President Barchi answers questions from The Daily Targum

Members of The Daily Targum’s 147th editorial board sat down for an on-the-record campus question-and-answer session with Rutgers President Robert L. Barchi, Pete McDonough, vice president of External Affairs and Greg Trevor, senior director of Media Relations the afternoon of April 8 on the New Brunswick campus. We posed questions received from members of the student body along with questions of our own about the community, with topics ranging from athletics, transportation, the honors college, University funding, sexual assault, the recent Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) attack, Dance Marathon, greek life and exam surveillance software ProctorTrack. President Barchi’s answers were directly transcribed for this article.

The editors present at this meeting included The Daily Targum’s Editor-in-Chief Marielle Sumergido, Managing Editor Michelle Klejmont, News Editor Katie Park, Opinions Editor Yvanna Saint-Fort, Photo Editor Naaz Modan, Copy Editor Chris Roney, Features Editor Rachel Narozniak, Social Media Editor Melanie Goulet, Associate News Editors Avalon Zoppo, Dan Corey and Natasha Tripathi, Associate Sports Editor Kevin Xavier, Associate Copy Editor Maegan Kae Sunaz, Associate Photo Editor Edwin Gano and Associate Features Editor Danielle Gonzalez.

The Daily Targum: Gov. Chris Christie and Sen. Raymond Lesniak came out saying that Rutgers, being in the Big Ten, should “act like it.” So, are there any plans for athletic facilities in the near future — namely, the RAC. And, what is your involvement in those plans?

President Barchi: Sure. Well, first of all, I have to say that I agree with the governor and with Sen. Lesniak, who’s one of our alumni, that we are in the Big Ten and should act like it, and we need to be competitive. Our teams need to feel like they can compete both at home and away, and that they’re adequately prepared. So, our goal is over the long term to provide facilities that will allow our teams to be competitive and to play at the level of the league that we’re in, which is a very high level of performance. We had included as part of our facilities master planning, and our physical master planning exercise, discussion of where athletics needed to be, and that was always the case, it wasn’t something that was just a last minute consideration, and it is a piece of the multi-chaptered plan that will eventually be approved by the board in June –– June 2nd is the date that all the pieces finally get approved. And there will be a piece in there on athletics that looks at what we need to do for D1 athletics from basically the five- to twenty-year time frame. Right? That’s what the facilities master plan is all about. It’s this window from five to 20 years, and clearly we have a lot of areas where we need to pay attention ... whether it’s our Title IX issues or our NCAA compliance issues or ability to provide facilities in which the league can televise and broadcast games, or it’s facilities that simply need to be brought up to speed to recruit the kind of student athletes for this campus that we want to have represent us.

DT: I was just wondering if there’s any particular time frame you have –– I know when the plan is to be approved, but the proposed plan, is it a five year plan, is it a 10 year plan as far as when the upgrades would take place?

Barchi: Yeah. The physical master plan, as we’ve been saying all along, is a five- to 20 year plan from the time that I started. So when I began three years ago now, we did a strategic plan, and that strategic plan had with it a number of construction elements that we were going to build right away. That was the first five years. Right? That’s the roughly $850 million worth of construction that we’re doing right now, and then we started a facilities master planning exercise, or the physical master planning exercise that covered all of our campuses, all of our activities that really looks at the window from the completion of the construction that we’re doing now outwards, so from five to 20 years. Five years now being two years away, right? So it really covers that timeframe and the plan is that we have laid out along that entire spectrum.

DT: So with all the construction, transportation becomes an issue. So since being able to get to all the campuses is one of the most highly advertised aspects of the University, what is the administration’s plan for dealing with deficiencies, especially when more students are coming in?

Barchi: So have you read the New Brunswick piece of the facilities or physical master plan?

DT: I have not.

