Imus Rutgers Comments

Rutgers athletic department needs fees, funds to stay afloat

Also last year, Rutgers said it would withhold scheduled negotiated raises for its employees because of state funding cuts, a move expected to save $30 million.

The battle between academics and athletics is brewing nationally. Subsidies account for $1 of every $3 spent on athletics at NCAA Division I schools. Since 2006, athletics budgets at 219 Division I public schools have increased 22%, and subsidies — the part of the budget that comes from student fees and university money — have increased 26%.

But no athletics program has matched Rutgers' subsidies; $115 million is the highest for any public school and nearly twice the subsidy of the next highest school among the power conferences — those whose football champions automatically qualify for the Bowl Championship Series .

The university is trying to close the gap. In October, it launched a seven-year, $1 billion fundraising campaign that includes a goal of raising $100 million for athletics. Last week, it sold the naming rights to its football stadium to a New Jersey-based computer services company for about $6.5 million over 10 years. Athletics director Tim Pernetti , a former sports television executive, declares he is "as bullish as anybody" about the windfall the athletics department hopes to receive when its conference, the Big East, negotiates new media rights deals to replace those that expire in 2013.

Meanwhile, Rutgers' employee unions are awaiting arbitration rulings concerning the raises, which they had voluntarily deferred but that the university maintains it was not obligated to pay because of inadequate funding, after the state cut funding by tens of millions of dollars.

"A student doesn't come to Rutgers to attend a football game. They come here to get an education — and then maybe attend a football game," says Patrick Nowlan, executive director of the Rutgers teachers' union.

"From our perspective, the core mission of the university is to teach, do research and then provide service to the public of the state of New Jersey , and ancillary enterprises such as athletics should not be the top priorities. They should not be priorities when you, as a university administration, are arguing that you don't have resources, you don't have enough funding from the state.

Don Imus Rutgers Controversy Not Going Away

However, Imus might find that he has an increasingly difficult time getting guests on his program. The National Association of Black Journalists is calling for a boycott of the show. Imus doesn't often have black journalists on his show, but he does often have people who don't want to be in the crosshairs of the National Association of Black Journalists: People like Tim Russert, John McCain and Joe Lieberman. If those people decide they're not going to do Imus's show anymore, his show will suffer. http://mtc-comm-gcp-core.app.aol.com:8080/read/render?version=1&count=3&channel_id=3&template_id=x0PF&topic_id=869345&link=/discuss/2007/04/07/don-imus-rutgers-controversy-not-going-away [PluginType] => 1 [Method] => get [Debug] => 1 [CacheTime] => 300 [CacheFailureTime] => 10 [CacheBuster] => [NoCache] => 0 [Timeout] => 1 [Filter] => [ProxyGET] => 0 [ProxyPOST] => 0 [EncodeURL] => 0 [ProxyCOOKIE] => 0 [ProxyREFERER] => 0 [Prefix] => [Object] => [UserAgent] => Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 5.1; en-US; rv:1.8.1.9) Gecko/20071025 Firefox/2.0.0.9 ) --> http://widgets.surphace.com/widgets/sphereit/content?siteid=aolnews2&url=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.aolnews.com%2F2007%2F04%2F07%2Fdon-imus-rutgers-controversy-not-going-away%2F&tags=Don+Imus%2CDonImus [PluginType] => 1 [Debug] => 1 [EncodeURL] => 1 [CacheTime] => 1800 [CacheFailureTime] => [CacheBuster] => [NoCache] => 0 [Timeout] => 1 [Filter] => [ProxyGET] => 0 [ProxyPOST] => 0 [ProxyCOOKIE] => 0 [ProxyREFERER] => 0 [Prefix] => [Method] => get [Object] => [UserAgent] => Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 5.1; en-US; rv:1.8.1.9) Gecko/20071025 Firefox/2.0.0.

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