Jersey Governor Research Articles

The state takeover of the Camden City District schools and students’ academic performance: A descriptive analysis

ABSTRACT In March 2013, New Jersey Governor Chris Christie announced a state takeover of the Camden City School District. Under state control, state appointed superintendents assumed powers customarily held by the board of education and implemented substantial changes to the district, including closing eleven district schools, eliminating more than a thousand teaching and other positions, and shifting almost half of all district students to renaissance charter schools. We examine the changes in students’ standardized test scores before and after the state takeover and find mixed results. We also find evidence that test scores for some grades were improving several years before the state takeover and that positive gains in test scores in a few subjects/grades in the period following the state takeover were occurring across all low income schools in New Jersey, not just in Camden. We address why these findings are at odds with political leaders’ positive perceptions of the takeover.

Relaxing Mask Mandates in New Jersey

Relaxing Mask Mandates in New Jersey

Public parks and the pandemic: How park usage has been affected by COVID-19 policies.

Public parks serve an important societal function as recreational spaces for diverse communities of people, with well documented physical and mental health benefits. As such, parks may be crucial for how people have handled effects of the COVID-19 pandemic, particularly the increasingly limited recreational opportunities, widespread financial uncertainty, and consequent heightened anxiety. Despite the documented benefits of parks, however, many states have instituted park shutdown orders due to fears that public parks could facilitate SARS-CoV-2 transmission. Here we use geotagged social media data from state, county, and local parks throughout New Jersey to examine whether park visitation increased when the COVID-19 pandemic began and whether park shutdown orders were effective at deterring park usage. We compare park usage during four discrete stages of spring 2020: (1) before the pandemic began, (2) during the beginning of the pandemic, (3) during the New Jersey governor's state-wide park shutdown order, and (4) following the lifting of the shutdown. We find that park visitation increased by 63.4% with the onset of the pandemic. The subsequent park shutdown order caused visitation in closed parks to decline by 76.1% while parks that remained open continued to experience elevated visitation levels. Visitation then returned to elevated pre-shutdown levels when closed parks were allowed to reopen. Altogether, our results indicate that parks continue to provide crucial services to society, particularly in stressful times when opportunities for recreation are limited. Furthermore, our results suggest that policies targeting human behavior can be effective and are largely reversible. As such, we should continue to invest in public parks and to explore the role of parks in managing public health and psychological well-being.

In Memory of Andy Brooks

In Memory of Andy Brooks

The Ugly Truth: Abject Corporeality as Political Authenticity

Abstract In this article, I argue that, as materialized in the figures of current U.S. President Donald Trump and immediate past New Jersey Governor Chris Christie, a culturally resonant variant of political authenticity has become aligned with the corporeally abject. In a climate in which conventional cornerstones of political comportment have become suspect, the corporeal abject has become a marker of authenticity, material evidence of resistance to perceived “politics as usual.” Moreover, mediated coverage of Trump and Christie that turns on their corporeal abjection to the end of critique augments and sediments this effect; fetishizing the grotesque corporeal features of Trump and Christie effectively serves to secure their relative “realness” and their concomitant distance from the artifice and deceit against which a disaffected public draws itself. This analysis prompts a theoretical reconsideration of relationships between abjection, subjectivity, and relative privilege and the role and relevance of the body in mediating those relationships.

Metaphors that communicate weight-based stigma in political news: A case study of New Jersey Governor Chris Christie

