Meet the Public Deficit

NJ’s budget shortfall is now estimated at $1.2 billion and climbing, per today’s bad economic news.  That’s triple the estimate of just a few months ago.  Mid-year funding cuts apparently will be needed…Dick McCormick are you listening?  The Rutgers budget will be cut and that means every penny of the millions wasted on football comes directly out of the academic budget.  Supporting football is a vote for worsening academic mediocrity (and a mediocre football team, too).  It’s that simple…and horrific.  Just say no to more waste on Mulcahy’s “middling time” sports gulag.

Schiano on the Global Warming Hoax

The Rutgers coach must believe global warming is a hoax because, per this Star Ledger report, he has dialed up the temperature in the team’s practice bubble to a sweaty 84 or 85.  

Right now our offices are heated to 65 degrees, our home to 67, and we do this because it saves money and is also responsive to our planet’s ecological needs.

Greedy Greg Schiano — wasting the taxpayer’s nickel — obviously does not care about money and he doesn’t care about the planet either (doesn’t he still drive an Escalade, also paid for by Rutgers?).

Why is the bubble heated to 85?  Apparently to help Schiano’s Stumblers adjust to temperatures in Florida, where they play on Saturday.  Talk about an eco criminal!

The economy rings in, the stadium expansion stops now

Fabrikant in the NYTIMES: Colleges struggle to preserve financial aid.

Lewis in the Times on Tough times strain colleges rich and poor.

Across the country, universities are delaying capital expenditures, as they pull in their belts to deal with the rough economy.  Universities are also faced with cutting financial aid to deserving students. In NJ there is no doubt — none — that state funding for Rutgers will take another, huge hit for the next academic year.  Rutgers — because of its proximity to the imploding financial services sector — will be hit harder than will many other universities.  That is just reality.

So right there is RIP for the stadium expansion plan.  We consider this discussion at an end.  Were the university to continue with the expansion we will perforce conclude that the leadership is derelict (stupid to the brink of criminality) and we will cease any and all support for the institution (although we will work for a change in the leadership).

A Grad Student’s Lament

A guest blog:

“I am an underpaid international PhD student in one of the engineering departments from which I will graduate (hopefully) soon. Although I said it as if it is important, I don’t give that much damn about being “underpaid” and I don’t ask for half of football coach’s salary to be divided equally among all GA/TA’s (but man, that would be a relief!) or any other actions that will reduce the money spent on sports. My only concern is my research, variety and richness of resources that I can access. I don’t even ask for a reasonable office with windows so that I will know it is raining before I go out from the building, or proper air conditioning that will not make me sick because of extreme high temperatures in winter, or icy cold deep freezer environment in summer that cannot be adjusted due to the age and technology of the equipment. My desk and my computer is enough. In brief, I am very modest and expecting the least from my university.

My only concerns are slight increase in university rankings and academic reputation of the school so that I may be hired by universities that I have heard the names before. If that does not happen, that’s still fine, because reputation is not something that you can buy from Amazon.com and related to what I (and the others in the university) produce as well. At the end, companies will not hire according to the football team’s ranking but the academic reputation, so I have to do my marginal part to reach the level, so that people coming Rutgers for the new stadium can also have better chances when they graduate.

But to do what I ought to do, AT LEAST, I would like to be able to download academic papers from Rutgers Libraries online directly, instead of trying to catch my friends from other universities (no need to mention names, their football team is not even ranked) online at various IM tools to ask for journals that Rutgers used to have access, but do not have anymore.

I was complaining until very recently. However, solution is very simple, of course, thanks to our university administration for showing the way: WE HAVE THE HARD COPY VERSIONS AVAILABLE AT THE LIBRARIES!! How lazy I am… I want to download a paper in few seconds and understand whether it is what I am looking for and continue searching for more. Hey! I can do the same by going to a library, spend hours to go over the journals and papers trying to locate what I really need.

