When I first started attending Rutgers in the fall of 2001, the football coach had to come and practically beg the incoming freshmen to come to a football game. Promises of free t-shirts and plenty of seating were doled out to try and get attendance up, but the fact of the matter was that we didn't have a good team and no one was very interested in attending games. I've never attended a game and I don't intend to (I've never cared much for organized sports and don't have enough "school spirit" to go), but I have noticed a big change in the way the team has been viewed.
The fall 2006 season was the breakthrough many had been hoping for (although the schedule, from what I understand, was so easy that it didn't mean very much in the end), and I can recall many nights of seeing red-clad undergraduates stuffing themselves into buses to try to get to matches. Demand has been so great that there are now waiting lists for seats in the stadium on Busch campus, and because of this the university administration has decided to go ahead and dump $102,000,000 into stadium expansion. I think it's a bit of a short-sighted gamble.
In an e-mail sent out by the president of the university, Richard L. McCormick, it was revealed that the Rutgers board of governors approved the expensive plans to add "14,000 seats, locker rooms, and other amenities." The funds for the expansion coming from "$30 million raised through
private fundraising with the help of Governor Corzine and Senator Ray Lesniak and $72 million through issuance of Rutgers bonds," the rationale being that the investment will pay itself back (and then some) through increased seating capacity. I'm pretty doubtful that this plan is going to work, especially in a university under strain from state budget cuts. While the plan might seem like a good investment over a period of several years, it's highly contingent on the performance of the football team, something that could very well change from year to year.
Everyone seems to be under the assumption that the Rutgers football team is going to continue doing relatively well and drawing crowds, the stadium breaking attendance records last season despite a so-so performance by the team. Perhaps the "good times" will continue for a bit, but players change/graduate/leave, coaches retire, and records can go sour, and it seems that $102 million is a lot to gamble when there are better uses to which the money could be put. Fortunately no public or university funds are supposed to go into the project, (at least according to the statements of the administration), but I am still concerned that the university is investing so much in something that's subject to such variability.
Part of the reason for the project is probably an attempt to get more non-student spectators in, especially since Rutgers has a policy of making tickets free for students. There have been suggestions that season tickets might be sold in special blocks to students, but I don't see why the university can't charge a minimal price for student tickets (or slightly raise prices for non-student attendees) if university funding is such a problem. Granted, it wouldn't affect me so I don't care, but I'm sure the suggestion would raise a howl of protests among students who already feel like they're being bled dry (and I don't blame them).
Perhaps the plan will work out and an improved football team will generate enough extra money to make university athletics self-sufficient, but the general plan seems to smack of the current administrative policy of "Well, we're just going to do what we want anyway." Rutgers has undergone some major changes in the past year, and I know that many students and faculty feel like the Rutgers is no longer their university; we're being told what's best for us. Comments and complaints are "heard" but not really listened to, and in general it seems that the present administration has big plans that are going to move forward regardless of what anyone else says. In all of this it's easy to feel lost in the shuffle (and believe me, I do), but I guess that's just what being a student at Rutgers has become.
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I'm sure there are other things that could be funded that are much wiser investments. But they aren't 'sexy'.
Even university officials spend more time thinking with their viscera than their brains.
I sympathize. One of these monstrosities is going up on my campus as well. Great investment when you have faculty with the largest research labs fleeing for the hills.
You should read "Beer and Circus" by Murray A Sperber. A fairly large portion of the book deals with how athletic departments bleed money from universities while trying to act like they give back.
We invest part of ourselves in the things we care about, and so we tend to become possessive of them - they're part of our self-image, after all.
It is always a bitter lesson, to learn that we don't have ownership of those things after all.
Sperber's book is great. A Rutgers-geared book which chronicles the takeover of the university by the football boosters (and the corresponding unwillingness of Richard McCormick to stand up to them) is William Dowling's "Confessions of a Spoilsport."
You might also be interested in knowing that there is a, still relatively young, campaign afoot to fight back and reclaim the university for learning and academia, called Rutgers 1000.