IntroductionNews media use metaphors to describe politics (Landau & Keefer, 2014) and obesity (Barry, Brescoll, Brownell, & Schlesinger, 2009). Weight-based stigma is prevalent in U.S. news media (Heuer, McClure, & Puhl, 2011). Media coverage of politicians’ body size may contain metaphors that stigmatize weight. Metaphors reflect and shape how people think about important issues like politics or obesity (Landau, Sullivan, & Greenberg, 2009; Landau, Meier, & Keefer, 2010; Landau & Keefer, 2014). ObjectiveThis study uses stigma communication theory (Smith, 2007) to examine stigmatizing metaphors used in media coverage of a United States politician, and candidate for the 2016 Republican presidential nomination, New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie, Republican. MethodWe coded n=240 articles, from January 2011 to December 2014, that referenced Christie's weight. Considering both the articles and the comments in response to them, we identified n=246 weight references that utilized metaphors and coded these using categories derived from the stigma communication theory framework. ResultsOur coding of these weight references, from journalists and comments posted by the public, demonstrated that metaphors accomplish all four functions of stigma communication: they mark, label, assign personal responsibility, and link to peril the stigmatized person. ConclusionOur findings demonstrate not only that news media use metaphors to describe a politician's weight, but also show how these metaphors — alone and together — function to constitute stigma communication messages. These messages can affect public opinions toward politics and obesity.

New Jersey Governor Brendan Byrne: The Man Who Couldn’t Be Bought

Birkner's review of New Jersey Governor Brendan Byrne: The Man Who Couldn’t Be Bought, by Linky.

“Governor of the House of Pancake”: A content analysis of the political framing of Chris Christie’s size in online news media

ABSTRACTNew Jersey governor and presidential candidate Chris Christie exemplifies the epitome of stigma against fatness in a political candidate. Since Christie became newsworthy several years ago, political journalists, other political candidates, cartoonists, comedians, and social commentators often have satirized his weight. In order to investigate the extent of political weight stigma, a content analysis was conducted of 319 online news stories about Chris Christie between 2011 and 2014 identifying 1,490 fat references from political commentators and the public. Over 80% of the 1,490 comments were stigmatizing references to his weight. The most common expression of stigma was negative attribution about Christie’s character associated with large size followed by unflattering metaphors to describe Christie. In every case where political commentators made stigmatizing weight comments, numerous stigmatizing weight comments were posted by the public. This result poses a question for responsible political journalism and stigmatizing public framing of weight and ableism.

Brand New District, Same Old Fight: The Bankhead–Hobson Campaign of 1916

Brand New District, Same Old Fight: The Bankhead–Hobson Campaign of 1916 Kari Frederickson (bio) Spanish–american war hero and prohibition crusader Richmond Pearson Hobson defeated ten-term Congressman John Hollis Bankhead in 1906 in a spirited and nasty campaign of ideological and temperamental opposites.1 His victory over Bankhead was equal parts political triumph and personal vendetta. For Hobson, Bankhead had become a personal nemesis determined to block the rise of a younger, more dynamic foe. Despite his victory over John Bankhead, Hobson remained especially sensitive to the Bankhead influence in the state and to what he regarded as politically imperious behavior by the family. When Hobson was defeated in a race for the U.S. Senate in 1914, most political observers believed his political career over. They were wrong. Hobson’s suspicion of all political moves by the Bankheads within the state of Alabama, in addition to his desire to usher a prohibition amendment through Congress, prompted him to make a fateful political decision. In 1916, Hobson challenged John Bankhead’s forty-two-year-old son William for the newly created Tenth Congressional District. But the son was not the father; Will Bankhead was better able to counter Hobson’s claims to the prerogative of political leadership by drawing on some of the same masculine conventions that had powered Hobson to victory over the senior Bankhead in 1906. The charismatic younger Bankhead and Hobson’s political missteps proved impossible for the war hero [End Page 267] to overcome. The results of the 1916 election set the combatants on opposing tracks: Hobson would never again hold political office while Bankhead’s victory would be the first of many that would bring him to the pinnacle of power in the nation’s capital. Richmond Hobson took his seat in Congress as the representative of Alabama’s Sixth Congressional District when that body convened in December 1907. For the next seven years, Hobson proved himself to be a staunch advocate of a strong navy. He spoke frequently of his concern about Japan’s growing power and urged his fellow Congressmen to support generous naval appropriations and general military preparedness. Hobson also became a reliable advocate of progressive reforms. He opposed protective tariffs, which he believed hurt rural folks and promoted “an abnormal growth of city life,” and supported additional federal aid for education, constitutional amendments instituting the graduated income tax and for the direct election of U.S senators, as well as the Clayton Anti-Trust and Federal Trade Commission Acts. Though popular with his constituents, Hobson was not well liked by his fellow congressmen, particularly those from his own state. While in Congress, he developed a reputation as something of a maverick and was not considered a reliable southern Democrat. For example, Hobson supported New Jersey governor Woodrow Wilson for the Democratic Party’s nomination for president in 1912, breaking with Alabama’s Congressional delegation, which supported favorite-son candidate Representative Oscar Underwood.2 Hobson stood apart from his southern colleagues on a number of critical issues. Viewing women as natural allies in the progressive reform battle, Hobson was one of the few southern representatives to actively support women’s suffrage. Of the value of women’s political participation, Hobson argued, “We find ample provisions of law for dealing with cholera in hogs or foot-and-mouth disease in cattle, but [End Page 268] there is nothing to reach infant mortality and little to reach child labor, debauchery, and moral obliquity.” Giving women the vote would make it more likely that political solutions would be found for these problems. When the National American Woman Suffrage Association staged the first suffrage parade in Washington D.C., in 1913, it named Congressman Hobson as a parade leader. Some political observers spoke of his potential as a vice presidential and perhaps even a presidential candidate.3 More conspicuous than his support of women’s suffrage was his response to what became known as the Brownsville Affair. In late 1906, President Theodore Roosevelt ordered a dishonorable discharge of 167 African-American soldiers of the 25th Infantry Regiment stationed at Fort Brown in Texas. The presence of the black troops had exacerbated racial tensions...

