2022 Address to the University Senate

Jonathan Holloway
President, Rutgers, The State University of New Jersey

September 23, 2022

Madam Chair, officers of the Executive Committee, Senators, faculty, staff, students, and alumni, good afternoon. Thank you for inviting me to speak before the University Senate. I am now at the start of my third year as Rutgers president. I have seen a lot in the last two years—we have all seen a lot in the last two years: a university navigating some of its most challenging moments and experimenting with so many of its standing practices and traditions, and then a university that pivoted once again, back toward something more familiar to us all, but still something different than before.

Metaphors abound, but for me, thinking about a pendulum is useful given the radical swings from one side to another. Due to the nature of the pandemic and the way it has required that we reorganize our personal and professional lives, we need to add another element to the metaphor of the pendulum swing. It is as if a creature of its own design came along and redirected the smooth swing of the pendulum just enough that we are bearing witness to a university returning to its normal ways of beings, but still different from before. How different depends on where you are in the university, where your work and your studies reside in that pendular swing. Some have seen relatively little change in how they do business at Rutgers; other places have been radically redefined and are still trying to sort things out. No matter where you are in the pendular arc, I want you to know that I am aware of how challenging things have been the last two years and I am aware that things may still feel either very new or unfamiliar to many of you. My colleagues and I have been working hard—just as you have been—to make sense of this moment and to plot out how we will move forward. This address presents an opportunity to bring you up to speed on some of this work and to share some of the vision of how we will move forward.

Specifically, I want to remind you of some fundamental truths about Rutgers and to tell you about our commitment to boost student success, to make our online education portfolio stronger, to build an ecosystem that better supports our work in serving students, and to build on the early success of our new summer internship program for undergraduates. If you’ve noticed a common thread among these commitments—our students—you’re right. After all, while Rutgers serves our state and the world in thousands of ways—from the cranberry farmer to the cancer patient, from the immigrant seeking asylum to the entrepreneur incubating a startup—the heart of our enterprise is and always will be the preparation of students for lives and careers of meaning. So while we all need to attend to vast and various opportunities at Rutgers, this will be my focus today.

Our Fundamental Truths

I was hired to, among so many other things, be Rutgers’ chief storyteller, a task I take very seriously. It has been difficult to tell Rutgers’ story these last two years because of the pandemic and because we have all changed so much, but I’ve made some real progress in how I understand the institution, its role, and its potential.

Here is the narrative that I tell about Rutgers: we are a profoundly complicated institution because of the way that we have grown and evolved over many decades. The complications are often sub-optimal from the standpoint of organizational efficiency, but many of the same complications allow for important sensitivities to local dynamics. While it is critical that we reduce the complexity of the university, I am obliged to be mindful of local practices and traditions. And, to the extent that it is possible, I will do everything I can to respect those nuances. That said, part of my story-telling duty is to speak to some fundamental and sweeping truths about Rutgers—fundamental truths that unite us all and that cut through the complexities of our structure:

One: As an institution we are committed to academic excellence while also keeping the university accessible and affordable. (These are not oppositional commitments!)

Two: At Rutgers, we are also committed to recognizing that everyone—every single one of us—has an important role to play in the success of the university. This does not mean that we will always agree on the right path toward that success, but it means that we will acknowledge our shared purposes even while understanding our differences of opinion.

And three: Rutgers is committed to serving the common good, to making a difference in the worlds of ideas, of politics, of social justice, of innovation, of invention, of business, of health, of local need, of national discourse, and of global priorities.

I’ve come to these broad conclusions based on two years of listening, engaging, and learning, and I believe them to be true. Indeed, I have seen these three truths embodied again and again in the remarkable people I’ve interviewed for the Faces & Voices of Rutgers project. In Engineering professor Kristin Dana, whose amazing work on socially cognizant robotics brings together the disciplines of computer science, engineering, sociology, linguistics, urban planning, and psychology. In Dining Services worker Nicole Bates, 32 years on the job, who has students who graduated years ago come back to see her because of the kindness she showed them on a difficult day when they were undergrads. In Tania Martinez, Class of ’22, a human dynamo who has become a passionate advocate for immigrants. In Professor Nathan Link, who developed a course where his students help prisoners reentering society learn about the possibility of expunging a criminal record so they can get a job and rebuild their life.

And listen to what medical student Angelica Lopez said when I asked why she is so dedicated to helping underserved communities: “I believe our time on this earth is short—and it’s important to use that time to make a difference.”

These remarkable people love what they are doing, and they not only understand the value of access and academic excellence, the beloved community, and serving the common good, they live and breathe it.

