Author: hankkalet

I graduated from Rutgers in 1988 with a degree in English and have been a backer of the school as an academic institution since before I arrived on campus as a junior, having transferred in from Middlesex County College and Penn State.

That the school has a stellar academic reputation was hammered home to me in the fall of 1989. I was entering my one and only year of graduate school at Rutgers, joining students from Brown and Berkeley and other notable schools. I was talking with one of the students, who came from one of the Ivy League schools, when he asked where I earned my undergraduate degree.

“Rutgers,” I replied.

“Rutgers? Wow,” was his answer.

That short exchange has stuck with me, and I’ve used it when doubters criticize Rutgers’ as an academic institution.

The sports program is another story. It’s history is, at best, uneventful — a couple of good basketball seasons (a magical 1975-1976 season that saw the team make the Final Four, the football team a couple of years ago, and the girls basketball team).

Administrators have periodically focused their attention on athletics, but it only is in recent years that the university has committed serious money to turning Rutgers into a big-time football program.

The result — disappointment on the field after the team’s surprising 2006 season and questions about the impact that spending on football has had on other sports and other programs. (A report issued last week called for tighter controls and more transparency in the department after a sports marketing contract was issued without formal bidding, its stadium expansion failed to gain funding and it extended the contract of football coach Greg Schiano.)

The New York Times referred to the assorted failures as “The Rutgers Mess .”

Rutgers, the biggest and most important public university in New Jersey, has spent millions of dollars furthering its ambition to become a major football power that might otherwise have been devoted to academics. It has done so during a period of rising tuition and budgetary cutbacks in academic departments, and, worse, without any real oversight from the university’s president, Richard McCormick, and its Board of Governors.

A review committee appointed by Mr. McCormick has now issued a scathing report accusing him of being “too passive in exercising his authority” over the athletic department and football program. The report suggests that he and the board turned a blind eye while the university’s athletic director, Robert Mulcahy, signed the football coach to multimillion-dollar contracts and employed a sports marketing firm that once hired Mr. Mulcahy’s son. It also criticizes a secret side deal engineered by Mr. Mulcahy in which the marketing firm paid the football coach an extra $250,000.

The criticisms are warranted, the Times says, because these “efforts to make Rutgers a football powerhouse” have caused other programs to suffer.

To save money, the university has downgraded teams including tennis, swimming and fencing to intramural status.

Rutgers, of course, is not the only school to go through this. Every big-time football and basketball program creates a conflict, sucking up more than its share of money at the expense of other sports programs and even academics. Debate over Notre Dame’s recent football failures has focused on the school’s strict academic standards, as if the school should lessen them just to accommodate someone who can toss a football 70 yards in the air and hit a sprinting receiver.

The most calling aspect of all of this is the phone calls I continue to receive from the Rutgers alumni group seeking money. Given the massive contract that Greg Schiano has and the amount of cash being spent on a stadium I have yet to step foot in, it is no accident that I have yet to turn over one thin dime. The money that is being spent on the football stadium could be better spent on other campus needs.

Amid all this, of course, comes the news that National Book Award winning poet Mark Doty will be teaching at Rutgers beginning in the fall 2009 — evidence that the school will continue to have one of the premiere English Departments on the East Coast. And that’s what this school should be focused on.

I root for Rutgers every week, but if they don’t win I can live with it. I’d rather the school remain a top-notch academic institution, even if it means never winning another football game.

(South Brunswick resident Lew Schwartz, an alumni of the school like myself, will offer a commentary on the report next week in the South Brunswick Post.)