For only couple of hours more, what the hell, right? Couple of hours more so that our university administration can spend more hours to find out more funding opportunities for the stadium (I am sure it will finance itself, no doubts!), instead of spending their precious time to find some funds to provide access to online resources (at least recovering the ones that are cut) so that a lazy grad student will save approximately 1-2 days per week. We are a research university, so we must research it by all means, with all pains, walking in between the aisles, hoping on&off buses to reach to the sources, get wet under the rain… so that university will fulfill its mission, right?

I really pity myself for my lazy nature, which I happen to understand lately, and I want everybody reading this blog to support our university administration showing their academic excellence priority in a crystal clear fashion, working hard to find funding for the stadium and giving so much to make our university’s name known “worldwide” with its football team, so that everybody in the nation will distinguish the university Rutgers and the cartoon Rugrats without a moment of hesitation.

As clearly stated in the Rutgers website, Rutgers is “one of the nation’s leading public research universities”. Read it again and think once more: Even without the proper academic resources! I cannot even think of how our reputation will be after the stadium is completed and our football team has 4 wins in a row. That is beyond my imagination…”

GUEST BLOG — SHOW US THE STUDENTS

Where were the students Saturday? is the question asked by Matthew Stein in today’s Daily Targum.

And I want to know why they are building a bigger stadium if the students can’t be bothered to fill the seats they already have.

“College Sports Has A Spending Problem”

That’s from the Knight Commission, which reports: “It’s clear that college sports has a spending problem that must be addressed,” said William E. Kirwan, Knight Commission co-chairman and chancellor of the University System of Maryland.  “In the aggregate, athletics spending continues to escalate while instructional spending has remained stagnant and has even decreased at many institutions.  The current economic climate and the needs of our universities require a change in this imbalance.”

And pretty much simultaneously, Big Bobby Mulcahy’s gang of money wasters in the Rutgers Athletic Dept. announced five new hires.  What is so shocking — disgusting — is that simultaneous with real decreases in spending on academics at Rutgers, spending on sports is skyrocketing.  And all those new expenditures are in the red because Rutgers has an annual loss on sports over $10 million, possibly much over.  (The University still declines to provide meaningful financial reports for the major money losers, that is, football and men’s basketball.)

Meantime, signs mount that NJ voters are sick of the state’s indebtedness (as in the $100+ million slated to be poured into the wasteful, extravagant football stadium expansion).  Per Bloomberg News: `The state is seen as being overextended in its debt,” said Joseph Seneca, an economics professor at Rutgers University’s Edward J. Bloustein School of Planning and Public Policy in New Brunswick, New Jersey. …New Jersey, the 11th-largest U.S. state by population, has the third-biggest debt load relative to personal income, or $32 billion. The amount has tripled in a decade as governors sold bonds to help balance budgets and avoid tax increases. 

Consider that the unofficial RIP for the stadium expansion, particularly as experts warn that the NJ economic realities will only worsen next year.  

The only real question is why the BoG has not officially pulled the plug on the stadium expansion — and other than that the BoG is dominated by cretinous jocksniffers, we don’t have an answer.

Preston Pennypacker on Coca Cola University

We’ve heard from our old friend Preston Pennypacker, Rutgers ‘32, who reports that he is “in as good health as can be expected, given the horrible news that keeps coming  in about the collapse of our beloved Rutgers.”

Mr. Pennypacker is deeply upset, it turns out, by the current talk about selling “naming rights” to the Rutgers football stadium. “It strikes me,” he writes, “as obscene. This business of making an old university over into a cheap shill for some brand name. It’s intolerable. My generation of undergraduates would have been over there throwing our bodies in front of Mulcahy’s bulldozers. What’s wrong with kids today? How can they let Rutgers—our Rutgers—be turned into a marketing vehicle?”

 Mr. Pennypacker reminded us that the story of Rutgers’ downward spiral into what he calls the “cesspool of commercialization” is chronicled in William C. Dowling’s Confessions of a Spoilsport. “The pertinent chapter,” he writes, “is chapter six, ‘The Coca Cola University.’ It tells how, just a few years ago, an admirable group of Rutgers undergraduates defeated the Lawrence administration’s marketing deal with the Coca Cola Corporation. Tee shirts. Demonstrations. Petitions. Personal confrontations with Francis Lawrence in Old Queens. Aren’t there any students like that left at the university?”

