Dear President Barchi,

Distinguished Professor, English Department

Director, Rutgers-Newark MFA Program

43 Bleeker Street

Newark, NJ  07102

www.JayneAnnePhillips.com

 

Click on Poster to Enlarge

 

——– Original Message ——–

Dear President Barchi:

Thank you for your response to the letter regarding diversity initiatives at Rutgers.  I am delighted to hear of your intention to maintain the autonomy of the Diversity Council. 

That said, I am still worried by the final paragraph of your letter, including your request that we drop all discussions of the process by which this office was conceived, established, and staffed; the lack of a search committee and formal process for hiring its chief officer; and the hundreds of thousands of university dollars in administrator salaries that will presumably be flowing to it beginning this summer.   I, and a number of my colleagues, feel very strongly that we need constructive, substantive discussions about the way in which this office was launched.  I am very reluctant to set aside our deep concerns about process in the name of our “important work in this area,” since doing so would appear to approve procedures antithetical to our ideals of shared governance.  There is indeed important work to be done in this area, as you so rightly put it, but such work should take place in an inclusive, open, and consultative manner.

Sincerely yours,
Andrew Murphy

For more correspondence with President Barchi, click here.

Faculty write to President Barchi to express their concerns.

Department of Jewish Studies
School of Arts and Sciences
Rutgers, The State University of New Jersey
12 College Avenue
New Brunswick, NJ 08901-1282

Gary A. Rendsburg
Blanche and Irving Laurie Chair in Jewish History

12 February 2013

Dear President Barchi:

I was on research leave in Oxford for the six(-plus) months of June through December 2012, so I was not at Rutgers when you arrived, and since my return to fulltime teaching this semester our paths have not crossed yet. So let me take this opportunity to introduce myself and to share some thoughts about the current strategic plan, with an eye to the University’s aspirations.

I have completed the online survey via the Qualtrics website, and I have shared my thoughts with my Department Chair, both at a recent Jewish Studies faculty meeting and then as a follow-up in writing – all part of the directive from your office that departments discuss the ‘six questions’.

No doubt my chair, Nancy Sinkoff, will incorporate my remarks (and those of my colleagues) into her report to SAS Acting Executive Dean Richard Falk, whose report will in turn wend its way to your desk. But I wanted to share with you my thoughts directly, as someone with 33 years of experience at three academic institutions (Canisius, Cornell, Rutgers), and with adjunct and/or visiting status at three others (Penn, Binghamton, Colgate). We all know the challenges before us: less-than-adequate support from Trenton; below-average alumni and donor giving; a physical plant badly in need of upgrading; a greener, prettier campus; a smooth merger with the medical school; more financial aid for needy students; and more.But I want to focus my remarks here on one particular issue, related to the question that you posed: “What current strengths of the university should be leveraged in achieving the future aspiration(s) for Rutgers?”

The unsung strength of Rutgers is its humanities programs. In the current (2012-13) Times Higher Education (London) World University Rankings (which I believe has greater credulity and receives greater respect than similar rankings),Rutgers ranks 99th in the world overall.

But in the Arts and Humanities area, Rutgers ranks 20th in the world – ahead of such peer institutions as Wisconsin, UNC, and UCSD, and just behind Michigan (18) and Cornell (19), and in fact ahead of such privates as Penn (23), Duke (27), and Brown (29) (Last year our ranking was 15th in the Arts and Humanities – as high as we have been, as far as I know.)

Or to look at the rankings in a different way, the only state universities ahead of Rutgers are Berkeley (7), UCLA (16), and Michigan (19) – placing us fourth,though with just a slight nudge upwards, we could be second.

The point is that while Rutgers talks science, medicine, engineering, etc. (and I intend no disregard of these fine programs populated by our excellent colleagues), rarely do I hear any boosting, especially from Old Queens, perhaps even more so under the current administration, of the humanities programs.

And without any disrespect to the other broad domains of knowledge taught at Rutgers, I would point out that Rutgers is not ranked among the Top 50 in any of the other subject areas: Clinical, Pre-Clinical, and Health; Engineering and Technology; Life Sciences; Physical Sciences; and Social Sciences (these rankings only go to 50, not higher).

Given Rutgers’ overall ranking at no. 99, it does not take a math genius to realize that without the high scores in Arts and Humanities, Rutgers would not be in the top 100 universities worldwide. And yet no one seems to know this. All of this is to say: if you wish to know what current strengths of the university should be leveraged in achieving the future aspirations for Rutgers, the answer is;the humanities.

During his tenure as SAS Executive Dean, Doug Greenberg was fond of saying that there are many great universities without a great law school or without a great medical school or without a great pharmacy school or without a great agricultural college and so on, but there are no great universities without a great School of Arts and Sciences. He obviously is correct on this point. And based on the determination of the respected Times Higher Education survey, it appears that humanities is leading the pack here (with presumably an assist from Mason Gross, given the general Arts and Humanities category in the ranking system).

