Position: Associate dean, finance and administration, Graduate School of Education
Length of Service: Since February 2006
Residence: Somerset
Basketball jones In 1990 Dallas Grundy, a first-year student at the College of Engineering, tried to walk his five-feet, 10 1/2-inch frame on to the Scarlet Knights basketball team. He had been a starting point guard on a Haddon Heights High School team that had made it to (but not won) the South Jersey championship, and he thought he could compensate for his smaller stature by working harder than any player. It was a little about over-confidence, he confesses now. “I really thought I was going to play.” But that wasn’t it entirely: For one thing, he loved playing basketball; he still does. He also is most comfortable when acting as a team player. “It definitely says something about what I thought I could bring to the team, in any small way I could,” he said. “I didn’t need to score a lot of points. It was about maintaining a game plan. I thought I could bring that to the school.”
It’s all about the children Grundy has brought this strong sense of collaboration and teamwork to Rutgers, first as an engineering student (he graduated with a bachelor’s degree in 1995), then as a student at the Rutgers Business School-Newark and New Brunswick (MBA.1999). Since returning to Rutgers in February 2006 as an assistant dean at the Graduate School of Education (GSE), Grundy doesn’t often see the inside of a classroom. But he views his work supporting future teachers at the Graduate School of Education as vital to improving K-12 education and helping children and families – and, ultimately, their communities – succeed and prosper.
The go-to guy As “chief financial officer” at the GSE, Grundy assists the dean, education professors, and graduate students in financial planning, securing research funds, and disbursing and accounting for grant money. After his computer skills became quickly apparent, Dean Richard De Lisi added the school’s information technology systems to his portfolio.
Entrepreneurial spirit Grundy came to the GSE at a time that some might have called “difficult,” but which he calls “interesting.” Last year, the university suffered a $66 million reduction in state funding compared with the previous year. Like many Rutgers departments, the GSE absorbed an approximate 7.5 percent reduction in its budget, and it is still challenged to maintain its mission of preparing teachers and providing a service to the state in ways that can be felt academically and administratively. In addition, Grundy has overseen the GSE’s transition, along with all schools and departments at Rutgers, to “all-funds budgeting,” which requires all units to balance their own budgets. The new system gives the GSE increased control over its own budget but also increased fundraising responsibility. It has been a difficult change for some at the university, but it plays to Grundy’s entrepreneurial strengths.
Payback time Grundy, 34, sees every day at Rutgers as an opportunity to repay the many people who have helped him get to where he is. He grew up as part of a large extended family (he has 30 cousins) in Lawnside, New Jersey, a close-knit community near Camden that was one of the first municipalities in the northeast where African-Americans could buy land. When Grundy was a boy, there was always an adult around – a parent, an uncle or aunt, a cousin, teacher, coach, mentor or minister – to challenge him, lend support, or keep him in line. “I grew up with all of my teachers having access to all of my family,” Grundy said. “People stayed in your business and made sure you were doing what you were supposed to do.”
Support at Rutgers That support system held true at Rutgers, where he was recruited to the School of Engineering by Associate Dean Donald M. Brown. At Rutgers he joined the National Society of Black Engineers, “a transformative experience,” Grundy said, because it added to his academic learning an appreciation for organization and professionalism, and a long list of contacts in the business world.
Strategic consultant With a freshly minted MBA, Grundy collaborated with Randal Pinkett (before Pinkett became famous as Donald Trump’s “Apprentice”) and two other Rutgers’ College of Engineering classmates, Lawrence Hibbert and Jeffrey Robinson to form BCT Partners, a management, technology and policy consulting firm based in Newark. There he developed a holistic approach to working with entrepreneurs and start-up companies, seeing them not just as business people or business units, but as members of families and participants in healthy community life. “I see myself as meeting people and families where they are and helping them get to where they want to be.” From there he turned naturally to higher education administration, where he has found “no better fit for my background, qualities, interests and aspirations, and who I know I am.” He did a two-year stint as director of business affairs at Somerset Christian College, before being tapped for Rutgers.