So Happy to Welcome You to Fall 2022 at Rutgers

September 6, 2022

Members of the Rutgers Community,

Welcome to the Fall 2022 Semester at Rutgers! A big hello to all our newest undergraduate and graduate students and welcome back to each of our returning students. I hope all of you are as eager as I am for the year ahead. 

Faculty and staff members, thank you for your continued commitment to our mission, and I hope you have had a rewarding summer. To those employees joining us for the first time, welcome aboard and thank you for choosing Rutgers.

Our campuses are never as vibrant as they are when our academic buildings, dining halls, residence halls, libraries, studios, labs, student centers, and recreation centers are abuzz with activity. I’m so happy to have you back.

We’ll be excited to hear the stories of our students who engaged in our first year of the Rutgers Summer Service Internship program, which gave them firsthand experience of the important work done by nonprofits, government agencies, and other public service organizations. (Look for several of those stories on Rutgers Today over the next few weeks.)

We’ll be happy to introduce Rutgers to the contingent of new faculty members on each campus, adding the power of their own expertise, energy, and insights to our community of scholars.

We’ll be proud to learn about the latest research discoveries being made at Rutgers, about academic and athletic achievements across the university, about the myriad ways in which we serve the people of our state and the broader world.

And I look forward to the healthy exchange of viewpoints on all matter of subjects that defines an active, engaged university community. No doubt, we begin the academic year at a very complicated political and social moment in our nation’s history. With a midterm election just two months away, the rhetoric and rancor will likely only grow more intense.

With that in mind, I want to reiterate Rutgers University’s firm and ongoing commitment to academic freedom and free speech and encourage you to read that document in its entirety. As that document states, academic freedom—the right of our faculty in the discharge of their duties to express their ideas and to challenge the ideas of others without fear of retribution—is a cornerstone of American higher education. And all members of our community—our faculty members, students, alumni, and staff—are free to express their viewpoints in public forums as private citizens, including viewpoints that the university itself may not share.

Last week I had the pleasure to offer words of welcome to new students during events on our Camden and New Brunswick campuses and will do the same tomorrow at Newark’s convocation. I’m sharing this link to my New Brunswick remarks in the hope that they will resonate with you in some way as the academic year begins.

As I told these newest additions to the Rutgers family, I believe there is so much to be gained if we only committed ourselves to be better, to be kinder, to be thoughtful, to be still, to be open-minded, and to be critical thinkers. We all can make choices to make a better future.

Have a wonderful semester!

Sincerely,

Jonathan Holloway
President and University Professor