I would encourage you, accordingly, to build from Rutgers’ strengths. Do not, I advise, let any other developments at Rutgers (merger with the medical school,etc.) compromise our strong position in the humanities, recognized worldwide.In fact, notwithstanding the current decrease in enrollments in the humanities,Rutgers should promote the main point I am making herein again and again –including the seemingly unknown wisdom that corporations, medical schools, etc., seek people who can read and write and think critically. (Not that scientists do not, and I have only the greatest respect for them; but there may be a different kindof critical thinking that transpires in humanistic research.) Let the humanities remain strong, encourage Rutgers to champion this strength, and then watch the University at large prosper and achieve new heights.

Sincerely,

Gary A. Rendsburg

Professor II

Department of Jewish Studies
(with additional affiliations in History and AMESALL)
email: grends@rci.rutgers.edu

P.S. For the record, in the two previous years, our Times ratings were:

2011-12: 81 overall – 15 humanities

2010-11: 105 overall – 17 humanities

Rendsburg letter to Barchi 

Subject: Your recent letter
Date: Sun, 17 Mar 2013 13:10:47 -0400
From: “Robert L. Barchi” <robert.barchi@oldqueens.rutgers.edu>
To: <grends@rci.rutgers.edu>
Cc: “Richard L. Edwards” <redwards@oldqueens.rutgers.edu>

Dear Gary,
 
Dick Edwards brought your recent letter to my attention. It appears to have been submerged in the recent avalanche of correspondence that hit Old Queens with the start of the strategic plan. Please accept my apology for having overlooked it. I (somewhat naively) assumed that the president’s office had a robust system for tracking all incoming correspondence and ensuring a timely response, but this does not appear to be the case.
 
At any rate, let me reply to your very important points regarding the importance of the humanities for Rutgers’ reputation and its future.
 
You have been off campus for the Fall and therefore were not “subjected” to any of my many public appearances and open sessions around campus since September. If you were to review recordings of these many events, you will find that I have made the same point about the humanities on virtually every occasion, in fact quoting the same Times Higher Ed survey. In my comments, this is also usually tied to the outstanding international reputation of our Philosophy department. The message that I have been consistently delivering is that our humanities departments are central to our current standing and critical to our future success, and that we cannot allow these strengths to be diminished as we consider other areas that need to be strengthened. In this regard, you and I are definitely singing from the same songbook. 
 
In regard to the strategic plan, my message there has also been consistent. To that point, the strong liberal arts component has been introduced as a foundational element, absolutely required for success in the overall venture. Furthermore, my steering committee has been pushing for additional academic themes that specifically address the humanities (and the arts, by the way). I am sure that these will be among the final set chosen for inclusion. However, no other academic area is being given comparable prominence in being identified as a “foundational element” in the plan.
 
I must admit to being a little surprised that my very public positions regarding the humanities has not made enough of a general impression for you to notice it on your return, Guess we will have to turn up the volume a little…
 
A final note; the largest and most prominent construction project about to begin on campus, at the top of the mall opposite Old Queens, is devoted almost entirely to the humanities, and will make a very public statement about the centrality of these disciplines to a great university.
 
Please feel free to discuss this further with me if I have not sufficiently address your concerns.
 
My best regards,
 
Bob Barchi

For more correspondence with President Barchi, click here.

An open letter from my colleague Yolanda Martínez-San Miguel.

Dear Colleagues:

Yolanda Martínez-San Miguel
Professor I and Director,
Institute for Research on Women
Latino Studies and Comparative Literature
Rutgers, the State University of New Jersey
www.yolandamartinez-sanmiguel.com

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 College Avenue Campus. The notification about the first violent act–including the notification that the suspect was still at large–didn’t go out for another three hours! Three hours during which the streets of the College Avenue Campus were filled with thousands of drunken revelers. 

About thirty minutes after the first warning text, another went out:

What had started as the annual spring party featuring live music, known locally as Rutgersfest, had ended as a sprawling, brawling, drunken mutinous crowd, indeterminately composed of Rutgers college students, students from other area colleges and high schools, and free-roaming visitors. Before the sun rose, another shooting victim would show up at one of the local hospitals and a student who’d been cracked over the head with a bottle would be rushed to the emergency room. But the effects of Rutgersfest didn’t end there: over the next couple of days, videos of fistfights, drunken crowds out of control, and police cars, lights flashing, converged around the fallen bodies of shooting victims would all to make their way onto YouTube and WorldStar (a website that markets itself as “the CNN of the Ghetto”), archiving the night’s excesses so all could see. 

The big video hit of the night was a sustained, multi-person fistfight that featured women throwing uppercuts, roundhouses, jabs, and haymakers, as they overpowered their stunned male opponents. As if staged for maximum negative publicity, the fistfight took place right in front of the Rutgers Student Center, which ensured that the university’s name featured prominently in the numerous videos that were posted of the fight. One video of the fight, “This Is Just 2 Crazy,” featured live ringside narration, with the fight announcer interrupting himself repeatedly to shout gleefully, “Bitches poppin’ dudes! Bitches poppin’ dudes!”

Grappling just below a sign featuring RU’s new visual identity system

Why was this “a bigger hit” than the shootings?

