Rutgers, A University that Makes People Poor and Wants Them There
By Mack Miller
The university that champions itself for a diverse population and a world-class Women and Gender Studies department is one of the biggest contributors to New Brunswick’s rampant poverty. When the options are a healthy city community with access to resources or large salaries for the administration of Rutgers, the administrators themselves will always choose in their own self-interest.
Rutgers University, the State School of New Jersey, is the biggest employer in New Brunswick employing more than 14,000 people. This beats out Johnson and Johnson, Robert Wood Johnson, and Saint Peter’s Hospital. Yet, they willfully choose to turn a blind eye to the poverty they are explicitly contributing to so they can live overly comfortable lives at the expense of Rutgers workers. With an $800 million surplus, there are solutions to New Brunswick poverty that can be made without impacting university tuition, graduate student wages, or other expenses that get put on the backs of working class people. However, it would mean ending the neoliberal project taking place at Rutgers. A project that President Robert Barchi and his administration have very aggressively put forth for their own self benefit. This neoliberal project has allowed for over 244 administrators to be making more than $250,000 a year while, until January, student workers were earning the state minimum wage of $8.60 an hour.
New Brunswick, New Jersey, has a poverty level of 41.8% according to city-data.com which is more than 3 times the poverty level of New Jersey as a whole. It is the 7th most impoverished town in the state. It’s also a university with a football coach making more than a million dollars annually and a university president who makes more than $325 an hour.
United Students Against Sweatshops (USAS) and the various unions on campus have been fighting for a $15 minimum wage for all Rutgers workers for over a year and a half. They have taken on this issue as one that universally benefits the most downtrodden of the greater New Brunswick community. The student worker rights organization operates under the belief that ending university administrator greed and uplifting the working class community of the area is one of the first steps in ending New Brunswick’s poverty and bringing real material and overdue justice to the New Brunswick people. It is a campaign that is material racial justice, gender justice, and immigrant justice, especially in the city of New Brunswick which has a disproportionately large immigrant community.
However, currently 12 USAS organizers are facing criminal charges for shutting down a Board of Trustees meeting last December in an effort to force university administrators to address the poverty that are complicit in creating. The overly successful protest was immediately met with university suppression. The Rutgers administration quickly weaponized their access to the state to press legal charges against the lead organizers of a 60+ person action. This university suppression was brought on by Felicia McGinty, the vice chancellor of student affairs, who at a previous school single handedly made the decision to end childcare for faculty and staff in order to save money. The Rutgers administration views Rutgers as more of a business than an institution of knowledge.
Poverty does not just contribute to increased criminalization but they are inherently inextricable. Arrests due to inability to pay parking fines, warrants due to inability to show up to court summonses because of uncontrollable and necessary work hours, being fined because you cannot pay previous fines. Increased capital earned through labor which gives increase access to resources is the best way to protect against criminalization, create opportunity to organize against over-policing and increased criminalization, and ultimately live lives that exist beyond surviving day to day.
Rutgers University administration will ultimately choose higher wages for the bosses of the university that they consider a business over being able to put food on the tables of the people of New Brunswick and help end the rampant poverty. They will go as far as to criminalize activity that fights to end their complicity in the poverty of this city then addressing their own greed and selfishness.