Barchi: You should, right? Even if you read the executive summary there’s a very large section in there on transportation. And when we started the planning process I think everyone around the table was here and you probably took surveys on where you were every hour for the week, remember that? We were trying to identify exactly who was going where and when, and so we have an incredible amount of data about how people use the buses and when they do and what we can do to improve those things. Because as far as we’re concerned one of the first questions we needed to address was ‘How do we improve the accessibility of the campus? We have a big campus here but it’s spread out, and it’s spread out in ways that are not logistically lined up, so it’s difficult to get from place to place. So that was really the very highest priority that we had, was to address that. First to find out exactly what the issues were, when are the bottlenecks, where are the bottlenecks, and why are they there. And then to look at different ways of addressing them. Some ways are long term — can you ever put in a high-speed monorail or something like that? And some are more immediate — what can we do this year to help fix the problems? And one thing I mentioned in conversations last year was early on noticed that there was a problem in aligning the schedule and locations of classes with the assignment of first-year rooming to students coming to Rutgers, and the coordination of teacher requests for where their classrooms were going to be. They were done by three entirely different systems that had no communication with each other. And we found that if you simply ran logistical software, put them all into the same scheduling system and you appropriately asked first-year students to live on a particular campus that was associated with where many of their classes might be and you changed the assignment of classrooms until the time that you knew where students were going to be, you could reduce ridership on the buses at big times by more than 30 percent without doing anything other than that. So there are some things we can do right away which is to be a little bit more — a lot more attentive to what we do about scheduling and deciding where you are and how you should get from point A to point B — that we can do right away. We have a task force working on that now that will be in play for the next assignment of dormitory space to incoming students, which I guess will be a year from now. So that a year from September this system will be running. The second thing in this strategic plan, and again I refer you to the plan because it’s all in there — is the development of high-speed connectors between the campuses. We have a lot of problems getting students from Cook/Douglass to College. Getting through New Brunswick on George Street is a challenge. We have a lot of problems actually getting from Busch to Livingston, which seem like they’re really close together — I can tell you my wife teaches on Livingston for one of her classes and she has kids who are 15 minutes late for class who left an hour earlier over on Busch to get there. So hard to believe, but it does bring home the problem. So we are looking at a number of ways that we can build high-speed connectors, one we’re already working on with The City of New Brunswick is to create a high-speed loop that goes one way down George Street and comes back one way two streets towards the river that has a dedicated bus lane on it and synchronized traffic lights so that the buses just go one way on one street and one way on the other street and don’t have to stop for other vehicular traffic. And they have dedicated lanes for bicycles as well, so we can use more bicycle activity. And in the Livingston-Busch area, we’ve looked at the connector that goes between the two now, and realized that we actually have another road that has been put out of service when route 18 came in, but it’s still there. It’s overgrown with underbrush and stuff so we’re actually going to recreate that road and put a new bridge over 18 so that there’s a high-speed link directly from Busch to Livingston that is nothing but buses and bikes and pedestrians, so no cars at all. So we can get people back and forth at a very high (speed). We’re also looking at the possibility in the longer term of putting high-speed rail on that link, because that seems like one that would be amenable to it. Again, the physical master plan is all about what we are going to do in that window. It’s not about what we think we’re going to look like 50 years from now. This is the plan for things we’re actually going to do, and these are things we know we can do and we’re going to be planning to do right away. We’re going to have transit centers on each one of the campus locations. The whole plan is developed around the concept of these cores, where the buses come in, you get off the bus and right there is a facility for you if you’re a transient student who’s commuting or if you’re waiting for a bus or if you just want to sit down and study, there’s food right there, there are study carrels right there, you are within five to 10 minutes of everything you need — the classrooms, the electronically enabled classrooms, all of that. And then if you walk further, you get to the dorms, you get to the research labs, things like that. So we’ll be identifying one of those locations on each of the campuses and those are the ones that will be linked by these high-speed transit lines. So I think we have some good plans, things that will address the problems in the short term within the next 12 to 18 months and things that we can do that will be operational probably within two years.

DT: In regards to the setting up students on campuses where most of their classes are, so that would correlate with their majors right?

Barchi: Well that’s the idea. Most freshmen who come here have no idea where they want to live and just get assigned to some place. Most of the time we know pretty much what classes they’re going to be taking because they’re in SAS or Engineering or SEBS or whatever. They’re required courses and those are the ones that are the problem — the great big classrooms that everybody tries to get to. So there’s no reason we shouldn’t be able to put people in a location that’s most convenient for their classes and make sure we schedule the classes in a way that’s most convenient for most of the students. So that’s doable, I’m not sure why it hasn’t been done. But yeah, that’s what we’re talking about. Now, the other part of that is — if you think back to the beginning of the physical master plan — we were asking questions about how do we be more effective and efficient in moving around the campus and the other big question we asked is how do we see education 10 years from now? Are we going to be moving students the way we are now, are we going to have students stay in place and move faculty or are we not going to do either one of those and will we move the information? And it’s clear we’re going to move the information. We’re going to try to minimize moving anybody and use a lot more immersion classroom technology to have the information and the teachers available to the students in a number of locations at the same time. Now, one example of how that’s working right now is you know we’re merging our two law schools into one law school but they will stay in their current locations in Camden and in Newark. We have two great faculties that overlap [like this] and their areas of strength that aren’t in Newark and vice versa, and one of the real synergy is one of the opportunities we have is to create a law school where everyone can take advantage of all these strengths. So in order to do that we can’t move the students — that’s too far for a bus — and it’s tough to move the faculty that way, so what we’re doing is moving the information, and here we’ve set up an example of what we’re talking about. If you wanted to see one you should go look at it — there are two semicircles, and each semicircle, one in Camden and the complementary one in Newark, in this case are about 40 to 60 students but they can be scaled up to 400 students — and in operation, the other wall, the non-curved wall, is completely TV, the whole thing. So when you walk in the room and it’s on, it feels like you’re walking into a circle. You can see everybody, everybody can talk to everybody else, the faculty member’s in the center, everybody can see what he’s doing, what he’s writing, he can answer questions, you can interact and see if you get it or not. And we’re now offering five courses in that synchronous classroom. So that kind of approach to moving information is one of the things we’re thinking about down the road. Not distance learning, not go home to your dorm room and turn a computer on and take a course online, that’s not what we’re talking about. That’s here now, we’ll do more of that. We’re talking about how we provide some of the bigger information transfer with the faculty members seeing everyone else interact at the same time and then use your smaller face time to do interactions with 20 to 30 people in a room with a single instructor to review that material. So that came out of the first few months of our planning process. Again, I just refer you to the document because that’ll give you the details.

DT: So last Wednesday I was at the Board of Governors meeting in Newark and I’m a commuter — I come from Woodbridge, so it’s like 20 or 30 minutes away. And when I was in Newark I noticed there are in the parking decks — you click a button and get a ticket, and the ticket, if you’re a student there, it’s $4 — if you don’t have a hang tag it’s $4 to park. And if you’re not a student it’s $12. And here, if you have a hang tag just for the wrong campus and you parked in the wrong parking deck you get a $50 parking ticket. So what’s the reason? Why don’t we have those machines here, and why is a parking ticket $50?

