Credit: Peter Tenzer

Professor Sherri-Ann Butterfield brings her expertise in immigration and diversity issues to a new faculty fellowship.

When Chancellor Steven J. Diner decided to create a first-ever faculty fellowship in his office, he chose Sherri-Ann Butterfield, an associate professor in the Department of Sociology and Anthropology and an immigration expert, whom he felt could help reach out to this “campus of immigrants.”

Butterfield’s scholarship encompasses a wide range of interests, including race and ethnic relations, identity development and culture, and urban education within the Afro-Caribbean Diaspora. Her research specifically explores how race, ethnicity, class, and gender impact Afro-Caribbean immigrants and their children within the metropolitan contexts of New York and New Jersey.

“She had the strengths I was looking for, and also had expertise in diversity and immigration,” Diner said.

Diner noted that for the past 12 years Rutgers–Newark has been ranked by U.S. News & World Report as the most diverse campus nationally. “We need to find a way to reach out to everyone, to take full advantage of our unique diversity in the educational experience of our students,” Diner said.

Our campus is very diverse, but often faculty and staff aren’t prepared to deal with the diversity and its issues. We have to give them tools to do this – Sherri-Ann Butterfield

Diner said he was inspired his experience as an American Council on Education fellow in academic administration to create the faculty fellowship at Rutgers-Newark last September. The position is designed to give a faculty member some experience on the administrative side of college life and a perspective on how decisions are made.

“I think in higher education, we don’t often have a lot of opportunity, when we move into leadership positions, to prepare for those positions,” Diner said. “So I thought it would be a useful thing to create a program to enable faculty to gain the experience needed to take on leadership/administrative positions.”

Diner said future faculty fellows will also be assigned projects during their year’s tenure, such as the issues of immigration and diversity that Butterfield is tackling during her faculty fellowship. For her first project, she conducted a survey on how many faculty and staff were involved in immigration research, and then proposed creating an Immigration Studies Center on campus as a place where researchers could exchange information and ideas. The center, still in its early stages, would be located in the Institute for Ethnicity, Culture, and the Modern Experience on the Newark Campus.

Butterfield is quick to point out a persistent myth about Newark itself. “There is still a conception of Newark as a largely African-American city, which is not necessarily true any longer,” Butterfield said. “With the federal census only being done every 10 years, there’s a lack of study on what happens in the intervening years.”

She noted that Newark’s Ironbound section used to be mainly Portuguese but now is largely Brazilian; the city’s North Ward was once Puerto Rican but is now largely Central and South American; and the South Ward’s African-American majority has been joined by many African and Caribbean immigrants, especially from Guyana.

Butterfield also has set up diversity workshops for faculty and staff. The first workshop, held in March, was open to all departments, and topics included how diversity is defined and how to manage “unscripted” moments in the classroom. A second workshop to take place this month is designed to help disciplines, such as the sciences, incorporate diversity into the classroom, Butterfield said.

“Our campus is very diverse, but often faculty and staff aren’t prepared to deal with the diversity and its issues. We have to give them tools to do this,” Butterfield said.

Eventually, Butterfield said, she hopes to design the workshops to deal with specific diversity issues faced by each department. “Science and math deal with different issues than the humanities and social sciences. The law school has a different set of challenges than the business school. And nursing has a set of very practical concerns,” Butterfield said. “I’d like to see the workshops tailored to fit those specific needs.”

While her faculty fellowship extends into June, Butterfield said that she hopes she will be able to continue some of her work after the fellowship is over.

The position has given her an invaluable glimpse into how the administration makes decisions. “Often if a faculty member asks for something, like, say, resources for an academic program, and ifI it is denied, it sometimes feels like a very arbitrary decision,” Butterfield said. “But this position has allowed me to see the nuanced thought processes and work that go into these decisions.”

Butterfield said the perspective that she has gained as faculty fellow has been especially informative during the current economic crisis and budget crunch. “After watching the process firsthand I have a whole new appreciation for higher ed administrators, as they must deal with the financial crisis while not sacrificing educational excellence,” she said.