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
.
Rutgers athletics
budget has caused controversy in New Jersey. That story is printed
below.
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. 
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