For two reasons: coverage of the shootings in the paper press stopped after one day (none of the people who were shot, apparently, were students, so where’s the story?) and there was no live footage of any of the shootings as they occurred. “This Is Just 2 Crazy,” by contrast, went up on WorldStar.com and got over half a million views in its first week.

“Only at Rutgers”: Gettin’ Branded

In a vain effort to counter the impression that Rutgers was under siege and out of control, Richard McCormick, then president of the university, announced four days after the shootings that Rutgersfest would not be allowed to occur in the future. Some enterprising students responded by printing shirts that made light of the entire affair. Others vowed that, sanctioned or not, RAGEfest would return in 2012.

These responses, coupled with a protest march down College Avenue and a sit-in, both staged to draw attention to increased tuition, created a mounting public perception that the president had lost control of the university. And so, after the seniors had been graduated, the faculty had dispersed for the summer, and the press had moved on to other things, President McCormick announced in late May, 2011, that he would be stepping down.

He wouldn’t be stepping down immediately, though, because that’s not how we do things here; rather, for reasons that were never made clear, he was letting everyone know, a year ahead of time, that his last day would be June 30th, 2012.

*

So, all right, there was a hiccup or two in the handoff of power. That happens.

McCormick was out as of June 30th, 2012; for contractual reasons his replacement, Bob Barchi, couldn’t take the job until September 1st. 

Barchi’s honeymoon at Rutgers didn’t last long. 

Hurricane Sandy Bears Down on the Jersey Shore: Rutgers is Still Open!

October 26th: a university-wide email is sent out reminding everyone of the numerous ways to keep up with the campus status as Hurricane Sandy moved north. A website, a local cable tv channel, a phone number, even a number to text for alerts. Looks good in terms of campus preparedness.

October 28th: 11:56PM, minutes from Monday. Campus employees receive the following email about reporting to work the next day:

As you are aware, in anticipation of Hurricane Sandy, New Brunswick Mayor James Cahill declared a State of Emergency at 6:00 p.m. today, Sunday, October 28, 2012, and imposed restriction on travel along City streets for non-emergency personnel effective Monday morning. However, we have been advised that this restriction will not apply to Rutgers employees. All Rutgers employees with a valid Rutgers identification card will be allowed to travel to and from work.

 Got it: the Mayor of New Brunswick has said that it’s not safe to travel the streets, but RU employees, with a valid id, can still get to work.

Twelve hours later, after RU staff members in New Brunswick have reported to work on a campus where all the classes have been cancelled and the faculty are safely at home, the following message is sent to all members of the university community:

Officials at Rutgers have been closely monitoring the storm pattern of Hurricane Sandy.  Due to the increased threat of flooding and high winds, President Barchi has ordered the closure of offices and programs on all campuses of Rutgers University, effective Noon on Monday, October 29, until 12:01 a.m. on Tuesday, October 30.  Employees critical to operations, and the health and safety of our campus community, will still report to work as specified by their supervisor.

Daytime and evening classes on all Rutgers campuses remain cancelled on Monday, October 29, and Tuesday, October 30. Classes are scheduled to resume on Wednesday, October 31.

“Closely monitoring the storm pattern?”

Apparently, this close monitoring didn’t involve tracking the warnings from NOAA, the federal organization that covers whats going on with the oceans and the atmosphere:

In other words, minutes before the university sent out its email blast telling employees to report to work on Monday, despite the fact that the Mayor of New Brunswick had declared a state of emergency, NOAA was warning of widespread flooding and major power outages.

At 5AM, Monday, Oct. 29th, NOAA warned that the storm was actually getting stronger. And yet, employees received no instructions to stay home, to stay off the streets, to stay out of the way. 

At 8AM, Monday, Oct. 29th, NOAA had the center of Sandy moving ashore in the Mid-Atlantic by that evening. And still, no instructions to stay home.

This is not a subtle point.

The president of the university is responsible for ensuring the safety of university students and employees. Who exactly was “closely monitoring” the slow, steady, endlessly reported on development of the “storm of the century”? This is a university, recall, with vast faculty expertise to draw on. Indeed, David Robinson, the state climatologist, is one of the president’s resources. Which specialists in emergency management, extreme weather, marine and coastal sciences, or environmental studies did the president consult with in order to come up with the orders to report to work on Monday?  It’s hard to believe that any of these experts would have recommended bringing the staff to work as the clouds darkened, the winds picked up speed, and the highways were emptied because EVERYONE else was staying at home.

Maybe it was a judgment call. 

Comparing Irene to Sandy

*

In the event, so much damage was done as Sandy moved up the coast that classes were cancelled on the New Brunswick and Newark campuses through November 2nd. And students who’d stayed on those campuses were finally encouraged to go home, if they could, because the power outages and water problems produced by the storm made campus housing a dicey matter. Those who remained were relocated.

Had no one thought about the fact that the students would need food and clean water in the event of a sustained power outage? That foreign students would not have a place to go?

When campus opened a week after the storm had hit, downed trees blocked and, in some cases, uprooted sidewalks, fallen and tilted electrical poles left wires drooping, dangling, and splaying. 

