Dear Colleagues,
I hope that each of you has had a relaxing and productive summer and that Hurricane Irene did no more than inconvenience you. As we begin a new academic year, I want to thank you for your dedication in the year past and offer a few thoughts on the year ahead.
These are tumultuous times for public higher education. Across the country, our colleagues in other institutions of public higher education find themselves beset by three demons we know all too well: declining state subsidies, increasing tuition, and their inevitable consequence, decreasing academic budgets. Here at Rutgers we face not only these profound structural changes in our institutional life, but countless local concerns as well.
The challenges we face are many and, I am sorry to say, require no enumeration for dedicated members of the SAS faculty. Some of what we must do to face these challenges involves money, but much of it is also a matter of will and of courage. Of money we surely have too little; of will and courage, however, we have much. We are also fortunate to have in Dick Edwards an Interim Executive Vice President for Academic Affairs who knows and cares about the significance of the liberal arts and sciences in a public research university. With Dick’s support and encouragement, I am certain we can continue to pursue our many goals in education, research, and service.
Indeed, despite the barriers we must surmount, I remain confident that we have the wherewithal to extend the remarkable record of achievement that the faculty and students of the School of Arts and Sciences have established. Rather than dwell on problems, I thought this year to celebrate our faculty and our students by offering up a list of 50 Things You May Not Know About SAS. One of the best aspects of my job is the opportunity to see SAS as a whole. The inevitably incomplete list that follows reflects that fortunate vantage point, but I hope that it provides all of us with an opportunity to express our pride in our colleagues and our students. Equally, it should inspire us to even greater success in the year ahead
Fifty Things You May Not Know About the School of Arts and Sciences
1. We have 51 superb students who were admitted from the Mountainview Correctional Facility since 2005.
2. Over 40 percent of this fall's incoming class speaks a language other than English at home.
3. Almost 300 students in the School of Arts and Sciences are military veterans.
4. Nearly one-fifth of our students come from families with an adjusted gross income of $30,000 per year or less, and half of our students identify themselves as non-white.
5. Eighty percent of our students qualify for financial aid.
6. Twenty-nine percent of this fall's incoming class are the first in their families to go to college.
7. We believe that the School of Arts and Sciences enrolls the highest proportion (almost one-third) of Pell Grant students of any college of arts and sciences in the United States, public or private.
8. Six SAS chairs or directors are Africanists: Ousseina Alidou (Center for African Studies), Abena Busia (Women’s and Gender Studies), Dorothy Hodgson (Anthropology), Alamin Mazrui (African, Middle Eastern, and South Asian Languages and Literatures), Ken Safir (Linguistics), and Rick Schroeder (Geography).
9. Our Psychology Department enrolls 22,000 students per year, a number equivalent to the entire SAS student population.
10. Including the coming year, we will have offered a total of 11 different Signature Courses. More are in the pipeline.
11. Twenty-nine new faculty members will join the School of Arts and Sciences in 2011–2012; SAS has also authorized 35 searches for new faculty during the coming academic year.
12. The working budget of the School of Arts and Sciences is approximately $160 million. This does not include money expended from grants and the cost of benefits associated with state lines.
13. This amount is approximately 60 percent of the academic budget in New Brunswick and 40 percent of the academic budget for the entire university.
14. More than 85 percent of the School of Arts and Sciences budget is committed to faculty and staff salaries.
15. Two-thirds of the School of Arts and Sciences budget comes from tuition.
16. The School of Arts and Sciences has 34 Board of Governors Professors, the largest number of any academic unit in the University.
17. The School of Arts and Sciences had 10 ACLS New Faculty Fellows in the first two years of the program, far more than any other university.
18. The School of Arts and Sciences brings in more money in grant dollars than any other school in the University ($109 million last year).
19. The School of Arts and Sciences has more members of the National Academy of Sciences and the American Academy of Arts and Sciences than all the other Rutgers schools combined.
20. The School of Arts and Sciences spends more than $30 million a year supporting teaching assistants, the next generation of scholar-teachers.
21. The School of Arts and Sciences spends more than $6 million of its own money per year on fellowship support for graduate students, not including funds provided by foundations and government agencies.
22. Members of the Department of Physics have played an essential role in the Large Hadron Collider, arguably the most important physics experiment in human history.
23. More than 300 graduates of Rutgers work for Goldman Sachs.
24. The School of Arts and Sciences Office for Diversity and Academic Success in the Sciences (ODASIS) celebrated its 25th anniversary in 2010–11 and has graduated 963 academically and economically disadvantaged students. The vast majority of these men and women are studying for or working in the health professions, including many at top medical schools.
25. We have 15 new post-doctoral fellows in the Humanities this year—the largest number in the history of SAS - in the departments of American Studies, English, History, Jewish Studies, Linguistics, Religion, Women's and Gender Studies, as well as at the Center for Race and Ethnicity, the Center for Cultural Analysis, and Rutgers Center for Historical Analysis.
26. Under the University’s diversity hiring initiative that supports the School of Arts and Sciences Caribbean Studies cluster, SAS has hired six faculty members and a post-doctoral fellow with appointments in seven departments.
27. The School of Arts and Sciences has recently hired five new faculty members specializing in the study of South Asia, with appointments across five departments and programs.
28. The School of Arts and Sciences will this year begin an initiative to hire faculty in Chinese Studies, an area where we already have many strengths. Aided by assistance from Old Queens, this effort will include at least five appointments in five departments.
