Richard Ebright is a decorated microbiologist and a prominent member of the Rutgers faculty who has stockpiled national honors for his work. But, even when a smart person does something dumb on the Internet, he falls back on the tired excuses that any garden-variety troll might use.

“That’s Twitter.”

This is what Ebright said when I asked him on Sunday morning if it was appropriate to call Amy Towers, a billionaire philanthropist appointed to the university’s Board of Governors last week, “a parasite and an idiot.” Those were Ebright’s words in a tweet on Saturday night, leading dozens of people in the Rutgers community -- and rightly so -- to fire back with their displeasure.

Ebright’s beef with Towers: She had the audacity to give part of her personal fortune to the athletic department to help build facilities for the university’s football team. That, in his estimation, made her unqualified for a seat on the university’s leadership panel -- a position Ebright admits he took without studying her credentials beyond what appeared in this news story.

“It probably would have been more prudent, just as I said to you, to indicate that the donations directed to the athletic program do not support the core missions of the university and indicate a lack of familiarity or emphasis and interest on the core missions of the university,” Ebright said. “That’s one thing for a private citizen, it’s quite a different thing for a candidate for a member of the Board of Governors for a university.”

The professor was, as you’d expect, much more eloquent in a 15-minute phone interview than he was in a 280-character tweet. That doesn’t excuse the nastygram, however. Ebright should hold himself to a higher standard social-media name calling. He should apologize.

That won’t change the broader problem. The divide between the academic and athletic communities at Rutgers, present from the moment that the university started its pursuit of “big-time athletics” four decades ago, only seems to be deepening over recent years. And so is the resentment on both sides.

I figured, somewhat naively, that Rutgers joining the Big Ten in 2014 would quell some of the discord. Rutgers was joining a league with academic peers such as Michigan, Northwestern and Illinois, and there were tangible benefits academically that seemed to make this a win-win move for the university as a whole.

Instead, the attacks seem to have intensified. The faculty council offered a public rebuke of the athletic department’s massive deficit in March 2017, demanding an outside review. It has pounced on every negative headline, including former football coach Kyle Flood’s inappropriate contact with a professor in 2015, and railed against the department’s spending on HBO’s Real Sports.

Patrick Hobbs, the Rutgers athletic director, was so perturbed by the 2017 rebuke that he met with the faculty group recently to ask that it passes no more resolutions that publicly embarrass the athletics department. They agreed -- for now. But anyone who has followed athletics in Piscataway know that is unlikely to last.

Are conflicts like this normal at other places? Bob Mulcahy, the former Rutgers athletics director who faced his own resistance while building the football program in Piscataway, doesn’t think so.

“You don’t read about this crap with a lot of the other Big Ten universities,” Mulcahy said. “It’s like a lot of things with New Jersey. We seem to tear down a lot of our institutions.”

Which leads back to Ebright and the opposition to Towers joining the Board of Governors. The Rutgers faculty has opposed other appointments. But the objection to Towers seems less about her overall qualifications -- a simple internet search reveal their depth in both the business and philanthropy -- and more about one simple fact: She supports the football team.

Would this be different had Towers donated $10 million to the chemistry department but had the same qualifications?

“That would indicate a clearer understanding of what core university missions are,” Ebright said. “That would be a very different situation. Again, we have an overemphasis on the athletic program, an overrepresentation on the board. Increasing that emphasis is not healthy to the university.”

But isn’t that donation to athletics also supporting Rutgers students? Isn’t there value in offering the best facilities and opportunities to them?

“I don’t think so, no,” Ebright said.

Can’t a large state university like Rutgers support both a successful football team and a vibrant academic culture? Will there ever be a day when the divide -- and the animosity -- between athletics and academics finally starts to close?

“That’s unclear,” Ebright said.

Soon after, the conversation had come to a close. The distinguished professor who had lobbed a pair of undistinguished insults at a woman he had never met, all because she supported a sports team he does not like, was not going to change his opinion.

Just another day at Rutgers.

Steve Politi may be reached at spoliti@njadvancemedia.com. Follow him on Twitter @StevePoliti. Find NJ.com on Facebook.