Observer » Rutgers University

[em]Daily News[/em] Floods the Zone on Imus

Wed, 11 Apr 2007 15:21:30 -0400

The Daily News, like most of the media, has gone completely overboard on the Imus/ Rutgers basketball story.

Today in the News alone, there were six pieces: news stories on both the press conference and the advertising angle; columns by Mike Lupica, Errol Lewis, and Filip Bondy; and an editorial!

(The Times clocked in with four separate items, while the Post had three).

Covering the players' response, the News employed four reporters, whereas Rutgers Daily Targum used just one.

Comparatively, there was the Rutgers Medium's (typically un-PC) take on the matter, here.

--Michael Calderone

Do They Really Want to Be Like Rutgers?

Terry Golway — Mon, 09 Apr 2007 00:00:00 -0400

Now that March Madness is over—by this I mean both the NCAA college-basketball tournament and the state budget process—let’s start talking about another form of insanity that involves both collegiate sports and state institutions.

You’d have to be a dedicated watcher of the ESPN sports crawl to notice this, but over the last few years, some odd place names have begun appearing in college-sports results. Buffalo, for one. Albany, for another. And Stony Brook, too.

The state-university schools in those places were once known primarily for their strong academics—they were among the public Ivy League colleges, the state equivalent of CCNY back in the day.

About a decade or so ago, however, SUNY Buffalo rechristened itself as the University at Buffalo, perhaps to shed its unfortunate reputation for academic excellence, and decided to begin fielding a big-time college football team. For years, Buffalo existed mainly to provide its New Jersey cousin, Rutgers, with a guaranteed victory—no small achievement in the late 1990’s.

With Buffalo leading the way, SUNY Albany and SUNY Stony Brook also rebranded themselves (as the University at Albany and Stony Brook University, respectively) and decided to get into the big-time sports game, too. As a matter of fact, just recently, Stony Brook announced that its football program is joining the Big South conference, whatever that is.

Apparently, it wasn’t enough that these schools provided thousands of smart New York kids with a first-rate education.

The students, somebody decided, needed to paint themselves in school colors and cheer from the sidelines in order to fully develop their academic potential.

I’ve been waiting for years to hear some lawmaker raise a question about the state university’s conversion to big-time sports. How much is Division I sports costing taxpayers? Does New York really need to be in the company of the football factories of the South and Midwest?

More than 20 years ago, dozens of colleges and universities around the country tried to take a page from Boston College, birthplace of the so-called “Flutie Effect.” As writer Murray Sperber, a retired professor of American Studies at Indiana University, has noted, Boston College saw a flurry of applications and donations after Doug Flutie won the Heisman Trophy in the early 1980’s. But Mr. Sperber, in his book College Sports Inc., showed that the move to big-time sports was ruinously expensive and never delivered the promise of bowl-game riches.

Rutgers University, the state university of New Jersey, cheerfully ignored Mr. Sperber’s warnings by pouring tens of millions into its football and basketball programs. For years, Rutgers football was a Big East joke, capable of beating Buffalo but almost nobody else. This year, of course, the team finally made it into the Top 15—but at what cost? The tab for football at Rutgers is so huge that the athletic department recently found itself in the hole for a million bucks. The department cut crew, men’s swimming and several other low-profile sports.

Just yesterday, Rutgers enjoyed another high-profile athletic success, with its women’s basketball team playing archrival Tennessee for the national championship. I suspect that folks in Buffalo, Albany and Stony Brook were watching with envy, and dreaming of doing likewise.

Maybe it’ll happen. Maybe it won’t. But why are these schools—supported as they are with tax dollars—proceeding with little or no supervision? If any State Comptroller in the last decade has studied the cost-benefit analysis of big-time sports at SUNY, I’m not aware of it.

In the meantime, I know of several parents who are discouraging their children from attending Albany. Word on the street has it that the school is best known today for its parties.

I’m sure that’s unfair. But I’m also sure that building a big-time sports program at SUNY may hurt, rather than help, the schools’ reputations for excellence.

