The Shadow Scholar

by Dave Tomar

  But those who had difficulty finding what they were looking for—and I would count myself among them—experienced Rutgers as a preview for a callous, indifferent, infuriating, and inconsiderate world. Surveys suggest that this inhospitable quality is a constant presence.

  According to the Princeton Review, which surveys students from 373 college campuses, in 2010 Rutgers ranked eleventh for “Least Beautiful Campus.” Just down the turnpike a shade, New Jersey Institute of Technology was tops in that category. In response to the prompt “Are Your Instructors Good Teachers?” Rutgers got the ninth-lowest marks. NJIT got the seventh-lowest. In the category of “Financial Aid Not So Great,” Rutgers ranked third, just behind Penn State and two spots ahead of Villanova.

  Rutgers ranked eleventh in the category of “Class Discussions Rare.” And in a list of 373 colleges, only the University of Toronto ranked worse than Rutgers in terms of the accessibility of professors. So according to the Princeton Review, the professors at Rutgers had the worst office hours of any professors in America.

  Of course, I didn’t know any of this when I signed up to go there. And it probably wouldn’t have mattered if somebody had told me. I was a resident of New Jersey, and it was the only school I could afford that wouldn’t have been considered a huge sociological embarrassment given my academic abilities and my 98th percentile SAT scores. As per the advice of my high school guidance counselor, I applied to five schools. I got into three. I had the financial means for only one. And I knew it all along. The admissions process was a charade, so I despondently resisted doing any real research on the subject.

  All I really knew was that community college would have meant another year living with my parents. At the time, I’d have robbed a convenience store and turned myself in to the cops just to get out of their house. And so, I was New Brunswick–bound.

  For the cost of tuition, room, and board, Rutgers delivers you into the brutal clutches of its bureaucracy and never lets go. Once your check is cashed, they bend you over and start thrusting, and they tell you you’ll have to fill this form out in triplicate and submit it through the proper channels just for the reach-around.

  They have this really cute thing at Rutgers University called the RU Screw. They probably have it at other colleges as well. It’s like a syndrome, a catchall diagnosis for any number of things that are likely to go wrong over the course of one’s time at the school owing to the incompetence, negligence, and bureaucratic inefficiency of the university and its personnel, as well as their very genuine indifference toward the student body. I spent more time at college trying to repair scheduling errors, attempting to navigate the endless maze of automated phone systems, standing in lines, filling out forms, haggling with Student Services, and wishing I had simply studied abroad than I did on my schoolwork and my binge drinking combined (and they usually were combined).

  Even if I’d wanted to be a diligent student, even if my classes had been compelling, it would have been this way. This college, which I still pay for every single month, was a straight scam, the fourth-largest university in the nation at the time and boasting the leanest staff of administrative personnel this side of the American embassy in Samoa. At a discount price compared to many other universities but a total rip-off when you compared it to something you could actually use, my Rutgers education came with a major caveat to the emptor: You are on your own.

  Hence, the RU Screw. This is every symptom of a sick system; every consequence of designing an institution of learning to function like a multinational business; every demonstration of the university’s commitment to its corporate sponsors at the expense of its student body; every bit of evidence that the educational goals of the school are secondary to its vitality as a firm. As a client of any type of business, you would like to think that you’d stand up to such shabby treatment, that you’d be indignant, that you’d be all, “I don’t have to take this crap.”

  But with colleges, you really do have to take this crap. As much as you’re paying for the experience, it is you—not the college—who is constantly being evaluated. Say you buy a vacuum cleaner from Sears and take it home, and instead of vacuuming, it sends a power surge through your house and blows up all of your kitchen appliances. Suddenly, this shitty vacuum cleaner has cost you a ton of money. So you bring the vacuum cleaner back to Sears to complain. While you’re waiting in line, a customer service representative walks up to you with a report card and says, “Based on what we’ve seen from you during your limited time in the store among several thousand other customers, we think you’re a C– shopper.”

  “But what about my defective vacuum cleaner?” you ask.

  To which your customer service representative replies, “There’s nothing wrong with the vacuum cleaner. You’re just too stupid to know how to use it. By the way, we misplaced your original payment on the vacuum cleaner, and your account with us is now delinquent. You’ll be hearing from our attorneys.”

  It’s ludicrous to think that as a customer, you would stand for such an arrangement. But such is the nature of the RU Screw, except that your vacuum cleaner costs somewhere between twenty-four and thirty-six thousand dollars per year, and you’ll be paying for it until your Social Security benefits kick in.

  Now, I’ve spent a number of years distancing myself from the day-to-day, bang-your-head-against-a-brick-wall frustration of being a student at this type of institution. So I thought it’d be fun, like a trip down memory lane, to call over to my old friends at Rutgers Parking and Transportation.

  I push a few buttons to get through to the Parking Department. Somebody answers and immediately asks me to hold.

  “Sure thing,” I say.

  A female robot voice says, “Thank you for holding. Somebody will be with you in just a moment.” Cue the Muzak. Synthetic beats farmed from the opening credits of a motivational film and a jazz flute like Ron Burgundy with a frontal lobotomy.

