Amanda Brown/The Star-LedgerThe proposed merger between the two schools might signal that a decade-long standoff on the controversial proposal may be over.
NEW BRUNSWICK — The presidents of Rutgers University and the University of Medicine and Dentistry of New Jersey said today they are now working together on a merger between parts of the schools — signaling that a decade-long standoff on the controversial proposal may be over.
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If you or one of your children are going to college, you know how much the cost of a college degree has increased over the decades. Students and their families are forced to go into significant debt even as the job market for college graduates shrinks. Students from lower income families are especially disadvantaged because loans are harder to come by. Unless the student is fortunate to have garnered a full scholarship, you are also paying a hidden tax – the cost of college athletics.
It’s time to change the tuition funding playbook.
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By James Osborne, Inquirer Staff Writer
A University of South Jersey?
When Democratic deal-maker and Cooper University Hospital chairman George E. Norcross III talked up the concept – at a recent business luncheon in Mount Laurel – of merging Rowan University with Rutgers-Camden, the University of Medicine and Dentistry of New Jersey-Stratford, and the soon-to-open Cooper-Rowan Medical School, to many observers it sounded far-fetched.
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McCormick’s new salary angered many members of Rutgers’ faculty and staff unions. The university has frozen the salaries and canceled raises for union members since last year, citing the school’s budget problems. At Rutgers Board of Governors meeting in recent months, union members waved blown-up copies of mock dollar bills and signs protesting Furmanski and McCormick’s salaries.
Kelly Heyboer/ The Star-Ledger
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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.”
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By CHARLES STILE COLUMNIST
Governor Christie never let a mere technicality, such as lack of authority, stop him from imposing his will on the Passaic Valley Sewerage Commissioners.
Christie stood in his bully pulpit and railed against that agency’s waste and patronage and its ridiculous regatta on the Passaic River. He shook the place up. The overpaid executive director quit. The board of commissioners fled. Some workers ended up in court, like the four arraigned Wednesday in Paterson, charged with sending subordinates to work on their homes on company time. PVSC hacks became the first scalps in Christie’s cost-cutting crusade.
But ask Christie about Rutgers University’s lavish sports welfare — it spent more money on athletics than any other public institution in the six biggest football conferences during the 2009-10 fiscal year, based on data compiled by Bloomberg News — and Christie is content to stand on the sidelines, quietly, like Rex Ryan on mood drugs.
“Listen, I’m not someone who is into micromanaging Rutgers,” Christie said.
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Officials with the American Federation of Teachers New Jersey, the state conference of the American Association of University Professors (AAUP), and the Health Professionals and Allied Employees said Thursday that in addition to its effect on tuition and aid, Christie’s budget would result in fewer faculty and programs, less research, and larger classes.
Already, they said, New Jersey ranks near the bottom nationally in state funding for higher education.
Rutgers communication and information professor Dan O’Connor, president of the New Jersey AAUP, questioned Christie’s decisions regarding higher education when he “is banking $640 million in unspent state revenue to create the largest budget surplus in 30 years.”
Anxiety in N.J. over college-aid funding
With demand up, many wonder how they’ll get help after Gov. Christie’s line-item budget vetoes.
July 10, 2011, By Rita Giordano, Inquirer Staff Writer
NEW BRUNSWICK — Faced with an angry, rowdy audience at a public meeting today, the Rutgers Board of Governors did not just retreat behind closed doors.
They built a wall.
Read full article at http://www.nj.com/news/index.ssf/2011/06/rutgers_board_meeting_closed_f.html
Kelly Heyboer/ The Star-Ledger