Barchi: Well, I’d refer you to the parking authorities as to tell you why the wrong garage is $50 but if you know it’s the wrong garage I presume you wouldn’t park there. Why it’s $50? We have a real problem here, and that is because we don’t have enough parking on campus to accommodate our students and our faculty, our graduate students and other people who come to campus, our staff. And in order to get it to work we have to make sure people park where they’re assigned to park and not somewhere else or we won’t be able to accommodate who were assigned to the other place and they won’t necessarily have anywhere to go. So in terms of how you create an impediment to parking where you’re not supposed to park, that’s not something I get directly involved with but I imagine that’s why there is a ticket when you’re not in the right place. The technology that’s used to get you into the right place, whether it’s a hang tag in a small location like Newark you might be able to do some of the new things like push buttons. We have a huge operation here. What we can do in Newark very easily would be much more difficult to do here overnight. But what we have to do is provide more parking in more accessible locations. We have to get rid of surface lots and replace them by vertical parking structures. We have to get parking structures out of the center of our campus facilities where we need more open space and more classrooms and be more conscious about how we move people from the parking lots to other locations. Now, I imagine of the reasons why you might wind up in the wrong parking lot is because you’re late for class on another campus and it’ll take you two hours to get from your parking lot to the location. So the answer isn’t park in the wrong lot, although that may be the only answer you have now. For us, the answer is how do we get you to where you’re supposed to go quickly, or create a situation where you don’t have to go all that distance in order to get what you need? So again, if you look at the facilities master plan, you’ll find that there is a lot of proposed parking in there. A lot of structures we intend to build that are exactly for that reason. Why? Because it affects your experience, it affects the experience of our faculty and staff and it’s important.

DT: Okay. Moving on, this is more about RBHS and UMDNJ and the merger that occurred. How do relations stand between the UMDNJ staff and RBHS administrators and faculty? Because I’m in the nursing school and I know there are — kind of — tensions between the two staff.

Barchi: Like any merger, it takes time to merge the cultures after you merge the businesses. In this situation, we’ve taken two very large businesses, if you will, with disparate cultures and totally different infrastructures from an IT point of view. Totally different ways of doing business, and all of a sudden molded them together. And the miracle was they were functioning the day after we did that, which I think is a tribute to the team that did the thousands and thousands of individual tasks that it took to get there. And after the integration, all the classes went on, all the clinicals were delivered, paychecks were cut and life went on. But we still have situations where staff in one office come from either legacy of Rutgers or legacy of UMDNJ and their experience in the past is different, and what we’re trying to do now is get everyone onto the same systems. Right now, we have an issue where staff from one location don’t even have the same vacation days — they’re not off on the same days because of the negotiations and the unions that have taken place over the years. We’re getting all that reconciled, make sure we’re all in the same place — it takes a little time, especially in a unionized environment like ours, because every one of those changes is subject to negotiation at the bargaining table, so it does take time. I think the problems are going down — I know they are. And my guess is that if you talk to folks in your offices, the chatter is going down as well. Why? Because the issues are getting dealt with as we move along, and the benefits are becoming more apparent. For one thing, the two nursing schools from Newark and New Brunswick that are now merged have moved up to 25th in the nation, from being down below 80 and the other one down below 100. So that’s really pretty important for the students and the staff and for the faculty and for your degree and where you go from there. So it’s worth a little pain to get that to happen. I think the medical schools are doing very well in terms of turning them around. We have a lot of underlying issues from a financial point of view and from the point of view of the clinical work environment that needed to be dealt with. The relationships with the hospitals is for the first time, I think has really been ironed out, especially with RWJ University hospitals. I think it’s going very well. We got a new dean for the School of Public Health, just announced the new dean for medicine at RWJ, a woman who has been the dean of Mayo Clinic who’s coming to be our new dean. Some very, very talented people coming aboard. The new chairman of medicine and his wife were major leaders at Johns Hopkins, both of them, independently, and are both coming up here to run major programs here. So the atmosphere is one of “whoa, what’s going on there?” from the outside when I go around talking to people around the country and there’s a real buzz about what’s going on with our biological and health sciences, a lot of excitement. So we probably have a couple more years of integration to do. Part of it is designing the right IT systems to use, and I can tell you neither Rutgers nor UMDNJ had the right system. Neither of them worked very well, so we really have to redesign the whole thing, which is what we’re doing right now. If you were at the board meeting up at Newark you might have noticed that the board approved the first phase of that deployment for the new IT system. It took about 18 months to design and to bid and get it all ready and now we’re doing it, so that’s about a 2 ½ to 3-year project. Those things have to be done, and I think you’ll see the other issues slowly fall to the wayside. Hopefully all the union negotiations will be done in the next few months as well. So that’ll sweep in some of the workplace issues that needed to be changed.

DT: Okay, in terms of the student experience, will there be like, any kind of interdisciplinary education among the RBHS students?

