A Vital Mission and a Shared Humanity

January 16, 2024

Dear Rutgers University Community,

Welcome back to a new semester. I hope you found time during the break for rest, reflection, and renewal. While the hardest days of winter are upon us, the warmth of spring will arrive before we know it.

You return to a community that is brought together by our long-standing mission as a public university: to provide for the educational needs of New Jersey through our undergraduate, graduate, and continuing education programs; to conduct cutting-edge research and clinical care that contributes to the health, environmental, social, economic, and cultural well-being of the state, nation, and world; and to perform public service in support of the people of the state and their local, county, and state governments.

All around us we see remarkable examples of how we meet our mission. At Rutgers Health and in New Brunswick, Newark, and Camden, our faculty are tackling urgent challenges from preventing infectious diseases to reducing carbon emissions to addressing the opioid crisis. Our students are competing for prestigious fellowships, volunteering in our host communities, and contributing to our groundbreaking research. Our Scarlet Knights football team won the Pinstripe Bowl. Our Rutgers–Newark and Rutgers–Camden students won the New Jersey Ballot Bowl. And I’ve asked a task force led by Rutgers–Camden’s Nyeema Watson and Eagleton’s Elizabeth Matto to recommend how we can harness the already strong spirit of civic engagement at Rutgers and make it grow.

To excel in our mission as a community requires that we engage in genuine curiosity and commit ourselves to understanding one another—even around the most difficult and divisive topics. For our community to thrive, we must embrace our shared humanity, with all its messiness and contradictions.

Over the course of the spring, we will host events to spark conversations affirming our commitment to equity and inclusion amid rising tensions. I hope you will join us as we grapple with navigating differing viewpoints and conflicting ideologies, against the backdrop of the challenging local, national, and global political environment.

In the months ahead, I ask you to think about how we, as members of the Rutgers community, can preserve our freedoms, how we can embrace them with the awesome responsibility they require—to be respectful and openminded, to be intellectually honest and curious, and to be civil, decent, and understanding of one another. I hope that you will carry those reflections with you in your interactions with professors, staff members, students, colleagues, and classmates, and that, when conflict arises—as it inevitably will—you seek first to understand.

I wish you a productive, peaceful, and truly rewarding semester.

Sincerely,

Jonathan Holloway
President and University Professor