Wasteful, Wanton Football Expenses

State auditors are blowing foul whistles regarding Rutgers and money at the Texas Bowl.

The Bergen Record story is here.

The Gannett story is here.

Ledger reporting is here.

Call this a sad saga of waste. Auditors “found the university spent $11,000 on in-room movies, valet parking, room service, Internet connections and phone charges for spouses, guests and children of athletic staff during the Texas Bowl trip to Houston in December 2006,” per Gannett.

This is the very same university that keeps jacking up fees and tuition for students and that has a backlog of hundreds of millions of dollars worth of deferred maintenance.

According to the Bergen Record: “The school could not provide a figure for how much was spent at the bowl, which Rutgers won.

“The previous year, when it played in the Insight Bowl in Arizona, the athletic department spent all of its $1.25 million bowl payout and more, according to documents analyzed by The Record.

The school also paid the way for dozens of guests, spouses and children to attend that game.”

Chew on that: Rutgers has no idea what it spent, it admittedly lost money in the Insight Bowl appearance the prior year, and yet it paid for “dozens” of guests to go to Texas to watch a tertiary bowl game.

Is this a program you want to support with your dollars? A program that — apparently without shame — admits it does not have a clue how much it lost on the Texas Bowl.

How much money is Rutgers losing on bigtime sports?

Guess a lot and you are on target.

Guess that the losses are never likely to end and, sadly, you are also right.

New research overseen by the Chronicle of Higher Education reports that “just 17 of the more than 300 athletics programs in all of Division I,‘about 5 percent’, earned a net profit between 2004 and 2006.”

The probability that Rutgers will ever be in that elite is slim to none. That’s just being realistic. Deluded jock-sniffers whose heads are filled with musty aromas may not be able to see this reality, but it is what it is: Rutgers will continue to lose money pursuing the tawdry dream of sports championships.

Where does the rest of the money come from? From the universities’ general funds of course. That means money is diverted from English and Philosophy to plug up losses incurred in football, basketball, and down the line.

And now we know there is no real end in view. Adding more seats to Rutgers Stadium — aka Mulcahy’s Folly — changes nothing since that increased revenue would be needed to pay off the debts incurred in adding the seats in the first place.

Talk about Idiocracy in action!!

Another Athlete Arrested

Here’s news about a Rutgers soccer player arrested for assault, in an incident triggered by the alleged theft of a jacket by the player. When the victim protested, he got beaten up, suffering “a broken nose, black eye, dislocated shoulder and chipped tooth,” according to the Star Ledger report. The victim identified the assailant by looking at web pages of the soccer team. The athlete, apparently unable to make bail, has been in jail since May 1.

Exactly how bad is Rutgers?

A new college ranking system — concocted by the Center for College Affordability & Productivity, spearheaded by Ohio University economist Richard Vedder — takes direct aim at the reliability of the US News & World Report rankings (“the U.S. News rankings ought to get a D,” says Vedder in a recent Forbes Magazine article) and seeks to rank colleges based on three key factors: “Our measures begin with student evaluations posted on Ratemyprofessors.com, a nine-year-old site with 6.8 million student-generated evaluations. We look at college graduation rates (as does U.S. News). We also calculate the percent of students winning awards like Rhodes Scholarships and undergraduate Fulbright travel grants. For vocational success we turn to Who’s Who in America. Though imperfect, it is the only comprehensive listing of professional achievement that includes undergraduate affiliations,” Vedder wrote in Forbes.

The logic of this system, says Vedder, is that is based on two important metrics: do students like their classes, are they successful after graduation? Taken on its face, this is not a bad off-handed way to stack up colleges.

At the top of the heap, differences between CCAP and USNWR ratings are small. Virginia is #1 among national publics in CCAP, #2 in USNWR. Berkeley is #1 in USNWR, #2 in CCAP. Etc.