Barchi: Oh, I certainly expect that to be the case. One of the things we expect in the health sciences and that I’ve been very much involved in pushing in my past is interdisciplinary education where our students in the various health professions are educated together in the preclinical environment, usually in simulated environments so they learn how to work as a team, rather than as individuals. That’s very important. But I also think you’re going to see more opportunities for people in SAS to be working in programs in RBHS and the medical school and public health. I’m certainly expecting public health, for example, to take the lead in global health that will extend throughout the University. There’s a new bioethics program that’s being developed and the recruitment is being done by a search committee that’s University-wide for someone who will pull those programs together across the University. The Institute for Health, Health Policy and Aging is still heavily on the old Rutgers side in terms of its faculty, although it is in RBHS now and will continue to be that way. So one of the advantages we have here is that we’re not just putting these things side-by-side, we’re forcing them to integrate so the educational opportunities, the research opportunities for our students will be permeable across that barrier, and as equally important, the faculty will be able to do that, be teaching courses at both locations and will be able to collaborate with their colleagues in all those locations. I don’t want to see anything that says “Well, this used to be part of UMDNJ.” It isn’t there anymore, it’s all Rutgers. Right? So this whole operation now is one Rutgers faculty, one Rutgers student body, one Rutgers core values.

DT: Moving on, so this is something we talked about in the office. Since the honors college is coming in and we’re trying to raise the academic standards at Rutgers, does that isolate underprivileged students who may not have all the opportunity to get here because of their socioeconomic levels?

Barchi: Yeah. You know, that is something that could potentially happen if you weren’t paying attention. It’s something that we care an awful lot about and are not going to allow to happen. There are two pieces to your question, I think, if I can tease them apart — one is if you keep Rutgers enrollment the same and you increase the attractiveness for the best students and you increase your lower cutoffs, then the average of the student body is going to [go up], right, in terms of their average whatever credentials you want to use. So the question is “Is this a bad thing?” and the second question is does that by itself disadvantage individuals from particular socioeconomic backgrounds? And I think the second question says yes, it could, if you weren’t paying attention to programs that could take students who are way back in grammar school — we’re starting with eighth graders — and give them the opportunity to improve their readiness so that they would be in that group, and then pay attention to the EOF students and other categories to make sure we are getting them represented in our student body, so I think that’s very important. So I think we do a pretty good job about that — matter of fact, our Rutgers Future Scholars program was the reason why Mrs. Obama invited us down to The White House to tell everyone else how we did it. So they really called us out as one of the leaders.

Pete McDonough: Do you understand what that program is? Rutgers Future Scholars?

DT: They do extra programs with some of the students.

Barchi: We actually start with groups of students who are in the eighth grade in inner-city high schools, schools that would graduate from high school normally less than 50 percent of their graduates. We sign a contract with them. We say, “Look, if you’ll stick with us and you’ll come to Saturday morning programs and the extra things we’ll do for you, work with us, we’ll provide you with a mentor and people to help you, when you graduate and when you’ve done those things and your grades are good, we will give you a full scholarship to Rutgers. And I’ll tell you that right now, in eighth grade.” That program has been running. The kids who are in the program are graduating from high school at 98 percent rate where their classmates are graduating at 50 percent rate, and it’s just a matter of if you’re in the program or out of the program. And I think somewhere around 92 percent of them are actively in four-year colleges and a lot of them here are Rutgers. We can do that. It’s not cheap, we just got a $300,000 donation from one of our alumni to help to continue to fund it. We’re funded almost entirely by philanthropy, but that’s the sort of thing we have to do. We have to be creative in developing programs that will help people to succeed if they have the talent and the abilities to be here, to not be denied that because of their socioeconomic position. And the second question inherent in what you’re asking me is if it’s a bad thing for us to raise the profile of Rutgers, and remember, Rutgers, the State University, is a system of three universities, of Rutgers University-Newark, Rutgers University-Camden and Rutgers University-New Brunswick, which is the AAU campus and includes RBHS. Each of those shares the same overall goals. It shares the same standards. It shares the same faculty promotions. They all get the same degrees. You get a degree from Rutgers Camden or Newark or New Brunswick, it says “Rutgers, the State University of New Jersey.” Exactly the same degree. But they have different specific visions of what they’re doing. So Newark, they’re much more focused on being an anchor institution in an inner-urban environment. And Camden, it’s very focused on being a school with research but liberal arts focus that feels like a smaller institution in an urban environment. And New Brunswick is the AAU institution with a very heavy focus on research. So what applies to one doesn’t necessarily apply to all three in terms of the students and the student body and access and things like that. Having said that, we lose about 28,000 students from New Jersey every year — high school students because we don’t have enough college seats and because we don’t have enough high quality programs to attract them. And it is not Rutgers’ job to provide educational opportunities to 28,000 students. That is the state’s job, and one I talk about every time I go down to Trenton, that the state needs to do more for higher education. It needs to do more for the rest of the University system in the state. Our job is to be the very best academic institution that anyone who graduates from high school in New Jersey could want to go to. There’s no reason to be going anywhere else, so we’re focused on building top-end programs here that would attract students that would have never come to Rutgers or would have never applied. And in the process, to raise the overall standards, and I don’t think there’s anything wrong with that, as long as the state realizes their job is to provide opportunities for all of the students who are graduating from high school here, so they have a lot more work to do.

DT: The Future Scholars Program — how far-reaching is that in New Jersey? Is it just New Brunswick?

Barchi: It’s designed to be in the cities in which we live and operate, so that one is in New Brunswick, but we’re looking to have those programs extend to some of the other cities as well through the universities that are in those cities. Think of them this way — they’re demonstrations of how it could be done if people would get on board and do their part and do the same thing that we’re doing.

DT: Do you think that recruitment standards are going to be one thing that changes in terms of trying to attract more people to come to Rutgers? Because I’m just speaking from a personal standpoint — I transferred here and I always say my one mistake was not going here freshman year, but I think that’s partially because I wasn’t necessarily aware of the programs Rutgers had to offer, so do you think in terms of raising our standards that we’re going to be able to express those programs and show people that Rutgers is the place to be?

