Rutgers University, The State University of New Jersey (Camden, New Brunswick, & Newark)

Case Study - Spring 2006

History and Context

As one of New Jersey’s major state schools, Rutgers University serves over 50,000 students on its three campuses: Camden, Newark, and New Brunswick/Piscataway.  Nearly half of the students, 25% of the faculty, and 35% of the staff at Rutgers come from ethnic and racial minority groups.  Approximately 55% of Rutgers students are female and 45% are male.  Rutgers University has long been a supporter of campus diversity and has already achieved a structural diversity representative of the state of New Jersey.  Nonetheless, the effort to move beyond structural diversity is ongoing and has been an institutional commitment for more than a decade. 

In the 1980’s and 1990’s Rutgers made a great deal of progress in providing students with experiences and information about a wide range of individual cultures through both curricular and co-curricular offerings.  A number of area studies majors were developed including Africana and Afro-American Studies, East Asian Languages and Studies, Puerto Rican and Hispanic Caribbean Studies, Latin American Studies, Middle Eastern Studies, Jewish Studies, Russian, Central and East European Studies, and Women’s Studies.  Co-curricular programming on multicultural issues and cultural scholarship were developed during this time period as well through a variety of centers and institutes on the three Rutgers campuses such as five women’s research centers, Paul Robeson Cultural Center, Center for Latino Arts and Culture, the Asian American Cultural Center at Rutgers-New Brunswick and the Institute for Ethnicity, Culture, and the Modern Experience at Rutgers-Newark. 

In Spring, 2000 Rutgers convened a university-wide task force to assess the effects of these past efforts and determine the state of multicultural issues in the curriculum.  The task force concluded that, while Rutgers had made great strides in increasing students’ knowledge about individual cultures, more work was needed to increase students’ knowledge and skills concerning intercultural interaction.

In addition to the strong presidential leadership that reinforces the educational value of diversity from the top, Rutgers has tapped the combined power of both student and academic affairs to maximize student learning.  Its success in infusing diversity into the curriculum is derived from the strategic approach they have taken to curricular transformation and the willingness on each of the campuses to continue to rethink content and pedagogy.  The institution has been able to tap innovative faculty and staff, already engaged in diversity work at a grassroots level, and has enhanced and expanded that work by providing increased institutional support.  By offering real incentives through grants and guidance in the form of faculty development and seminars, Rutgers’ three campuses have produced a core group of faculty members who have acquired a deep understanding of diversity and intercultural issues, and who have developed the practical experience of infusing this knowledge into courses to improve student learning.  These faculty members represent the critical mass needed to keep these initiatives moving forward, as they work to spread the educational benefits of diversity throughout the curriculum.  The comprehensive connections among courses and between the curriculum and co-curriculum have created a support network that ensures diversity initiatives at Rutgers remain pervasive and central to the mission as they continue to grow and evolve. 

Campus Diversity Initiative Model 2002-2006

The historical commitment to the educational value of diversity at Rutgers has led to an environment rich with innovation and high quality diversity work in all areas of the institution.  In order to affect curricular change, Rutgers has very strategically tapped into this pervasive commitment to diversity work by identifying individuals already engaged in it and enhancing their work through increased institutional support and leadership.  The NJCDI project at Rutgers focused on a select group of faculty fellows and provided them with incentive grants and faculty development workshops.  As a result, the faculty fellows were able to re-think their instructional approaches and revise their courses by incorporating elements of intercultural interaction and multicultural learning into the curriculum.  Faculty members throughout the three campuses have taken part in the fellows program in order to bring about curricular change throughout the disciplines.

Rutgers - New Brunswick,
Rutgers – Camden, and
Rutgers – Newark

In 2003, Rutgers-New Brunswick and Rutgers-Camden each created Intercultural Steering Committees made up of faculty, staff, and administrators.  The role of the Committees is to serve as structural vehicles to guide the development of a conceptually connected learning environment for students across student and academic affairs with a focus on intercultural interaction.  Each year, the Committees select a number of faculty members to act as Multicultural Fellows.  These Fellows commit to either revising existing courses, or creating new courses that incorporate intercultural issues or innovative pedagogies.  The Fellows also work to connect their work conceptually to that of the other Fellows and to co-curricular programs developed by professional staff through small grants awarded by the Steering Committee.

Rutgers-Newark has developed its most recent diversity work around the use of ethnic life histories as pedagogy through the Institute of Ethnicity, Culture, and the Modern Experience.  Existing courses have been revised and new courses have been developed to incorporate this innovative pedagogical approach to student learning.  The courses require students to research and document the life histories of the Newark community, requiring them to explore the social realities and connections among the city’s many cultural groups.  The students work to understand a given community’s patterns of tradition, histories, and the ways it has been shaped and changed over the years.  Students document this material and help preserve it by making it available to future scholars.  The courses allow students to capture a unique historical moment that otherwise may have been lost.   When their research is complete, students then share their findings through class presentations, sponsored programs for the public, and performances.  The courses help students explore their own identities and those of others in their community and open up new ways of learning and new definitions of scholarship.

