DISTURBING QUESTIONS of judgment continue to follow Rutgers University President Robert Barchi. Every time they do, it seems, Barchi offers a plausible explanation, and in time the particular issue at hand fades away, while the larger mission of the university takes precedence.
We have grown weary of how this sequence of events keeps playing out time and again. When will enough be enough, and when will those who govern the university begin to see the larger picture — that the larger mission of Rutgers is necessarily tied to the man the school’s board of governors and the state’s political class have deemed qualified to lead it?
We have criticized Barchi on leadership lapses in the past. Most of those dealt in some way with personnel decisions in the school’s athletic department. But this week we learn Barchi is also collecting more than $300,000 for privately advising two firms that do millions of dollars in business with Rutgers related to scientific research. Given that Barchi, a neuroscientist, was brought to Rutgers mainly to oversee the massive merger with the University of Medicine and Dentistry of New Jersey, the perception is indeed troubling.
Staff Writers Shawn Boburg and Patricia Alex report Barchi got clearance from the university’s overseers to sit on advisory boards of both firms, VWR International and Covance Inc. — pushing his total yearly compensation to more than $1 million — when he was hired last September. The arrangement is worrisome, and possibly ethically challenging, because of the potential for the businesses — one a distributor of lab supplies and the other a pharmaceutical research firm — to get an upper hand while vying for more contracts as the university ramps up its biomedical research efforts.
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