I remember a conversation with a fellow graduate English student in 1988. She had entered the graduate program the same year I did (I didn’t finish), coming in from Brown — an Ivy League school. She asked me where I had gotten my bachelor’s degree and I responded “Rutgers.” Her answer? “Wow, that’s impressive.” It’s a conversation I recount all the time, when people ask me about the university.
Rutgers is a top-notch school, often ranked among the better public institutions*. As a graduate and now a part-time faculty member, I’m aghast that this reputation could be damaged by the failings of its athletic program and a president brought in to manage a merger that is not nearly as popular with students or faculty as it is with the governor.
First, the news leaks that basketball coach Mike Rice had been channeling the worst of Bobby Knight (without the wins), bullying his players both physically and verbally, and university administration did nothing more than suspend him.
Once the news leaked, Rice gets fired, along with popular Athletic Director Tim Pernetti, while university President Robert Barchi apologizes for not being in the loop when the Rice allegations first came to light. Barchi remains working, while the school’s chief attorney John Wolf, a good man whom I’ve know for more than 20 years from my time covering the South Brunswick school board, is run through the public-relations mill.
Barchi announces an investigation and the school undergoes what was supposed to be a very public search for Rice and Pernetti’s replacements. The school hires former Rutgers guard Eddie Jordan, who played for the undefeated 1976 team that lost in the Final Four. In touting the hire, they describe him as having graduated with a degree — a lie that undercuts what could have and should have been a public relations victory.
Then comes the hiring of Julie Hermann to replace Pernetti, which has now blown up into a fresh scandal. Hermann, according to various press reports, apparently has a rather nasty past that includes the bullying of her players and coaching staff, sexual harassment charges and an apparent willingness to sacrifice ethical and legal niceties for the so-called good of the school. I have no idea whether any of these accusations are true, though they are starting to pile up, but they should have been red flags for an administration already reeling.
It is, as Dave Zirin writes, mindboggling:
In looking to move the school forward following the scandal that cost bullying former basketball coach Mike Rice and athletic director Tim Pernetti their jobs, school president Robert Barchi hired former Louisville assistant athletic director Julie Hermann. After the homophobic, misogynistic invective that will define the Mike Rice era, appointing an extremely competent woman must have seemed savvy. Unfortunately, in aiming to get beyond a bullying scandal, the school hired an athletic director with a history of bullying. In attempting to show that the athletic department is not a haven for misogynists, they hired someone with a history of misogyny. And worst of all, in boasting about the depths of their research into Hermann’s past, they missed a series of incidents that a Google search followed by ten minutes of follow-up phone calls could have revealed.
That, Dana O’Neil on ESPN.com writes, is why the school has become a “trainwreck.”
The real problem here, as it has been since March when the news first broke about Rice, is Rutgers and, more specifically, the people in charge at the State University of New Jersey.
After the firestorm surrounding Rice’s exodus and the dismissal of athletic director Tim Pernetti, the university had one charge: To get these searches right. To find people beyond reproach, with careers built on integrity and decency. And while that sounds oxymoronic in the land of college athletics, those people actually do exist.
Instead, Rutgers took a flier on a woman with two lawsuits filed against her and a team that accused her of the same horrific cruelty that got Rice rightfully canned. Then it hoped no one would notice or, if they did, no one would care.
For Ian O’Connor at ESPN.com, the failure of leadership goes to the top — and does not stop with Barchi. Writing about Gov. Chris Christie, he wonders how “the same outsized figure who has come to personify Jersey strength and stubbornness and resilience” could fail to force Barchi’s ouster. Christie, he said,
should’ve leaned hard on the university’s Board of Governors to dismiss Barchi along with Rice and Pernetti and install someone who would see how vital it was for Rutgers to get this one right. Someone who would’ve ordered the search committee to take an extra two weeks to examine Hermann’s career head to toe, to interview administrators, coaches and players from every corner of the candidate’s past.
But he didn’t. And Barchi survives, even though a Christie spokesman questioned the school’s leadership in April. He survives, even though Barchi’s “staggering inaction” — in O’Connor’s words — “had diminished his school’s prominent academic standing.”
Barchi and the merger and reorganization of the state’s higher education programs he was brought in to oversee are the roots of this problem. The merger, as Zirin points out, “was approved by the state legislature without the funding to see it through.” That has left the school chasing money, Zirin writes.
“Many of us have been horrified since he arrived,” said Professor Beryl Satter, who teaches at the school’s Newark campus. “The scandals in the athletic department are the logical outgrowth of his indifference to both students and the community. President Barchi came here with no interest in the student body and no interest in research. What does that leave? Money. He has been profoundly blinded by the corporate process, a fact that’s been obvious to us from the very beginning. Someone indifferent to the welfare of students should have no place running a university.”
As part of this process, he has proven deaf to the concerns of students and faculty — especially those at the Newark and Camden campuses, which have a higher percentage of minority and low-income students. The goal, it would appear, is to attract a greater number of out-of-state students to a school with an overwhelmingly in-state focus — which is among its greatest strengths, I would argue.
This is not about sports, the Big 10, which the school is about to join, or even Hermann. It is about the integrity of one of the great public educational institutions in America. For that reason, this debacle needs resolution. Gov. Christie, the ball is in your court.
* Correction made — ranking number removed.
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Hank Kalet 