Another Round
at Rutgers
By Allie Grasgreen
August 24, 2011
The turmoil unfolding around the sports program at Rutgers University
right now would set a standard for contentiousness and conflict
at most institutions. At New Jersey's most visible public university,
though, it's old hat.
Recent articles
in USA Today and Bloomberg News revealed that Rutgers has driven
athletic spending to unprecedented levels, higher than any public
institution in the six biggest football conferences, with institutional
subsidies making up a full 40 percent of the athletic department's
budget, more than at any other public university. Department
spending increased from $41 million in 2006 to $64 million in
2010, while revenue grew from $21 million to $37 million.
On Friday the
Rutgers faculty union responded to the news articles by calling
on the board to rethink subsidizing athletics at $27 million
a year (totaling $115 million since 2006, USA Today reported)
at a time when salary freezes are in effect for faculty. “When
[Richard L.] McCormick became president, he announced that athletics
would need to be self-supporting within five years. This will
be his 10th year in office and the subsidy is now the highest
in the nation,” the union wrote. “The Rutgers Board
of Governors must acknowledge that the resources exist within
the university budget to support our faculty and staff, our academic
research programs, our undergraduate and graduate students. Anything
less is to admit that athletics is truly valued more than academics.”
In a statement
sent to Inside Higher Ed last week, university spokesman E.J.
Miranda said the athletic department is still taking “significant
steps” toward a revenue-generating program, and argued that
Rutgers remains committed to its core mission of teaching, research
and service – and that is reflected in where the money goes.
“The university’s
direct support to athletics represents only about 1 percent of
the Rutgers budget,” Miranda wrote. “While athletics
opens a door to the university, it is our outstanding academic
programs, world-class faculty and unique campus community that
make Rutgers a premier institution of higher learning.”
(Inside Higher Ed also reached out to multiple other sources
within and outside the university who might have been expected
to view athletics spending sympathetically, including athletics
boosters, but received no responses.)
More of the Same
These are hardly
new issues at Rutgers, where the now-defunct Rutgers 1000, a
group of faculty, alumni and students, went toe-to-toe with university
administrators in the mid-1990s to try to get Rutgers to leave
the National Collegiate Athletic Association's Division I-A competitive
level. They failed, but their efforts helped to bring about the
resignation of then-President Francis L. Lawrence.
In 2007, the
university cut six participatory sports to help close an $80
million athletics budget shortfall.
Rutgers's history
makes longtime professors skeptical that the latest round of
roiling will have much effect.
“I don’t
think I’m being pessimistic. I think I’m being realistic,”
said William C. Dowling, an English professor at Rutgers who
fought the rise of big-time athletics there, and wrote about
it in Confessions
of a Spoilsport:
My Life and Hard Times Fighting Sports Corruption at an Old
Eastern University. If things go on as they are now, Dowling
said, Rutgers will be a lost cause within 15 years. "It’ll
stop attracting the best students, the top faculty will flee
– that’s already happening.”
He and others
worry that the university’s direction is driving away the
talent that makes Rutgers good. The aforementioned salary freezes
for all the faculty and unionized staff also meant those employees
didn’t get the raises they had negotiated before the freeze
-- which didn’t apply to head coaches -- was announced.
In the meantime, the university picked up the bulk of the tab
for a $100-million football stadium expansion and renovation.
And as school
spending on athletics has gone up, state spending on the school
has gone the other way. Bloomberg reported that, "In the
three fiscal years through June 30, 2010, athletic revenue excluding
support from the university climbed $7.6 million, or 25 percent,
according to school records. The department also took fatter
subsidies, including a 21 percent rise in university aid and
21 percent more from fees levied on the 28,904 undergraduates."
Meanwhile, state funding for Rutgers will have declined by 10
percent (or by $29 million to $262 million) during the three
fiscal years ending in June. In 2006, the university suffered
a $50 million budget cut. The money shortages have become evident
in facilities with cracked and leaky ceilings, thin walls and
the elimination of phone and fax lines, faculty members say.
“Our members
-- some of them don’t dislike football or athletics. But
when you think about balance, I think that’s when they start
to get a little concerned, or upset, or agitated,” said
Patrick Nowlan, executive director of the Rutgers faculty union
chapter of the American Association of University Professors
and the American Federation of Teachers. Case in point, Nowlan
said: the first football game of this year falls on the day classes
start -- and to make room for game-day parking, faculty and staff
have to leave the campus lots by 2 p.m. that day.
