So proud to see my alma mater back in the headlines. Way to go Rutgers. As the Mike Rice tapes make the rounds in the news media, the shock, outrage and hand wringing are universal. People can't believe this goes on at a major university.
Yeah. Whatever. I was so shocked, you could have knocked me over with a basketball.
If you've read my book about hypocrisy, bureaucracy and cheating in higher education, then you know what I think about Rutgers.
In case you haven't read my book, here's a brief excerpt:
"Rutgers is big, old, and unfriendly. It's like going to school in Dick Cheney."
Still, when I went to school there, I was never physically throttled by a high-profile university employee. Apparently they've gotten even less friendly.
So say the videotapes depicting men's basketball coach Mike Rice pushing, hitting, pegging and verbally abusing his players as a matter of strategy. The strategy was good enough for a 44-51 record, which suggests that he might not have been hitting his players quite hard enough.
Now that we all know Rice has been picking on kids, he's gone. In a stammering and cringe-worthy apology before cameras this past Friday, he didn't look so tough anymore.
But of course Rice is finished. This is a no-brainer. Or at least it should have been. What remain behind, as an independent probe comes to Rutgers campus, are questions about the school's 'process.' Indeed, this is the euphemism used by University President Robert Barchi as he went about the unenviable task of covering his own ass. He told reporters at last Friday's televised press conference that what happened at Rutgers was "a failure of process."
I can tell you from personal experience that the bureaucratic inefficiency at Rutgers makes transferring classes or campuses an absolute administrative nightmare. But transferring blame takes almost no effort at all.
Taking a note from last year's Sandusky scandal at Penn State, Barchi laid out a very clear sequence of events which demonstrated that he clearly did everything he could about these terrible revelations as soon as he realized that other people knew about them. The problem is, there isn't a version of events that doesn't make him appear either incompetent or negligent. Clearly, he has chosen incompetence as his alibi, which I find wholly plausible.
Calls for Barchi's ouster have emerged from within the campus, where a small group of professors composed a petition demanding his resignation, and from without, where journalists and other members of the NCAA community have deemed the lack of accountability unacceptable. But you have to hand it to Rutgers. They genuinely don't care what anybody thinks. Barchi is now the third of three consecutive university presidents to have faced loud public calls for termination. He will probably be the third to survive these calls.
And unlike some of his predecessors, he did at least stop short of making racist remarks. We can't say the same about former President Fran Lawrence, who observed that minorities are genetically bad at standardized tests, before going on to serve another seven years.
I actually think Barchi is slightly less of an asshole than either of his predecessors. And he has been tasked with the incredibly demanding responsibilities of converting Rutgers Athletics into a Big Ten program and navigating the legal, political and financial gauntlet that will lead to one of the biggest mergers in higher education history.
In no way at all, however, do these demands or the general mediocrity of his predecessors excuse Barchi's inaction, his smug performance in Friday's press conference or the university's larger problem of bureaucratic insanity. Barchi's blame-shifting act seemed in particular to magnify this latter phenomenon which, as an alumnus, I can assure you is real.
In addition to Rice, assistant coach Jimmy Martelli, athletics director Tim Pernetti and university general counsel John Wolf have all lost their jobs in just the last week. The university knew all about Rice's anger management issues as far back as November, at which point they determined that a brief suspension and fine would be sufficient. It just wasn't until ESPN knew about the tapes that it really mattered.
The footage on the Rice practice tapes is dramatic and the coach's aggression alarming. We'd like to assume that Barchi would agree, but according to his alibi, he didn't see the tapes until the rest of us did. A failure of process indeed.
Obviously, the primary difference between this and the Penn State scandal is that it isn't as icky or horrifying. Lord knows if given the choice, most of us would take a basketball to the shin. But the commonalities are also important. Namely, the sheer insensitivity of university leadership and the unshakeable impression that kids are a distant priority behind such incredible economic opportunities as joining the Big Ten. Presumably, Rutgers calculated that this would bring far greater financial growth than a few lawsuits might cost it.
This cynical calculation sounds a lot like my old school and like the university system in general.
It's time to stop giving our universities the benefit of the doubt. They have betrayed that trust. Universities are businesses and most of the decisions they make are business decisions. But where do the students fall on the priority list? After all, they are the ones who pay for it.
Rutgers rarely sees itself as having an obligation to the students. It's simply too old, too venerable, too crusty to give a shit. But this -- this imagery of a grown man, a coach, standing over his young players, peppering them with homophobic slurs, bombarding them with basketballs, shoving them to the ground -- is the impression that people now have of Rutgers and how it treats its students. And you know something? The impression is accurate.