It’s a mental process we don’t know too much about yet, but we can sometimes see its tragic effects in the jock school’s chief executive. No one wants to depose the doddering old thing, but as the athletic deficits increase, and his or her tendency to give ever more bizarre public statements about them grows, faculty and students begin a popular revolt.
No one can predict the outcome of this volatile situation. At University Diaries, our obligation is simply to report its phases.
Rutgers University, having bled athletics money at a grotesque rate for some years, and now subsisting under a leader determined to hemorrhage yet more, has entered The Era of High Restlessness. Economics professors in particular, having run the numbers, have begun issuing denunciations (“To try to do any sugarcoating of the magnitude of (this) financial loss is just not being honest … We’re No. 1 in financial losses … by a mile, we lose more money than any other university on athletics.”), and the student newspaper, as in this article, routinely confronts the fond foolish old man with the ruins of his hopes and dreams. It cites such things as comparative loss charts and statistics on ranking (“After investing about $250 million [in athletics] across the last decade, the University fell down 12 spots in college rank, declining from No. 58 to No. 70, according to U.S. News and World Report. Rutgers also fell to No. 177 on Forbes magazine’s Best Colleges list, a collection of 650 liberal arts colleges and universities, a spot that gives the College of New Jersey a nine-rank advantage over the Garden State’s flagship state university.”)
President Robert Barchi has not yet started hiding out from the press (that will come), but his interviews have become strange affairs. Amid a nationwide trend of much higher foreign student enrollment, Barchi insists that the increase at Rutgers is because of the worldwide renown of their football games (“The University’s 40 percent increase in admissions applications from international students can be attributed to greater name recognition from Rutgers’ presence in the Big Ten, Barchi said.” — Hubba Hubba Hubei!). Amid a monumental financial disaster, he says, “If we were to not remain in the Big Ten, we would have a monumental financial disaster on our hands.” And though there’s no indication the alumni give a shit one way or another about belonging to the Big Ten, he says, “Administrators also feel the need to satisfy the University’s alumni base, composed of many who are interested in intercollegiate sports.”
What’s next? After the Era of High Restlessness, we can expect – as I suggest above – the Era of Not Available for Comment.
April 20th, 2015 at 3:02PM
Tricky. A lot of things have gone wrong at Rutgers; at the same time, they’re one of the putative winners in the big-picture competition because they were admitted to the Big 10, which means they’re likely to make money on football, have a chance of breaking even on athletics, and can redefine their image positively.
April 20th, 2015 at 3:20PM
Rutgers will never make money on football. There are three pro teams within an hours drive. Why pay good money to watch the semi-pros?
April 20th, 2015 at 4:21PM
Mr Punch: What Anon said. Plus, as one of the people quoted in the original article notes, big-time sports schools spend huge amounts of money on athletics whether they’re winning (and maybe making some money) or losing. The arms race never ends. When coaches who make five million a year start winning games, they demand seven million. And so on and so on.
April 21st, 2015 at 1:24PM
There’s even more buffoonery associated with Barchi. Here he is earning money from working with two companies that do business with his university. Conflict of interest is for peasants, don’t ya know.
http://newbrunswicktoday.com/article/rutgers-president-has-kept-lucrative-jobs-companies-do-business-ru