Barchi: Yeah. Two parts to your question — one is raising our standards, that is, we’ve got something to tell you about, and the second is raising our awareness, because we’ve got a lot of things to tell you about right now, and we have not done a good job of getting the message out. That’s something I hope is changing, so we have programs now where we bring in college counselors from high schools around the state in groups on weekends and I’ll go and talk to them, the chancellor will go and talk to them, and we’ll put them in buses and tour the campus. Many of them have never been to Rutgers before, literally. They’ll say “Wow, I didn’t even know this was here.” Not that Rutgers was here, but some of the things you see on campus. And I think that’s one way we do it. We’re doing that with out-of-state counselors as well, and not this summer but next summer we’ve been designated as the host university for the annual meeting of graduate high school counselors from foreign universities. They go to one place each year, they picked Rutgers for this one. In 2016, they will all be here in the summer, so we need to raise the level of awareness about what we’re doing. And the second thing is developing additional programs that will in and of themselves be attractive to a different group of students that might not have looked at us. That’s what the honors college is all about, and Dick Edwards and I have been tag-teaming with lunches and events where we have invited all the accepted students and their parents to come and listen to what we’re doing, what we’re offering here, take a look at what the thing is going to look like because many of them haven’t even seen the renderings of it, and have them talk to the faculty as well, because the faculty that are going to be teaching, the two deans that are going to be involved speak to them and get to know them. There’s a lot of excitement, a lot of excitement. So I think we’ll do very well with that process. So yeah, you got to go out and market it. We can talk about the impact of marketing on our other numbers later. I’m sure we will.

DT: So, where does all the funding come from for all these new programs? I’m sure it’s a question you get a lot.

Barchi: It is, it’s like pulling it out of a hat kind of a routine. Funding is a major challenge for Rutgers. We’re a big organization, we have a $3.7 billion dollar budget and our operating margin for those of you that might be business majors is less than .5 percent. So we run on a razor-thin margin. So we are always challenged to find the marginal dollars, if you will, that we can use to build a program. So we’re constantly thinking about how we can do that. We’re not going to do it by raising tuition, I’ve said that all along. We’re going to going to try to keep the rate of rising tuition as low as we can and I just point out again that over the last five years Rutgers is one of the lowest three in the whole (AAU) in terms of its rate of increase in terms of tuition. So we’ve been trying very hard to do that, I think we have been doing that. So where is the money going to come from? It can come from philanthropy, we’ve increased our fundraising from sort of in the $90 million a year range to the $120 million a year when I came. This year, we’re probably going to be close to the $200 million a year fundraising. And some of that will go into operation, some of that will go into scholarships, some of that will go into professorships. But even the endowed scholarships and professorships relieves some of the pressure on the operating budget and generate dollars that we can then use to build new programs. We’re working hard to offset some of our expenses in research by increasing our grant dollars there. We’re looking hard at technology transfer, we’re looking hard at public and private partnerships to generate additional dollars. I don’t think we can really expect it from the state right now. We’re seeing a decrease in the amount of revenue from the state each year. The governor has touted it as being flat but what I hope that you do understand is that our appropriation includes a part of the appropriation that pays fringe benefits for our faculty and staff and a part that pays for the operations of the University. The operations of the University is the only part that you care about — you don’t even see the other part. But the fringe benefits are going up every year. Health care is going up and everything else and the way the governor keeps the appropriations flat is that he takes it out of this hand and puts it over there. So the operating budget that we have gotten for the last three years has gone down every year. It’s gone down about 3 plus percent per year at the same time our expenses are going up by 3, 4 or 5 percent or more each year. So we’re facing a constant decline in support from the state in real dollars as well as inflation-corrected dollars. And an increase in the things that we have to pay for, and a bunch of our costs are labor, salary and compensation. But there’s a lot of other things that we pay for, from fuel to the buses for electricity that we generate or whatever, so we’re running all the time to find other sources of revenue to be able to provide you the education that we do now without raising tuition any more than we absolutely have to, but at the same time, building the new kinds of programs that you want. Now, the construction is a different story. If you keep in mind how budgets are put together, there’s operating budgets and there’s capital dollars — you can’t mix the two together. So you go out and you have bonds that you raise in the market to do construction, you can’t use any of that revenue for operations. You just can’t do that. We are in the fortunate position right now, probably the first time in 30 years, that we have a bolus of money from the state for construction. That was the Building our Future bond act the governor and I and a bunch of other people worked so hard to get passed two or three years ago. Those dollars along with public-private partnerships, particularly with DEVCO, are what are financing the construction you see here now. So that $800-some million dollars that I’m talking about is paid for. It doesn’t come on your backs, it doesn’t even require additional fundraising. It’s all taken care of from those sources. So we’re very fortunate in being able to do the capital construction that we need to really take this step forward without a big hit on our operating budget. So what we need to do is find the operating budget dollars to construct the new programs and make sure the programs are active.

DT: I’m not sure if you read it, but Forbes recently published an article that basically said the University spends about $36 million more on athletics than they get back. And while you were saying before that you would like to add or upgrade so many programs without increasing tuition, why doesn’t that money get allocated towards benefitting education, structural issues of the University?