College Avenue, November 10th, 2011.
Snapped electrical pole on left, eye-level sagging wire drooping from right to left.

What happens next is instructive.

Having completely failed to communicate with the university community in a timely way prior to, during, and after a foreseen catastrophe, President Barchi declared, six weeks after the floods had receded and the roads had been cleared, that he had formed a “presidential task force” to “document the lessons we learned during the storm and comprehensively evaluate our emergency operations, communications, infrastructure, business continuity plans, and other potentially vulnerable areas” (Memo, 12/10/12).  

Four months have passed since this announcement and not a peep from said task force.

*

But life goes on, as it does, and as surely as winter turns to spring, campus emergencies don’t wait for the experts in preparedness management and proactivitization studies to finish coming up with their new procedures for keeping the community safe. Emergencies just happen. Some out of the blue. Some rather predictably.

Which takes us back to the cancelled Rutgersfest, followed by the threatened but unrealized RAGEfest of 2012.

Is it possible that the desire to resurrect the spring party lived on in the student body past 2012? Could anyone have predicted that, with a break in the weather and an upturn in the temperatures, students might congregate and throw an unsanctioned bash?

If there was advance information of Delafest, an off-campus block party held during the day on April 13th, 2013, available via social media, the news didn’t trickle up to the powers that be at Rutgers or the New Brunswick Police. Consequently, everyone charged with keeping the peace in the area appears to have been caught entirely by surprise that just a few blocks from campus, around the time of year when Rutgersfest would have been held, students spilled out from seven different house parties on to Delafield, blocked off the entrance to the street with some sawhorses, and just let loose.

Rebranding, Part Deux

The cops showed up and tried to disperse the revelers, but they didn’t meet with much success. Even with pepper spray, they couldn’t quash the party faithful’s felt sense that they had a right to party like there was no tomorrow.

According to multiple reports, the police then retreated to the parking lot of a nearby funeral home and got backup support from the Rutgers University police and police from nearby North Brunswick and Franklin Township.

Was there a conscious decision not to use the RU Alert System to notify the Rutgers community regarding what was going on at Delafield? Or to encourage those who were on Delafield that it might be a good idea to peaceably disperse, so as to avoid the legal consequences of being present at an unlicensed party where minors were drinking and any number of additional misdemeanors were in the process of being committed? A simple announcement: If you’re not there, stay away. If you are there, go home. 

Nothing. Not a peep.

Instead, outfitted with plexiglass shields and tear gas, a wall of police marched down Delafield, forcing the crowd to disperse.

And firefighters arrived to tend to an overstuffed chair that had been set afire in the middle of the street:

Burn that shit! Burn that shit!

*

After the streets had been cleared and all that remained was the garbage, the broken bottles, and the smoldering remains of that great bonfire idea, Rutgers was right back on the front page again, the brief respite from the Mike Rice debacle squandered by what the press termed alternately a “riot” or a “melee.”

And, as with Rutgersfest 2011, the attendees couldn’t wait to post images of the event up to twitter and, using an app called Vine, they also linked their tweets to short videos of the various stages of the all day drunken bash. And then, when those images and short videos got picked up by the news media, the posters rushed to twitter to celebrate their success: they were on TV! they were on the news! Yay! 

 
Delafest gets ranked 13th “craziest college party” of all time by ChaCha. 
The week before, Rutgers was rated the “#1 Sluttiest College in the United States” by Barstoolsports.com

If the horses weren’t already well over the horizon, if the barn door hadn’t been ripped off the hinges and set ablaze, and if the field hands dancing in a circle and shouting “burn that shit!” weren’t playing on an infinite loop in the cloud for all eternity, maybe this invocation of the rule of law might have had some power. Coming after the event, it serves as just another example of how woefully unprepared the university administration is for the realities that govern life in the age of the internet.

Rule of law?

These students are on the other side of a week in which the university “fired” its basketball coach for abusing his players–a firing everyone involved openly admits only took place because a video of the abuse, which the administration seems never to have imagined would get out, went viral.

 A week that ended with  a long Saturday Night Live skit that prominently featured the Rutgers visual identity system in its opening scene.

Growing the Brand: Opening Montage from Saturday Night Live’s Spoof of ESPN’s “Outside the Lines.”

7 million people watch SNL a week.

Time magazine singled out the skit for special praise:

As Sheila Kelly, a thinly veiled female version of Rice, McCarthy terrorizes her players with everything from dropping bricks and throwing toasters to using a stun gun and forcing players to serve her meals. If you’re not planning to watch the whole episode, this sketch is one not to miss.

In this incident, the victim (a University Student) reported that while walking on Union Street, she was approached by an unknown individual who intentionally struck her on the buttocks with his hand.  The assailant then got into a white car and left from the location.  The victim was not physically injured during this incident.

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 Athletic Director, had “jointly decided to terminate Mike Rice’s employment at Rutgers,” an announcement that suggested either that they were a team or that he needed Pernetti’s permission to fire a coach who was videotaped over a two year period kicking, shoving, and verbally intimidating his players. And now, there’s Barchi announcing Pernetti’s resignation. Not his firing, mind you, but his resignation. 

