Rutgers, Misunderstood

Rutgers University athletics is back in the news again this Memorial Day weekend, and again, it is for all the wrong reasons.  The new athletic director, Julie Hermann, hired after former AD Tim Pernetti was forced to resign in the wake of the Mike Rice scandal, apparently carries with her some baggage of her own.  Specifically, in the 1990s she resigned as head coach of the University of Tennessee women's volleyball team in the wake of a unanimous letter written by her players, describing some pretty horrible coaching methods.  Additionally, though this has been known for the past few weeks, she was found liable in 1997 in a wrongful termination lawsuit by a former assistant coach alleging that she had been fired due to wanting to become pregnant.

It is certainly possible, at this point, that the scandal will carry over to some hypothetical tipping point, and Rutgers University will end up dismissing the new athletic director for some bad decisions that happened over a decade ago.  I am not certain this would be the correct move to make, as people's behaviors and attitudes are allowed to change over time (certain things that are not politically correct to say in 2013 were way more acceptable to say in the 90's), and also as it's impossible for a person to move through the ranks in a highly competitive field such as athletics management without burning a few bridges in the process.  (In fact, some of Hermann's colleagues stepped to the plate today to dismiss yesterday's allegations.)  But, it may still happen.

With Rutgers' mismanagement of its athletics department continuing to make news, I am sure there are people within Rutgers' administration who are wondering when they will catch a break on a good thing that the school does in the mass media.  If only some professor's latest invention or cure or something would make the headlines on the nightly news the way the school's bungling their latest athletic hire does on ESPN these days.  Lately, it seems the school has been in the news for all of the wrong reasons, and the point of this blog post is to help to understand why.

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I attended Rutgers as an undergraduate between 2002 and 2006.  I graduated with a B.A. in Biology (and I did pretty well there as a student, to leave it at that).  Later, to provide some context, I attended Boston College for my master's degree - so I know what it's like to attend a school with a different philosophy (there is no such thing as a "B.C. Screw", though there is an "RU Screw," for instance).

I love Rutgers to the core, though, and while I primarily love Rutgers for the academic opportunities and high amount of value it provides to students for a quality education, I've also been a football season ticket holder since 2009 - which has been more painful than enjoyable, but hey, I am a glutton for punishment.

My first point, as an alumnus of the University, is that for the most part, Rutgers does not seek to excel - and this is perfectly okay.  Rutgers, if it had a philosophy on this - and it probably doesn't, but bear with me here - seeks to be "good enough" and a good value.  Rutgers is now experiencing the bad side of an equation it's been taking advantage of for a very long time.  Nationally, the Rutgers name exceeds what people in New Jersey think of Rutgers.  When I visit my family in Florida and meet someone new, and it comes up where I went to school, I mention Rutgers and they think "Wow, that's a great school, you must be successful."

I think Rutgers is great, and to the extent I am successful, Rutgers played a huge part in that, but think about it objectively: who goes to Rutgers?  In reality, it's a safety school that takes advantage of the fact that New Jersey graduates WAY more college-ready high school seniors than the national average (because our educational structure is pretty close to top notch, and because of genetics and having lots of smart parents here, etc.).  Any qualified honors student in a NJ public high school could write his or her ticket to any small, private liberal arts college in the U.S. - if they wanted to pay tons of money to attend.  On the flip side, the Ivy League schools have to be way more selective toward NJ students because too many are over-qualified and they seek to have a geographically diverse student body (transplant any of these NJ kids to Kansas and Princeton would admit them in a heartbeat).

So here lies Rutgers, with attractive in-state tuition and the opportunity to obtain a very good (but not world-class) education, close to home.  I could have attended a small, private, liberal-arts school, but I am so glad I attended Rutgers instead.  I write this well aware that, with the exception of one or two academic departments, Rutgers is not excellent at anything.  And of course bureaucratically, due to its complexity and uncommon dependence upon the state, Rutgers has always been a nightmare for everyone (students, professors, staff, etc.).  This bureaucratic awfulness had to have played a huge role in a few of the recent scandals - Rutgers' response to every problem is and always has been to form a committee, adding another layer of garbage and noise to the problem - but in the news coverage of the scandals, it's sort of hidden between the lines, as subtext.

This is because Rutgers' national reputation does not include any of the above truths about what Rutgers is like!  So when a series of scandals like those that have plagued the athletic department over the past few months happen, everyone in the national sports media goes "Wow, Rutgers?!  That pillar of academic excellence?!  How can they be so messed up?!"  To which every Rutgers alumni responds back with a face palm and a "Duh," because even the best students at Rutgers who excelled at everything HAVE to remember waiting in line after line, being shuffled from department to department, in order to get anything administrative accomplished while they were a Rutgers student.  That is the not-so-hidden truth about Rutgers.

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Every candidate for the athletic director position at Rutgers had to have known all the good, and the bad, about working at Rutgers. The good had to the have outweighed the bad, though, because a number of qualified candidates were finalists for the position. But "qualified" and "without warts" are two different things, which leads me to my second point: Rutgers was never going to find someone to be their AD that did not have something checkered in their past.

Here am I speculating a bit, because I do not work in this industry, but it seems reasonable to assume that college athletics are a fairly murky area with lots of potential booby traps: NCAA infractions, overzealous and hyper-competitive recruiting of top athletes, academic scandals, shady AAU coaches, etc.  There seem to be too many ways for a person to fall into possible trouble while climbing the ranks of athletic management at the university level.  And Rutgers, which - let's face it - is not known for its athletics, was also not offering a large sum of money to the athletic director.  If Hermann keeps her job, I believe she will be paid $450,000 annually - I'd take it, and you'd take it, but it's not a huge sum of money for the position and for the responsibility.

So what did we expect to get from our new AD?  Former AD Tim Pernetti was a great find, but not without risk - he did not have a traditional AD background (he came from broadcasting) and as a Rutgers alum who loved the school, he was willing to be paid what was Rutgers was willing to pay.  (I would also assume that as a former TV exec, he was already so wealthy at the time of his hire that he was thinking of the position almost like working for a non-profit, a career change that many wealthy people make at mid-career.)  And it turns out that his flaw - keeping Mike Rice on board when he should have fired him - was probably at least partially a result of his non-traditional AD background.

I am not sure if Rutgers will end up dismissing Hermann for this, but the damage has been done already.  The real problem is that the Rutgers Committee to Select the Members of the Committee to Select the Athletic Director appears to have not known something about Hermann that anyone who reads the On the Banks blog knew about two weeks ago - specifically, that wrongful termination lawsuit (with an actual jury verdict, not an out-of-court settlement) from 1997.

That, above everything else that's happened over the past few months, looks really bad for Rutgers University, and it speaks to the core of the problem, which is that Rutgers seems to be a rudderless ship, constantly reacting to these issues without ever being proactive.  Whatever his good traits, new Rutgers President Robert Barchi has shown time and time again that he has no clue, or interest in, managing a medium-profile athletics department.  Athletics, whatever its warts, is fine marketing for the University, and if Barchi can't fix this series of negative news about Rutgers very quickly, in my opinion, he needs to be dismissed as President.

What I think doesn't really matter, though - there are plenty of influential alumni boosters who have to feel the same way about this, and if your money talks and if my money talks, their money SCREAMS.  And once that goes away, the Board of Governors will have no choice except to let the big boss go.  Let's see what happens in the days and weeks ahead...