Rutgers however fares extremely poorly. It plummets from #20 in USNWR to #60 in CCAP’s ranking of publics — where schools like Auburn (#46) and Kentucky (#45) decisively beat Rutgers.

In the rankings of national universities (private and public), Rutgers is #117, one ahead of Howard, several rungs below Dayton (#114).

Has Rutgers fallen that dramatically? Just maybe it has. After 15 years of poor leadership and a like number of years of inadequate state funding, maybe this is what you get: a truly mediocre state university.

It is hard to find anything in this to cheer about.

Focus on LaRue

A reader pointed us to this pr write-up about Rutgers vp Jeannine LaRue in an internal organ, Rutgers Focus.

We’ve expressed skepticism about how LaRue, a onetime deputy chief of staff for Gov. Corzine with no prior ties to Rutgers or to higher education for that matter, might earn her $250,000 pay in a job post that had been vacant since 1997. We explored this topic here, here, and here. Basic thrust of the argument is that we were puzzled by Rutgers’ commitment of some $589,000 to fund an office that apparently had not been needed in a decade.

Of course there is no direct tie but it interested us when last week another Corzine deputy chief of staff, Javier Inclan, resigned. Mr. Inclan testified in a corruption trial about passing envelopes stuffed with cash to Hudson County pols and, well, you have to read this stuff to grasp the quality of Corzine’s hires.

Back to Ms. LaRue and the FOCUS article. Indeed, we are touched that she is raising two grandchildren. We are stupefied that she has 17,000 contacts in her BlackBerry. But most of all we finished the article still uncertain exactly what Ms. LaRue does to earn her keep.

By all means, anybody in the know, please do tell us.

No Confidence in McCormick

A hard hitting guest blog calls for a faculty vote of no confidence in President Dick McCormick. Read on for the “why” of this plea:

“Click on the attached article from Inside Higher Ed to see how the West Virginia State university faculty gave an overwhelming vote of no confidence to its university president, calling for his resignation, because he knowingly issued a false diploma to a politically connected grad student.

“Should the Rutgers University Faculty Senate do anything less for its president, Dick McCormick, who knowingly condones the admission of academically unqualified athletes, including at least one who submitted false admissions documents.

“Is Rutgers prepared to become the focus of a national academic/athletic scandal such as has enveloped too many universities, including the University of Washington which has received damage nationally to its
reputation as a result of McCormick’s knowing actions or inactions during his tenure there?

“Rutgers has certainly embarked on that path, but it’s not too late for standards oriented faculty and alumni to change the leadership and course of the school.”

Karl Engelman, MD (RC’55)

Bozos in the Classrooms at Rutgers

A Rutgers professor wrote us an email that warrants becoming its own blog entry because she taps into how pervasive fan violence is becoming at Rutgers. According to this professor, the terrifying violence highlighted by Rees and Schnepel just scratches the surface.

Let the Rutgers prof pick up the argument about how bigtime sports have degraded the Rutgers student body:

“Game-day violence is the least of the problems. Yes, the undergraduate riots make the news, and yes, the drunken bonfires in the downtown area provide a spectacle for TV coverage. Sometimes you can hear the obscenities howled by students in the background on telecasts. The pictures of overturned cars and smashed windows and ‘victory graffiti’ after the game are fairly dramatic.

Still, the big problem about college sports violence isn’t what happens on game day. It’s what happens when the drunken students who were turning over automobiles on Saturday show up in class on Monday. In lecture classes, the same yobbo who was screaming obscenities from the stands is the one in the fifteenth row — always wearing a baseball cap, for some reason — who spends the period playing video games on his laptop or text-messaging his buddies. He’s the one who cheats his way through midterms and finals, and pays a term paper company to get the essay he turns in for a course grade. In smaller classes, he’s the one who leans back and listens to his Ipod while everyone else is discussing the material, and who answers “huh?” when he’s called on. He’s usually unshaven, and wears a sweatshirt still stained with vomit from his last post-game party. He is, in short, someone you wouldn’t sit next to on a bus. Yet someone has let him into Rutgers as a ‘college student.’

