dedicated to academics, the chancellor might not have been as willing to back the proposal that will add a 3,000-seat “club seating” section to the east side of Memorial Stadium.

If Gray-Little, in the first month of her KU tenure, has had that kind of influence on the KU athletics department, everyone who gathers in Memorial Stadium this Saturday should give her a standing ovation.

As Gray-Little’s statement also noted, this is an “unprecedented” move. Although KU Athletics has directly supported academics in bits and pieces, it is far behind the academic contributions of athletic departments at many other major colleges.

Perhaps KU Athletics Director Lew Perkins believes his organization now has reached a threshold at which it can afford to divert more money to academics without damaging the drive to put KU athletic teams among the nation’s elite. Maybe this will be a new, and welcome, trend. Maybe the next gift to academics will be a share of the revenue from those $15,000 courtside seats in Allen Fieldhouse.

We can always dream.

For now, of course, there’s no reason to look this gift horse in the mouth. The $40 million is a wonderful shot in the arm for KU academic programs. Hopefully, Tuesday’s announcement will be the first of many such announcements to come from the KU chancellor and athletics director in the years to come.