Faculty write to President Barchi to express their concerns.

Was it really just two years ago that everyone hooked into the Rutgers Emergency Alert System (upwards of 40,000 students, faculty, and staff) received this terrifying text message, three times in succession, in the early morning hours of April 16th, 2011: As I’ve written about elsewhere, this text was anything but an “early warning.” Around midnight, the first of three shootings occurred on or near the university’s...

Did you catch that news conference Friday? The one following the firing of RU men’s basketball coach Mike Rice and the resignations of RU Athletic Direction Tim Pernetti, RU interim chief counsel John Wolf, and Jimmy Martelli, assistant basketball coach? Kind of a big deal ’round these parts. It began quite oddly. There’s President Barchi, who just days earlier had issued a statement that he and Tim Pernetti, RU’s...

So, Rutgers is in the news again. And again the story involves students, abuse, and video. This time, though, the story has some additional spice: sports, a cover-up, scandal. For those of us who have devoted our working lives to Rutgers, this latest spectacle is both breath-taking and soul-crushing. How did we get here, again? Again? * If you’ve been watching the news, listening to the radio, tracking your twitter feed, or visiting your...

So, here’s the set-up. It’s Friday Night in the small East Texas town of Kountze. And Friday Night means football. It’s fall, 2012. The Kountze Tigers suit up and when the time comes they charge through the opening in the back of a large inflatable football helmet. They are led by a player carrying a flag that reads: “I can do all things through CHRIST who strengthens me. Ph 4:13.” To the cheers of the crowd, of...

I love this picture of my dad at work in his study, hunched over, pounding out another story on his favorite manual, which was heavy enough to serve as a boat anchor for an ocean liner. The desk is too small, the chair is too small and too hard, the sunlight flooding the room is too bright. It’s too hot, but the air condition hasn’t been turned on. A cassette tape boom box is doubtless playing one of his recordings of music off the...

My last post presented a case study of how print news reports on plagiarism in the university. In this post, I want to reverse the poles: a student paper publishes a letter to the editor; the letter is picked up by an online scandal aggregator and turned into a news story. And the story jumps from site to site, makes its way to MSNBC and from there jumps the Atlantic and appears in the Daily Mail. What can we learn about 21st century writing...

It’s early December, end of the fall 2011 semester. What’s above the fold in the paper version of the Sunday edition of New Jersey’s biggest paper, The Star Ledger? Herman Cain suspending his presidential campaign? In-depth coverage of the case against now disgraced former governor Jon Corzine and now former CEO of MF Global? A Rutgers student’s effort to clear her name of plagiarism? Plagiarism, of course.   The...

So, if you had to predict what happened on election day in Loudoun County one week after the Loudoun County Republican Committee (LCRC) made national news for circulating an image of Obama as a zombie with a bullet hole in his forehead, what would you say: A.) As news of the image spread, outrage grew in the week leading up to the election, handing the Republican candidates in Loudoun County a devastating setback at the polls. B.) There was...

In case you blinked and missed this Halloween bombshell, let me bring you up to date. Act One: The Mailing (2 AM, October 31st, 2011) What is this, you ask? Is that really a picture of President Obama with a bullet hole in his head? It turns out that this collage of images accompanied an email invitation to the Loudoun County GOP’s constituents in Northern Virginia early Halloween morning inviting them to a bash later that afternoon. The...