GETTING ON THAT LOCAL ISSUES TRAIN: The audience for my blog is already very tiny, and the remaining audience that would be interested in subject matter of this post is even tinier--it has not even been determined if that number is nonzero--but: the Chris Christie administration has come out in favor of the entirety of the UMDNJ Committee report (you can read it here) which contains some sensible recommendations, like dissolving the corrupt UMDNJ institution, and some odd ones, like giving the medical school in New Brunswick to Rutgers (makes sense) but spinning off the rest of the spare parts into a new institution that's, ummm, indistinguishable from UMDNJ (what?) The real headscratcher, though, is the proposal to fold Rutgers-Camden into Rowan University, which would involve a regional, undergraduate focused university with little graduate activity absorbing South Jersey's only public research university, which of course carries the centuries of prestige of the Rutgers name with it. This is, of course, completely illogical. It's being done so the nascent medical school in Camden (which still hasn't admitted anyone to my knowledge) can have the backing of a public research university, which it does need. But this can be done just much more simply with Rutgers maintaining its AAU status and creating a formal research relationship with Rutgers, as in the model proposed by former Camden Dean Margaret Marsh here. Otherwise the proposal destroys Rutgers-Camden to no good purpose I can imagine, though I can imagine some less good ones with no relationship to education or research.

Too long? Didn't read? Just sign this petition opposing the merger, please.