The problems of populism: celebrity politics and citizenship

In contrast to approaches that frame the ‘populism’ of celebrity politics as a ‘dumbing down’ of politics, this article draws on an approach that seeks to understand the social conditions, political rationalities, and organizational networks that shape populist mobilisations. In light of this approach, it considers two case studies of contemporary populist politics from the US and Britain, both of which implicated celebrities (albeit in notably different ways): Bruce Springsteen’s response to the ‘Bridgegate’ scandal surrounding New Jersey Governor and aspirational Republican Presidential candidate Chris Christie in 2013; and the interventions of comedian and actor Russell Brand in the lead-up to the 2015 British general election. In addressing ‘the problems of populism’, it highlights two issues: firstly, the fraught and risky nature of market-oriented celebrity politics that appeal to the affective investments of consumer-citizens; and secondly, the necessarily reductive nature of populism itself.

Did the “Road to the White House Run Through” Letterman? Chris Christie, Letterman, and Other-Disparaging Versus Self-Deprecating Humor

In this article we present the results of an experiment designed to disentangle the effects late-night talk show viewership have on presidential candidate evaluations. Respondents in one condition viewed a short video clip of David Letterman humorously disparaging New Jersey Governor Chris Christie, thought by many at the time to be considering a run for the presidency in 2016. Those in a second condition saw a short clip of Christie engaging in self-deprecating humor while appearing as a guest on Letterman's program. Compared with respondents in a control condition, those in the other-disparaging humor condition had lower evaluations of Christie and reported a lower likelihood of voting for him in 2016, while those in the self-deprecating humor condition had higher evaluations of him and expressed a greater likelihood of voting for him. The research has practical implications for modern campaigns and also serves to clarify some of the seemingly contradictory findings of earlier political humor effects research.

