Let’s get this part out of the way first:
Forget that Julie Hermann, the Rutgers athletic director whose first year on the job rivaled her football team and men’s basketball team for embarrassing results, attacked a newspaper a few weeks ago while talking to a journalism class. Forget that she said it would be “great” if the Star-Ledger of Newark died — this a few weeks before the paper would lay off 167 employees.
We get it: Nobody sheds a tear when anyone or anything in the media takes a hit. That’s fair. It is, as Hyman Roth famously said, the business we have chosen. The media is an easy target. Sometimes it’s even a fair target. We can agree about that.
But this isn’t about the media. It’s about a company that’s been one of the most successful in the history of New Jersey for much of its existence, a winner of Pulitzer prizes, an employer of thousands of people through the years — including, full disclosure, me from 1998 to 2002.
Which means that Hermann, one of the most visible administrators at Rutgers — which produces more accountants, more actuaries, more pharmacists and business executives and lawyers and educators than any entity in New Jersey, whose very mission is to keep New Jersey’s business community thriving — is on record actively hoping about 600 people — craftsmen, custodians and cafeteria workers, by the way, not just evil journalists — lose their jobs.
Apparently the 167, as the old lawyer joke goes, is just a good start.
You would say this is intolerable, but then, what we’ve learned about Rutgers is that when it comes to Hermann, anything is tolerable.
Before she ever worked a day, there were verbal abuse accusations lobbed her way by former volleyball players she coached at Tennessee — take one guess which newspaper found those ex-players, the kind of vetting the school should’ve done and couldn’t be bothered with. She denied that. But she also denied a wedding video existed in which she addressed a former assistant with whom she had a falling out. Except that video very much existed. The Star-Ledger found that, too.
Hermann’s ham-handedness continued last year when a Rutgers football player accused an assistant of bullying him. Hermann said she called the player’s parents — which was news to the parents, who said they’d never heard from her. She survived an investigation that never even tried to answer what Hermann did or didn’t do.
“If they’re not writing headlines that are getting our attention, they’re not selling ads — and they die,” Hermann told a Media Ethics and Law class. “And the Ledger almost died in June, right?”
“They might die again next month,” a student said.
“That would be great,” she replied.
Presumably, had she been living in New Jersey in 1992, she would’ve been delighted when the old Maxwell House factory in Hoboken closed. She might’ve passed out with glee when Bamberger’s, once Newark’s largest department store, went out of business in 1986.
“I’m going to do all I can to not give them a headline to keep them alive,” she told the students, then acted surprised when these comments — again, made before student JOURNALISTS, most of whom probably know how to use the Internet — became public.
Perfect. She’s not even competent enough to follow her own sinister intentions. What in the world is she actually good at, again?