Stakeholder Address 2022

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

October 12, 2022

Thank you all for being here, both in person and online, for this first annual Stakeholder Address. This is my opportunity to provide both an accounting of where this remarkable 256-year-old institution stands today and a sense of my vision for its future.

Some of you here today are deeply proud alumni who earned your Rutgers degrees 10, 25, or 50 years ago. You may remember fondly the experience you were able to have here in New Brunswick, or in Newark, or in Camden because of the Rutgers people who taught and supported you.

And even though I’m still in my early days, I’m confident declaring that Rutgers continues to be a special place, and that it is perhaps special in new ways because of its commitments to being a place that is ever more diverse, inclusive, and welcoming.

What do I mean by this?  Let me cite a few examples.

It means that through a combination of donor generosity, state and federal financial aid, and intentionality on the university’s part, more students of modest means than ever before are able to attend and succeed at Rutgers.

It means that Rutgers has become one of the best universities in the country for veterans and active-duty personnel to seek a college degree -- and that Rutgers-Camden is New Jersey’s very first Purple Heart university.

It means that LGBTQ students are thriving at Rutgers, where our New Brunswick campus is one of the most highly rated campuses for LGBTQ life in the country.

And because of Newark Chancellor Nancy Cantor’s leadership and the work of others, too, it means that Rutgers is a remarkable place for immigrant students, including many Dreamers, to find opportunity.

I take immense pride in the privilege of leading Rutgers at this moment in our history, and in welcoming you all to this Stakeholder Address.

Our stakeholders are many:

The students who come to Rutgers from every background and from near and far to pursue the democratic possibilities that our university offers;

The faculty whose expertise and commitment to discovery inspires our students and helps to solve society’s most intractable problems;

The staff who dedicate themselves to ensuring a rewarding student experience and supporting our pursuit of academic excellence;

Our remarkable alumni body, more than 570,000 strong, applying their Rutgers degrees and their Scarlet grit to lives of purpose and careers of accomplishment;

Our donors, who see the transformative opportunities that Rutgers makes possible and choose to invest in our future in powerful ways;

And the people and communities of New Jersey, whom we are so privileged to serve as the State University of New Jersey.

Here I want to pause to acknowledge some of our most influential stakeholders -- our partners in local, state, and federal government who are represented today by: Lieutenant Governor Sheila Oliver; State Treasurer Elizabeth Muoio; Higher Education Secretary Brian Bridges; State Senators Bob Smith (a proud Rutgers alum), Andrew Zwicker, and Pat Diegnan; Assemblymen Joseph Egan and Bob Karabinchak; Middlesex County Commissioner Ron Rios; and New Brunswick Mayor Jim Cahill, another proud alum.

Our partnership with our elected leaders at the state level is better than ever, as witnessed by the record budget appropriation Rutgers received this year. Thank you again to Lt. Gov. Oliver, our legislative partners, and our state treasurer.

The same can be said for our strong relationships at the local level. Thank you, Commissioner Rios and Mayor Cahill!

Important to Rutgers’ success on so many levels are the stakeholders who serve so faithfully on our governing boards -- the Board of Governors and Board of Trustees -- and on the boards of our alumni association and the Rutgers University Foundation. I am indebted to them for the guidance and wisdom that these boards bring to our decision making. My thanks to all the Board members who are with us this afternoon.

To all of you stakeholders gathered today -- and, frankly, because of all of you -- I am able to say with confidence that the state of Rutgers is strong and that our future, though not without significant challenges, is exhilarating.

Here is why.

We have come through a global pandemic in remarkably good shape, thanks to the good will and resilience of our students ... the flexibility of our faculty and staff ... the generosity of our alumni and donors ...and the significant support of our partners in government at every level.

Rutgers became a leader in new ways over the past two years.  Our faculty and clinicians contributed to the development of COVID testing and vaccines that saved countless lives. Our health and safety protocols kept our people and the surrounding communities protected. And our decision to require vaccinations of our students became a national model for hundreds of universities. 

Even in the midst of a national decline in college enrollment that was exacerbated by the pandemic, our numbers overall have remained strong and I am confident that they will improve.

In the midst of difficult times, during which we had to make hard decisions about our resources, we have been good stewards of the revenues we receive from tuition and fees, government appropriations, grants and gifts, and research contracts.

And while the pandemic is not over, and we continue to follow appropriate protocols, we are finding our way to a new normal that both learns from our COVID experience and brings back the exciting hustle and bustle of a lively campus environment.

As you know, I began my presidency just a few months into the pandemic. Nearly all my meetings that first year had to be remote. And we couldn’t hold a traditional Commencement ceremony until this past spring. But over the past two years, I have met remarkable people all across the university -- at first virtual, and now mainly in person. And through these encounters I have come to a much better understanding of this great institution, its vital role, and its immense potential.