Choosing Sides: Loyalists in Revolutionary America by Ruma Chopra

Book Reviews 125 nar. Chopra must be commended for her account of the “unnatural rebellion ” that New York’s loyalists endured at the hands of revolutionaries and the British. Choosing Sides: Loyalists in Revolutionary America. By Ruma Chopra. New York: Rowman and Littlefield, 2013, 241 pages, $45.00 Cloth. Reviewed by David Hoogland Noon, University of Alaska Southeast Loyalists during the Revolutionary period have enjoyed a revival among historians in the past few years. Maya Jasanoff (Liberty’s Exiles), Thomas B. Allen (Tories), Jeffrey Bannister and Liam Liordan (The Loyal Atlantic), and Ruma Chopra (Unnatural Rebellion) have contributed to a new appreciation of the complexity of loyalist ideology and activity throughout the British world. As a follow-up to Chopra’s study of loyalists in New York City, Choosing Sides offers a collection of primary sources as well as an extended introductory essay that challenge prevailing assumptions about who the loyalists were and why they chose to maintain their allegiance to the crown. Comprised of letters, court affidavits, newspaper editorials, diaries, and memoirs, this body of documents calls into question the prevailing interpretation of loyalists as merely “colonial aristocrats who selfishly pursue[d] wealth and position.” Instead, Chopra highlights the “diversity and potential of the loyalists,” revealing the complexity of motives and interests that led colonists from varying socio-economic backgrounds to resist the lure of rebellion (2). As Chopra explains in her introductory essay, mainstream loyalists were committed to maintaining the integrity of the British Empire. They identified with British culture, held its constitutional system in reverence, and worried about the consequences that might result from ruptures to the social and political order. In public and private settings, they displayed pessimism regarding the motives of rebels, believing the rebels would emerge from the revolution as demagogues conspiring against the liberties created and nurtured under British rule. As one loyalist newspaper warned in October 1776, rebels had embarked on a war against “their lawful Sovereign,” were “aiming to sap the foundations of the British Empire,” 126 ■ NEW YORK HISTORY and intended to set into power a “desperate and malevolent faction” of “base and unworthy men” (110). Among the documents, we find extended laments from powerful officials, including Massachusetts chief justice Peter Oliver, New Jersey Governor (and son of Benjamin Franklin) William Franklin, New York Governor William Tryon, and Governor Josiah Martin of North Carolina. Their letters reveal a complexity and diversity of attitudes toward the rebellious in their midst. Loyalist observers were by turns indignant and fearful of rebel misbehavior; disappointed by a lack of support from British authorities at home; and worried about the “fatal consequences” of rebellion (as Oliver described it) for ordinary citizens led astray by their leaders (77). They were also horrified by the violence and coercion employed by rebels. Several of the documents describe presumed loyalists being sewn up in ox carcasses, dragged through the streets by horses, thrown from courthouse windows during public debates, and chased from their homes by vigilance committees. One British agent, assigned to an anti-smuggling commission, described a young boy “belonging to the Admiral’s Ship” who was “thrown down by a person who swore he would break his leg,” who then “wrenched it til it snap[p]ed” (67). At the same time, however, loyalists were not blind to the faults of royal officials, whose policies and actions had provoked insurgents to take up arms in the first place. Disappointed by Parliamentary overreach and frustrated by the often tactless responses to colonial discontent, loyalists nevertheless believed some plausible compromise might be achieved. Chopra’s collection includes proposals from leading colonists like Joseph Galloway (New Jersey), William Smith, Jr. (New York), and John Randolph (Virginia), who at various points—prior to and during the Revolution— offered detailed proposals that aimed to preserve, and even enhance, colonial autonomy within the empire. Even as late as 1780, exiled loyalists like Randolph maintained hope that rebellious colonists might yet give “Proofs that they have recover’d their Senses, and feel the Value of a Connection with G. Britain” (102). Exploring the contours of loyalism outside the realm of elites, Choosing Sides illuminates the dilemmas of non-elites as well as those who...

Review: The Space Between: Redefining Public and Personal in Smartphone Photography

