The costs of forcing a divorce between Rutgers and Camden, and arranging a marriage between the campus and Rowan University, haven’t been calculated.
Which may be less an oversight than an example of foresight, a reader writes:
“The major flaw of past merger (proposals) was… to determine the added costs (in advance), which led to wild calculations that scared lawmakers away…
“I am not a huge fan of the Governor, but I think he has at least learned from the past failures. Christie does understand one thing — do the merger and THEN people will make it work out.
“The fact that the Gov is willing to consider a multi-billion bond issue for higher education this fall is his signal that he knows they need capital dollars…In a play on Field of Dreams — if you merge them, the money will eventually come.”
Meanwhile, Andrew Shankman, the indefatigable Rutgers-Camden associate professor of history, predicts the proposed bond issue — the state’s first in a quarter century — will be taken hostage by the pro-merger forces.
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