So, in a way that only Rutgers can do, Barchi stands in the national spotlight and chooses to use the opening moments of the conference to serve as Pernetti’s ventriloquist and apologist by somberly reading aloud Pernetti’s letter of resignation in its entirety. Out of the president’s mouth, we hear the following: 

Are you following? 

The president is voicing the AD’s new claim that he wanted to fire Coach Rice last November, but that he was prevented from doing so by the consensus of other university specialists. The president’s defense of his own inaction and Pernetti’s defense of his previous actions blend: together, they blame the Rutgers staff, administration, and its top legal counsel for overriding the athletic director’s moral instincts. Pernetti’s got the moral compass; the university’s got a bunch of bumbling, cowardly, nameless bureaucrats.

This may or may not be true: the point is, why would the university’s own president chose to give credence to Pernetti’s explanation–an explanation which had already been posted front and center on the Scarlet Knight’s home page and had been distributed to news agencies around the country? Pernetti’s got his soap box and his digital megaphone; why’s the president still doing his bidding after he’s resigned and  no longer works for Rutgers?

Or to put this another way, why stage the conference as a wake for the athletic director instead of as the occasion to announce that the AD was being fired for gross incompetence and that the president was launching a full scale investigation into how this catastrophe came to pass?

Why didn’t this happen? ¹

Because the gross managerial incompetence is not Pernetti’s alone, but rather is shared by Rutgers’ senior administration and the Board of Governors and the Governor. Lamenting Pernetti’s sad fall from grace is just a way to keep everything focused on the relatively trivial matters of individual coaches, individual administrators, and individual words when the real issue is systemic incompetence. The Board itself has played a central role in fostering and promoting a structure of mediocrity at the university in ways that the news conference, as it continued to spiral out of control, put on display for all to see.

 *

As soon as Barchi finishes reading Pernetti’s letter, there’s the question–the predictable one, the one that was and is on everyone’s mind, the one that made this hastily organized news conference necessary: was Barchi going to resign? It is a question that will get asked a number of times over the course of the next forty minutes.

How had Barchi’s team prepared him for this question?

His first response:

Um, that’s not exactly a full throated endorsement of the president’s own commitment to the university. Rather, Barchi has chosen to depict himself as essentially powerless, so powerless that the question of his own resignation is not something he could initiate on his own: whether he continues on or not is an expression of the Board’s will, not his.

  *

His second response to the same question, some ten minutes later:

Did he really say that? Out loud?

*

The third time the question gets asked it is directed to Ralph Izzo, head of the Board of Governors:

I would say bundling these two objectives creates a job that no single person could ever hope to accomplish. As Barchi mentions later in the press conference, Rutgers is going through the biggest merger in the history of higher education as a result of the governor’s insistence that it be joined with UMDNJ. This project involves tens of thousands of employees, two different kinds of institutions, and a tangle of personnel decisions that it would take a dedicated team of hundreds of people to carry through effectively. Barchi is probably the person to do that job, but he’s not the person who should be overseeing the development of the plan for what directions the university should take over the next two years, let alone the next ten. He’s not qualified to do the second job and, as the press conference documents, he’s not someone who inspires confidence at a moment of crisis.

Who put Barchi in a position to fail so spectacularly?

The Board that Mr. Izzo oversees.

*

So, having been at Rutgers for eight months, what is Barchi’s assessment of the university as a whole?

Relatively fallow? For a long time?

This may or may not be true, but why say this out loud at this moment?

Not a great strategy for gaining the hearts and minds of the folks who have spent their working lives here.

*

A reporter asks if this is the last “interval” (I think he means “installment”) of this saga or if there will be more to come. 

Barchi reaches to straighten his tie, then he overplays the gesture, which gets a laugh, and so he continues, making it seem as if the noose is tightening. There’s more laughter. And the question remains unanswered.
 

A voice in the audience provides the caption for Barchi’s moment of mime: “They’re coming to get you next!”

*

It’s hard not to feel for Barchi during this excruciating experience. He doesn’t seem like a bad guy. He’s just in way over his head and how and why he got there is not his story, but rather the story of a much deeper problem at this university.

Why wasn’t there a plan for when to end the spectacle? 

This question leads to the events that brought national attention to the sorry state of affairs of management at Rutgers.

Why was Tim Pernetti out defending his initial decision to suspend Rice on Monday night on ESPN. Surely, the AD’s actions on national television about such an immediately inflammatory issue required consultation with the university president? The AD’s team? Somebody? Why didn’t anyone prep Pernetti to lay off the argument that Rice had been disciplined and admonished and that was all the situation called for? That was just gasoline on the fire.

Why hadn’t the president’s staff made it possible for the president to see the DVD sometime prior to Tuesday morning? The president says he had the DVD in his possession that morning while he was in transit to Newark, but that his computer couldn’t read the DVD. Giving up on the technology, he waited till all his meetings were over and he could go directly to the AD’s office Tuesday night to watch it with him. By that time, of course, the video had been viewed millions of times by people around the world.

