Richard McCormick Recounts Leading Rutgers through Changes that Strengthened the University
His new book, 'Raised at Rutgers,' examines his roles in academic and athletic restructuring and the political moves to integrate medical education
Richard L. McCormick, the 19th president of Rutgers University, fondly recalls his boyhood in the 1950s when his history professor father would take him on visits to William Demarest, who had served as the university’s president earlier in that century. The elder McCormick would occasionally let his son tag along to hear the genial, gentlemanly Demarest recount Rutgers history.
The younger McCormick, of course, had no interest in the grownup conversation, but he grew attached to a small replica of the Liberty Bell that sat on Demarest’s desk. During one of these Saturday morning visits, Demarest gave him the bell, a centennial souvenir that Demarest bought as a schoolboy on an 1876 trip to Philadelphia. The younger McCormick has cherished it ever since.
That same bell sat on McCormick’s Old Queens desk when he served as president and it was front-and-center on a recent Thursday evening when he read excerpts from his newly published book, Raised at Rutgers, to an audience of 150 students, colleagues, family members and friends at the Barnes and Noble bookstore in New Brunswick.
Published by the Rutgers University Press, the book touches on McCormick’s childhood growing up on campus, his early positions at Rutgers and his leadership roles at the universities of North Carolina and Washington. It mostly focuses on his challenges and successes leading Rutgers during tumultuous years in the first decade of the 21st century.
“I always assumed I would write such a book,” said McCormick, who is now a full-time professor teaching a history and political science course on political corruption in America and leading a Graduate School of Education seminar on the research university in modern America. “I had a long life at Rutgers: I grew up here, I served on the faculty here, I was a department chair and a dean, and then I returned as president. [That] led me to believe I have a Rutgers story to tell, and I wanted to tell it.”
McCormick had his hands full overseeing athletics, reorganizing liberal arts education in New Brunswick, increasing federal funding for research and bringing medical education back to Rutgers. He examines these tasks in detail, citing many successful outcomes while accounting for his missteps.
“I acknowledge my limitations,” he said. “My presidency was an open book – everyone who knew me knew that I didn’t get everything right the first time. I don’t think my book would be credible without … telling those stories truthfully.”
Praised by many for his inclusive leadership style, he described how that worked well when he engaged students, faculty, leadership and alumni in conversations about how to transform the four mostly separate New Brunswick liberal arts colleges with their loyal constituencies into today’s School of Arts and Sciences. But his attempt to try the same approach with athletics when he first arrived at Rutgers met with resistance.
“I took my eye off the ball, to use an athletic metaphor,” he said. “I’m not the only president to make that mistake.” But he acted to correct problems and had the opportunity to appoint a new athletic director, Tim Pernetti, who “more than any single individual got us into the Big Ten,” McCormick said.
Bringing medical education back to Rutgers showcased the challenge of managing higher education in the rough-and-tumble political environment of New Jersey. In the “if you want something, you gotta give something” environment of Trenton, South Jersey politicians engineered a plan to attach Rutgers University in Camden with Rowan University as part of a plan to integrate the medical schools and other units of the University of Medicine and Dentistry of New Jersey into Rutgers. After years of tumult that stretched into the final days of McCormick’s presidency, the involved parties reached agreement to bring medical education back to Rutgers and retain Camden as part of the university.
An observation McCormick shared with his audience is how Rutgers’ role as New Jersey’s state university compares to that of other great state institutions, including most of its new Big Ten peers. He was not the first president to aspire to make Rutgers’ reputation more like that of the flagship public research schools in states such as Michigan or North Carolina. His successes in transforming undergraduate education at New Brunswick, increasing research funding, integrating medical education and laying the groundwork for joining the Big Ten advanced Rutgers toward that goal.
“But it takes a long time to change perceptions, both within Rutgers and within the State of New Jersey,” he said. Rutgers was founded as a sectarian college in 1766 and didn’t become the state university for 190 years. It never developed the historic relationship with the state that many universities outside the Northeast did when they were established as land grant institutions and thrived in the post-World War II years. But, he said, “we’re moving in the right direction.”