Barchi: You probably know if you go back and look at the various speeches and comments that I’ve made that the decision to go into D1 athletics was made 15 or 20 years ago here, and it’s put you on a particular path. You’ve made a lot of investments in the facilities to do that. My commitment when I came here was to get us back into a cost-neutral situation in athletics and that’s what I intend to do. We are using right now and are on a plan that will get us to that position. The key ingredient there was getting us into the Big Ten. We have a very clear schedule with the Big Ten where we are probationary members for a period of years and then we become full members. We know what the revenues are for each of those years. When we get to the first year that we’re full members we should be just about neutral for athletics. That’s what we have to do, and then we’ll have dollars from our operating budget that might have gone on to be providing some (support) to athletics that can be put back into operations … This is not a process you can magically speed up. I know that there’s been a report from some of our faculty members suggesting that we do that more quickly. The math doesn’t work that way. We can’t change the contracts that we have and we can’t speed it up. That is the math, and we will get there in three years rather than the 5 ½ it’s going to take will result in a disaster. And if we were to not remain in the Big Ten we would have a monumental financial disaster on our hands. So we’re very conscious of that and moving that direction but there’s another aspect to the Big Ten that you need to pay attention to. You’re all very intelligent people — don’t be fooled by thinking that it’s only a matter of dollars and that it’s only the dollars that someone wants to show you. Let me give you a few examples — every time our football team plays a game we are in a million homes in the U.S. Every time. In that time, they see Rutgers, they see the Rutgers logo, but they also see a 45-second slot that talks about Rutgers as an educational institution that gets our name out there. The value of that advertising is gigantic. I could not begin to pay the collateral cost of that advertising. Secondly, every time the Big Ten plays anything, they do that pop-up thing that you probably see if you watch other sports that’s kind of like the Game of Thrones, and the thing that pops up is what, guess what? Rutgers. Right next to New York City, it’s the last thing you see there. I don’t pay a cent for that. Rutgers is getting a huge collateral value out of the advertising and the buzz of being in the Big Ten. And I’ll give you a piece of data that supports that — our admissions applications this year were up about 14 percent. Right? And about 15 or 16 percent out-of-state, much of that in the Midwest. Go figure. Up about 40 percent internationally … We didn’t do anything. We didn’t change the Common Application, we didn’t play any games, those are just the numbers. And a lot of that has to do with name recognition, appreciation of what we are as a University linked to a name that nobody knew before, or they didn’t have a feeling for all the stuff they see in that 45-second slot over and over again. And that has a huge impact. That means we have a better group of students here, it means we have a better mix of in-state, out-of-state, foreign — and, by the way, that means we have better revenue to do what we need to do for you without raising tuition. Right? And the other part of it that you have to keep in mind is that we have an alumni base, many of whom are very interested in intercollegiate sports and tend to tune in or tune out depending on whether we’re paying attention. We raised a record number of dollars last year for athletics — athletics, over the course of our campaign, is close to 10 percent of the total revenue that we raised — a hundred million dollars — and we expect to see that go up. So you can’t ignore the fact that the dollars are coming in and focus only on the mathematical deficit that’s there. And the one other thing that I want to point out because I hear this over and over again has to do with the student fee. And that why is my student fee going to support football and basketball. The fact of the matter is that not a dime of the student fee goes to support football and basketball. Those are the only two sports that are revenue neutral or generating some money. Those are the ones that are keeping the other twenty sports going. Right? And your student fee is going to all the other Olympic sports that we have here. Whether you go and watch a volleyball game or a wrestling match, soccer or field hockey. They don’t go to support the football team. Those are the facts. Not everybody wants to say that in their particular statement.

DT: While I know you said not to focus on the number, but in terms of actually getting that number to go back to a neutral position, do you plan on more of reallocating that money to other means or of simply raising or spending less money in order to get to that position?

Barchi: I’m not sure what the question is, but if I have a fixed budget and I have to take some of my disposable revenue … and if you’ve got a budget for your month and you’ve paid your rent, you’ve paid everything else and you’ve eaten and you’ve got some disposable revenue, you make a choice about where it goes. If right now I have to put it into athletics to keep it going but in a couple years I don’t have to do that anymore, money is still there, now I can move it to something else. So, if it’s a part of my annual revenue stream, I can then use it for anything I want to. Which includes new programs and new faculty or anything. It’s not a matter of not spending it, if it’s there we’ll spend it. But we’ll spend it on things that we think that we really need to do as opposed to construction or whatever.00

DT: Does the Big Ten — being in the Big Ten — open up any research opportunities or academic partnerships?

Barchi: Oh, yeah. This is huge, and the one thing about this conference that just isn’t the case with any other big sports conferences out there. This is a lot more than just D1 sports, it’s a conference that includes all of our aspirational peers, you know, it is the big research intensive public universities that do what we do. And so in addition to the Big Ten which is the athletics piece of it, there’s something called the CIC, the Committee of Institutional Cooperation, which has been around for many years that is run by the provost of each of the schools that are in the Big Ten. And that’s all about academics, it’s all about programs, about sharing access. You can take a course at the University of Michigan and have it count here and vice versa because we are in the CIC. You can go to the library and order something like, I don’t know, ten or twenty million books that we don’t have in ours from the sharing of the CIC libraries. Our faculty write grants now with these faculty and other institutions, submit them jointly. We lobby together on Capitol Hill for research and education. It’s a very powerful force. Our people from Rutgers are now playing key roles in the committee that runs that thing. So yeah, it’s much, much more than just sports for us. Again, if you look back at some of the comments and memos and news releases at the time, we put the CIC really right up there in terms of the reasons why this is a good thing for Rutgers.