In the pre-Big East era, students like this were a tiny minority — not least, probably, because very few made it past the admissions office. By the late 1990’s they were already becoming an increasingly visible presence on campus. (I know at least two colleagues who took early retirement because, as one of them told me, he’d come to Rutgers to teach at a university, not a reform school.) In the period since 2000, as the Mulcahy-Schiano sports buildup was attracting more attention, this type of undergraduate has become dominant. It’s not hard to foresee a time when it’s the only type Rutgers is able to draw. If Rees and Schnepel really want to study the effects of big time athletics on public universities, they should forget about post-game criminality and sit in on some classes during the week.”

Proof: College Football is linked to crime

The research is in: college football is starkly linked to fan violence and anti-social behavior, per this January 2008 research paper out of the University of Colorado. The authors — economists Dan Rees and Kevin Schnepel — write: “Our results suggest that the host community registers sharp increases in assaults on game days. In addition, there is evidence that vandalism, arrests for disorderly conduct, and alcohol-related arrests increase on game day.”

This is a detailed, 42-page analysis of crime data and college football.

Hello, New Brunswick, ready for a rumble? You had better be. Where there is big-time college football, there are sharp spikes in crime, simple as that.  Drunken, rowdy, criminally-minded fans rampaging through city streets are an inevitable by-product of big-time football.  Sounds extreme?

Wharton School professor Justin Wolfers, writing about the research in the New York Times, says: “the study is quite convincing. It is worth noting that these results occur despite the fact that the football programs they analyze ban the sale of alcohol in the stadium.”

Hear an interview with the researchers here. Look on the site for the audio icon.

The results reported in this research are frightening. For instance, on game days with an upset loss, assaults increased 112%, per the researchers.

Write the authors: “our results indicate that college football games lead to increased arrests for alcohol-related offenses and disorderly conduct (the Group B offenses). Home games are associated with a 13 percent increase in arrests for drunk driving, a 41 percent increase in arrests for disorderly conduct, and a 76 percent increase in arrests for liquor law violations.”

Here are charts that make all the violence associated with college football vivid.

The data in this groundbreaking paper are horrifying — and they ought to be ample to sober up Old Queens and get the administration off its jock-sniffing bender.

Fan Lunacy Is Already Here

Blog readers pointed us to powerful, troubling evidence of Rutgers fan misbehavior.

* Watch Maryland fans (in black) pelted by laughing Rutgers fans. Yellow jackets are security. The red shirt wearers are guess who.

Pretty funny. At least the Rutgers fans think so. No word from the Maryland fans, however.

Just think…if they get more seats, they can get more violent! More classless! More stupid!

Keep those links coming! Potential stadium donors will want to see exactly what their money will buy.

Win Idiocracy: New Contest

Raucous, irrational fans are notorious for the worst kind of anti-social violence. So we have to ask: When will Rutgers fans seek to castrate UConn fans? Is that where we are heading? Don’t snort. Exactly that scenario played out in Oklahoma when a 53-year-old Oklahoma fan (who happens to be a deacon in his church) apparently attempted to castrate a Texas fan. The victim’s only “sin” — wearing a Texas t-shirt. This incredible story is here, and here. Yes, this story is not breaking news; we offer it up as a harbinger of what could come to Piscataway as booster culture takes hold and sports cretins proliferate.

Email us with hot tips about misbehavior by Rutgers fans. A copy of Idiocracy will go to the informant with the sorriest tale of Rutgers fan hooliganism. See some of Idiocracy, see more here.

Don’t think the triumph of mindless fandom depicted in the film cannot happen here. Gresham’s Law bodes poorly for Rutgers tomorrow, unless we join together today to put an abrupt stop to the spread of booster culture.

Tell us what you’ve seen and we’ll highlight the most egregious incidents of rampant vulgarity, i.e., fans being fans.