University Diaries » Crime Library

Context matters. If you’re the new president of a crime- and scandal-ridden university, you want to watch yourself. Given the scuzzy reputation of the joint, you want to do all you can, personally, to model a new, less scuzzy ethos.

So for instance if you’ve just taken over the notorious University of Medicine and Dentistry of New Jersey, a school UD has long described as having rolling prison admissions (scroll down and enjoy), you want to set a personal example of probity and non-greed and all the things UMDNJ has never before known.

You’ve taken over America’s most financially corrupt university as part of its recent merger with Rutgers University. And oh yeah that’s another thing. If at Rutgers you’re running a national laughingstock (thanks to endless sports scandals culminating in a Saturday Night Live skit about your sadistic basketball coach — again, scroll down… forever…) and a fiscal disgrace (thanks to your bankrupting the school to pay for your sports program), you really, really, really want to set a moral example as you begin to run the school.

But hey. It’s Jersey. Whaddya expect? You expect a president who can be content with his legitimate close-to-a-million-dollars-a-year salary? It’s fucking Jersey!

“It smells to high hell quite frankly,” said Jay W. Lorsch, a professor at Harvard Business School who focuses on corporate governance.

Yeah! The place stinks already; how ’bout bringing your own stink bombs to the game? President Barchi’s particular stink bombs are of course all about sitting on corporate boards – as the New York Times points out in this article, it’s the done thing if you’re a university president panting to make (as the title of a recent book about the practice has it) money for nothing. And Barchi adds an extra jolt of stink by sitting on the boards of companies who do business with Rutgers.

What with perennially expensive sports scandals, and a sports program that in any case is bankrupting the school, you won’t be surprised to hear that tuition at Rutgers is so high that student protests escalate by the day. It can only make things better for students to realize that instead of running the school Barchi is off to relax-and-rejuvenate corporate retreats. What better way for the president of a struggling, scandal-ridden, public university to comport himself?

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