  The sound triggers something terrible and evil inside of me.

  I’m tumbling into a well of bad memories the way that a motorcycle backfiring in the distance might take a guy back to ’Nam. I can see a younger version of myself flailing his arms and wantonly spewing profanities in tremors of apoplectic fury, knowing that ol’ Charlie Rutgers has gotten the drop on him again.

  I remember in an instant the absolute misery that was the school’s matrix of automated phone services, understaffed offices, and disgruntled employees.

  Now a male robot voice comes on.

  “We appreciate your patience while holding. Please continue to hold for just a moment longer so that your call can receive the time and attention it deserves.”

  The first smooth-jazz abomination fades out, and another one comes in. This one has more of a 1980s-porn-soundtrack feel, with a backbeat that seems almost to thrust over the top of the lead synthesizer and a bass line that just kind of hangs there like a botched boob job.

  This whole thing feels really familiar.

  I used to skip classes, clear my schedule, and stock the house up with food as if a nor’easter were approaching anytime I had to accomplish something that would require administrative assistance. Nobody in any of Rutgers’s offices of Academic Affairs, Student Services, Financial Aid, or Resident Life wanted to be there, and only a fraction of the staff seemed to know their job function…unless that function was to create a maddening hedge maze of bureaucracy where nothing was ever accomplished and absurdity lurked at every bend. If that was the function, the personnel at Rutgers were as utterly brilliant, and as temperamental, as trained seals. Through a workforce of button pushers that could outbitter you on the day that your puppy died, Rutgers University found every way possible to separate the student from his dollars without giving him the recourse to defend himself.

  I suffered lost documentation, registration holds, course-credit snafus, and sudden new expenses. I watched my classmates endure disappearing professors, unexplained course de-registrations, and prerequisite lockouts. Putting aside the school�
��s accidental inefficiencies, I could not, for the life of me, figure out why Rutgers was so damn mean.

  The female robot voice comes back on.

  “We apologize for the delay. Please stay on the line. We will be with you very shortly.”

  They say that the purpose of Muzak is to provide an innocuous and inoffensive soundtrack that uses lowest common denominator science to achieve universal accessibility. It functions as background noise that doesn’t cause you to think too hard about anything of meaning when you’re fondling produce in the grocery store, minding your own business in an elevator, or eating in the food court at the mall.

  But when it’s piping directly into your earhole, it has a whole other purpose. It is designed to piss you off and make you hang up the phone. Four and a half minutes have passed.

  The male voice comes back on.

  “Thank you for your patience. You will be assisted momentarily. Please stay on the line.”

  Now I realize that the male and female robots are alternating. They’re in on it together. And they’re so wretchedly polite.

  Another minute and she comes back on.

  “Please hold so that your call may receive the time and attention it deserves. Please stay on the line.”

  It has only been five and a half minutes, and I’m seething anew with long-buried hatred for my archnemesis. I begin to remember the literally thousands of dollars that they took from me. I’m glad this is all coming back to me. I’m calling to find out what they did with all my money.

  According to an article in the Rutgers University student-run newspaper the Daily Targum, as of 2006, Rutgers was grappling with roughly $3 million in unpaid parking tickets. And in the year 2005, the school had collected $1.3 million in paid parking fines. But things never seemed to get better. Everything was a Kafkaesque exercise in the ridiculous.

  There were never new parking spaces. Commuters desperately circled the lots of New Brunswick in search of a place to stow the car before the start of class, sometimes finding none and returning home with no education to speak of for the day.

  There were never enough buses. The class periods were close together and the campuses far apart. In the middle of a weekday afternoon, when people were mashed together on an intercampus bus like it was the last transport out of Saigon, you got the feeling that nobody but you really gave a shit about what happened to you and your little education.

  It was hard to shake the feeling that they were plotting against you, that this was all part of some absurd conspiracy designed to waylay you on your path to mere adequacy, that your mission was to somehow obtain an education in spite of their best efforts to stand in your way.

  No one was better at this than Parking and Transportation.

  The people who worked there were a special breed. Among heartless bureaucratic soldiers, these were the Green Berets. They were taught to have rhinoceros skin, to breathe hate cloaked in onions. They were indoctrinated by self-flagellating monks to feel not the twinge of remorse, to know not the ache of compassion, and to fear not the wrath of our indignation. They were trained in tiger cages, poked with cattle prods, told that they were as replaceable as their own undergarments, and forced to listen to Celine Dion on full blast until they actually liked it. By the time we came to them angry and defeated, they were carved from stone. We were nothing to them but a source of revenue.

  To be sure, the school prioritized Parking and Trans above education, as though the reason we were there was to defy all laws of physics by parking matter where no space existed. According to the university’s current website, “Unpaid tickets and late fees”—a crime of which I was guilty on any occasion when I chose to spend money on food and toilet paper instead—”will result in a university hold barring students from”:

  Class registration

  New parking permits

  Receiving grades

  Receiving transcripts

  Permit refunds—ticket and late fee amounts will be deducted

  Graduation

  So, pretty much everything. The successful completion of your education depends on whether or not you’ve paid your parking tickets. I want to know why this is.

