Rutgers University–my erstwhile employer for 29 years–is a major engine of education-based social mobility. A whopping 37% of our students have been “first generation” participants in tertiary education. Rutgers serves the people of New Jersey by providing stable, high-quality access to education. As a result, students improve the quality of their lives, lengthen their life expectancy, become greater net contributors to society. Rutgers expressly seeks out, and trains, “new” talent–kids that do not come from already educated-professional or high-bourgeois / ruling class families. It is a “Tier 1,” full-service school–with majors and departments in just about every conceivable area of scholarship–and an “R1” research university, with serious achievements and excellent overall reputation. It is also a fully unionized workplace with serious bargaining. In that regard, it is a site of significant political education for its students and employees. It is by no means free of stress and unpleasantness–but even with that, the basic premise of the enterprise must be recognized as . . . well, . . . excellent.
Rutgers’ business model is dependent on the federal government, to the tune of 58% of its revenues. Specifically, in 2024, Rutgers revenues from federal sources amounted to USD 560M (see the left side of the graph).
Pretty much exactly two-thirds of Rutgers’ federal funds came from the US Department of Health and Human Services. An additional 12% came from the National Science Foundation, and another 4% from the Department of Defense (right side of the same graph). Tuition payments amount to 27% of Rutgers’ total revenues. Altogether, USD 872.3M is “sponsored research” (not all that is from federal sources of course). Rutgers is a “state university” in it being an item of the State of New Jersey which appropriates just under one-fourth of Rutgers’ revenues (see left side of this graph). (Of course the State of New Jersey itself, like all other states, is a recipient of federal funds for various projects. In 2022, such allocations amounted to over one-fifth of the budget of NJ. In the same year, the average federal transfer to the fifty states was slightly higher than NJ, 26.5%.)
Let me put it this way. Just looking at these basic facts, the threatened withholding of those funds by DOGE-bags threatens the immediate collapse of all similarly fed-dependent institutions in the US. The threat of the destruction of Rutgers and its peers amounts to the ruination of institutions that are (1) major contributors to publicly funded, for-public-(indeed: pan-human-)interest research, as science should be, (2) serious and generously laid out training facilities for people seeking expertise in high-quality research, and (3) sites of social mobility for tens, if not hundreds, of thousands of young people.
I can’t get into the details of what I think will follow, once that happens here–but I assure you–nice it ain’t gonna be.