How is this possible at a flagship university? How did the president’s handlers let him end up in such a vulnerable position?

How is it that Barchi watched the video and in “five minutes” came to a conclusion that the Athletic Director, human resource managers, university lawyers, and the outside law firm all failed to reach over the many months preceding the airing of the video on ESPN?  

*

Who told Barchi it would be a good idea to describe his response to the video in the following terms:

There are two aspects of this response that I believe will spell lasting trouble for President Barchi and the university. First, if the 30 minute video is excerpted from hundreds of hours of practice tapes, how could Barchi reasonably reach the conclusion that what he was seeing amounted to “pervasive behavior”? My guess is that this is a claim that will have legal consequences. If I were Coach Rice, I’d have my lawyers drawing up papers for a yet bigger settlement. 

Second, if Barchi stands by his assessment, then it seems to me that he has no other option but to fire the entire basketball staff and all the HR specialists and other members of his legal council who, given months to examining the evidence, couldn’t see what he could see in the blink of an eye.

Shortly after making this statement, Barchi makes certain that everyone present understands that he didn’t fire Coach Rice for cause; he “just fired him.”

What does this mean?

It means that, because Rice had been suspended and had met the terms of his disciplining, he had to be fired in a way that let him take over 1.4M out the door with him.

In other words, Barchi couldn’t fire Rice for cause because of how the university had assessed the video evidence originally. He “just fired him” because he had no other option. So, Rice was “fired” in the sense that he now gets the full payout of the remainder of his contract without having to do anything for it at all.

Would that we could all experience the luxury of such a firing.

Similarly, Pernetti couldn’t be fired for cause. He’d done what everyone in the system said was legally defensible. So, he resigned in a way that let him take 1.2M with him, a car allowance, health insurance, his computer, and weirdly, his iPad. That last detail is pretty revealing: take everything that isn’t nailed down, including a $300 piece of technology, when you’ve been making 450K/year.

So, Barchi acted decisively, paying two people top dollar to leave.

Got it? That’s what authority looks like around here.

Just like that: 2.6M gone.

*

Is it really true that the university couldn’t have fired Rice for cause when his behavior first became known? Is that really believable?

The claim that is voiced in Pernetti’s letter of resignation and that was repeated in the news conference is that this was “a failure of process.” The outside evaluator’s report tied the university’s hands, internal counsel offered bad advice, the dog ate the homework.

It is true that the report of the outside investigation talks out of both sides of its mouth. On the one hand, it states that there is not grounds to fire Rice for having created a hostile work environment. On the other hand, the report states:

So, Rice could have been fired for cause, because his contract stipulated that he could not “embarrass or bring shame or disgrace to Rutgers.” But the consensus decision of the administration and the Athletic Director was to discipline Rice instead.

Presumably, Pernetti had the same clause in his contract.

Did he bring shame and embarrassment to Rutgers based on his performance on the ESPN show, where he claimed that Rice was punished for his actions and then defended his decision to keep Rice on as head coach. Pernetti is saying this on national TV after Sandusky, mind you, and after Tyler Clementi’s suicide brought national attention to homophobia at the university.

How, with the report of the outside counsel, could anyone have concluded that Rice should stay on?

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Has Barchi brought shame and embarrassment to the university? 

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Has the Board brought shame and embarrassment to the university?

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Earlier in the year, the Rutgers Foundation, the university’s fundraising arm, rolled out its latest gambit for reaching the elusive goals of Rutgers capital campaign. 

This odd, baffling image accidentally captures how Rutgers is being run these days. If you cut your head off, you can show your pride in Rutgers without regret.

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?

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If you’ve been watching the news, listening to the radio, tracking your twitter feed, or visiting your facebook page, you’ve learned that on Monday ESPN’s “Outside the Lines” had Rutgers Athletics Director Tim Pernetti on to address “hours and hours” of video footage of RU basketball coach Mike Rice’s behavior during practice. ESPN learned about the tapes from a former RU assistant basketball coach who maintains he was fired for bringing the tape to Pernetti’s attention. (Amazingly, the tapes have been available all along; ESPN accessed them through the Freedom of Information Act.)  It’s a hard-hitting interview–the kind that can only happen in the sports arena: Pernetti is firm that the three-game suspension, the fine, the behavior modification sessions, and all the other ornamental aspects of Rice’s punishment amounted to a strong response from the RU administration. The guys on ESPN aren’t buying it though and by the end of the interview Pernetti is left to insist that the firing of the assistant basketball couch was for “insubordination,” while Rice’s punishment was for “a first offense.”

Post-Tyler Clementi. Post-Jerry Sandusky. This is the response?

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That was Monday. By Tuesday morning, TV trucks with their satellite dishes had the university surrounded. And what were all these “journalists” doing? Interviewing students about their response to the video. The real journalists were killing time waiting for the news conference over at the RAC.

The fat lady was singing.

Six months after Pernetti was first informed about Rice’s behavior and four months after he reviewed all those “hours and hours” of tapes, Pernetti fired Rice.

