Rutgers at 250: Professor chronicles university's triumphs and scandals

Paul G. E. Clemens, a veteran Rutgers history professor, is marking the university's 250th birthday with a new book looking at the school's recent history.

NEW BRUNSWICK -- When Rutgers University celebrated its 200^th birthday in 1966, beloved campus history professor Richard P. McCormick released a book chronicling the New Jersey school's complex history.

McCormick's book was considered the definitive account of Rutgers' history.

Fifty years later, Rutgers is preparing to celebrate another big birthday and another history professor is taking a fresh look at the state university.

Paul G. E. Clemens, a veteran Rutgers history professor, is picking up where his late friend and mentor McCormick left off. His new book, "Rutgers since 1945: A History of the State University of New Jersey," marks the university's 250^th birthday by looking at the school's recent history.

Clemens traces the university's transformation from a mid-size private college to one of the country's largest public universities. The book chronicles Rutgers' academic and research triumphs and the school's entry into big time athletics.

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The history also recounts Rutgers' low points, including the firing of professors accused of being communists in the 1950s and a national scandal involving President Francis Lawrence's comments about race and intelligence in the 1990s.

Clemens spoke to NJ Advance Media reporter Kelly Heyboer about Rutgers' past and future.

Rutgers has been around for 250 years. Has there been much written about its history?

Actually, there are quite a few histories. Various college presidents and college historians have had a hand in it. There was a classic study that was done right around the time of World War II. But the most important one was the 200^th anniversary history that Richard P. McCormick did. He was the outstanding historian of the university.

I won't call this new history an update. But it's a book that continues the story that Richard P. McCormick started when he wrote the bicentennial history.  His bicentennial history, like my new work, were both published by Rutgers University Press.

Rutgers University history professor Paul G.E. Clemens (right) during a book signing for his new book, "Rutgers since 1945." Clemens sits with English professor Barry Qualls (left) and Linda Stamato (center), co-director of Rutgers' Center for Negotiation and Conflict Resolutions. Qualls and Stamato contributed to "Rutgers: A 250 Anniversary Portrait," a new coffee table book about the university. (Carl Blesch | Rutgers University) 

You start the book at the end of World War II, as Rutgers was transitioning from a private college to New Jersey's state university. What was Rutgers like at that time?

Rutgers was really two schools and a couple of professional schools in 1945. It was the New Jersey College for Women and Rutgers College. There were professional schools here, including the engineering school and the agricultural school. But, it was a very small college. It looked sort of like a modern high school in terms of the number of students. The building that we associate with the campus in New Brunswick and Piscataway had not occurred.

The skeleton of the university was almost entirely on College Avenue and on the other side of New Brunswick where the New Jersey College for Women, later renamed Douglass, were. Everyone was able to walk around campus and meet people they knew. It was a very closed world, a very comfortable world for people.

There are seven Rutgers presidents profiled in your book, from Robert Clothier during World War II to current president Robert Barchi. Which president had the biggest impact on the modern Rutgers?

That's an easy question. It was Edward Bloustein. He served longer than anyone else after World War II - almost two decades. He is far and away the most dynamic president of this post-war period. He made the major changes that moved Rutgers forward as a research institution, as an institution that gets national recognition with the likes of the University of Wisconsin and the University of North Carolina. He put more emphasis on graduate education. He worked vigorously to get government grants for programs at Rutgers.

Bloustein was also the one who launched Rutgers on the path to big time athletics, which increased its public visibility.

How did the entry into NCAA Division I athletics impact Rutgers?

That's a pretty hard question to answer. As the school has grown, the athletic program has become more nationally known. But the athletes themselves have become a smaller part of the student experience here. We start after World War II with a large number of male students playing intercollegiate athletics. At the same time, everybody took physical education and everybody took ROTC, which in turn occasioned more physical activity. So, this was a campus in which physical education was a very large part of education.

As we moved more and more to a specialized athletics program, more of those features drop out--including mandatory physical education.

