NJ 101.5 Bill Spadea and Eric Scott SLAM RUTGERS
Here's the weird thing.. these two opened this morning's show at 6AM with seemingly off-hand remarks about Rutgers. Here are the main points they made:
A) They began talking about how expensive Rutgers is saying its cheaper to go to a private college out-of-state
B) Then they blasted the campus.. specifically citing the sidewalks for some reason.. and no, they did not specify which of the New Brunswick area campuses they were talking about
C) Then they attributed these issues to spending on football and the stadium and saying we are trying to be a southern state school where this works because there are no professional sports teams in the south.
D) They mentioned cutting sports (apparently someone remembered that from 10 years ago)
E) They mentioned not paying adjunct professors well enough (again, just pulling a charge from their bin labelled "we hate Rutgers")
F) Then they said that New Brunswick, the city, is great.. positively mentioning the theater district
G) They slammed Barchi and suggested that new Governor Murphy will have the power to remove him
I wish I had a recording of that to link for you all. Eric Scott is the news head at NJ 101.5.. he should know better than to go off and speak from ignorance. If Rutgers spent ZERO on football the tuition would likely need to go up or we'd need to cut other sports too... because we would be out of the Big Ten ASAP.
These idiots need to be forced to actually visit campus and be taught a few things about why it is so expensive to run Rutgers and why it looks like it does.
My list would be:
1) Princeton is beautiful.. it was a much larger school than Rutgers for 100 years or more and was a town built around a college. Most flagship state universities are towns built to serve the university.
2) Rutgers is a college built in and around a trade town on the D&R Canal. And did not become especially large until after WWII when state legislators made a deal to help returning GIs, to allow Rutgers to become the flagship State U.
3) Now imagine the typical State U.. created by the State (or even Territory) in the mid to late 1800s.. state contributions began immediately and were part of the budget for more than a century. Buying land (or having it granted to them).. building buildings, etc. MEANWHILE, at Rutgers.. a small private eastern college is finding ways to do the same thing. The benefit of the Morrill Act after the Civil War, Rutgers because the state's Land Grant institution and the land granted is selected by politicians and then sold off and that money is used to buy land in and around New Brunswick in order to build Cook College, the agricultural school. And during the Great Depression, Rutgers expands across the river into Piscataway.. again.. no state funds used.
3) Rutgers bought up and were granted lands piecemeal. It was, in essence, a group of small colleges.. a liberal arts college for men, a liberal arts college for women, an agriculture school, and engineering school.. it was pieced together with loss of economies of scale due to distance between campuses.
4) In the 60s and 70s.. like many New Jersey cities, New Brunswick suffered white-flight and Rutgers along with it. This is something towns built around State Us largely did not suffer.
5) I know the state funding has dropped.. in real and adjusted dollars... repeatedly. As cost of living increases in this state. As overhead of state workers pensions and benefits has increased. As cost of repairing roads and streets and building new buildings has increased.
You can see the state funding here. Keep in mind the recent increases came with even larger increases in liabilities due to assuming UMDNJ's debts and liabilities.
UCONN gets more from its state, has fewer students in a lower cost-of-living area...
6) Rutgers football is revenue neutral at a minimum... and when you consider that the bulk of the Big Ten money is yet to arrive.. blaming football is just ridiculous.