The Afternoon Wrap: Tuesday

Tue, 03 Apr 2007 17:15:27 -0400

Yonkers is the new Brooklyn! Brit architect Will Alsop will make his U.S. debut by transforming an 80,000-square-foot power plant there into a $250 million Hudson River "residential complex featuring a museum, restaurant, and park." [Arch. Record News]

Speaking of Brooklyn: The Department of Transportaiton has ideas to make the nightmarish Grand Army Plaza [above] slightly less nightmarish. In a nutshell: less cars; more bikes. [Streetsblog]

Celebrity designer (and Beverly Boulevard man) Richard Tyler has put his 9,200-square-foot Washington Street townhouse on the market for $15.9 million. Curbed admits to drooling over the place. [The Real Estalker]

The Empire State building is getting feverishly scarlet tonight to celebrate the first-ever appearance of the Rutgers' women's basketball team in the NCAA National Championship Game. Observer real-estate reporter John Koblin, Rutgers '05, says: "Upstream red team, red team upstream, rah rah Rutgers rah!" [Scarlet Knights]

Why have name-brand architects become such superstars? The AIA's Center for Architecture is hosting a "BRANDISM" panel to "take a hard look at the superstar architect's signature--both literally and stylistically." Watch your back, Zaha! The release is after the jump. [PR]

- Max Abelson

Fourth Panel Discussion in Six-Part BRANDISM Series to Examine "Signature as Brand" in New York City Architecture and Real Estate: Anna Klingmann's BRANDISM Series Set To Resume at AIA's Center For Architecture, 536 LaGuardia Place, April 24th at 6p.m.

NEW YORK (April 3, 2007) - "Signature as Brand," the fourth installment of the BRANDISM panel discussion series on the recent branded architecture boom in New York City, will take place at the AIA's Center For Architecture, 536 LaGuardia Place, at 6p.m. on Tuesday, April 24th. The panel will be presented by Anna Klingmann, Ph.D., former professor of architecture at Cornell University and author of "Brandscapes - Architecture in the Experience Economy," the soon-to-be published book from M.I.T Press.

The event, presented in association with the Center For Architecture, will take a hard look at the superstar architect's signature - both literally and stylistically - as it relates to New York's recent real estate boom. Moderated by Joseph Grima, director of the Storefront Gallery for Art & Architecture, the panel of architectural luminaries and the marketing experts behind them will include Daniel Libeskind of Studio Libeskind; Stanley Perelman, Managing Principal of JANI Real Estate; and Berndt Schmitt, Robert D. Calkins Professor of International Business at the Columbia Business School and Matthew Bannister, the founder of DBOX.

"In the current sales environment, star-caliber architects with signature styles have become a material commodity," says Klingmann. "To promote a building based on its architect is not unlike promoting clothing based on its designer. There is economic security in selling a high-profile designer product, but the task of our panel members will be to explore the broader implications of this now commonplace marketing strategy."

The six-part BRANDISM series is designed to encourage candid discussion of brand architecture, which first transformed the retail world with flagship stores such as NikeTown, BMW World and Prada and has since become the mandate for residential real estate development in New York City.

Students String for C.B.'s

Mon, 02 Oct 2006 13:30:00 -0400

Amid all the complaints from community boards about getting overwhelmed by rampant development that they cannot keep track of, Manhattan Borough President Scott Stronger hit upon one solution: Get students to do it!

This fall, the Beep recruited 13 graduate students in urban planning programs at Hunter, Columbia, Rutgers, New York University and the New School to advise community boards on specific projects. The students, working a minimum of 15 hours a week, will receive stipends of $2,500 a semester, which should give them a taste of the salaries of real-life urban planners.

-Matthew Schuerman

For Customers Only

Wed, 22 Mar 2006 10:04:16 -0400

Wansoo Im is an adjunct professor of urban planning at Rutgers University. He has a twenty-two-year-old assistant, who took Professor Im’s Geographic Information Systems course. And now, they're taking on New York together.

The two are mapping the city's bathrooms.

The New Yorker

- Riva Froymovich