Olympics? Who Cares? Rutgers Slashes Its Teams
While the Rutgers University board of governors voted on July 20 to raise annual tuition by 7.8% and mandatory fees by 5.4%, the additional funds will not be enough to restore the hundreds of classes and jobs that were lost due to less money coming from the state of New Jersey, or to save any of the six varsity teams cut by the public university.
The increased cost to students—a total of $38 million—will instead go to help cover the $66 million shortfall in state funding. Some faculty searches will resume, but no further plans for restoration have been determined, according to Rutgers spokesman Greg Trevor.
Decisions made at that meeting ended a yearlong struggle to save teams competing in Olympic sports. It was a rare defeat in Rutgers’ magical sports season. The football team upset No. 3 Louisville en route to its 11-2 record; and the women’s basketball team made it to the championship game of the NCAA tournament, an event marred by shock jock Don Imus’s on-air ridicule of the women’s appearance, leading to his dismissal.
The glow of athletic successes made cutting six teams all the darker. Men’s swimming and diving, and tennis, men’s and women’s fencing, and men’s lightweight and heavyweight crew have all ended their tenures at Rutgers as varsity sports. They will continue as club sports, a change not unlike going from baseball’s majors to Little League. Athletes were stunned.
“I found out last summer when I was at work and I got hysterical,” says fencing captain Cindy Jorgensen. “I couldn’t drive home. I had to call my parents to come get me.”
Rutgers athletes have a rich Olympic tradition, especially rowing (19 appearances), and the teams that were cut are fed by active state high-school involvement; New Jersey’s fencing is “the pre-eminent high-school program in the country, absolutely without peer,” according to U.S. Fencing head Michael Massik. That regional base constitutes a strong support system of parents and alumni who look to Rutgers as a place for New Jersey kids to attend college and compete in their sport, and they quickly kicked into action with the creation of the Coalition to Save Our Sports.
“It’s a travesty,” says coalition member Lisa Pantel, whose son Adam just completed his freshman year on the fencing team. “We’ve met with the board of governors, with the president and athletic director and countered every argument they presented for cutting the teams. They weren’t listening.”
The coalition created an email network and reports $995,000 in pledges to save the teams, but the university refused to change its plans. Legislative efforts—led by state Sen. Bob Smith and Assemblymen Patrick Diegnan and Peter Barnes—failed, at least partly, according to Sen. Smith, because of strong messages from Rutgers that the money would be refused.
“If the legislature passes money for one year, what are you going to do next year, or the year after that,” says Rutgers Athletic Director Bob Mulcahy. “As far as all those pledges, nobody ever said here is a list of money that they had in hand.”
Women’s basketball and especially men’s football form the other side of the Rutgers sports picture. Their recent success imbued a sense of identity denied a state caught in the shadows of New York and Philadelphia, and electrified the campus.
“After we beat Louisville, the streets were filled with students slapping hands with one another, strangers with this great togetherness,” recalls Jessica Durando, editor of the student newspaper, the Daily Targum. “There was even a Targum selling on eBay; I think it sold for $15.”
Rutgers showed its appreciation by increasing the pay of women’s basketball coach C. Vivian Stringer in a package that could yield her $950,000 a year, and boosted the compensation of men’s football coach Greg Schiano to a reported $1.5 million a year, both raises of about 50%. Such increases, in light of cutting six teams with a combined operating budget of $798,000, angered coalition members.
“The cutting of these teams has nothing to do with the extra money put into football,” counters Mr. Mulcahy, who says that the university was simply operating more sports than it could with success. Cutting the teams brings Rutgers down to 24, more than most schools in its Big East Conference, which saw another member, Syracuse, cut men’s and women’s swimming and diving teams in June. “Football is a separate issue—I look at it differently from the rest of the sports. It raises far more money, and ultimately the success of football can carry the rest of our programs.”
Ultimately is the key word. Football does not now pay its own way, but Mr. Mulcahy is betting that it will. He says he was charged when he was appointed in 1998 to “fix football” after years of losing. His model, he says, were the “big, good” programs of the Big 10, and calls his legacy tied to Mr. Schiano’s success.
“You look at schools where football has been successful for 30 or 40 years, and it can carry an athletics program,” says Mr. Mulcahy, adding that the last two years of football success head Rutgers in that direction.
Perhaps, but those most familiar with “big, good” programs know this to be dangerous territory.
“When you read accounts about the revenue that football generates, they’re really full of holes, ignoring capital expenditures and debt financing,” says James Duderstadt, president of the University of Michigan from 1988 to 1996. “I think people close to Michigan, with all of its visibility, regard football at this level as more of a headache than a benefit to the institution.” The headache, says Mr. Duderstadt, is getting worse. “We’ve seen more institutions going heavily into debt to pay coaches over a million dollars, and more programs eliminated in order to feed the beast.”
While this is a story about budgets, it is essentially about different visions of intercollegiate athletics. Rutgers emphasizes success in revenue-producing football and basketball. Another view supports a broader range of students’ athletic interests.
“Once colleges had athletics as part of the equilibrium of teaching people beyond the classroom, creating well-rounded individuals, physically and intellectually,” says Glenn Merry, head of rowing’s national governing body. “At some point it became more of a business; sports had to earn their way. It puts any sports at risk that aren’t a huge media attraction.”
If this is really about today’s changing values, Americans’ Olympic future is in trouble, along with whatever remains of balance in college athletics.