New Jersey's current governor wants to decree a divorce between Rutgers-Camden and the rest of the statewide university system, while also officiating at a shotgun wedding between Rutgers-Camden and Rowan.
The merger is the least-detailed - and, to my mind, only ill-conceived - recommendation of a gubernatorial committee to help reshape higher education statewide.
The committee appears to have spent most of its time figuring out how best to divvy up the University of Medicine and Dentistry of New Jersey among Rutgers-New Brunswick and other institutions in the northern and central parts of the state.
"Let there be no mistake," Christie declared as he announced the proposal Jan. 25. "This is going to happen."
Few people in and around Camden immediately applauded the prospect of restructuring one of the city's few assets; Mayor Dana L. Redd released a statement so generically equivocal, it might have been about anything, or nothing.
But there was no such caution on the part of the Democratic majority of one named George E. Norcross 3d, whose fingerprints are magically everywhere and nowhere on the merger proposal.
Norcross is the chairman of Cooper University Hospital, which already plans to open a city medical school in partnership with Rowan this year. He predicts the merger will be "great for Camden and for South Jersey."
He also calls it an "exciting, inspired plan [that] can be the catalyst for the kind of renaissance that could make South Jersey an epicenter of intellectual and economic success for decades."
At Rutgers-Camden, meanwhile, the university community is organizing against this top-down proposal from the ground up.