I have identified three very fundamental and sweeping truths about Rutgers that unite us all. I’ve come to these broad conclusions based on two years of listening, engaging, and learning:

A: Rutgers is committed to academic excellence while also keeping the university accessible and affordable. (And I firmly believe access and academic excellence are not mutually exclusive commitments!)

B:  We strive to become the ideal of a beloved community. At Rutgers, we are committed to recognizing that everyone -- every single member of the Rutgers community -- 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.

C: 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.

Accessibility and Academic Excellence, the Beloved Community, and the Common Good ... it’s a formula that is as simple as our ABCs.

Let me take each of these principles in order, starting with Access and Academic Excellence.

At Rutgers, we are committed to access for students and aspire to be a national model for outstanding academic programs, social mobility, and educational equity. 

We are determined to help our students complete their degrees on time, prepared both for careers and for lifelong learning. We are already making important progress. I hope you share my pride in knowing that each of our campuses moved up in this year’s U.S. News & World Report rankings, even as we aim higher.

Rutgers-New Brunswick is now in the Top 20 among public universities across the country. Rutgers-Camden jumped 21 spots among national universities. Rutgers-Newark is number 7 in the nation in social mobility. And on every campus, 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.

Want further evidence of our academic excellence?  How about the 12 faculty members elected to the prestigious American Association for the Advancement of Science this year?  Our own Professor Salamishah Tillett winning a Pulitzer Prize? Our more than 40 graduate programs ranked in the Top 25, including two of them, Women’s History and African American History, ranked at #1? Our students winning Soros, Goldwater, and Fulbright awards and our $872 million in research grants last year? Our ranking among the 75 most innovative universities in the world by Reuters? 

Not bad. Not bad at all. We have more work to do, but we’re building from strength.

We also continue to make a Rutgers education affordable. We now have programs on all our campuses to ensure that families with incomes below $65,000 won’t have to pay Rutgers tuition. This year is the first for the Scarlet Guarantee program in New Brunswick, which builds 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. 

Though they have different names, they all mean one thing:  we can take financial concerns off the table for Rutgers students who come from limited resource backgrounds.

Many of you know about -- or even may count yourselves among the donors to -- our Scarlet Promise Initiative. This is an outgrowth of the pledge I made on my first day in office to raise $10 million in additional funding for Scarlet Promise Grants, which provide need-based aid for students who otherwise would not be able to remain at Rutgers because of a family emergency or other financial hardship.

These are generally smaller grants -- a few hundred to a few thousand dollars -- but they can change the entire trajectory of a student’s academic career by keeping them in school and on the path to a degree. They can also ensure that students have equal access to the full range of educational opportunities at Rutgers.

Let me introduce you to one of those students.

Her name is Jacqueline Giz and she is just the sort of high-achieving student the Scarlet Promise Initiative is intended to attract and support. Innovative, collaborative, and a valuable contributor to our university community, she is a senior completing a double major in political science and art history with a minor in archaeology. Jacqueline is an Honors College mentor and ambassador, and she serves as vice president of communications for the Alumni Association’s Scarlet Council. She also conducts research on the provenance of ancient gems while serving as a docent at our Zimmerli Art Museum.

Experiential learning is a critical component of a world-class Rutgers education. Thanks to the Scarlet Promise Initiative, Jacqueline was able to travel with the RU in Rome summer study program. There she found her passion among the historic churches and world-renowned museums. As Jacqueline has said, "Art History is one thing when you are learning it on a PowerPoint slide, but when you are there in person … it’s a completely other thing, and it really comes to life."

Today, she is conditionally admitted to the Rutgers School of Graduate Studies, where she is pursuing coursework towards her master’s degree in Cultural Heritage and Preservation Studies.

Jacqueline is here today and I want to thank her for being with us.

At my inauguration last November, I announced a three-year, $50 million campaign to raise funding for the Scarlet Promise Initiative. Thanks to friends like you, we are already more than halfway to our target at $27 million. Just as important is the number of people who have already said 'yes' to this great program. I’m delighted to say that we already have more than 9,750 individual donors contribute to the Scarlet Promise Initiative in the past year. And because of that generosity, thousands of Rutgers students benefited in the past year. 

They, and I, thank everyone who has invested in the Scarlet Promise Initiative, and those who will donate in the months and years to come.

This brings me to B -- the concept of a Beloved Community.

As I said earlier, at Rutgers we believe that every single person in our community brings value and has a role to play in our success. And that we recognize the inherent dignity not only within our community but in the people we serve. On a day-to-day basis, this means cultivating an ethos of mutual respect, even when we disagree. 

It entails being intentional about building a diverse and inclusive faculty and staff to match the rich diversity of our student body. It means establishing what I have called a healthy ecosystem based on constructive collaboration in pursuit of our goals. At Rutgers, we believe in building a culture of respect for one another, one that embodies, reflects, and appreciates the complexity of all our parts. 