But I also know that the clarity of those truths about Rutgers can get muffled. It is a tough thing to say, but I’ve discovered that too often people begin to tell their Rutgers story from a place of grievance. Grievance organizes their thinking and their peer groups: Rutgers has screwed them again, Rutgers has conspired to make things difficult, the administration only cares about what’s happening in New Brunswick…all this talk about aspiring to become a beloved community is nothing but talk. Well, if that’s your mindset when you start to tell your Rutgers story, it will become self-fulfilling—and this is a grave disappointment.

We all need to work together to bring the culture of grievance to an end. We all need to be better than that, and I believe we can be. I will never claim perfection, but I will always embrace best intentions and the humanity that undergirds them. This is where I start my Rutgers story.

Every one of us should be proud that each of our campuses moved up in this year’s U.S. News rankings, even as we aim higher. We should feel universitywide pride that Rutgers-New Brunswick is now in the Top 20 among public universities. That Rutgers-Camden jumped 21 spots among national universities. That Rutgers-Newark is number 7 in the nation in social mobility. And that our reputation for supporting veterans continues to grow. Every one of these gains is a marker of the vital work we’re doing across Rutgers.

We are one university and we need to talk more often about those things that make us strong and excellent. Yes, the subtleties are important, the local flavors are always critical, but we can be better if we think bigger.

Student Success: Our North Star

One way in which we can think bigger is to underscore the principles that are important to the university.

Chief among them is student success; it is the reason we exist and the core of our mission. Student success entails the measures we concern ourselves with every day: retention, a smooth path through the academic requirements, a timely graduation, and productive careers beyond Rutgers. Student success also represents the shared space where those fundamental truths about Rutgers intersect: promoting and preserving academic excellence, supporting accessibility, aspiring to a beloved community while recognizing differences, and serving the common good.

To that end, we need to align our institution, our respective org charts, and our administrative practices to be in service of our students and their success. While faculty have this goal every day in the classroom, there are opportunities for all of us, faculty and staff alike, to serve this mission. To me, student success means that our administrative practices begin with the question—how are we serving students and what is the student experience? It means that we prioritize access and make it easy for students to navigate the university. And it means that we are committed to helping students manage the cost of their education by graduating on time, with the education they need to become the people and professionals they aspire to be. We are already at work on this critical project. Let me cite a few examples of positive progress:

As Chancellor-Provost Fran Conway will make clear next week when she launches the implementation of New Brunswick’s academic master plan, student success will be the North Star for the New Brunswick community. The more I study New Brunswick, the more it becomes clear that administrative structures and practices have impeded its ability to follow industry best practices. This is already changing under the chancellor’s leadership and I stand by her side in this critical work.

Ensuring student success means providing the resources so that students can focus on their textbooks and not entirely on their checkbooks. The creation of the Scarlet Guarantee program in New Brunswick, building off the model first established by Camden in its Bridging the Gap program and quickly followed by Newark in the RU-N to the Top initiative, means that we can take financial concerns off the table for Rutgers students who come from limited resource backgrounds. Rutgers University–Newark has set a national standard as an anchor institution contributing to the community in which it is located. This assures student success.  Rutgers University–Camden puts a premium on experiential learning, making certain that education goes well beyond the classroom door and engages the world—another powerful means of student success.

In the central administration, Eduardo Molina, Vice President for Institutional Research, joined us last fall. Vice President Molina is revamping his office, aligning it with institutional priorities so that, for example, we will be better able to diagnose where we fall short in student outcomes so we can redirect resources to improve our students’ academic experience. In this regard, we have so much that we can learn from each other: how Camden tracks student engagement may yield insights for New Brunswick, and how Newark assesses career outcomes may help Camden. Too often in the past we have been content to treat all data as local, but we have done so—without intention, of course—at the expense of student success broadly. With Eduardo’s help, and support from the chancellors and others in my cabinet, we are moving toward a new paradigm of data governance at Rutgers, one in which it is clear that the central administration has dominion over the university's data.

Strengthening Online Education

As we look to the future, I don’t anticipate that the terms upon which student success is measured will change much at all. But what has certainly changed are the means by which we support that principle. An obvious opportunity is examining the role that online education should play in the Rutgers academic landscape. The pivot to remote instruction happened before my tenure began and became refined in my first year as president. This is all to the good. But as we move back to predominantly full-time, in-person instruction we need reflect upon what we learned in the move to remote instruction and to think creatively and with intention about how we can clarify our presence in the online space, and in so doing, better serve our students.

How can we capitalize on the lessons learned during the transition to remote instruction, recognizing there is a difference between shifting a course in an emergency and offering a well-designed, pedagogically rich online program? Could we help more students graduate on time by leveraging online courses? How can a better coordinated, more collaborative, and more thoughtful approach to managing online programs support those who already teach online or want to? How might we attract new students or reengage former students who never completed their degrees?