Accomplishments

Rutgers - New Brunswick

The foundation of the curricular transformation at Rutgers-New Brunswick lies in the Basic Composition course required of all students.  Through readings that address intercultural issues and classroom activities that encourage intercultural engagement, the 4500 students per year who enroll in the course are challenged to think about social issues in their complexity and within a cultural context.  The course sets the stage for continued learning about diversity issues throughout the curriculum. 

In addition, the nine intercultural fellows continue to have tremendous impact on the campus.  With the chief academic officer present in support of their work, the Fellows presented on their diversity work to other faculty. As a follow-up, they established a faculty engagement committee in which they provide ways for interested individuals to become involved with diversity efforts.  Rutgers also offers professional development opportunities to the fellows. At the latest event, Dr. Lester Monts, Senior Vice President for Academic Affairs at the University of Michigan and nationally known diversity leader, talked about diversity in context. 

One of the Fellows, Nannette DeJong received a Fulbright to continue her research on music in different cultures, which was initiated through NJCDI.  Fellows also collaborate amongst themselves through team teaching opportunities, which has generated innovative pedagogies to engage students in diversity issues. Lastly, in the Fall 2006, a roundtable discussion will be held with students to talk about diversity issues on campus. 

Rutgers has also redesigned more specialized disciplinary courses.  For example, the Introduction to Music course at Rutgers-New Brunswick, which has historically focused on compositions by European and American composers, was revised in 2003 by Professors Andrew Kirkman and Nannette deJong to offer a multidisciplinary approach to the study of music that cuts across contemporary societies and cultures.  The course now addresses the ways in which cultures from around the world define, create, value, and use music.  In addition, the revised course explores larger themes such as music and the ritual, music and migration, and music and colonialism.  The revision of the course has maintained the high level of learning about basic elements of rhythm, melody, timbre, texture, harmony and forms, while simultaneously enhancing the cultural understanding of music for the 700 students who enroll yearly.

Rutgers – Camden

At Rutgers-Camden campus in 2003, the director of the writing program, Assistant Professor Holly Blackford, coordinated a letter exchange between a class of freshmen at West Philadelphia High School and students in English Composition 102.  The program was organized around the 50th anniversary of the landmark Brown v. Board of Education decision.  The students kept in touch through a series of five letters exchanged over the course of the Spring 2004 semester and finally met up at an event called Comp-Poster at which the Composition students prepared posters on the Brown decision.  The Camden students, who were roughly 60% white, were shocked to learn that the students at the 98% Black and African-American high school did not have access to a guidance counselor.  Similarly, the Camden students, many of whom had never given any thought to the fact that they came from predominately white, suburban neighborhoods began thinking about their own cultural identities.  In addition to exploring this important event in U.S. history, both high school and college students alike learned a great deal about the cultural context of each other and themselves, and how to communicate across their cultural differences. 

Rutgers - Newark

At the heart of The Institute on Ethnicity, Culture, and the Modern Experience’s Bildner initiative was the creation of a coterie of junior and mid-career faculty members who were at once interested in weaving issues of diversity into their scholarship and their lives on campus and beyond the campus. Toward that objective the Institute provided support and encouragement to Bildner Faculty Fellows that strengthened research agendas, valorized public scholarship and other activities that bring Rutgers-Newark faculty members into closer contact with diverse audiences in Greater Newark.

For example, at the Imagining America conference at Rutgers-New Brunswick, the Institute mounted a panel entitled, The Resonance of Public Scholarship: Perspectives from Newark. The panel included Bildner Fellow Tim Raphael who discussed his truly imaginative theater project on immigration, “Something to Declare: Performing Oral History.” The panel was moderated by Institute director, Dr. Clement Alexander Price and drew a large audience.  Other events included Reinventing Newark II: Challenges for the Future, a panel discussion on future prospects for the city of Newark, facilitated by Bildner Fellow, Max Herman. Professor Herman also coordinated an on-campus screening of the Oscar-nominated documentary, Streetfight. The film, which chronicles the Newark Mayoral Election of 2002, was shown for the first time to a diverse public audience in the city of Newark, and featured a lecture by the filmmaker, Marshall Curry.

Bildner Fellows Sherri-Ann Butterfield and Barbara Foley mounted two-day seminars on campus for Newark Public School teachers enrolled in the Institute’s project, “Teachers as Scholars”. This project, funded by the New Jersey Council for the Humanities, provides professional development opportunities in the humanities and the social sciences to for a diverse cross section of Newark public school teachers.

The Institute also hosted a reception celebrating recently published books by Bildner Fellows, including: Fighting in the Streets: Ethnic Succession and Urban Unrest in 20th century America (Max Herman); Performing Folklore: From Lisbon to Newark (Kim DaCosta Holton); and Ethics Along the Color Line (Anna Stubblefield). It is our hope that these junior faculty members will be promoted with tenure and as Bildner fellows contribute all the more to the cultural, intellectual and civic transformation of Rutgers-Newark.

The Institute organized a series of other events inspired by a commitment to acknowledge diversity on a large scale, such as an ethnic dance performance and a lecture/demo on the influences of African and African-American dance on modern American culture.  Rutgers-Newark’s Bildner Fellows continue to make contributions through their presentations and public performances of their work. Recently, the president of Rutgers also saluted 52 diversity scholars, including Bildner Fellows. This recognition, the first of its kind at the University, helps to institutionalize the work of the Institute and that of our colleagues on the New Brunswick and Camden campuses.