By John Farmer Jr.
With the introduction Monday of a statute designed to effect a major reorganization of higher education in New Jersey, the stakes of the ongoing debate have become clear. At risk in the modestly and misleadingly titled “New Jersey Medical and Health Sciences Education Restructuring Act” is not just the governing structure of medical education, nor of Rutgers University, nor of the relative status of Rowan University. What’s at stake is nothing less than the vision of
New Jersey as a state that underlay both the designation of Rutgers as the state university and the 1947 constitution itself.
No less than the creation of a strong governor and attorney general and a centralized and independent judiciary, the designation of Rutgers as the state university of New Jersey was intended to create an institution powerful enough to counter the centrifugal forces of local and regional interests that, for most of New Jersey’s history, had frustrated every effort to achieve greatness as a state. The governor, the attorney general and the judiciary were to provide the power; Rutgers was to assist in providing the vision.
For decades, this strategy seemed to work. A succession of great governors from both parties was able to advance New Jersey’s interest as a state, often overcoming the opposition of local and regional bosses that might well have stymied similar efforts under prior versions of the constitution, under which the Legislature was supreme.
The state judiciary, led by the Supreme Court, became renowned for the quality of detached justice it delivered, and for landmark decisions in contexts ranging from contracts to school funding to the right to die.
Rutgers, for its part, quickly became one of the elite research universities in the nation, as one of only 61 out of 4,500 universities admitted to the Association of American Universities. Equally important, Rutgers became an indispensable voice for the interests of New Jersey as a state, providing the scholarly underpinnings for many of the important legal and policy objectives advanced by the governors and the courts.
But the atomizing force of what former Assembly Speaker Alan Karcher termed “New Jersey’s multiple municipal madness” was never entirely vanquished. The provision of state revenues did little to supplant property taxes; state revenues became, instead, a supplement.
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