The Space Between: Redefining Public and Personal in Smartphone Photography CENTER FOR PHOTOGRAPHY AT WOODSTOCK WOODSTOCK, NEW YORK JUNE 28-SEPTEMBER 15, 2014 Photography now marches in lockstep with smartphones, and engages all the Imagemaking possibilities (democratic, social, individualistic, narcissistic) that smartphones invite--although might not notice this turn when visiting most contemporary photography shows. This past summer, however, the exceptional group exhibition at the Center for Photography at Woodstock, The Space Between: Redefining Public and Personal in Smartphone Photography, offered a surprising corrective grounded in the ways photographers actually capture images in the present, fluctuating moment where so much of art, photography, communication, and documentation is contested and political. What's more, the show sowed fertile ground for the progressive moves ahead in photography, and in the ways we picture ourselves. The Space Between was curated by Henry Jacobson, a photographer invested in the uses and abuses of mobile photography. It featured the work of seven photographers and two collectives, installed throughout the large gallery space in three separate groupings: personal space, public space, and hyper-space. Thus installed, the work of the seven individual photographers documented the current moment in digital, hyper-democratic, individualist photography--in which one's take in and of the viewfinder is both necessary and sufficient for a picture--and pushed well beyond it. Jacobson curated his own painterly diptychs into the show: personal notes to his friends and family, sent off like photo postcards from his recent three-year nomadic travels. The other individual photographers in the show--Chip Hinterland, Florence Oliver, Kerry Payne, Mark Peterson, Sofia Verzbolovskis, and Laura El-Tantawy--together covered, from wall to wall, the private, political, and historical bases of contemporary photography. Oliver stood from the other photographers: a painter who uses photographs as sketches, she captures the painterly pictorialist tradition that once grounded photography. The past covered and the present counted, the show looked ahead and featured prints from Instagram. That move suggested what many already think: online, shared imagemaking is the next step in the story of photography. Indeed, it was the work of the two collectives, Echo/Sight (a collaborative duo) and Tiny Collective (a decentralized outfit spread across much of the world now roiling and boiling in images), that, playing off Instagram and Dropbox, seemed to challenge the monopoly doctrine of one person, view, machine, The two collectives showed collaboration as the path ahead for socially engaged photography--that is, if photographers dare risk their time traversing that path. The Egyptian-born El-Tantawy's work reflects her myriad interests and commitments. A trio of Instagrammed photos--Foces of a Continuing Revolution--Cairo, Egypt 26/6/2013 (2013), Outside My Window (2013), and Where Do We Go From Here?--Cairo, Egypt, 11/1/2013 (2013)--read like reflections on the recent and utterly confounding Arab Spring in Egypt. They promised the content of a conversation we might have someday about the facts out there. Peterson's work documented the course of recent politics in caricatured portraits of renowned public officials. The iPhone app distortions of Hillary Clinton and New Jersey Governor Chris Christie recall Honore-VIctorin Daumier's political cartoons and Leonardo da Vinci's fantastic grotesques. The critique here isn't cutting as much as historical: this happened, and then that happened on the campaign trail. Looking at the pictures, wished politics weren't structured the way they are, that our leaders had more integrity, that they were less farcically corruptible people. There was little of the portraiture-as-glamour-shtick of Richard Avedon's and Irving Penn's work, and that felt like an appropriate stance to take on the contemporary captured and coerced image. …

The Composition Classroom and the Political Sex Scandal

This article details a newspaper-based composition exercise focused on examining coverage of a trio of local political sex scandals. The exercise encouraged first-year composition students to analyze how the rhetorical strategies that the New York Post used in covering these three similar scandals—which involved former New York governor Eliot Spitzer, then-current New York governor David Paterson, and former New Jersey governor Jim McGreevey—differed markedly depending on the Post’s then-relationship to each political figure. In the exercise, students chose several articles at random from a selection of newspaper clippings about these scandals and wrote any interesting headlines, epithets, or descriptions of cartoons they had found on the section of the board dedicated to each governor; students then used the evidence gathered in each section to generate and support thesis statements about the Post’s differing coverage of the three governors’ scandals. This examination through close reading of the Post’s rhetorical strategies in covering parallel sex scandals inspired thoughtful discourse among my composition students, including an increased appreciation of and interest in the news media, an improved understanding of the strategies that scholars use when they gather and interpret textual evidence, and intelligent discussions about the implications of rhetorical strategies utilizing Otherness.