We believe in active citizenship, in sustaining democracy, in engaging in the growing diversity of our society. As such, we instill in students a commitment to community through service and experiences that contribute to a greater understanding of themselves and of others.

One of the most exciting examples of that service can be found in our new initiative, the Rutgers Summer Service Internship program, or RSSI, which speaks to the role that the university can play in serving the common good and in building better communities. RSSI places Rutgers students in non-profit public service internships where they are immersed in situations that expose them to worlds that are different, diverse, and challenging.

The goal was to begin to create a culture of public service here at Rutgers. And the first year has been a terrific success. We had nearly 600 applicants for the 100 internship opportunities. Our students interned with dozens of non-profit organizations, ranging from Elijah’s Promise in New Brunswick, to Future City, Inc. in Elizabeth, to the Food Bank of South Jersey in Camden County. And they came back to Rutgers using words like "truly life-changing" to describe their experiences.

One of those students is here with us today. His name is Alqamar Anderson, and he interned with the social service agency La Casa de Don Pedro in Newark.

Last month, Alqamar shared his experiences with a couple of hundred people during the first annual RSSI Reunion. On that occasion, he reminded us that these internships were about more than pushing paper around, that they were about more than hitting service targets and meeting deadlines. These internships were about making connections with people who often had nowhere else to turn. Yes, the paperwork mattered, but we needed to remember that the work was in service of people -- mothers and fathers, sisters and brothers, uncles and aunts -- people who found themselves in difficult circumstances and who needed a helping hand.

He came to this conclusion because of the conversations he had with Casa de Don Pedro clients; but he also spoke from experience as he himself had been a client of that agency when he was a teenager.

Alqamar, I’m proud to acknowledge you for your service this summer -- and I want to thank you for reminding us why this work is so important.

The first year of this program was an experiment -- and a wonderful experiment at that.Now, with the help of our donors, we intend to expand from 100 students to 150 next summer.  In expanding the program, we are also adding a Washington, DC element, called RS-DC.

As a former Washington intern myself, I know how much these kinds of experiences can change a person’s world view and can help them understand that government offices, despite everything that critics like to declare, are often filled with people who simply want to do good and help make life a little bit easier for their peers. Although it likely goes without saying, let me state for the record: I am excited about this addition to the program.

This naturally brings me to the third fundamental truth about Rutgers -- C, our commitment to the common good.

We believe that through the excellence of our health systems, our scholarly research, and our outreach programs, as well as our collaborations with local and global partners -- that Rutgers is addressing society’s biggest challenges and helping to improve the lives of people in New Jersey and around the world.

Let me give you just a few quick snapshots.

Last week we announced an exclusive license between Rutgers and a startup called RenewCO2. The collaboration uses a technology incubated in a Rutgers laboratory to develop a carbon-negative process for making plastics that will cost far less than plastics derived from fossil sources -- a potentially world-changing technique.

A Rutgers neuroscientist, Mark Gluck, has come up with a method to determine whether people are likely to contract Alzheimer's disease long before they begin to show symptoms. This will be a huge help to doctors, who can then work on early intervention to slow or even halt the onset of a disease that is one of the leading causes of death in our country.

Rutgers is part of a collaborative of anchor institutions in Newark that has increased the number of city residents going to college and helped more local businesses and their employees get hired.

A team that was led by Rutgers researchers has given spinal cord injury victims reason for hope. They have developed therapeutic proteins that use both artificial intelligence and robotics to stabilize an enzyme that can potentially reduce the scars from spinal cord injuries and help those patients regain function.

Just a couple of weeks ago, a 60 Minutes story on the urgency of protecting and rebuilding coral reefs mentioned Rutgers by name because of our own federally-funded project to create a shoreline ecosystem using oyster reefs to protect the coast from storm damage and erosion.

And in Camden we are the host of the New Jersey Innocence Project, which combines our faculty expertise in law, criminal justice, social work, and forensic science to help exonerate people who have been wrongly convicted of crimes.

Climate science innovation, disease intervention, work force expansion, AI and robotics-assisted medical enhancement, coral reef rehabilitation, and social justice engagement ... These are just a tiny fraction of the ways in which Rutgers is serving the common good through our research, teaching, outreach, and clinical care.

Serving the common good is an intrinsic good, of course, but it can also lead to greater good.

Case in point: Grateful patient Marcia Bird, a 1984 graduate who was diagnosed in 2011 with a cancer that quickly metastasized and spread to her lymph nodes and her neck. Then her oncologist recommended she go to the Cancer Institute and learn about a new treatment -- immunotherapy.

This was cutting-edge research and treatment conducted at the Cancer Institute, and it was one Marcia felt would give her a chance to live her life. She turned out to be the first exceptional responder they studied. Happy to say, her tumors disappeared.