 We hadn’t looked at Confessions of a Spoilsport since it came out a year or so ago. Our interest piqued by Mr. Pennypacker’s comments, we went and reread “The Coca Cola University” chapter. As he says, it gives the full story of the successful student campaign against the Coca Cola contract. For those of you thinking of voting in the “Rutgers damage poll,” it usefully pinpoints Robert E. Mulcahy as the source of commercial contagion at Rutgers. It also mentions, interestingly enough, the episode of “naming rights” at another state university. By way of historical perspective, we reprint those paragraphs here:

  “In Universities in the Marketplace, former Harvard president Derek Bok describes how corporate marketing has undermined the university as an institution whose essential forms and values go back to the early Middle Ages.

 Yet Harvard and private schools like it, blessed with substantial endowments and a long tradition of academic distinction, are not the best places to look for signs of commercial penetration. For various reasons, public institutions have proved to be most vulnerable to the contagion of corporate marketing. Consider, for instance, the case of Boise State University in Idaho.

 Boise State’s basketball games were once played in an arena called the Pavillion. Then the university was approached by representatives of Taco Bell, the national fast food chain. All Boise State had to do was agree to rename the Pavilion the “Taco Bell Arena,” and the company would make a sizeable contribution to university coffers. It was a win-win proposition. Tac Bell would write off the cost as an advertising expense, and Boise State would have money it would never otherwise see.

 Faced with so blatant a move to commercialize their university, professors at Boise State mounted a short-lived protest. After some debate, the faculty senate was persuaded to pass a resolution opposing the Taco Bell deal. Boise State’s president struck back immediately. The faculty, he declared, were harming their own university. If Boise State wasn’t permitted to sell the name of the Pavilion to Taco Bell, other corporate donors might be discouraged from making similar offers.

 An anthropology professor named Robert McCarl answered the president in the student newspaper. “If students, faculty, and community members cannot protest a significant decision like this without ‘harming the university’ then Boise State is well on its way to becoming a corporate-controlled university.

 The very purpose of a university, Professor McCarl declared, “is to open up debate and create discourse about the issues of the day,” placing them in a “wider intellectual and cultural context.” Then, having flickered for a moment, the faculty protest at Boise State died out.”

 

    — Confessions of a Spoilsport, Ch. 6, “The Coca-Cola University”

A reader raises intriguing questions

“If it goes off and a polygraphist is called in at SL expense, perhaps long burning questions relative to RU should be also asked. There have been allegations of slush funds, trips, rings and preferred seating arrangements centered around the Senator and others using University dollars. Also questions about the elimination of the six sports and the Senator’s involvement in all of it. Shouldn’t the Boxer and Malone
investigative staffs be keeping an eye on how this new development plays out also? It could be the smoking gun to many things bantered about over the last several years at RU.”

This email is vis a vis the Star Ledger’s offer to run a lie detector on Three Ring Codey.

PHD Comics, Funny or Not

A reader sent us this link to PHD comics, where average salaries of collegiate football coaches are seen as 11 times higher than tenured professors.  The average football coach makes $1 million and change — and the average (male) tenured prof gets $95,000.  A female gets $86,000.

Question: Is Greedy Greg Schiano worth 11 professors?  Is he worth twice as much as an average coach?

On another note: another day, another editorial against the Rutgers Stadium expansion.  This piece in the Bergen Record specifically opposes the university’s efforts to sell “naming rights” to the stadium to the highest bidder.  Read the piece.  It is adamantly against pretty much everything to do with the “foolish” stadium expansion.