The Long Road to Recovery: Environmental Health Impacts of Hurricane Sandy

Building contractor John Pierciey stands in the gutted interior of a 1950s-era home in Manasquan, New Jersey. Wallboard, two layers of wood flooring, a layer of felt—all of it had to be ripped out to rid the house of mold caused by Hurricane Sandy’s storm surge. “This is the sixth house I’ve gutted in a week,” Pierciey says. “Every one is different. You don’t know what you’re going to find until you take them apart.” Residents and volunteers keep warm by a fire barrel in the New Dorp Beach neighborhood of Staten Island, 5 November 2012. Power outages persisted through a cold snap that put temperatures in the single digits. So it is with the environmental health impacts of Hurricane Sandy. Every layer of society, every type of building, has felt the impact of the storm, which struck the U.S. East Coast on 29 October 2012. Incidences of death and illness, though small in number compared with some storms, have come in many forms, the effects still unfolding as time goes by.

Labor Education at Rutgers University, 1931-1981, and the Establishment of IMLR

In 1997, the Institute of Management and Labor Relations (IMLR) will mark its 50th anniversary. It was on June 19,1947 that New Jersey Governor Alfred Driscoll signed into law, Assembly Bill 250-A. Passed against the backdrop of the great postwar strike wave that engulfed the United States, this legislation formally established the IMLR. Its primary mission was to promote harmony and co-operation between management and labor, and greater understanding of industrial and labor relations, thereby to enhance the unity and welfare of the people of the state. In order to carry out this assignment, the IMLR was authorized to establish programs in order to develop new material and techniques to aid in carrying on the educational activities.

Governor James J. FlorioA Fighter for Environmental Issues

The article discusses the political career and environmental advocacy of former New Jersey governor James J. Florio. The author describes Florio's early political career and how he championed environmental issues long before the issue was seen as one of national importance. During his time in office, Florio was recognized as an authority on environmental, health care, energy and international trade issues. While serving in the U.S. Congress from 1974 to 1990 he authored the Comprehensive Environmental Response, Compensation, and Liability Act, also referred to as the Superfund Program. As governor of New Jersey, Florio signed the Clean Water Enforcement Act of 1990 into law. Many saw the law as a precursor to the federal Clean Water Act.

Contesting Commerce:Gibbons v. Ogden, Steam Power, and Social Change

The U.S. Supreme Court case Gibbons v. Ogden (1824)1 represents one of the most significant yet least understood cases in the history of American jurisprudence. Most accounts depict the case as a constitutional showdown between former New Jersey Governor Aaron Ogden and his estranged business partner, a Georgian businessman and planter named Thomas Gibbons. Ogden charged Gibbons with operating a steamboat on the Hudson River in violation of the Fulton–Livingston Steamboat monopoly that controlled steam travel in the state of New York. In March 1824, Chief Justice John Marshall ruled for the Supreme Court that Gibbons' federal coasting license trumped a state grant issued to Ogden by the Fulton–Livingston syndicate.2

Contesting Commerce: Gibbons v. Ogden, Steam Power, and Social Change

The U.S. Supreme Court case Gibbons v. Ogden (1824)1 represents one of the most significant yet least understood cases in the history of American jurisprudence. Most accounts depict the case as a constitutional showdown between former New Jersey Governor Aaron Ogden and his estranged business partner, a Georgian businessman and planter named Thomas Gibbons. Ogden charged Gibbons with operating a steamboat on the Hudson River in violation of the Fulton-Livingston Steamboat monopoly that controlled steam travel in the state of New York. In March 1824, Chief Justice John Marshall ruled for the Supreme Court that Gibbons’ federal coasting license trumped a state grant issued to Ogden by the Fulton-Livingston syndicate.2

New Jersey Acts on Energy and Climate Change [Living with Technology

An unusual aspect of this conference was its focus on state-level energy and climate policies. The lack of federal leadership on these issues within the U.S.A. has opened a window of opportunity at the state level for policy entrepreneurs. California acted in 2005 with an executive order establishing greenhouse gas emission reduction targets, ratified in 2006 by the state legislature. New Jersey acted in 2007, helped along by the fact-finding, target-setting effort leading to this conference. The thoughtful discussions and careful analysis that played out during 2006 and early 2007 played a role in giving policymakers and stake holders the confidence to act decisively. Thus, by February 2007, New Jersey's governor had penned an executive order setting two greenhouse gas targets: reduce emissions to 1990 levels by 2020, and reduce emissions to 80% below current levels by 2050.