And  shortly thereafter, RU President Bob Barchi sent everyone at Rutgers his explanation for Rice’s eviction from the fold. It’s an odd missive, detailing the use of an independent investigator to study the video clips, and the President’s direct involvement in agreeing on the original suspension. Apparently, though, Barchi failed to actually watch the video clips until Monday afternoon. That did it: Rice had to go. Not because he’d violated the terms of his original suspension or because of any new infractions, but because the President had found time in his busy schedule to look at the clips that were now being avidly replayed by viewers around the globe. 

The last sentence is the most important one: “Tim Pernetti and I have jointly decided to terminate Mike Rice’s employment at Rutgers.”

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Who’s in charge here? 

If the President is actually in charge, he has to fire Pernetti and Rice at the same time. That closing sentence tells the deeper story at Rutgers, though, and that’s a story of rudderlessness at the top, mendacity in the middle, and demoralization at the bottom.

Chris Christie, NJ’s governor who has been known to blow his stack while the cameras were rolling, knows a thing or two about rage. When the story first broke, he let it be known through his spokesman that “he [was] obviously deeply disturbed by the conduct displayed and strongly condemns this behavior.” Obviously.

And, now that Rice has been fired? 

It’s all better. “As we move on from this, I’m very optimistic that [Rutgers] will select a new head coach who not only puts a winning team on the court but will make everyone proud of the example he sets every day for the young men in his charge.”

Problem solved.

Well, if the problem was the basketball coach, the problem has been solved. But that’s not the problem. That’s the symptom.

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How did RU end up with Bob Barchi as its president? 

Look to the Board of Governors for your answer. And look to Governor Christie, who forced Rutgers to merge with UMDNJ (the University of Dentistry and Medicine of New Jersey) last year. Forced, without completing any financial assessment of the consequences of bringing the formerly scandal-ridden UMDNJ into RU’s own troubled portfolio. And, with this forced merger, RU needed a new president, one who knew his way around a med school, so they hired the then outgoing president of Thomas Jefferson University in Philadelphia. He came on board this past September and, as his official school biography proudly proclaims in its first full paragraph, Professor Barchi “announced on November 20, 2012 that all intercollegiate athletic teams on Rutgers’ New Brunswick campus will join the Big Ten Conference at a date to be determined.”

Wait a minute, November?

Isn’t that when Pernetti was deciding Rice’s fate?

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A coincidence, doubtless.

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Just before Barchi assumed control of RU in September, the Athletics Department found itself in another pickle. On January 26, 2012, It’s grossly overrated, overpaid, and overhyped football coach, Greg Schiano, had abruptly announced that he was jumping ship and heading to the NFL to coach the Tampa Bay Buccaneers. (Who better to man the pirate’s ship?) Schiano’s timing, which both he and his players defended in terms of his need to take care of his family, seemed destined to severely damage Rutgers’ ability to recruit a strong class of 1st year talent, so something had to be done–and done quickly–to reassure those prospective recruits that Rutgers was still a safe bet.

Just four days later, on February 1st, Tim Pernetti announced that Kyle Flood, formerly the Scarlet Knights offensive line coach, had signed a five-year deal to serve as the new head coach of the football team.

Who’s in charge here?

Pernetti, with the full support of the Board of Governors, locked Rutgers into continuing down the road of pouring unlimited resources into the athletic department: they acted swiftly, before the outgoing president had officially left his position and before his successor had been named. Whoever ended up getting the job overseeing RU’s merger with UMDNJ, he or she would inherit both this decision and a system where the Board and the Athletic Director determine the university’s priorities. 

Could they have done something differently? Indeed, they could have. Flood could have been appointed Interim Head and then the new president, whoever he or she turned out to be, could have played a central role in establishing the appropriate relationship between the athletic department and the university’s larger commitments.

Is this a crazy suggestion?

Currently, RU has an Interim Executive Dean for the School of Arts and Sciences in New Brunswick, who is slated to serve another year: no national search was mounted this year to fill the senior administrative position for the largest academic unit on all three of RU’s campuses. Here are other positions that are currently staffed by interim appointments: Vice-President of Student Affairs, Vice Chancellor for Undergraduate Academic Affairs, Vice President of Research and Economic Development, Executive Vice-Dean of SAS. There’s also this key vacancy: Senior Vice President and Legal Counsel.

Why can you hire a football coach in four days, but you can’t even launch a search for the Executive Dean of your largest academic unit in six months?

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What happened to the last dean, you ask? He was fired by the outgoing president on his own last day in office. 

Now, that’s leadership.

And the outgoing president?

Well, he announced in 2011 that he would be stepping down at the end of June in 2012, officially making himself all but irrelevant at the very moment the university was being shoved into the merger with UMDNJ. 

How could the Board of Governors let this happen?

To answer that question,one must recall that this is the same Board that hired the previous previous president, only to discover, days after his arrival on campus, that he had been having an affair with an employee at his previous job. Barely unpacked, Richard McCormick, the new president, the one on whom so many Rutgers faculty had pinned their hopes, was completely hobbled–more scandals followed, leaving McCormick powerless to push whatever his own agenda might have been.

