By David Cruz
NJ Today
On a warm spring day, the Rutgers University campus comes to life, the sidewalks teeming with students on their way to class, enjoying an iced latte or just hanging out. It has been quite a week at Rutgers. A student body thrust into the national media spotlight, at first bemused, then embarrassed, and now, getting annoyed.
“I think everyone’s pretty upset about it. We’re the state university of New Jersey; it’s not how we want to be represented,” says Rutgers senior John Wong. “Every day students do incredible things around campus, tons of incredible research goes on here, tons of incredible events: fraternities, sororities, organizations that all do things for the good, and we feel like the media only represents us in a negative light and that’s not what we want to show the world. We do great things here.”
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The members of Kai Psi Fraternity are out in force today, setting up for a sale of sweet tea, a dollar a cup to raise funds for charity. They were part of a group of student organizations that raised half a million dollars for charity this past weekend at an annual dance marathon, an event that they say drew little interest from the scores of reporters who were on campus last week.
“You know, our main concern was that we weren’t going to get any media attention because of the negativity that was around campus,” said Bhavik Gupta, “but at the marathon, it was a unifying event. Everyone came together for one cause and our main goal was to show what Rutgers students really can do.”
Having survived the Tyler Clementi tragedy and several controversies before and since, seniors like Guarionex Rodriguez, say they’re getting used to avoiding the media when they converge on campus.
“Definitely part of the hype machine, and I think a bit unfair, to say the least,” he says. “To come here and then focus so much on this coach — and I saw the video and those things are obscene — but to then say that this doesn’t happen in other sports arenas or in other schools or under other supervision or other coaches or different departments, that’s incredibly hypocritical of them to do that.”
The Daily Targum, the campus newspaper, has dedicated an entire homepage to the scandal. Amani Al-Khatahtbeh edits the paper’s opinion page, where students have been sounding off on the scandal and the media attention. She says that with all the media that swarmed onto campus last week, she expected a bit more depth to the reporting.
“I think that, especially when you take into consideration that a college campus is a microcosm of society as a whole, we should be focusing on the issues that cause these types of events to happen in the first place,” she says. “Instead of focusing on one particular incident of one basketball coach abusing his players, we should think of how this is reflective of our college sports culture in our country and the setbacks and the shortcoming that we have in our society that allow these abuses to happen in the first place.”
For much of the past week, satellite trucks and reporters in suit jackets have been ubiquitous on campus. Today, it was just us, and for most of the students we talked to, that was just fine with them.