To that end, and building on preliminary work we’ve already done, today I am announcing a council on online education, led by Prabhas Moghe, Executive Vice President for Academic Affairs. The council would draw insights from the academic leaders of the institution and coordinate with other members from my team, including Senior Vice President Brian Ballentine in the Office of Strategy and Michele Norin, Senior Vice President and Chief Information Officer. I want the council to advise on universitywide policies, practices, expectations, and investments to improve all aspects of the online experience across the student life cycle. Done properly, a comprehensive and coordinated online education strategy will help us meet our obligation to provide a first-rate academic experience across the various modalities that Rutgers offers its students.

A coordinated strategy gives us the opportunity to more effectively meet our students where they are—whether they are on campus, are seeking to complete their degrees while working fulltime, or are engaged in lifelong learning—in new and compelling ways. We cannot afford to underperform in this important and expanding pedagogical space. While we do this, however, I need to be unambiguous: we remain primarily an in-person educational enterprise. Online education is a means to complement and enhance what we already do in the physical classroom and laboratory.

And here a quick note of thanks: the Senate heard about and contributed to the study of fully online programs this past spring, which led to our decision to launch this council, and I appreciate it.

On the issue of an in-person vs. remote experience, I want to take a moment to talk about the work environment at Rutgers. This month we began a year-long pilot program based on the findings and recommendations of the Future of Work Task Force. In these few weeks we have already learned a lot about the ways that people want to pursue and develop their careers at Rutgers. More than 6,100 employees are participating in flexible work arrangements—chiefly hybrid schedules, and more than 4,000 took advantage of the information sessions and professional development opportunities related to the Future of Work.

As I’ve said before, we are overwhelmingly an in-person enterprise and will remain that way. Yes, there are some types of work at Rutgers that can be fully executed remotely. I understand this. I also must say, however, that when that work is directly in service of our students we have an obligation to be in person. We know from talking to our students that their experiences are radically diminished when they are walking empty hallways, looking for assistance in their day-to-day life. Student success is our North Star and the ways in which we conduct our work at Rutgers must be in support of that.

A Healthy Ecosystem

There is much more to be said on a range of topics regarding or connected to student success, but I want to focus for a few minutes on the kind of work that supports our goal of having a thriving student body and a robust and engaging experience. And it starts with collaboration. I point you to the thousands of voices who have contributed to the extensive work that has been pursued in the last two years in terms of academic vision, workplace environment, and sustainability. When I reflect upon the execution of the Diversity Strategic Plan, the Future of Work report, the Climate Action Plan, and the strategic planning efforts in our chancellor-led units, I see excellent examples of where so many members of the university community came together to envision a better Rutgers. And I assure you, we are committed to put these plans into action. We need more of that work and we need it with greater consistency.

The more that we do this work, the more we become a university where there is an established reputation of listening to and working with all of our constituents. Forging this reputation is part and parcel of building the beloved community that I asked us to aspire to become when I started my presidency. I stand by that aspiration and have been excited to see so many different members of the community embrace that ethos and join in the effort to improve this great university. Having said that, I feel obliged to remind everyone again that aspiring to a beloved community does not mean that we must agree on everything. We won’t. That’s okay, and it’s healthy. What isn’t healthy is the weaponization of the language of the beloved community.

I spoke earlier about the ways in which we are organized by grievance, and lamented the self-fulfilling energy that is generated when one starts from that place. If you disagree with one another or with the administration, or with me, do so with fresh ideas, with integrity, with honesty, and, for goodness’ sakes, without political theater. We have enough of the latter in our national landscape and it is dragging us all down. Let’s aspire to be better than that, even in our disagreements. The first move should not be to presume the worst in others, to “cancel,” or to outshout the opposition. Everyone’s voice matters here, but how those voices are expressed matters too.

When I think about the beloved community and the nature of how we talk to one another, and how we talk to the world, I am reminded of the bedrock principle of free speech and academic freedom. My commitment to both is unwavering, even when defending someone’s right to express him or herself comes at great professional and personal cost to me. That is the price we must pay if we are to maintain our rightful place as an institutional leader in society. We must stand for the power of ideas, and more importantly, we must have faith that the best and most constructive ideas will outweigh those that are rooted in division, in fallacy, in scorn, or in hatred. This requires bravery…and grace.

None of this is easy, but we do not exist to do easy things. If a university is built to serve the common good, it needs to understand that doing that work is hard. It also requires a commitment to seek out the very best that society has to offer—and if it can’t find it, it requires a commitment to build the best to which society can aspire.

Broader and more constructive collaboration in pursuing our goals is about creating a healthy ecosystem at Rutgers. When I think about crafting or supporting the healthiest ecosystem at Rutgers for the sake of our students and their futures, I think about the role of the faculty and its commitment to being the best or building the best. Maintaining academic excellence is at the heart of this enterprise and we must be aggressive in identifying, recruiting, and retaining talent. The strategic plans and initiatives coming forth from the chancellor-led units are all in service of this project. Because local practices are so important to our enterprise, the central administration will continue to defer to those aspects of day-to-day practice that make the most sense locally. But, once again, we are One Rutgers, and to that end the central administration has an obligation to insist that we all get the fundamentals right in our work, even as the work is expressed locally. We need to push all units to conform to acknowledged best practices, to support (or construct) consistent governance structures across schools, and to simplify policies that are limiting our potentials.

