What’s Wrong at Rutgers?

Posted on November 24, 2008
Filed Under News, The Daily Prereq | By Jessica Dye

When things started going south at New Jersey’s “biggest and most important public university” (according to The New York Times), Rutgers, university president Richard McCormick appointed a review committee to figure out what Newark’s Star-Ledger deemed out-of-control spending. And boy is he sorry now. The review committee has published its report, and it is a serious burn on McCormick’s inability to control Rutgers’ football program spending.

According to the Star-Ledger: “The university operated with inadequate internal controls, insufficient inter-departmental … communications, an uninformed board on some specific important issues and limited presidential leadership.” And from the sound of it, Rutgers has really run itself aground in pursuit of gridiron glory–a $102 million football stadium project already underway has fallen $72 million short of its fund-raising goal, academic departments are experiencing significant budget cutbacks, tuition’s going up, their football coach is locked into a multi-million dollar contract, and other sports (like tennis, swimming, and fencing) have been bumped down to the intramural level.

Rutgers says they’ll take steps to fix some of the issues found in the audit, including asking McCormick to keep a closer eye on the money. While we all love cheering on a winning football team, Rutgers is finding out the hard way what “at any cost” really adds up to.

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