Rutgers Julie Hermann.jpg

Julie Hermann spoke on a wide range of topics to a Rutgers journalism class in February.

(Associated Press)

Julie Hermann had more than just strong words for the media in her meeting with journalism students in February. She also was critical of former Rutgers football players for not donating to the university.

Hermann, in the 1-hour, 17-minute discussion with the class, was lamenting the difficulty of becoming revenue neutral when the athletic department sponsors 24 varsity sports. That's when she mentioned a decrease in overall fundraising after the university cut six teams in 2006.

“That’s four or five more than most of our counterparts. So, do you want us to cut sports? I don’t know,” Hermann told the class. “They cut sports five or six years ago, and it was a political bomb. Fundraising revenues plummeted at the university.

“Some of the people most committed to the institution are people who got to play here. And often they’re not football players, because they don’t seem to give back – what’s up with those guys? – but rowers and fencers and swimmers go out and become physicians and write big checks back.”

A recording of

Hermann’s classroom discussion

was placed online by the website Raritan River Review, which also provided

an analysis of the controversy.

Her comments that it

would be “great” if The Star-Ledger went out of business

became another national story during her rocky first year as athletic director.

During the class, she discussed a wide range of topics, from her opinions on the pay-for-play model in college athletics to her department’s hope to end a university subsidy that reached $47 million this year.

In an interview, head football coach Kyle Flood disputed Hermann's contention that Rutgers football players don’t give back.

“I don’t think that’s accurate,” he said. “Shaun O’Hara is in the process of endowing a scholarship. Dax Strohmeyer has donated $200,000 to our facilities. Marco Battaglia has donated.

“People who understand fundraising understand that the major donations come from people 40 to 50 years old, not from 20- or 30-year-olds. Most of our NFL alums are in the 20 to 30 [-year-old] range.

“What I would also say is, these people give back so much to the university every day,” Flood said. “Every time one of them visits campus to talk to our young athletes, every time one of these athletes are on TV and says, ‘Devin McCourty, Rutgers University,’ I don’t think you can put a value on that to our university and football program right now.”

Through a spokesperson, Rutgers released a statement Saturday on Hermann's comments regarding the former football players:

"The discussion that Julie had at the media ethics and law class last February was intended to give the students some understanding of the challenges that she has faced and to share her experiences and impressions in an informal way and out of the glare of the media spotlight.

"Given the classroom context and personal nature of her exchange with students, Julie won't have any further comment on this matter.

Here are other excerpts from her class discussion:

On how she personally deals with seeing herself in the news:

“Oh, listen, it’s painful. It’s incredibly painful. Because there’s no way around it. And the narrative that went out for me – listen, the reason I didn’t stand up in front of ESPN for hours and deny, deny, deny [allegations made by her former players at the University of Tennessee] is because I think you look like an idiot denying everything. And there were a lot of people who wanted me to stand up and say, ‘Oh gosh, I was young.’ But no woman has ever been called anything by me. There are a lot of things you could criticize me for – I’ll give you the whole list. I’ll call my mother, get the rest of the list for you. There are so many things you could critique or criticize. How I’ve managed young people across my entire 30-year career, no one’s ever been spoken to rudely, let alone inappropriately, and to have that narrative go out was incredibly painful. Because it was the one thing I’ve felt incredibly strong about – twice I’ve left coaching positions because I didn’t agree with how the head coach was talking to women. The good news is, that people who have known me all my life – I got 3,000 text messages, 'I know you, don’t you back down.' I’ve got the top in our industry going, ‘Listen, this isn’t personal, this is business, this is based on everything else going on at Rutgers,’ but it doesn’t make it any less painful that people who don’t know you don’t know if that’s true or not. And that’s an example of, you had scores of women who played for me, women on that team, that were calling the Ledger and ran down to their local CNN channel, and the back story wasn’t coming out. So as soon as they realize the narrative wasn’t true, it went away. Instead of, ‘Oh, we talked to everyone else in the gym, and that didn’t happen.’ In the world of ethics, it’s disturbing to me that it’s acceptable for people to write out a narrative based on, you know, women who didn’t like playing for you – none of whom would own a single quote in the paper. ‘Julie called us X, Y and Z’ – that’s not a quote. Nobody would sign their names to those quotes for a reason. So you put that narrative out there, but when the back story comes in, it’s not written. I guess it becomes uninteresting when it’s not salacious any more.”

