Two lawsuits were filed against Rutgers University last month alleging that it artificially boosted its rankings by using a dubious agency to hire MBA graduates and place them into “sham positions at the university itself”.
According to the reports, the lawsuits accuse the Rutgers University business school of padding numbers of earning a better reputation among their potential students. The two lawsuits have been filed by the same law firm, McOmber McOmber & Luber.
One of the suits filed alleged that supervisors punished an employee for trying to highlight the irregularities.
On April 8, Deidre White, the school’s current human resources manager filed a lawsuit against the school in Superior Court, alleging that Rutgers hired unemployed students in its MBA program through Adecco Employment Services, a temporary agency.
In turn, the school would offer a “kickback” to Adecco, and the hiring data would be reported. The lawsuit described the jobs as “sham positions”.
The suit also said that the scheme aimed to boost the school’s ranking with crucial media outlets like US News and World Report and Financial Times. Last year, Rutgers University’s Business school was ranked first among public business schools in the northeast by Bloomberg Businessweek.
Rutgers Business School would claim that its graduates would obtain a job much sooner than others using such dubious data, as per the reports.
In her petition, the staff member said that she tried to stop the alleged scheme from taking place. However, the supervisors retaliated by creating a hostile work environment. She claimed that the university denied her support staff, increased her workload, including assigning her to a major project, and denied her a promotion and a raise.
The suit further alleged that Melissa Rivera, one of the defendants, began to post White’s position as available. The suit also said that retaliation was taken when White took medical leave to address a medical condition.
Student accuses Rutgers University of faking employment
Another lawsuit against Rutgers is filed by an MBA student charging that the business school violated the New Jersey Consumer Fraud Act by allegedly creating fake jobs for graduates simply to boost its US News and World Report program rankings.
Budet, a 33-year-old resident of Atlantic City, alleged that Rutgers reported false data and made misleading claims in its marketing materials, falsely asserting that unemployed students were gainfully employed in full-time MBA-level jobs.
“The fraud worked. In 2018, the very first year of the scheme, Rutgers was suddenly propelled to, among other things, the No.1 business school in the Northeast region of the United States. But Rutgers Business School was undeserving of its high rankings, having obtained this and other ranking positions through deceit,” said Budet’s attorneys in a complaint filed in US District Court in New Jersey.
The lawsuit claimed that the students became the victim of Rutgers’ fraudulent and deceptive business practices and paid premium tuition but received an education less than what they expected given the flawed rankings.
“This was a massive fraud on Rutgers’ prospective students,” the complaint charged, estimating at least 100 others could become parties to the lawsuit.
“For (Rutgers), ensuring each graduate student received a meaningful education is of little importance. Their focal point is ‘rankings’, ’employment rates,’ and other crucial statistics that keep students flocking to Rutgers under the guise that it will, or could, land them a highly coveted, highly paid job,” the complainant said.
Rutgers University and Hinduphobia:
Last year in March, Rutgers-Newark University had stoked a massive controversy by supporting controversial ‘historian’ Professor Audrey Truschke by whitewashing her anti-Hindu remarks and Hinduphobic views as ‘academic freedom’.
The controversy broke out after several Hindu students of Rutgers University had written a letter to the university in reaction to ‘historian’ Audrey Truschke’s attempts to sell Hinduphobic fiction in the name of ‘history’.
In its petition, the group of Hindu students studying at Rutgers-Newark pointed out that Audrey Truschke tried to trivialise and downplay the Hindu genocide committed by the Mughal tyrant Aurangzeb. The students who initiated the petition were miffed with Truschke’s continuous vile and bigoted opinions against Hindus.
Instead of addressing the concerns of Hindu students, Rutgers University had backed Audrey Truschke and whitewashed her vile and bigoted anti-Hindu remarks as ‘academic freedom’. However, the Hindu students’ intensified the protests against the university for their open support of Hinduphobic elements.
Later, the university had to backtrack on the issue and apologise to the Hindu community for failing to communicate properly, causing misunderstanding.
