Dear Rutgers: Your Budget Shows Your Priorities
Academics Too Often Come Second to Big-Time Sports
July has not been a banner month for my alma mater, Rutgers University.
NorthJersey.com published a report ( on a months-long investigation into the Rutgers athletic program, which shows “that Rutgers athletics had lost far more than it reported to the NCAA in annual reports, showing its debt had grown to more than $250 million — with half of that being loans to cover operating deficits.” There has been, according to North Jersey, “alarming — and until now hidden — flow of state government, taxpayer and student money to athletics. Losses were more than $73 million two years running.”
Other stories point to the abuse of school credit cards for personal use, the growth of the school’s endowment — despite its cries of poverty — and its receipt of $100 million in federal money for construction of a practice football field, even as students and many faculty and staff struggle to make ends meet.
Is this a scandal? It’s certainly scandalous, demonstrating that Rutgers — like so many American universities — has allowed the allure of big-money sports to warp its priorities. Rutgers has a $5.1 billion annual budget. Athletics allegedly accounts for 2.7% of it, though that seems an underrepresentation of what is actually spent. The school’s highest-profile coaches — football coach Greg Schiano and basketball coach Steve Pikiell — reportedly earn more than $8 million by themselves, or about 0.15%1 of the school’s budget, and this does not include the various other benefits provided by contract. Of course, Rutgers sports does generate significant revenue — from boosters, ticket sales, TV rights, merchandise, and other ares — but as the North Jersey story reminds us, this revenue falls significantly short of a break-even point.
The scandal here is not the spending on sports, which is not just a Rutgers phenomena. They are part of a systemic failure similar of higher education, which has fallen in love with a neoliberal, profit-centered structure. The failures of big-time sports — exemplified by the decimation of the Pac-12 sports league and the merging of its biggest programs into the Big Ten, the failure of the NCAA to come up with a package of compensation for athletes beyond their scholarships (the kids are the ones who draw the crowds and television audiences), the obscene money spent by fans and schools, and the repeated scandals involving boosters — are built in, tied to the money, which distorts priorities.
Even as theses schools spend more and more on their sports programs and facilities, they are remaking what a college education looks like by decreasing reliance on full-time, tenured professors, and increasing the educational load born by an exploited labor class — notably, adjunct instructors (of which I am one), grad students, and non-tenure faculty. The growing reliance on non-tenured instructors has ramifications for academic freedom, both in the classroom and in research, as Andrew Goldstone, an associate professor of English at Rutgers, told me during an interview for a piece I’m working on for The Progressive.
He defines tenure not as something reserved for faculty in ivory tower institutions, but simply as “just cause employment.” Tenure allows teaching and research faculty a sense of security, to operate with the knowledge that, “once you are in a job for a long enough time, and you have demonstrated your capacities in that job, you can presumptively remain in job unless you do something egregious.” This is something that should be built into all forms of employment, but academics have “lost a publicity war,” and allowed others to define tenure as an arcane privilege of the overeducated.
Academic work is the “kind of job where it is valuable to be able make long-term plans, to take risks, and to know that you have job security.”
Many adjuncts, myself included, are interested in full-time work of some sort; others with to remain part time. But all of us deserve pay that is equivalent to our full-time peers and the kind of job security that allows us the freedom to teach what we know and not worry that our jobs can be eliminated if we anger the wrong person.
Rutgers has a chance to lead on this, to reverse its own pattern of casualization of labor, by negotiating in good faith with its unions, by accepting the democratic will of its teaching and research faculty that it be represented by a single union and that part-timers no longer get the short end of the pay and security stick.
Rutgers may claim it doesn’t have the money. The documents tell us otherwise. As I’ve written before, there is nothing to prevent the university from altering its skewed priorities by investing in all its faculty.
Budgets and contracts are not just numbers. They are the place where institutions make their priorities and values concrete. Rutgers’ main priority, based on where it is spending its money, is not in the classroom. It is on the football field, and students deserve better than that.
I corrected a math error that inflated the percentage in the original.