By Patricia Alex, Staff Writer, The Record
Kean University is launching an expensive architecture program, largely tailored to foreign students, at its Union campus despite another public one just 6 miles away at the New Jersey Institute of Technology.
The technology institute, virtually across the street from Rutgers Medical School in Newark, is considering partnering with Rowan University, just south of Philadelphia, to train doctors.
A new public business school is opening in Jersey City even as others in nearby Newark and Montclair are spending millions to beef up their programs.
If it seems like there’s no statewide plan for higher education in New Jersey, it’s because there isn’t, and recent decisions by the schools have raised questions about whether weak state oversight has allowed for expensive and duplicative projects that have helped make the state home to some of the highest public tuitions in the nation.
The politically appointed boards that run the state-subsidized colleges and universities have a degree of autonomy unheard of in most other states. And with no resistance from state officials, the boards have approved costly and controversial projects.
Stockton University bought an $18 million former casino it is now unable to use; Montclair State University agreed to spend $250,000 on a statue of its mascot and Kean purchased a multimedia conference table from China for $219,000, prompting a state investigation.
[…]The recent merger of Rutgers University and the University of Medicine and Dentistry of New Jersey provides a case in point. The plan, outlined in a report by a governor’s task force, was hashed out in the Legislature, where an unsuccessful attempt was made by political leaders in South Jersey to make Rutgers’ Camden campus part of Rowan University.
“This is typical Jersey-style — you have these fiefdoms that are geographically small but politically powerful,” said Nat Bender, spokesman for the American Federation of Teachers, which represents state college faculty and staff.
[…]“These college presidents don’t have any checks on their power, the boards come in six times a year and they are wined and dined. They are very managed and fed a lot of good news,” said Tim Haresign, a biology professor at Stockton University who is a statewide leader of the faculty union representing 10,000 members across the state.
By way of example, he said trustees at Stockton were given little time to look over the controversial casino purchase that now has the school unable to turn it into a campus because of legal restrictions and paying out hundreds of thousands of dollars a month to maintain the shuttered property.
Haresign has traveled the state attending meetings of the college boards and found “very little public deliberation” taking place and very little statewide coordination.
“Right now the big push is for health sciences, so everyone is creating a health-sciences major. But I don’t think it’s based on any statewide analysis of need,’’ Haresign said. Bender, from the faculty union, said members of the presidents’ council support each other’s projects in deliberations that stay mostly private. “They’re advocating for more autonomy but essentially it’s less transparency,” he said.
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