In Pursuit of Excellence: Our Commitment to Equity

September 15, 2020

Members of the Rutgers Community,

From the day I arrived here as president, I have been discussing—and listening to members of our community speak about—a global moment of racial reckoning and the role that Rutgers can and should play in this movement. As I said in my remarks on Day One, racial, social, and economic inequities have destabilized this country, and in order to live up to the aspirations in America’s founding documents we must make concrete commitments to address systemic inequities. And that starts with us.

Rutgers can rightly make claims to welcoming people from diverse communities, especially in our overall student population, but is this simply a happenstance of our location in a diverse state and region—or are we intentional about it? Are we providing wide access to opportunities to learn, work, and teach here? Are we deliberate in our efforts to retain and promote faculty and staff from underrepresented groups? Excellence can be found everywhere—but are we looking hard enough and in enough places?

As we begin a conversation about these issues, I have taken two immediate steps. As I announced earlier this month, I have created a new position at Rutgers—Senior Vice President for Equity—to ensure a permanent, university-wide, intentional commitment to diversity, equity, and inclusion. Enobong (Anna) Branch has been appointed to this critical post.

Second, under Dr. Branch’s leadership, we conducted a rapid, internal survey this summer within the executive leadership at Rutgers about our own planning processes, policies, and practices related to diversity, equity, and inclusion. This initiative is the reason I am writing to you today.

The goal of our University Equity Audit was to honestly assess Rutgers’ on-the-ground commitment to these core values, starting with the central administration. The audit had three components: 1) a self-study by executive and senior vice presidents; 2) a leadership perception survey completed by 133 administrative leaders across Rutgers; and 3) an equity scorecard assembled by the Office of Institutional Research and Academic Planning using quantitative metrics in terms of access, retention, success, and leadership for underrepresented minorities and women at Rutgers.

I am eager to share with you the result of our University Equity Audit—a report that will serve as a first step in assessing and strengthening our position as a community in which diversity, equity, and inclusion are core values. You can find the full report, and an executive summary, at www.rutgers.edu/president/diversity-equity-inclusion.

A telling result from the perception survey is that while virtually all respondents believe diversity, equity, and inclusion are critically important for the university, fewer than a third believe Rutgers is “to a great extent” making ongoing efforts to increase diversity, ensure equity, and remove obstacles to inclusion. The scorecard, meanwhile, which tracks 30 different metrics across all campuses, shows a mixed bag of gains and losses in recent years: gains in areas such as the graduation rates for underrepresented groups at Rutgers but losses in areas such as retention of first-year students from these groups, to name just a couple of examples.

I encourage you to read the University Equity Audit report and recognize it as an important initial step in making Rutgers a model for diversity, equity, and inclusion. We have so much work to do in helping repair the inequities that have for too long denied Black and brown people, and those of other marginalized groups, the chance to thrive—but a critical step is for Rutgers to meet its commitments in our own policies and practices.

I will say more about the audit report, and the actions we will take in response to it, in my address to the University Senate on September 25.  

Sincerely,

Jonathan Holloway
President and University Professor