Credit: Nick Romanenko

Vice President for Undergraduate Education Barry Qualls at the first-ever convocation for all first-year and transfer students in New Brunswick

Convocation helps usher in new era – FOCUS story

Since April 2004, we in New Brunswick have been debating undergraduate education, sometimes even shouting about it. In April 2004, President Richard L. McCormick and Executive Vice President for Academic Affairs Philip Furmanski convened the Task Force on Undergraduate Education because they wanted to ensure that “undergraduate education is, and will be, a priority of discussion every year at Rutgers, not just when a committee has produced a report.” Their charge was to find the answers to two essential questions: “What is a Rutgers education?” and “What does it mean to be a graduate of Rutgers?”

If we have not fully answered those questions yet, we have certainly put in place many changes and much that is new, all designed to provide our students, faculty, and staff the incentives for answering them. The task force report, “Transforming Undergraduate Education,” the discussions that followed (many loud and contentious, as the topic deserved), the president’s recommendations, the implementation process, and now the real thing – the arrival of the first class admitted in a reorganized New Brunswick – have given Rutgers its most sweeping and revolutionary changes since Rutgers College become a co-ed college in 1971 and the colleges lost their faculty to the new Faculty of Arts and Sciences in the reorganization process of 1980.

Our work to establish a research

culture as the norm at Rutgers–

New Brunswick asks as much of

faculty and staff as it asks of

students.

Now we have a School of Arts and Sciences that contains all arts and sciences students in New Brunswick; we have a School of Environmental and Biological Sciences; succeeding Cook College; we have a rationally organized system for all of New Brunswick: Our students are in schools whose faculty are responsible for admissions, general education, and graduation policies.

I am convinced that new and returning students will see the benefits at once. The first-year seminars, covering topics from global warming and the Jersey shore to the “real” Dracula, and taught only by tenured and tenure-track faculty, have excited students, parents, faculty and outsiders. We have more than 1,600 new students who have signed up for more than 60 seminars; and we expect at least that many students to sign up for seminars offered in spring 2008. We have a new Office of Fellowships and Postgraduate Guidance, established to assist students applying for external fellowships like the Fulbright, Rhodes, Marshall, Gates, Goldwater, and Truman.

We have SAS advising offices located on every campus, and, for the first time, a transparent set of arts and science requirements that allow faculty to be active advisers of students. We have a Douglass Residential College, succeeding and inheriting the distinguished histories of the new Jersey College for Women and Douglass College, and enrolling a class of 350 students who will share curricular and co-curricular experiences, focused around women’s leadership in all areas. We have more resources for the University College community. We have set up special offices in Lucy Stone Hall at Livingston to welcome non-traditional and transfer students needing specific advising.

This change has not been simple; it has been and is stressful. At times I confess that I felt a certain nostalgia for the “simple days” of the very recent past – especially as we moved staff around all our campuses.  These moves are painful. Staff who know what they are doing, and do their work well, suddenly have found themselves moved to a different campus, encountering different colleagues and supervisors; some even have been assigned to new units. “Do you people know what you’re doing?” one staff member to whom I’ve always turned for tough advice asked me. Yes, I am convinced that we do.

Our work to establish a research culture as the norm for the campus environment at Rutgers–New Brunswick asks more of faculty and staff – asks as much of them as it asks of students. We ask our students to rethink their role as students, to engage actively with the resources all around them. We ask our faculty to assume more accountability for undergraduates, and to make connecting to them and their academic interests a priority.  We ask our staff to provide that environment of support, advice, direction that sustains the undergraduate experience. To do this, all of us need retraining. (I know I am doing things of which I was ignorant only two years ago.)

We need to rethink what we do and how we do it so that we are more effective emissaries of the research mission that defines Rutgers as a great public university. Our work lives are changing. But this change will make a difference in our students’ world at Rutgers – for life, as it were. The stress is worth it.

Barry Qualls chaired the original Task Force on Undergraduate Education and is now interim vice president for undergraduate education. He is also a professor of English, specializing in Victorian literature.