The program has always been important to the public perception of Rutgers. Spending the amount of money any university spends on athletics is projecting a certain image to the alumni, the residents of the state and nationwide. That has become increasingly important because universities like Rutgers are driven increasingly by their ability to enroll large numbers of students and have them pay high tuitions. It is a competitive world. It's a response to the diminishing state revenues that are being used to support the school directly.

In your book, nearly every Rutgers president complains the university is not getting enough funding from the state. Why does Rutgers always seem to be in a financial crisis?

State funding here has never been all that good. If you went to any state, you would find complaints from nearly every president that they never get enough money. Part of it is you always want more. With that said, New Jersey ranks badly behind most states in terms of college financing. Part of that story is New Jersey didn't have an income tax after World War II. There wasn't income tax to draw on for higher education funding.

When state income tax comes in, state aid improves a little bit. But still, it's a diminishing part of running an ever-expanding university. That's had pretty serious consequences. But, that is a national trend. It's why public college tuitions are going up everywhere. The state has sort of turned off the tap.

Rutgers is one of the most racially diverse universities in the nation. But, it wasn't always like that. How did the 1969 takeover of Rutgers-Newark's Conklin Hall by African-American students change the university?

To me, that is one of the two or three most important events in the long history of Rutgers. It was a student-led revolt. It is a dramatic event.

There were very few African-American students at Rutgers, as there were very few Puerto Rican students, which is the general term used at that time for Latino students, and very few Asian students. It was a school that was not diverse. What the Newark takeover did was it put more pressure on the administration than it had ever had before to change admissions policies and hire more staff and faculty of minority backgrounds.

One of the remarkable things is how positively Rutgers-Newark vice president Malcolm Talbott and Rutgers President Mason Gross acknowledged that the students were doing something that was important by giving their university a kick and getting them to move in the right direction. It was exactly what the university needed.

In the 1960s, women at Douglass College still had a curfew at their dormitories. Rutgers didn't become fully co-ed until the 1970s. Was Rutgers slow to fully integrate female students into the university?

That's a tricky question. Rutgers College very much wanted to bring women students into its classes. The faculty at Rutgers College very much wanted women students. They saw that having women at Rutgers College would be an enormous benefit both for enrollment reasons and for the quality of classroom education.

The resistance came from Douglass College, which saw that as a threat to its autonomy and its actual existence. There were heated debates. In the end, it took at least the threat of legal pressure to get the Board of Governors to agree to admit women to Rutgers College. It's worth keeping in mind that both Rutgers-Camden and Rutgers-Newark had already had women in their schools as had all of the professional colleges. What stood out was Rutgers College as a men's college and Douglass College as a women's college. There were fights about it, fierce fights.

Rutgers has grown into a major hub for research over the last 50 years. What is Rutgers' biggest discovery or its biggest impact on research?

Coming out of World War II, most of the research was in the agricultural school. It is where Selman Waksman comes in. He was a microbiologist who was working there and comes up with the drug that would be used in the early stages of battling tuberculosis. His work leads to the founding of the Waksman Institute, which goes on to do remarkable work, including cancer research. That is one of the areas that Rutgers becomes known for very quickly.

If you go from that to asking what Rutgers has contributed across the board in the arts, the humanities, the sciences or other fields--you'd have an almost endless list. That's what a research university is all about.

What is next for Rutgers, based on its history?

The university faces a lot of challenges. The importance of its two urban campuses, Camden and Newark, is going to become even more evident to the people who run the administration from a base in New Brunswick. The growth of those campuses is probably going to become one of the defining features of Rutgers in the 21^st century.

Figuring out how the university most benefits from having medical schools is going to be a major challenge and opportunity for the university. Integrating the medical schools (acquired when Rutgers absorbed most of the University of Medicine and Dentistry of New Jersey in 2013) and making sure all the linkages work is a big problem. That's a huge challenge for the university.

Based on past experience, how Rutgers handles the very large deficits in athletics matters too. As athletics budgets have grown and become a larger part of the university budget, they pose larger financial concerns for the university. The cost of running big time athletics is not going to go away for the university.