Today is the day. After months of battling back and forth with students, faculty, and concerned citizens in South Jersey, Governor Christie will be signing a new Rutgers bill that is immensely watered down from the vision he outlined in January of this year.
Throughout the spring, Governor Christie and certain South Jersey Democrats connected to George Norcross were adamant that Rutgers and Rowan merge into one school for a number of reasons outlined in our extensive coverage of the issue, which you can read in its entirety here.
Proponents of this plan said that it was imperative that the law be passed before July 1, 2012. The bill itself did pass the legislature just in time, but after polling indicated that this was Governor Christie’s least popular initiative to date, with only 19 percent of New Jerseyans on board, he backed off and delayed his signing off on the bill. It was almost as if he had forgotten that the issue even existed.
The final version of the bill to be signed today does not contain a merger provision at all. Instead it contains a plan for collaboration between Rutgers Camden and Rowan that will benefit the new Cooper Medical School in Camden, and hopefully benefit the two parent campuses as well. A previous version of the bill created a joint Rut-Row Committee that would have total control over both schools. This was a thinly veiled attempt at a merger and did not fly with certain members of the legislature, or the students fighting the deal.
By the time the bill had passed it was changed to allow the joint committee to merely oversee the joint programs between Rutgers Camden and Rowan, an idea first floated in the media here at Save Jersey.
The signing of the bill today will set into motion months of planning for a transition to a new Rutgers system, which will lose some control over its Camden campus, but will bring UMDNJ into the fold.
Governor Christie will be signing the bill in New Brunswick, but will be making scheduled stops in Newark and Camden today as well.
Its too bad that UMDNJ-SOM is getting screwed over in this "compromise"