“You pride
yourself as an [Association of American Universities] member;
none of that is about athletics. That’s about the quality
of your faculty, the students you recruit, the research you do,
the service you provide,” Nowlan said. “Something has
to give at some point, and it won’t be us. It won’t
be the faculty that give.”
'Voices in the
Wilderness'
But at this point,
are the faculty even fighting? There may be a few outspoken voices,
but the days of mobilized opposition appear to be over. Mark
Killingsworth, a professor of economics who has been at Rutgers
since 1978, doesn't even think most faculty members are even
complaining, let alone fighting. They just don't see the use
anymore, he said; if they're not demoralized, as is usually the
case, they're apathetic.
"I think
the faculty are typical of faculty everywhere. They do not like
conflict -- they're academic personalities," Killingsworth
said. "The idea that you're going to man the barricades
and storm into the palace is absurd. It's like asking them to
grow a second head or something." On the other hand, he
said, many faculty members didn't realize until the USA Today
article just how bad things are -- meaning there could be a movement
yet.
Norm McNatt,
a former administrator who left Rutgers for Princeton University
shortly after Lawrence took over as president, agreed that faculty
are reluctant to speak out. And as for those who have? "They've
been voices in the wilderness, really, because very few others
have joined them or even seconded their criticisms," McNatt
said. "I mean, one really has to put one's head on the block
to become critical."
Catherine A.
Lugg, a professor of education and treasurer of the faculty union,
believes, as do others, that the university’s trajectory
toward big-time sports began with a few outspoken members of
the Board of Governors who wanted Rutgers to become a football
powerhouse -- and the power and tunnel vision of those members
made voices of opposition irrelevant, they say. Even as things
haven’t turned out as planned, the university has kept with
it. “I think it’s just the proverbial snowball coming
down a hill, picking up speed,” Lugg said -- a few problematic
decisions made years ago have been exacerbated with time.
As Lugg pointed
out, Rutgers’s very geography works against a unified fan
culture. The disjointed main campus is actually broken into five
pieces, requiring a bus to get from one end to the other. And
it sits between the two American professional sports meccas of
Philadelphia and New York. While Rutgers football undoubtedly
draws more of a crowd now than it did in the past, it still finished
4-8 last year. (A losing record of 59-63 over 10 seasons makes
the $2 million salary of head coach Greg Schiano, already a symbol
of misdirected priorities for many frustrated faculty members,
even more contentious.)
“I don’t
think anyone got up first thing in the morning and said, ‘We’re
just going to decide to spend hundreds of millions of dollars
in an effort that won’t succeed’…. But it’s
kind of like, when do you fish or cut bait?” Lugg said.
“Athletics -- it adds to student culture, yes, but should
it displace academic mission? No. I’m a former high school
athlete. I love sports. But you know, it’s an issue of priorities.”
Boards to Blame?
When Rutgers
became a public institution in 1956, state legislation created
a Board of Governors as the governing body; all 11 members are
selected by the governor or the advisory Board of Trustees. The
59-member trustee board consists mostly of alumni and charter
members chosen by current trustees and by the governor. Some
argue that this structure allows for a sort of revolving door
in which a small group of people with a shared goal -- in this
case, big-time athletics -- can control the board's direction,
with no regard for input from faculty or administrators.
McNatt said as
much in a white paper he and some other staff presented to McCormick
on the eve of his arrival at Rutgers. The paper asked McCormick
to reform the dual-board structure; the president "declined
and made it very clear that he was the vassal of the governors
and trustees who selected him, and that their intent, and his
priority, was to continue the drive for success in big-time athletics,"
McNatt said.
"The unique
terms of the 1956 Act set Rutgers apart from most other state
universities by creating a framework for governance that potentially
preserves the university’s independence and insulates it
from political pressures. It also, however, put in place a trustee
nomination and selection process that has virtually excluded
from Rutgers’ boards those distinguished, broad-gauged leaders,
both alumni and non-alumni, whose demonstrated records of achievement
and independent judgment could best serve Rutgers’ interests,"
the white paper says. "Over several decades, an inexorable
pattern of lock-step succession has become the archetype for
service on the Rutgers boards: a long-active member of an alumni
association is nominated by his or her association to a six-year
term on the Board of Trustees, an appointment the trustees have
'assigned' to that alumni association such that nomination by
the association assures election. Six years later the alumni
trustee is re-elected as a charter trustee and takes up another
six-year term (but possibly up to 12 years if re-elected or elected
to an un-expired term). When an appropriate vacancy occurs, the
trustee then goes on to a seat on the Board of Governors, where
another twelve years of appointments can be put together by a
combination of partial, full, and public terms. By such devices,
a relatively young alumnus could spend most of his or her adult
life on one or both Rutgers’ boards."