  Seven minutes on the phone.

  The robot guy tells me, “Your call is very important to us. You will be assisted as soon as possible. Please continue to hold.”

  My mind starts to wander. I wonder how close the robot man and woman are. Are they friends? More than friends? Do they share a loveless marriage and a few bratty robot children? Whatever the status of their personal relationship, they’re a great tag team. Between the two of them and the smooth jazz, it only takes seven and a half minutes before I start to think about hanging up, eight and a half before I start to think about killing myself, and nine before I start to think about killing somebody else. I wish I had outgrown these feelings, but… I had a bad experience.

  Why should the school so aggressively victimize its own students? Is the financial situation at Rutgers so dire that it has no choice but to carry out this aboveboard form of extortion.

  Gimme all your money or the transcript gets it!

  Well, it seems that every year, Rutgers stands before the New Jersey Legislature with its hat in its hands, begging for more public assistance. The poor public educational institution, the victim of cold governmental indifference, Princeton’s talent-deprived neighbor.

  Well, maybe there’s something to that. According to an investigative report conducted by the Bloomberg News website in 2011, the History Department at Rutgers is so cash-strapped that its professors were forced to surrender their desk phones in 2009. The move was designed to save the school twenty-one thousand dollars annually.

  Bloomberg reports that the History Department also shrank its doctoral program by 25 percent. The department has cut the number of Ph.D. candidates that it can field annually down to between twelve and fourteen, from sixteen to eighteen.

  And with the recession worsening, leading to budget crunches at the state level, the university was forced to place a freeze on professor salaries. Professors were also instructed that they should give fewer tests to save money on photocopies. Professors were told in an e-mail in December 2010 that they could be billed personally for failing to cut down on photocopies. And professors are now being asked to pay for access to electronic journals that, until this point, they have had at their disposal for free. (It bears noting, here, that some of the paper-writing companies for which I have worked provide their contractors with access to such journals free of charge.)

  According to the Bloomberg article, “state funding for Rutgers in the three fiscal years ending in June 2012 fell $29 million, or 10 percent, to $262 million… Tuition and mandatory fees jumped 7.3 percent over the same period to $12,755 for state students. The 2,800-member faculty hasn’t received a raise since January 2010, according to Patrick Nowlan, executive director of the professors’ union.”1

  With some professors departing for better-paying work, academic resources have become yet scarcer. In my experience, the school’s overcrowding was apparent at every turn, with stuffed lecture halls and students getting turned away from classes at registration. So as I wait on the phone for a human being, I consider that Rutgers may have financial imperatives for the way it behaves. Maybe it’s not just a crappy heartless corporation. Maybe it’s a victim of the times.

  “Thank you for holding. We appreciate your patience. Somebody will be with you in just a moment.”

  Eleven minutes.

  So it would appear that Rutgers is struggling. It would be surprising to find out, then, that Rutgers is tops among all state universities in providing financial subsidies for its athletics programs.

  What?

  That doesn’t sound right. The same Rutgers that’s always asking its professors to tighten their belts? The same Rutgers that’s always forcing its students to make sacrifices for the greater good? The same Rutgers that continues to inherit the catastrophic financial problems of its parent state? Th
at Rutgers? That can’t be right.

  Let me check it again.

  According to Bloomberg, “at Rutgers, of the $26.9 million given to subsidize athletics in fiscal 2010, $18.4 million came from university coffers, top among state schools in the Atlantic Coast, Big East, Big Ten, Big 12, Pac-12 and Southeastern Conferences.

  “The other $8.4 million came from student fees, where Rutgers ranks fifth.”

  In a totally unrelated matter, Rutgers University raised its tuition fees by 8.5 percent in 2008 and proposed another 3.6 percent increase in the summer of 2011.

  According to Newark’s Star-Ledger, Rutgers has spent more than $115 million in university subsidies and student fees on athletics since 2006. The Star Ledger identifies this amount as the “highest of any public school and nearly twice the subsidy of the next highest college among the power conferences.”

  The recently departed1 Rutgers football coach Greg Schiano, who amassed a 68–67 record across eleven seasons with the university, made $2.03 million after bonuses in 2010, when the average salary was $142,000 for full-time professors, $96,000 for associate professors, and $49,000 for non-tenure-track instructors, according to the professors’ union.2 This is to say nothing of the forgiveness of $100,000 in home loans that the university gifts to the coach annually. The school also pays $500 a month for women’s basketball coach Vivian Stringer’s recreational golfing activities.

  According to the Bloomberg article, Rutgers Athletics reported a net operational loss of $2.2 million in 2010.

  Now, I’m a sporting gent. I enjoy a spirited match. I appreciate a good competition. But this just strikes me as a shitty business model, the kind that deprives the university of personnel for simple functions like helping new students register for classes or helping returning students develop independent studies… or… or answering the fucking phone at fucking Parking and Transportation!