All of this takes a lot of work, and honestly, some of it will require changes in how Rutgers has been doing things. In order to become our best version of ourselves, we must get beyond the culture of silos, of territorial assertions of who owns this or that, and of work processes that depend on workarounds rather than consistent, equitably applied practices. Being One Rutgers means that a dean or a chair or a director should advocate quite vigorously for their unit, but not exclusively—not at the expense of other schools within Rutgers and certainly not to the detriment of the university writ large.

The good news is that I think that we are on the cusp of a moment of profound opportunity in this regard. I point again to the strategic plans and campus initiatives, but I also point to the leadership turnovers in all of our chancellor units that, collectively, speak to the possibility of constructive change. We have a new provost in Newark and will have a new provost in Camden, we have a large batch of new deans arriving this year and next in New Brunswick, a new dean of the RWJ Medical School within RBHS, and a new head of the University Library system. I look forward to announcing a new dean of Rutgers Law School in the spring.

Creating change, getting the fundamentals right, and moving to best practices will build a healthier and more robust ecosystem. Collectively, we are moving in the right direction. Having said that, doing all of this work is not free and I need to point out that we will continue to have to make hard choices about the programs we support and those that need to be sunsetted. Being smart stewards of our resources will enable us to sustain our commitment to our mission. Finding and developing new areas of revenue growth is another key part of the equation. I will be going into more details on these matters in my February financial address, but we are already anticipating deficit budgets on the horizon, even while we are the beneficiaries of the largest state appropriation in history for the current fiscal year.

Service Internships

Although tough choices lie ahead, there are some areas of growth where the choices are easy. I want to close my address highlighting one of them, the Rutgers Summer Service Internship initiative.

Earlier in my address today I spoke about our aspiration to be bigger than ourselves and to pursue what we can accomplish through a new spirit of collaboration. I also talked about our students and their success being our North Star. The Rutgers Summer Service Internship Initiative embodies these elements.

When I announced RSSI in my inaugural address, I spoke about my conviction that higher education can save democracy. At the core of that belief is the role that the university can play in serving the common good and that service can play in building better communities. That belief is realized through RSSI, which places Rutgers students in high-impact nonprofit public service internships with constituent-facing positions and where they are immersed in situations that expose them to worlds that are different, diverse, and challenging. The goal: to begin to create a culture of public service here at Rutgers. The response to that call to action was uplifting. We had close to 600 applicants for the 100 internship opportunities.

Our students interned with dozens of nonprofit organizations, ranging from Elijah’s Promise in New Brunswick, to Le Casa de Don Pedro in Newark, to the Food Bank of South Jersey in Camden County. What they learned in that work was all the affirmation that I needed that this experiment in service needs to be extended. I am speaking here about Kathryn Lee, who worked with Esperanza Immigration Legal Services and described her experience as “truly life-changing.” And Jessie Chen, who worked in a congressional district office and believed that RSSI changed her views on government as an immovable monolith to more of what it really is: helping people every day.

The first year of this program was an experiment. Here’s what we found. It is popular with students and non-profits. It is appealing to donors, who have stepped up to the plate and opened their wallets and their hearts. And it is making a difference.

While the program will be refined and tweaked based on what we have learned and continue to learn from this initial year, we already are planning to expand to 150 RSSI students for next summer. Furthermore, and I am really excited about this, the summer internship program will be expanded to include a Washington, DC, component, the RS-DC program. Through RS-DC we will place our interns in congressional offices, advocacy organizations, and other public service opportunities in the nation's capital. I can’t wait to hear the stories our students tell next year—and, more than that, I can’t wait to see how these experiences shape their lives and careers.

So here we are: at the start of a new academic year filled with possibilities and challenges for us all. The ideas I’ve brought up this afternoon present us with opportunities to serve our students, strengthen our work together, and advance the common good. As we go forward, I wish the members of the Senate—and everyone in the Rutgers community—a year that is productive, exciting, rewarding, and maybe even at times a little bit messy. I leave you with the words of another inspiring person I met doing the Faces & Voices of Rutgers series: Karoline Gonzalez Sanchez, who at the time was a rising senior in the Honors Living Learning Community in Newark. When I asked her for advice about what I can do to build a beloved community, she said this: “Pay attention. Hear people out in a way that feels organic. A lot of times we try to help people but we (only) get to the surface level of things. Getting in there, getting your hands dirty—that’s what really makes a difference.”

Wisdom for us all. Thank you.