Welcome to a New Year at Rutgers

September 5, 2023

Members of the Rutgers Community,

I want to take this moment to welcome you all to what I hope will be a fantastic year at Rutgers. A year of discovery and accomplishment. A year of new friendships and collaborations. A year of academic excellence and outstanding research in service to the common good, locally and globally.

Let me also thank all of you for choosing Rutgers as a place to work, to pursue a degree, to conduct your research, clinical, and teaching endeavors, and to launch your academic career. Some of you are in your first days among our community, and we are eager to gain from the freshness of your energy and ideas. Some of you have been at Rutgers for many years or multiple decades, and we continue to draw upon your expertise and perspective. Every one of you contributes to our vital mission. Each of you adds to the Rutgers story and ultimately to our legacy of academic and research excellence.

We begin the 2023-2024 academic year amid continued political and social tension in our nation, and Rutgers is not immune to its effects. While our university continues to help address our world’s greatest challenges, we are also a marketplace of ideas, where competing viewpoints find expression and where members of our community may confront ideas and speech that are unsettling or even offensive.

So, as I intend to do at the start of each year, today I reiterate Rutgers’ ongoing commitment to academic freedom and free speech and encourage you to read the document in full. 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.

In renewing our commitment, let us also pledge to practice civility in our discourse. We can disagree—even strongly—without shouting each other down. Let’s take a moment to hear what the other has to say. As I asked some of our incoming undergraduates at the New Brunswick new student convocation last week, what might we become as a nation if, before we speak, we dare to listen? Listening is not acceptance, but it can be educative, and it can help us become better speakers and better thinkers.

Again, welcome—or welcome back—to Rutgers, and I wish you a rewarding experience this year.

Sincerely,

Jonathan Holloway
President and University Professor