Today Marcia is an annual donor to the Fund for Rutgers Cancer Institute of New Jersey. With help from her and others (including its namesake), this research will now be conducted at the Duncan and Nancy MacMillan Cancer Immunology and Metabolism Center of Excellence.

This is but one terrific example of the generosity of Rutgers donors and alumni. In the past year, we received gifts from nearly 46,000 donors. We also benefited from the time given to Rutgers by more than 1,700 volunteers, who supported the university in all sorts of ways -- on boards, in focus groups, at events, as guest speakers and mentors, and by helping our students explore careers.

Through the generosity of so many people in this room, watching on the livestream, and in our Rutgers family, we have had a year of mighty accomplishments.

We awarded degrees to more than 19,000 undergraduate and graduate students.

As I mentioned, our national rankings improved on every campus.

Our Scarlet Knights men’s basketball team beat the nation’s top-ranked team and earned a trip to March Madness, and our Scarlet Knights women’s soccer team earned its way to the College Cup, ending the season ranked third in the nation. Meanwhile, Scarlet Raptor Jude Misko won the Division III national title in hammer throw … for the second year in a row.

And just last month, we all cheered as one of our cherished alumnae, Sheryl Lee Ralph, won an Emmy for her role in the beloved and groundbreaking show, Abbott Elementary ... and then gave one of the most memorable acceptance speeches, saying, "Don’t you ever, ever give up on you."

Now we are six weeks into the new academic year, and we’re striving to make Rutgers --your Rutgers -- a stronger, better university.

Rutgers–New Brunswick has launched its Academic Master Plan centered on student success as its North Star. A centerpiece of that plan is to re-imagine and improve the student experience from enrollment to retention to graduation and beyond.

Rutgers–Newark is doubling down on its mission as an anchor institution by leveraging its capacities as an engine of social mobility, expanding its innovative model Honors Living-Learning Community, and investing in the publicly engaged scholarship that is having such an important impact, reflected in state funding for new centers and attracting support from companies such as Fiserv.

Rutgers–Camden has established the Chancellor’s Experiential Learning Grant to give students a transformative undergraduate experience as part of 15 initiatives announced by Chancellor Antonio D. Tillis—such as grants to promote faculty interdisciplinary collaboration and an award to help doctoral students complete their dissertation. And Camden just launched a strategic planning process aimed at its centennial in 2026.

Rutgers Biomedical and Health Sciences is putting into effect its strategic plan aimed at setting a new standard for excellence in health sciences education, research, and patient care. And -- with critical funding support from the state -- RBHS is seeing progress on the Rutgers Health Complex across from the New Brunswick train station and exciting plans for renovation of the Medical Sciences building in Newark.

On a universitywide scale, we are also forming a council led by our Executive Vice President for Academic Affairs to strengthen our online education portfolio so that we can better support all our students across their academic journey.

We are pursuing next steps on a Climate Action Plan that sets 2040 as our target for becoming carbon neutral, and we continue to implement our first-ever university-wide Diversity Strategic Plan, which recognizes that inclusion and diversity are critical components of academic excellence.

I ask all of you -- those here in person and watching online from their homes and offices -- I ask you to follow our progress. We have a daily e-mail called Rutgers Today that will help in that regard, and we’ll also be sharing other ways you can engage with Rutgers --ways that are not necessarily about philanthropy but are very much about our mission.

As you will have no doubt noticed, I have been upbeat in this address. Some might even think me naïve in all of my positive declarations. I want you to know, however, that I am not blind to the headwinds we face in terms of the socio-political moment in our nation’s history. Nor am I ignoring the inevitable financial pressures that will require vigilance and an unflinching attention to detail.

But I believe that hope is a choice. And I make that choice when I get out of bed every day. Thankfully, there are myriad reasons at Rutgers that make this choice easy. And if we commit ourselves to thinking about all of the good work so many in our community do on a daily basis, if we are unafraid to be proud of our excellence, well, it makes that hopeful choice so much easier.

So, as I look to the year ahead, I acknowledge that there will be challenges, but I also see the momentum that is happening at Rutgers as we return to campus, renew traditions, win important research grants, welcome outstanding new faculty, and move forward on the plans I have mentioned.

As I get out and meet more of you, our stakeholders, I enjoy the honor of telling the Rutgers story and, in delightful return, I get the privilege of hearing yours.You have contributed to our success; you have given your time, treasure, and talent to this place and have helped it grow; you have helped us build an ever-improving university that is going to set the standards for academic excellence in service to the common good.

I see all of this in you, I hear it in your stories. And for all of these reasons I am proud to say that We Are You.

Thank you so much for your time and attention; thank you for everything that you have done and will do for this great place. Thank you and have a great evening.