State higher-education officials face daunting task, tough timetable, in enacting sweeping changes
By Tara Nurin
The grandfather clock outside the office of new Rutgers University President Robert Barchi is ticking loudly, counting down the minutes to July 1, 2013. That’s the deadline for reorganizing 16 distinct college campuses, medical schools, and patient-care centers across the state into three research and educational institutions.
It took more than six months of wrangling in Trenton to craft a law – the New Jersey Medical and Health Sciences Restructuring Act — that finally satisfied most parties, followed by a summer to recuperate and make amends. It’s now time for the state’s higher-education policymakers and their staffs to figure out how to redistribute the wealth of intellectual and physical properties owned and managed by Rutgers, the University of Medicine and Dentistry of New Jersey (UMDNJ), Rowan University, and, to a lesser extent, Cooper University Hospital in Camden.
Beyond the sheer enormity of their mission, they face two major obstacles: First, Rutgers’ boards of governors and trustees have yet to approve the law, which the Rutgers Act of 1956 contract stipulates must happen before it can officially move forward. Second, there’s still no cost estimate for the overhaul.
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