Abstract
Trouble in the University has a very local story to tell about one New Jersey university’s demise after a federal report on misconduct made public its financial mismanagement, cronyism, and fraudulent behavior. The University of Medicine and Dentistry of New Jersey (UMDNJ) was dismantled in 2013 after it engaged in many years of improper billing of Medicare and Medicaid, patronage hiring of people close to New Jersey politicians, illegal hiring of cardiologists as “faculty” to garner patient referrals, falsifying statistics in order to raise rankings in US News and World Report, crediting students for coursework not completed, and lack of oversight on no-bid contracts. When the federal government began to monitor UMDNJ, key financial files were “stolen” during break-ins to administrative offices. This listing of the troubles at UMDNJ provides a sense of the compelling and problematic aspects of Mildred Schwartz’s book. Trouble in the University does provide detailed information about corrupt practices at UMDNJ, and yet readers are left wondering if the trouble is in “the university” or only in this one particular public medical school in New Jersey that is no longer in operation.
The strength of this book is the detail Schwartz provides about the case. She constructs a chronological history of who held certain positions within the UMDNJ administration and how certain political decisions—such as a 1994 policy decision that reduced supervision of the state university system—opened the potential for corruption. For readers interested in the UMDNJ case and details of New Jersey’s political processes related to higher education, we might suggest a focused reading of Chapters Four through Six, where details of corrupt practices are outlined.
Trouble in the University wants to make a generalizable argument about corruption in higher education, and yet not enough evidence is given to establish the empirical links between the UMDNJ case study and higher education research or statistical reports on universities in the United States more generally. Schwartz has a propensity to make claims about how this local story proves organizational-level corruption is rampant in higher education (see, for example, a section on “UMDNJ as an Exemplar of Global Corruption” on p.128). These arguments, however, are difficult to square with the lack of connection to higher education research and the lack of original research in the book. The author presents information based on journalistic accounts and the federal report on UMDNJ. A discussion of how material was sampled or analyzed for the book is missing, and the concluding chapter reveals that planned interviews with UMDNJ past faculty and administrators were not collected.
In addition to needing a basis in a more rigorous research design and data analysis, the book would benefit from a better grounding in the sociological literature on higher education. The attempted link to organizational theory is not focused enough. The author selects an array of organizational theories to sample without a clear logic as to how they fit together or why and how different theories may lead to different hypotheses.
While one comes away with a sense that UMDNJ was a bad medical school that deserved to be shut down by the federal and state governments, the book leaves the reader to ponder the “so what?” question. Despite the attempts to make wider claims, the information presented and lack of data (and analysis based on sociological literature) to the contrary means that the message a reader might get from this book is that the system works—the bad apple (troubled university) was discarded.