(Eleven former Tennessee Lady Vols, in interviews and e-mail with The Star-Ledger, agreed to go on the record about Hermann's alleged abuse, while expressing fears their former coach could somehow reach into their lives once again and retaliate. One, citing similar concerns, did not want her name used.)

On what might happen if college athletes unionize:

“Unionize? They can unionize, but you’re into taxes – that’s going to go badly off the rails. Collective bargaining is truly going to take it off the rails because the enterprise we’re in cannot sustain the finances of that. You look at Alabama, and Florida and Texas and Ohio State and say, ‘My God, those guys are making $130 million,’ of the 1,000 institutions in this country, there’s four of those. You get down to the rest of us, down to the bottom of the BCS where Rutgers is – we’re the poorest of the BCS. Of the power five conferences, we’re on welfare. We’re so on welfare, we have a subsidy. We’re the poorest of the BCS, and then it gets poorer.”

On the $47 million subsidy from the university this year:

“The $47 million is a misnomer. Technically, we hustled so we were positioned to reduce the subsidy, and the student fee is there – and we can arm-wrestle with the student fee, but if we didn’t provide our students with 10,500 tickets for free and you gave them back to me, and I could put a seat donation on them that I’m putting on the rest of them, I’d be making total bank. Like, total cash. So please send the student fee back. I would love to have those 10,000 seats back, in the lower bowl, in a Big Ten stadium, and make God knows what. But, we – and I agree with this – have made a commitment to giving those tickets to our students. I’m so enamored with Rutgers because you come, and you’re loud.”

On her plans to make sure Rutgers is "not going to be seen as a joke in the Big Ten:

“I have a media plan that I’m hoping to roll out in the next two, three months that will help manage some of what comes in. Keeping in mind that salacious sells, keeping in mind that we are a lot of people’s favorite topic, keeping in mind that there are people – I’ve got one guy over at the Ledger, and he has one mission, and that’s to get any AD at Rutgers fired. That’s his hobby. How soon can I get the new AD fired? Are they going to write stuff? Probably so. The only thing that I can promise you is that we are going to take the time to do things right, we’re going to do them ethically and I can always stand up and go, ‘Here’s what we did and why we did it.’ That’s our goal.”

On the Jevon Tyree alleged bullying incident:

“Our last little incident, that’s really what happened, unfortunately. Because I don’t have a counter-narrative out there, I don’t have anyone writing or putting this out on our website or getting the back story, all you have is what the Ledger wants to report. … I don’t mean to pick on the Tyree family, but the son’s not getting the playing time they want, which happens a lot, unfortunately. So he’s got this incident with the coach from the spring before. Despite it not being on my watch, I made sure it was reviewed three times and made sure the football coach met with the parents to make sure it was okay. I get called later – and if it’s not Mr. Tyree, it’s Mr. Tyree’s brother – giving me the exact scene. So, this became a big dust-up about whether or not the kid was bullied and whether or not I was lying about who I spoke to. So – big headlines, which there’s really nothing we can do about. So we spent $400,000 to have it reviewed by an outside audit, because when general counsel came in to review, the media attacked that. They said, ‘Oh, John Farmer likes Julie Hermann, so that’s not going to work.’ So now you have to spend hundreds of thousands of dollars to do an outside audit because of the media, only to find out what we already knew, which was it was not a case of bullying, it was a case of bad behavior on both people’s part, which they had already apologized for, and then I had spoken to somebody, otherwise there is no other way for me to have the information to call my football coach. The goal is to not be in that situation again where the only way to put out information is through The Star-Ledger, because they’re going to make it salacious. When they have the correct story, they’re barely going to print it, it’s going to be back news, it’s back-page news, where it’s like, ‘I guess that’s not what really happened.’ We’re going to do our best to create a place where anybody who cares about Rutgers athletics can go to get the information as we know it, as we have the information. Other than that, you can’t really fight the media. You have to be careful about it.”

On whether she agrees with how ESPN reported the Mike Rice situation:

“Listen, when you’ve got a tape, that’s bad. We’ve never seen a tape like that. I think there’s that, plus there was literally no love lost between ESPN and my predecessor, for many reasons. I think given the opportunity to roll tape, and given the opportunity to tear him apart, they weren’t going to miss that opportunity. A lot of people, right or wrong, blame Tim (Pernetti) for busting up the Big East. Which kind of started with his dialogue about needing to turn down the deal with ESPN with the Big East. So there was a massive war between those guys. Was it worse because of that? I don’t know. I mean, did you know about all that? I don’t know if it was worse.”

Star-Ledger columnist Steve Politi contributed to this report.