‘Rid Rutgers of Boosters’

Don’t they teach simple arithmetic at Rutgers?  You’d think that Slick Dick McCormick and his cronies on the BoG would have gotten the message that now is no time to talk about pouring $100 million into a stadium expansion no one wants.  It makes as little sense as a homeowner facing foreclosure who decides what he needs is a huge home equity loan to build a mammoth new garage and to buy an equally mammoth RV to park in it.  At least that home owner actually has a plan for filling the garage.  Rutgers has no plan for filling any new seating, other than continued reference to “the waiting list” — which of course was created when the program was on an upswing, not today’s Big East cellar-dweller.  Rutgers even is telling gullible reporters the waiting list has increased by 700 — but it’s impossible to fall off the list so nobody can say the 12,000+ on the list have any current interest in tickets (or that they they even have jobs),

Even the richest schools are scaling back in today’s economy, per today’s NYTimes piece, Financial Straits of Boosters Hit Athletic Programs: “Like the chief executives on Wall Street, leaders of collegiate athletic programs must acknowledge that the boom days of fund-raising have given way to belt-tightening.

‘Adjustments have to take place and look bleak in the short term,’ said Joe Castiglione, Oklahoma’s athletic director.”

Saturday’s NYTimes had another piece, Rising Criticism as Rutgers Invests in Athletics. As the school literally crumbles and tuition skyrockets, critics are asking: why put money into the sports sinkhole?  $500 million in basic physical plant maintenace has been deferred…and yet the McCormick administration continues to mumble support for athletics spending.  Talk about fuzzy logic!  “They had one good year, and everybody said this is the beginning of a trend,” said George R. Zoffinger, a member of the university’s Board of Governors and the chairman of its audit committee, which completed a report in February criticizing the athletic department for poor financial oversight. “One year doesn’t make a trend. That’s the problem.”

New Jersey will be particularly savaged by the nation’s economic collapse.  The Ledger writes: “A quarter-million jobs lost. Another year of falling house prices. A multi-billion dollar hole in the state budget.

Those were the grim predictions delivered Monday by economic experts and the governor as they analyzed the impact of Wall Street’s collapse on New Jersey’s economy.”

“This isn’t a recession,” added Kenneth Goldstein, economist for The Conference Board. “This is something worse.”

Even Seatbelt Corzine acknowledges the state faces a multi-billion dollar budget deficit — and there are no ideas about how to close that gap without inflicting pain on millions of state residents.

Nationally, the country’s imploded economy is hitting sports, hard, per this Reuters story. “Smaller crowds are only the first domino to fall for U.S. sports leagues, which could see lower corporate spending, flat or declining revenue and stagnant team values in a global recession, analysts said.”  

Keep in mind that Rutgers has not been able to bond its stadium expansion and the school’s back of the envelope payback hinges on spectacularly Panglossian assumptions about attendance and the willingness of fans to absorb ticket hikes and increased parking fees.  It’s all fantasy and the bottomline is: These are no times to be putting tens of millions into a sports program that is mired in misery.

Meantime, this blog was referenced in another NYTimes weekend piece.  Columnist Peter Applebome writes: “In the immediate future, Rutgers is facing rising financing costs, a severe budget crunch and a depressed economy that has all but shut down the donations that were expected to help pay for the project. And the questions raised by The Star-Ledger of Newark about the financial management of Rutgers athletics have hurt the university’s credibility with the Legislature at a time when it most needs it.

Chances are the situation will get worse before it gets better.”

In the Ledger, Bob Braun gathers up glaring examples of fiscal irresponsibility on the part of the state’s public schools — and at Rutgers many of the most glaring for-instances revolve around the ethically troubled sports regime of Big Bobby Mulcahy, the man who cannot count straight.

And talking about counting…in polling at this site on Who is ruining Rutgers, we admit to puzzlement.  Slick Dick McCormick has a huge lead over Big Bobby Mulcahy…but 1960s era historian Eugene Genovese has picked up a sprinkling of votes.  Genovese of course was famous for proclaiming at a 1965 teach-in that he “welcomed” a Viet Cong victory and, in turn, this triggered a campaign by the state’s crypto-fascists to “rid Rutgers of Reds.”  For our part, we want a campaign to rid Rutgers of boorish boosters (and while we’re at that, let’s dump McCormick and hire a real university president).