DT: What measures are the University — personally I don’t think that the university’s method of dealing with sexual assault is that bad compared to others that we’ve seen in the news but how do we further that and make sure that the student experience is (optimal)?

Barchi: Well, it’s obviously a very important issue for us and it’s one of the big things we take seriously and I think actually we are very well positioned among research universities doing this. We are looked at as one of the best of breed — that’s why our folks were invited down to Washington with three other universities to help put the standard together for how this is going to be done and the survey — the climate survey — was designed and piloted here because we know how to do it. So, I think we’re at the head of the pack in terms of looking at this. Does that mean we’re doing the best job we can? No, I don’t think anybody is. I think it has to be a continuously evolving process both from the point of view of dealing with situations that come up, how you would adjudicate them, handle both parties in a balanced way, how you make sure that everyone is taken care of and the necessary actions are taken. But also how do we raise the level of awareness on campus so that we reduce the likelihood that you would be exposed to that kind of situation. Paradoxically, that might mean that the number of reported incidents go up, and I don’t see that as bad. Actually, it’s not that they weren’t there before, but if you don’t report them, you can’t do anything about them. A lot of this has to do with education and participation whether it’s with SCREAM Theater or with some other forms of social marketing, with bystander education about stopping something that you see or whether it’s education about no meaning no in every way, shape, or form. A lot of it is educating ourselves and having you know and talk about it. The dialogue part of it is very, very important. And that means if we’re not kicking it around and we’re not arguing about it, we’re probably not doing our job. So I welcome an active, critical dialogue on this topic. You will certainly not make me feel bad about it, because that’s exactly what I think we need to be doing. On the other hand, I think we have good people to have that dialogue with and good ideas that you generate will be taken and used. So my goal is to make sure that we’re staying at the lead of that transformation process. I’m not claiming that we’re at the finish line by any means.

DT: So regarding the Code of Student Conduct, the definition of consent is a little bit weak. Anne Newman she acknowledged that it is a little bit weak. So is anything going to be done about changing that definition of the code?

Barchi: I assume that it will be. What I hear is part of the process is that there’s a dialogue about what needs to be changed, and then as that dialogue continues eventually you make a formal proposition for a change in the Code that has to be accepted and the revised Code goes into effect. That’s what I mean — that’s why you need to have the dialogue and why you need to push it. You can’t just kinda say, “Okay that’s done.” It’s not. You have to keep rolling the ball along to its finish, and it’ll be only one of many changes that you want, I’m sure.

DT: I was just wondering, you mentioned education and I wanted to know if you had any specific, future plans for encouraging students who have been in a position where they had been sexually assaulted and were wary to report it? Because from my personal experience I’ve had a lot of friends who’ve had that situation, and they weren’t sure where they should go to report it or they just chose not to and faded into the background. So how do you plan to encourage students like that to come forward?

Barchi: I really should have Sarah McMahon come in to talk to you because she is the guru, she’s got the plans. A lot of what you’re talking about has to do with raising awareness, that it’s okay to say something. It’s not stigmatizing — that you can know that if you say something, there are people who are listening. And the second is knowing where to go, who to talk to. So that’s a process of education and communication that we have to do a better job of. If there are people on campus who don’t feel that they don’t know what they would do, then we haven’t done our job well enough. On the other hand, we have people whose job it will be to do that, and that’s my expectation is that they do it.

DT: Do you have any specific future plans for that, though? I’m just curious.

Barchi: You’re asking me for a level of granularity that I can’t give you. We’re talking about somebody that has the charge to do it, and I know they’re very good. They know what to do. I’m waiting to see the results. As opposed to my saying you’ve got to do this particular thing.

DT: So we asked Rutgers students to give us questions and this was one of them. Andrew Getraer, executive director of Hillel, made bigoted remarks against Muslims in recent leaked conversations. Why hasn’t the University defended its thousands of Muslim students who follow a faith Getraer considers “a problem” and expressed its displeasure with Hillel International to show that such bigotry is not welcome at our school?

Barchi: Well, I think actually we have expressed that concern. Every time that sort of thing has happened, I’ve made a public statement. I’ve sent it to every single student and faculty staff member in our organization, and it’s gotten pretty wide press. Remember that this individual doesn’t work for us. He works for Hillel, so I can’t control or can’t sanction in any way what he is saying. He has a right to say that, that’s the mantra of the University. You have the right to say what you want. I have the right to disagree with you, and I have the right to say that I think that’s a heinous thing to say, but I don’t have the right to say that you can’t say that. So, what our position has to be is that every student, no matter whether they’re Jewish or Christian or Muslim or Sikh or anything else, there is no one here that should not have the right to be heard and spoken, but should also there’s no one here that should not be — should not feel that they’re protected from the point of view of living in a safe environment. So, we have to be a balanced organization to allow for speech, but we’re not going to tolerate anybody doing anything that attacks any of our groups here on campus. And in terms of the Muslim group, which you probably know constitutes about the same percentage of our students as our Jewish students, some people think it’s a minority compared to the Jewish students, that’s just not the case, we’ve been pushing hard to make sure that they have adequate prayer space and that they have regular Friday space now for the Friday services and that they do get the support that they might not otherwise get because they don’t have as strong an organization that wraps around that or the history of having that sort of thing done. But, we are not hesitant at all to speak out against any kind of hate speech whether it is Muslim against the Jewish population, or Jewish against the Muslim population, or frankly anyone else. It’s not acceptable.

DT: So Dance Marathon is coming up this weekend. Do you have any plans to stop by?

