Update
Q & A: Robert Goodman
Robert Goodman has served as executive dean of School of Environmental and Biological Sciences, the renamed Cook College, since June 2005. In that time, the New Brunswick/Piscataway Campus community has engaged in a dialogue of transformation. Goodman brings a new focus to the land-grant school to accompany its new name, and says he is looking forward to working on key initiatives and boosting Rutgers’ profile in the environmental, biological, and agricultural sciences.
How did the name School of Environmental and Biological Sciences come about? How will the school’s focus change?
The new name reflects what we feel is an all-inclusive description of what we do today. Whereas the biological or life sciences that you find in the School of Arts and Sciences is more genetic, molecular, cellular, and biomedical, what you find here is organismal, ecological, environmental, agricultural, and integrated sciences. So we have plants, animals, microbiology, food, nutrition, environmental engineering, ecology, evolution, natural resources, atmospheric sciences, meteorology, and marine sciences. Although we have many academic relationships with other parts of the university, there has been this tendency to have kind of an "us v. them" mentality. That attitude is deeply ingrained in the culture here. I am committed to moving us away from that kind of thinking toward being a full partner and member of the university community.
What are some of the major initiatives that the School of Environmental and Biological Sciences will pursue?
One is the nutrition initiative. This combines the study of agriculture, food science, and nutritional sciences, with a strong social sciences component – how children learn to eat healthy, how foods interact with the human body to promote well being and health, and then linking that with human health outcomes, focusing on obesity and diabetes, adult onset diabetes. When we are done building that program, we will have linked everything from farmers in South Jersey to the most basic clinical delivery of health care services at UMDNJ and other hospitals in the state. This will include community-based education about nutrition and health; basic knowledge about behavior and genetics as they influence the interactions of diet, activity, and health; and practical efforts to create environments in the workplace and design of living spaces where exercise can be integral to everyday life.
The second area that is under discussion is climate and environmental change. We are just at the beginning stages of this initiative; the first of a series of events leading to a plan for this initiative was a very successful on-campus symposium held in September. This initiative is a broadly-based effort responding to the clear evidence that we are experiencing trends in climate change and that perhaps as much as half of that change is caused by human activities. We have very good records, for example, of ocean temperatures, which trend upward. The consequences of climate change are going to affect virtually everything that we do. It touches the core of the economic state and security of New Jersey, and because it is such a complicated problem, there are a wealth of interdisciplinary academic and research opportunities.
The third is internationalizing our undergraduate education. To me, it is a moral issue that we better educate the next generation of Rutgers students to be good global citizens, to know other cultures, to have real learning experiences in other countries and other places, and I think in particular in the major developing countries: Brazil, China, India, and the countries of south and southeast Asia. It is imperative that we better understand the very difficult issues affecting Africa. Africa is the one continent on Earth where the conditions of life have actually deteriorated over the last 20 years.
My goal is to see that every student who graduates from the Rutgers School of Environmental and Biological Sciences has had some kind of community-based experience, and – just to throw a goal out there – the half who does not receive a substantive international experience during their academic career should get a substantive New Jersey-based experience.
How would the international emphasis be worked into the curricular and co-curricular experience?
There are two aspects here. One is opportunities for study abroad that fit into our majors – an “international track,” if you will, in appropriate majors. The second element is to introduce global content into our courses. For those faculty members who are willing to internationalize their courses, we need to provide the technology, resources, and time they need. As we have more students with international experience, there will be more of a demand from those students to have internationally relevant material in the courses that they take when they are here. And that will enrich the undergraduate course offerings. I also think we can do a better job of integrating our international students into the communities on our campuses, through innovative living arrangements, seminars, and informal gatherings that focus on cross-cultural issues and social events with a global focus.
The report of the Task Force on Undergraduate Education had a lot of positive things to say about Cook residential life and student services. Could you talk about campus issues?
It is true that there is a very strong sense of community here, and it is a worry of some students that if the qualification to live at Cook does not include being a member of the academic unit located at Cook, then the Cook experience is going to disappear. I am determined that this will not be allowed to happen. We want to enrich student life and the sense of community on the Cook Campus rather than dissipate it. And we’d like to serve, both as an example and through proactive leadership, in helping to achieve community on other campuses. Rick Ludescher’s role as the new campus dean will be central to achieving these goals. He will, for example, provide the leadership that will enable opportunities for community that will be as meaningful to majors in environmental and business economics, ecology and evolution, or in biotechnology as to Mason Gross majors in music who might choose to live here rather than in Rockoff. English, philosophy, or engineering majors with interests in the environment or food or horses will find a community at Cook where they can combine their academic and other interests. When we develop our residential college ideas, which we will do based on the model that the president has laid out for the Douglass Residential College, there will be even more of an integrative and inclusive ethos that will draw students from multiple academic interests and backgrounds.
What are some options for students who are not pursuing Cook majors to engage in the campus community?
We all have our avocations as well as our vocations, and part of learning in a university environment should be not just about one’s major but other things as well. Some of the finest and most interesting students I have known in my academic career have been those who, for example, came out of high school with enough talent to become musicians, but instead pursued music as part of their extracurricular activities while they majored in physics or philosophy or political science. My vision for the future of the community on the Cook campus is to achieve a living and learning environment that is rich in all measures of diversity – academic, cultural, racial, religious, gender, sexual orientation, and nationality.