The Board and the previous Athletic Director, Bob Mulcahy, (“Saint Bob”), colluded to get the 110M expansion to the football stadium approved at a time (which is still very much with us) when classrooms at RU crumble and the technological infrastructure yearns to be only ten years out of date.

If you want to understand how Rutgers got where it is now, you have to look to the Board of Governors. They have failed in their fiduciary duty to protect the state’s most valuable intellectual and educational asset. They have actively developed a chain of command where the university’s highest officer needs the help of the Athletic Director to collaboratively fire the men’s basketball coach.

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How far out of step has Rutgers fallen because of gross managerial incompetence? Let me paint a picture for you:

This little movie is what greets RU undergrads when they go to learn more about how the administration envisions undergraduate education. It’s an odd choice of imagery, no? A board game? Really?

Who made this decision? Who thought it would be a good idea to have a little movie where you can make the cows moo and the stadium roar, but nowhere can you hear the sound of education taking place.

Here’s another picture:

This picture is more attractive. 

It’s a picture of the School of Arts and Sciences’ Core Curriculum. Mighty pretty, eh?

What the picture hides is that the new core curriculum has twenty-seven requirements.

Twenty-seven? 

How’s that possible?

It’s possible because the new curriculum has been designed with the goal of appeasing every department in the university. Everybody gets a slice of the pie.

This monstrosity is something that the faculty did to itself. Or more properly, it is something the faculty is putting our undergraduates through.

Is this the best way to prepare our students for the future? Board games and limitless requirements that need to be checked off before one receives a degree in staying in between the lines?

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As it happens, last Friday, I had the honor of giving the inaugural lecture for the Tyler Clementi Center at Rutgers. It was a beautiful afternoon: today could be the day, I said, that we decide to change the world.

How do we learn to live in a world where anything that can be seen or heard can be recorded and then distributed globally in the blink of an eye? 

One consequence of living in such a world is that anything that can’t be seen or heard and then watched on a screen has little chance of holding anyone’s attention for long. We have images of a grown man, out of control, cursing and throwing basketballs at young men: something must be done!

But, how do you get images of gross mismanagement? Of incompetence? Of failure of vision? 

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What is to become of public higher education in the decades ahead?

If the dominant governing structure isn’t reconceived, I think public universities will waste all their energies chasing ephemeral revenue streams–athletics! MOOCs! mix-n-stir nostalgia binges–and state support will leak out entirely. 

At Rutgers, instead of contracting with the Boston Consulting Group to construct a “strategic” “vision” for the decade ahead, the President and the Board of Governors would have been well advised to have initiated a thorough assessment of the administration of university affairs over the past twenty years. What in the governing structure itself has led to Rutgers being known, first and foremost, for the “Rutgers screw.”

You can claim that this is a problem in perception and that it can be taken care of by “re-branding” and better slogans (Jersey Roots, Global Reach!). The truth though, as the Rice affair has made clear once again, is that this is a reality-based problem. Put the students’ education first; let that principle drive your future decisions, and the problems with the “screw,” with the incompetence, with the indifference, with the absenteeism, etc, etc, etc–all become solvable. 

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I’ve long rejected the argument that the university is being “corporatized.” This popular critique is based on a misunderstanding of the function of all the pointless exercises in assessment and survey-taking and massive committee formation and fly-swatting. That’s all just show: it is an adult form of pretend.

If the university were truly “corporatized,” wouldn’t someone be asking about the bottom line in budget allocations? Wouldn’t there be some discussion of “damage to the brand” by tweets like this:

You’re charged with protecting the brand, right? Now, here’s the most recognized name in the NBA tweeting to his 7 MILLION followers his assessment of the Rice video. And some 11 thousand of his followers retweeted this tweet, so it went on to untold, uncountable others. You can’t control what LeBron does, obviously, but isn’t that beside the point: the leadership at Rutgers put the university in the position to be identified, globally, as indifferent to the welfare of its students. Isn’t that a fireable offense?

Where’s the cost/benefit analysis of this approach to management?

The university isn’t being corporatized, except in the flimsiest, stageyest of ways. What has happened, rather, is that the public university has acquired all of the managerial problems one associates with the military: cost is no issue; results are always malleable, and problems are promoted up. So, the only way to understand how these problems can continue to remain unaddressed is to recognize that solving these problems is inconsequential to those at the top of the administrative heap. 

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Will Pernetti lose his job? Will Barchi? 

I don’t think those are the right questions.

Will Rutgers find a way to return the education of our undergraduate and our graduate students to the institution’s center? Will we develop a set of clearly articulated principles that are to guide decisions in these uncharted times? Will we seize this opportunity to become the first university in the nation to confront how technology has fundamentally changed the experience of education?

These are the questions I’d like to see discussed with the kind of energy and urgency that is now being spent on the system’s symptoms.

Today could be the day we decide to change the world.

It is the promise of education that dreams of a better future can be made real. The missing ingredient at this point is the will to risk trying.

Next installment: Good Enough For Rutgers: President Barchi Aims at Foot, Blows Off Head

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9PM Thursday: The NYT editorial board reaches something like a similar conclusion.