Barchi: Mhm, you know I have been trying to coordinate schedules with this Dance Marathon for three years, and for whatever reason, it seems to wind up on weekends when I am simply not in New Brunswick, and I really, really am proud of what the students are doing there and think it’s a great effort, it’s one of the best things we do here. I know my chancellor is going to go over and if I were in town, I would, too. We just got to get our schedules to coordinate. Unfortunately, mine seems to get locked down a year in advance in most cases. I personally am very supportive of the activity, I think it’s a great cause and it’s a great tradition.

DT: So I just wanted to get, if this is okay, your personal opinion on the sexual assault story because I think a few people are curious about what you think about that individual’s situation?

Barchi: Oh, I’m not going to comment on any individual’s situation. I’m sorry, I can’t do that. But I think made my position very clear about how I feel about sexual assault on campus and what we’re going to try and do about it and all those kinds of things. But I’m not going to comment on a specific case, especially one that’s been adjudicated or is still in the process of being reviewed. Can’t do that.

DT: I know you mentioned some of the things you wanted to do is make the school obviously more attractive to students in the state and things like that and obviously academics, athletics all play a major role in that. But you know, at 18 years old (for) a majority of students, social life is a major part of that. With the recent ban on greek life activities, do you think that could possibly affect incoming students decision on whether they want to come here? Because I know it’s a very big part of a lot of students’ decisions.

Barchi: I’ll tell you what would affect incoming students’ decisions even more is if we have another death, alcohol-related in a frat house and we haven’t done anything about it. That, I think, would really put a chill on the place. I’m in favor of greek life. I was very much involved at Penn in the fraternity, sorority affairs that were reported to me when I was provost. And one of the first things that I had to do when I walked into the provost’s office was to make the entire campus dry for six months because of a death in a fraternity house and rewrite all the alcohol policies before we opened everything back up again. And I have to tell you that that was back in 1999, and those policies became widely copied accross the country. And I’m really surprised that when I come here, we’re not doing those things that I thought were pretty standard, accepted features (such as) tip trained bartenders who are not members of a fraternity who are professionals, door minders who are checking IDs and armbands and all the other things most people do, sober monitors roaming in the campus for registered parties that try to make it a safe environment for people to have fun in that we probably should be doing. And I get the feeling that the leaders of the fraternities and the sororities also feel that we need to be a little bit more organized in how we do this. I don’t think anybody wants to see anybody get hurt. And if it takes just kind of chilling down for a four or five week period, remember fraternities and sororities can still party, that they can still go off-site with professional staff, third-party staff providing the alcohol and all those kinds of things. So we’re not closing down fraternities and sororities like some of the newspapers said, or some of the flashes on the evening news. But I think it is time to realize what’s been happening. This semester has not been a good semester in terms of harm to our students, the number of transports for alcohol intoxication, death, physical harm, can’t have that. So I would have to turn it around and say, if we don’t fix those things we’re going to make Rutgers a less attractive place for students to be. And fixing it doesn’t mean getting rid of them. There’s so many other things that fraternities and sororities do besides just party that that’s like the proverbial baby in the bath water. You don’t do that. So I’m not at all in favor of curtailing the number of fraternities and sororities we have, I’m just in favor of working with them so that they can help us to create a more appropriate and safe environment for their members to party in and to have fun and to do the things they want to do.

DT: So will some of those policies be implemented here, or reworked at least?

Barchi: I would hope so. You know I haven’t actually talked to the people here who report to the provost and the chancellor about what those policies are, but I know everybody is going to be looking at what the best practice is. And I think some of those policies are accepted as being best practices. So I would hope that some of them would be. They do work actually to reduce the riskiness of the environment, and that’s what you want to do. You’re not looking to remove alcohol use. You’re not even looking to eliminate underage drinking. I’m not that naive. But what you’re trying to do is remove the risk as much as you can. Because there still will be people who are going to use false IDs or whatever they’re going to use. But what we don’t want to do is have an environment where people who do choose to drink are at risk for physical harm or harming someone else. That’s just not acceptable.

DT: I guess, going back into the Big Ten, I’m not sure if you already mentioned this, but I just wanted to know in particular how many years it would take to hit that neutral point where we actually benefit from the athletics department and the Big Ten because I don’t recall a specific number, but I’m just curious.

Barchi: Yeah, it’s six years from the time we started until the time that that next year will be our next full year. But the sixth year is actually already starting to see some of that benefit, so that’s what it is. And the numbers that are out there, and I’m not telling any secrets, they’re widely publicized numbers, they’ve been written about and published in newspapers across the country based on the current contracts that the Big Ten has where our past athletic conferences may have given us two or three million dollars a year back into the programs. Right now we’re receiving over 9 million dollars a year from the Big Ten. And the payout of full members of the Big Ten right now, I believe, is in the mid-30s. And the numbers people are quoting in the newspapers are well above that. So, just based on the nature of the contracts that are written and the value of the playing that’s being offered, so the value of the Big Ten in real dollars is quite substantial when you play that against the quote deficit that’s there now. The other things you can look at if you’re thinking about these kinds of issues is well, what do we make from concessions, what do we make from ticket sales. We had sold out houses for football and a lot of our basketball games for the first time in years. And that’s all revenue that helps offset costs. It wouldn’t have been there most likely if we weren’t in the Big Ten. Certainly wasn’t there last year.

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Editor's Note: A previous version of this article said the University loses $6 million annually from athletic spending, according to Forbes.