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.

This afternoon the Rut-Row Bill passed the New Jersey Senate and Assembly by wide margins.

In the Senate the vote was 29 – 10. Most of the Nays were Northern Democrats at war with the Norcross Machine. Senator Diane Allen (R-7) also voted no, for which I congratulate her on her courage to go against the Governor’s wishes.

In the Assembly the vote was 60 – 18 in favor of passage. Assemblyman Cryan and his crew of Democrats were bulk of the Nays here.

As I stated in my earlier post today, the bill that passed both houses in Trenton is substantially different from the one we got to look at a few weeks back.

The new bill, which was most recently amended this afternoon before the vote, took a suggestion I had previously made and ran with it. That suggestion was the scrapping of the Joint Rutgers Camden – Rowan Board that would have total control over both campuses, and instead replacing it with a joint board that oversees only the joint programs and is ultimately subject to the control of each individual school. That amendment was made in full, making the merger much less of one at all and the final plan far easier to swallow.

With what this final bill turned out to be, we may very well have saved Rutgers Camden for now, which is something everyone, from the faculty and students to citizens in South Jersey, should all be proud of. However, our work is not done, and now we must fight on to make sure Rutgers Camden remains free from the clutches of political machines.

As this chapter in the Rut-Row saga ends, I want to thank everyone who read and shared my articles on what was an issue that hit close to home for me. Together we directly shaped how this legislation turned out and beat back what was set to be a unilateral takeover of Rutgers Camden. That was no small feat for anyone involved.

The bill will now go to the Governor’s desk, where he is expected to sign it into law. A court challenge is likely if any loose ends remain, since one has essentially been in the planning stages since January when this was first announced. Of course when that happens you can come right here to Save Jersey for the latest.