11-15-06, 10:14 am

This is my 36th year of teaching history at Rutgers University, a very good state university in New Jersey. It was a first-rate public university when I first came, and its students were paying less than $500 a year in tuition. Scholarship, teaching, service and governance were seen as part of the same university mission, and the only football game that mattered to anyone was the Rutgers-Princeton game. Indeed, a match between Rutgers and Princeton in the early post Civil War period is generally regarded as the beginning of American football.

But that was then and this is now. The students pay many thousands of dollars for tuition, half their courses are taught by adjunct faculty and graduate students, and the greatest expansion at Rutgers and many other public universities in recent years has come in the ratio of high salaried administrators to working faculty.

Rutgers did launch itself into “big time” college football in the 1980s, becoming over the last 15 years something akin to the Brooklyn Dodgers of the 1930s or the New York Mets of the 1960s in professional baseball, that is, losers who became the butt of jokes. The worst was a post 9/11 joke that the Rutgers team had found a white powder that they would always avoid---the goal line.

But all of that has changed this year. Like the Dodgers in 1941 or the Mets in 1969, Rutgers football has gotten very good. It is undefeated and is catching the imagination of the sort of people who don't root for General Motors, Wall Street, or Yale University for that matter. Even though many faculty and students grumble about the coach's salary (more than twice that of the university president, which ain't chopped liver either) in the face of devastating cutbacks which have seen the cancellation of 800 courses and major staff layoffs and service reductions on top of tuition increases, denouncing college football in the U.S. doesn't get you too far. In the aftermath of the Democratic victory, which was substantial in New Jersey, it may be time to make college football serve the people more than being a Saturday escape from their problems.

If Rutgers wins its last three games it will go undefeated, win the Big East Conference and be, along with either Michigan or Ohio State, one of the two undefeated Division I teams in the country.

Yet all the sports analysts are repeating the mechanical statistical formulas used by the NCAA's BCS ranking system, which is similar to the sort of superficial statistical models that corporations and nowadays universities following the corporate model use to evaluate their employees, to brush Rutgers off. Big East teams have been defeated in games against other regional powers, they say. The Southeast Conference is filled with good teams (and one might add bad universities) and should go to the BCS championship game and the national championship even with a one-loss team. Or perhaps Notre Dame, if it doesn't lose a second game or USC. Or USC, if it doesn't lose to Notre Dame or someone else.

And if all those teams lose, the loser of the Michigan-Ohio State game should play the winner in the National Championship Game. Anyone but Rutgers, victimized by the dead hand of history (its loser reputation) and statisticians who believe that a game of spirit and intensity and luck like football can be reduced to numbers. Few are daring to use the logic and reason universities are supposed to represent to even suggest that an undefeated Rutgers team belongs in the BCS championship game.

Let me make a modest proposal to the NCAA powers that be. Why not take into account the academic quality of a university in determining who plays for the national championship?

This would clearly put Rutgers above Arkansas and other SEC teams. Rutgers, which has some of the best academic “programs” in the liberal arts, sciences, and public policy professional schools, could more than hold its own as a center of scholarship and teaching against one-loss schools like USC and Notre Dame. That should more than compensate for their harder overall football schedule. Also, two teams from the same conference Michigan and Ohio State, really shouldn't play in a national championship game and Rutgers as a university more than hold its own against Ohio State. (As the holder of a Masters degree and PhD from the University of Michigan, I would hesitate to make that statement about the great public university that sports fans know as the Wolverines).

Let me make a few suggestions for fellow Rutgers supporters and supporters of underdogs and working people generally through the nation. First, let me say that I speak only for myself. The Rutgers administration, like all administrations everywhere, hews to conventional wisdoms and puts forward “new ideas” when they have already been accepted.

First we should publicize the fact that Rutgers is the most diverse university in the U.S. in ethno cultural terms according to studies in recent years. This is something to be really proud of and, in principle, one can argue that this makes it Rutgers really the most representative major university in the nation.

Rutgers is in the center of the New York Metropolitan region, the largest and most productive urban-suburban region in the country. Large productive metropolitan areas in general get terribly short-changed in the amount of federal funds they get as against what they put into the federal treasury, to the benefit of less developed regions like those represented by SEC schools.

Rutgers is a public university struggling to overcome its pre 1950s history as a private school with frustrated Ivy League pretensions. It is not “good ole boy” or sanctimoniously religious. It and the state of New Jersey are not what have represented 25 years of anti-urban, anti-labor, anti-minority and anti-public sector policies. It deserves the support of all those who “rooted” for teams like the Dodgers, the Mets, the Chicago White Sox, teams from nowhere that conventional wisdoms condemned to remain in no where. If it wins those last three games (a very, very big if) should, reason and fairness rather than narrow statistical formulas suggest, play in the BCS championship.

If football can become a holistic part of a university rather than a “program” or a “department” interested only in its own professional rankings and negotiating its own deals, then the faculty and administration can at Rutgers and perhaps other places begin again to think in terms of the university as something more than a place to hang their hats and build their respective careers.

Also, the New Jersey state government, which cut Rutgers budget by an unprecedented and devastating amount this year, might begin to rescind those cuts which have already done great harm to students, staff, and faculty. Certainly Rutgers has given much more to through its professional schools and its scholarship and teaching than it has received back--something that, given New Jersey's strong progressive traditions, makes no sense.

If even some of this happens, then College Football would be more than a diversion and an escape as spectator sports generally are and would play a positive and productive role in university life.

--Reach Norman Markowitz at