29. Every student who enrolls on the New Brunswick Campus takes at least one course (Expository Writing) in the School of Arts and Sciences, usually many more than that.
30. There are 3,924 new first-year students in the School of Arts and Sciences this year, more than all the other undergraduate programs in New Brunswick combined.
31. On average, students who graduate from the School of Environmental and Biological Sciences take 60 percent of their courses in the School of Arts and Sciences while students who graduate from the School of Engineering take 50 percent of their courses in SAS.
32. The School of Arts and Sciences offers instructions in 35 languages Akan (Twi), Arabic, Aramaic, Armenian, Bengali, Chinese, French, German, Ge’ez, Greek (Classical and Modern), Hausa, Hebrew (Biblical, Rabbinic, Modern), Hindi, Hungarian, Italian, Japanese, Korean, Latin, Malayalam, Old Norse, Persian, Polish, Portuguese, Russian, Sanskrit, Spanish, Swahili, Turkish, Urdu, Yiddish, Yoruba, and Zulu.
33. The School of Arts and Sciences Entrepreneurial Program, supported by Old Queens, last year made awards to begin six new, income-producing programs: a Master's degree in Global and Comparative History, a Master's degree and certificate in Jewish Studies, a General Chemistry eLearning tool, a Master's degree and certificate program in Sports Marketing, a Master's degree and certificate program in Religion, and an online Introduction to Ethics.
34. For 16 years the School of Arts and Sciences, in partnership with the National Museums of Kenya, has offered the finest field based training program in paleoanthropology in the world, The Koobi Fora Field School.
35. The School of Arts and Sciences has raised almost $10 million from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation in the last three years to support research and graduate education in the Humanities.
36. The biggest department in the School of Arts and Sciences is Mathematics with 66 faculty members and 20,000 undergraduate enrollments last year.
37. Fifty-nine members of our faculty will stand for promotion this year.
38. A total of 15.5 percent of School of Arts and Sciences faculty have joint appointments in two SAS departments.
39. The 81 students who took Professor Laura Ahearn's course in Linguistic Anthropology last year had been exposed to 29 different languages representing every continent but Antarctica; they spoke eight different languages as first languages and were fluent in 15 languages.
40. Over 85 percent of Rutgers students accepted to medical school last year came from SAS. Data for law school admissions are thought to be comparable.
41. The School of Arts and Sciences is one of the principal university sponsors of the South African Large Telescope (SALT), one of the most important telescopes in the world.
42. The SAS Dean's Emergency Fund, initiated at the beginning of the recession in 2008, has provided almost 100 students with emergency assistance. With support from 130 donors, including $500,000 from Goldman Sachs, the fund provides a safety net for students who find themselves unable to pay their term bills due to unforeseen personal emergencies.
43. The School of Arts and Sciences working budget is larger than all the academic budgets of the Newark and Camden Campuses combined.
44. Members of the Department of Computer Science co-authored the iPad Game of the Year, designed the search engine that powers Ask.com, and brought in more than 10 million dollars in grant funds.
45. The Department of Philosophy is ranked No. 2 in the nation by the Leiter Report, the most reliable and precise ranking of philosophy departments.
46. Biomaterials invented at Rutgers have been implanted in more than 20,000 patients who have received pacemakers or defibrillators.
47. For the 2010–2011 academic year, we sent 677 Rutgers students overseas on our programs. There are 102 Rutgers Study Abroad programs in 36 countries.
48. Professor and Chair of Economics, Rosanne Altshuler testified before the House Ways and Means Committee in July 2011 about the advantages/disadvantages of a value-added tax at the very time discussions on a U.S. default on its debts—which had debate about tax reform at its center—riveted the nation.
49. The Department of Physics has 11 NSF Career Awards. Professor Sasha Zamolodchikov was recently awarded the Dirac Medal of the International Center for Theoretical Physics. The Dirac Medal is not awarded to Nobel Laureates, Fields Medalists, or Wolf Foundation Prize winners, although many Dirac Medalists have later won these prestigious prizes.
50. The average College Board score for first-year students entering the Honors Program is 2160.
This list could be expanded many times over, of course, and we would welcome any suggestions you might want to make for such an expansion – the number of items on the list could as easily be 100 or 200 as 50. Yet I also think that the list, whatever its length, can be reduced to a single insight: No school of arts and sciences in the United States so effectively combines access and excellence as the Rutgers School of Arts and Sciences.
There are probably some institutions that can claim greater academic accomplishments by their faculty and others that can claim greater economic and cultural diversity among their students. But no other university can claim a school of arts and sciences that so fully combines intellectual achievement at the highest level with an undergraduate student body that reflects the socio-economic complexity and cultural abundance of the society the university serves. This is a distinction, in other words, of which we have a collective right to be extraordinarily proud. If we read in the press that we are first in other things, we should certainly be proud of being first in this. Rutgers and its School of Arts and Sciences have no “aspirant peers” in this arena; we are everyone else’s “aspirant peer”!
That we have established our unique position in all of American higher education during times of economic and political distress only reinforces its significance. As we begin the academic year – a year during which our University will select a new president – I feel extraordinarily fortunate to lead a school that so perfectly embodies these values of excellence and access. I thank you for all you have done to advance these noble purposes, and I look forward to more of the same in the year ahead!
As always,
Doug
Douglas Greenberg
Executive Dean
School of Arts and Sciences
