Some See Scarlet, Some See Red

By William C. Dowling

In 1998, Robert Mulcahy came to Rutgers as Athletic Director with glowing praise from Michael Rowe, president of the New Jersey Nets. "If you want to establish Rutgers as a premier entertainment option with sports as a basis," said Rowe, "Bob can do it."

Bob has done it. Today's Rutgers is a premier entertainment option. Football players wearing the school's name on their jerseys are regularly seen on TV, running back and forth between the commercials. Legislators are thrilled to see Rutgers ranked alongside places like Boise State and the University of Louisville. In the world of TV-revenue-driven extravaganzas like the Tostitos Corn Chips Fiesta Bowl and the Chick-Fil-A Peach Bowl, Rutgers is a big hit.

As Rutgers scaled the giddy heights of Div IA celebrity, some voiced misgivings about the financial waste. They had a point. A brief scrutiny of the budget for Div IA athletics since Rutgers joined the Big East in 1994 suggests that the outlay has been $100-300 million.

The lower figure is conservative. Just totting up the stadium upgrade ($25 million), athletic scholarships ($29.7 million), and the athletics deficit for one six-year period ($50.6 million) puts the cost well over that amount. But as sports economist Andrew Zimbalist has shown, every Div IA program has innumerable ways of "hiding" athletics costs in the general university budget. Given complete access to the university's books, a sharp-eyed auditor would almost certainly come up with a figure between $200-300 million.

Meanwhile, as everyone knows, Rutgers is trying to adjust to huge cuts in the state budget. Students still go to class on a slum campus, so litter-strewn and ugly that many visiting high school seniors take one look and decide not to apply. Classrooms are dilapidated, with pitted blackboards and battered chairs and cheap linoleum flooring. $2.7 million a year--money that should be going to top New Jersey students--is spent on "athletic scholarships" given to individuals imported solely on the basis of physical skills. Worse, Mr. Mulcahy has spent millions more on facilities meant to impress a tiny handful of low-SAT football and basketball recruits.

Still, it's the sense of intellectual community that has suffered most. As Rutgers' rise towards Tostitos Bowl celebrity continues, the percentage of bright and intellectually engaged students on campus is steadily shrinking. Some 70 percent of New Jersey's top students are fleeing to out-of-state institutions. In their place, the university is getting more and more students whose idea of "college" is painting their faces, drinking beer, and waving their index fingers at the TV cameras. They'd be the first to tell you that they "hate school," and that having a football team that gets national publicity is the only thing that makes it worthwhile. This is what Mr. Mulcahy calls "school spirit."

If you ask Mr. Mulcahy to defend his exuberant spending of the taxpayers' money, he'll talk about "exposure," "national attention," "getting visibility." But that argument is deeply misleading. There's all the difference in the world between "exposure," which is the cheap and transient celebrity one gets from being on American Idol or going to the Tostitos Bowl, and "reputation," earned by sustaining intellectual distinction over a long period of time. When we talk about the academic reputation of schools like Harvard or the University of Chicago, we aren't talking about the Chick-Fil-A Peach Bowl. When we talk about sports at Boise State or Nebraska or Tennessee, on the other hand, we're talking about "national attention" as Mr. Mulcahy uses the term.

So, just as Michael Rowe predicted, Mr. Mulcahy has made Rutgers into a premier entertainment option.When Mr. Mulcahy's football team beat the University of Louisville recently, there was dancing in the streets by the huge numbers of face-painting students his Div IA programs have drawn to campus. Among students who came to Rutgers to study Greek and philosophy and physics, though, there was little celebration. Several have already asked me about letters of recommendation for transfer to other universities. It may not be an accident that they're all considering schools--Columbia, NYU, the University of Chicago--that don't play sports at the Div IA level: schools where academic and intellectual values are at the center of the undergraduate experience. Then again, that may not be significant. Maybe, after all, they just lack "school spirit."

William C. Dowling is Professor of English at Rutgers University. His most recent book is Oliver Wendell Holmes in Paris: Medicine, Theology, and the Autocrat of the Breakfast Table.