Quote:The Daily Targum: Gov. Chris Christie and Sen. Raymond Lesniak came out saying that Rutgers, being in the Big Ten, should “act like it.” So, are there any plans for athletic facilities in the near future — namely, the RAC. And, what is your involvement in those plans?

President Barchi: Sure. Well, first of all, I have to say that I agree with the governor and with Sen. Lesniak, who’s one of our alumni, that we are in the Big Ten and should act like it, and we need to be competitive. Our teams need to feel like they can compete both at home and away, and that they’re adequately prepared. So, our goal is over the long term to provide facilities that will allow our teams to be competitive and to play at the level of the league that we’re in, which is a very high level of performance. We had included as part of our facilities master planning, and our physical master planning exercise, discussion of where athletics needed to be, and that was always the case, it wasn’t something that was just a last minute consideration, and it is a piece of the multi-chaptered plan that will eventually be approved by the board in June –– June 2nd is the date that all the pieces finally get approved. And there will be a piece in there on athletics that looks at what we need to do for D1 athletics from basically the five- to twenty-year time frame. Right? That’s what the facilities master plan is all about. It’s this window from five to 20 years, and clearly we have a lot of areas where we need to pay attention ... whether it’s our Title IX issues or our NCAA compliance issues or ability to provide facilities in which the league can televise and broadcast games, or it’s facilities that simply need to be brought up to speed to recruit the kind of student athletes for this campus that we want to have represent us.