The University Will Not Be Sold

By Belinda Edmondson and Beryl Satter. Public universities are not corporations. They are not sports franchises. They are not dysfunctional families in which the powerful can abuse the less powerful by enforcing silence. As faculty members, we were deeply dismayed to learn that some Rutgers University administrators had known for months about Mike Rice Jr. and his assistant coach’s physical and verbal abuse of student athletes, yet remained silent. Homophobic slurs and physical abuse teach students a deformed version of athletic masculinity.
We were equally dismayed by the institutional implications of this culture of abuse. The corporate vision of Rutgers’s president, Robert L. Barchi, and his associates centralizes sports branding as an income-generating strategy, clearly at the expense of our student athletes and potentially at the expense of academic excellence. Read more...