Others, such
as Killingsworth, say blaming the boards is too easy. True, the
Board of Governors dictated the path Rutgers has taken, but that's
no different from any other major university, he said. Killingsworth
doesn't take issue with money going toward sports; as he pointed
out, he's a University of Michigan alum who watches football
every Saturday. But when the money feeding football is being
taken away from the institution, that's when there's a problem;
for Killingsworth, the annual ritual of an e-mail from his dean
announcing more cuts, followed a few months later by the discovery
that the athletics budget has grown again, is getting old.
Unhappy Students
Not all students
are thrilled with the developments of recent years, either, said
Rohini Bhaumik, a Rutgers junior who has tried to reassemble
some sort of organized opposition akin to Rutgers 1000, with
which her older sister was heavily involved. But the campus climate
makes it tough, she said.
“Unfortunately
most students at Rutgers have kind of resigned themselves to
the fact that the administration is leading the budget in the
direction that we don’t want to go,” Bhaumik said.
Another difficulty, she added, is that even though about $8.5
million of the subsidies come from student fees, as USA Today
reported, students often don’t know something’s going
on until it hits them in a more tangible way -- say, when their
student club gets cut. “A lot of people don’t realize
the bigger picture” until that happens, she said. “But
there is definitely a small, vocal minority within the student
body of students who are very much aware of what is happening.
They’re vocal about how disappointed they are.”
The son of Lisa
Pantel, who formed the Coalition to Save Our Sports after the
six teams were cut in 2007, wound up transferring to Brown University
after the group’s one-year campaign failed to save men’s
fencing and the five other teams. Pantel’s son began taking
courses at Rutgers during his senior year in high school, and
despite having been accepted to other Ivy League and highly selective
institutions, opted for Rutgers in large part for its fencing
team.
Pantel still
believes Rutgers is an exceptional institution, albeit one that’s
lost its way a bit. “It just got off track, and it needs
to get back on track,” she said. “Rutgers isn’t
viewed as a top choice among top students in the state, and particularly
top students who are looking for an affordable school. And that’s
a shame, and that’s Rutgers’s loss, and I think that’s
a consequence of some of these decisions that were made that
resulted in excessive spending in the spectator sports areas
and not in the academic area.”
'Always Hopeful'
McNatt said that
over the years some board members and other officials have questioned
the spending. But the “revolving door” of trustees
and governors has given athletics the upper hand, he says –
and, despite the turnover that’s happened on the board,
“really not much has changed.”
Asked whether
a new president might open the door to a new direction, away
from big-time sports, McNatt said, “I doubt if anybody who
expressed such thoughts in a job interview with the presidential
search committee would get very far. That’s just the way
it is."
Lugg is “always
hopeful” -- one can’t work in education without being
a hopeful person, she said. But it’s frustrating.
“It’s
always, ‘In a few years it’ll all get better.’
Now, I’ve heard this song and dance for at least eight years,”
Lugg said. “It’s like everything – there are winners
and there are losers. And we have to make a decision as a corporate
body: Do we really want to continue down this path where basically
we’re serving as a farm team for the NFL? Is that our mission?”
Copyright
2011 (c) Inside
Higher Ed
|
(X) Francis Lawrence
football booster. Material released by the
university includes the
following:
at
a time when the Scarlet R boosters seem to have complete control
over the university.
Christine M. Tiritilli
show that some 2000
students on campus today are academically comparable to those
at schools -- e.g, Colgate, Lafayette, Columbia -- against whom
Rutgers competed in athletics for well over a century.
Mr Ralph Izzo
schools
nationwide -- at a time when New Jersey and Rutgers are in a
state of desperate financial emergency. Governor Christie purports
to be serious about solving that problem.
has shown a great deal more courage in opposing the erosion of
academic values by commercialized Div IA sports at Rutgers than
has so far been shown by self-styled "straight shooter"
wholesale staff layoffs
-- might wish to take this as an occasion to regain a voice in
university affairs. Concerned faculty, especially those interested
in an organized campaign of resistance, may address their suggestions
to
