While challenges abound, please know that our commitment to the university’s diversity goal is unwavering.
Consistent with Rutgers’ mission as the State University of New Jersey, Rutgers is committed to nurturing, maintaining, and enhancing opportunities for learning and understanding among individuals, communities and disciplines, and to promoting meaningful and inclusive engagement across a wide spectrum of characteristics and experiences.
Rutgers’ goal is to prepare tomorrow’s leaders for a world that is ever less homogenous and ever more challenged by the task of connecting across differences to build community, solve problems, and ensure prosperity. Rutgers considers diversity to be necessary to foster the cultural competencies, resilience, and openness to dialogue that promote the intellectual growth and intergroup understanding that are essential for success in the classroom, the university community, and society at large.
Overall, Rutgers pursues diversity to enhance the excellence of ideas, innovation, civic debate, learning, and teaching and to build a “beloved community” based on working together to reflect, respect, and embrace the complexities of all of our parts.
The diversity plan serves as a unified roadmap sharing Chancellor-led unit goals and action steps as well as overarching university strategies that will support their fulfillment.
Join us at the upcoming Chancellor-led unit Diversity Progress Showcases to reflect on the work that has been done and to envision the work that lies ahead.
Rutgers–New Brunswick: February 19
Rutgers–Newark: April 7
Rutgers–Camden: April 20
Rutgers Health: October 2024
The Ideas that Ignite Change series shares practices to enable us to build and sustain our community instead of coexisting in hostile proximity.
Each email blast starts with a message to spur reflection from Anna Branch, Senior Vice President for Equity, and includes resources from short articles to books and videos to put the idea into practice.
The alternative is to shut down and retreat to our ideological corners. Resist that urge and stay engaged.
Start small, read, and reflect on the ideas. When the opportunity presents itself, and it will, try one out.
We are partnering with Interfaith America to train a cohort of faculty and staff to be Bridging the Gap fellows. In fall 2025, they will work with the broader university community to increase our collective capacity to:
Education as disruption is an invitation to choose to be curious about what underpins hate and bias.
Use these resources to pursue understanding and grapple with how to engage across differences.
Watch the DEI Campus Climate Survey Data Release Webinar to contextualize the results. Take the time to:
Speak Up! is a call to action for all members of the university community to respond when they observe bigotry and to be vigilant about disrupting personally held bias.
More than just words, part of our institutional commitment in launching the University Diversity Strategic Plan was to promote transparency and accountability for progress.
Friday, March 07, 2025, 10:00 a.m.-12:00 p.m. | Virtual Event
Saturday, January 18, 2025, 9:30 a.m.-Thursday, January 30, 2025, 7:00 p.m.
"Recognizing diversity, fostering inclusion, and working towards common core values have become more urgent than ever ... As globalization renders our society increasingly multicultural, the answer lies in thinking more, not less, about the common bonds, public resources, and civic systems that bind us together as a nation, lest the very diversity we celebrate divides us." —Task Force on Inclusion and Community Values, Rutgers University–New Brunswick Strategic Plan
"For Rutgers University–Newark, excellence lies at the intersection of commitments to boundary-crossing scholarship, diverse talent cultivation, and engagement as an anchor institution in the world through collaboration—all of which are precisely what the public increasingly is demanding of higher education in the 21st century.” —Rutgers University–Newark Strategic Plan
"The Office of Diversity and Inclusion endeavors to make Rutgers–Camden, a leading research institution, a pillar for supporting equity, diversity, and inclusion in all activities, with a particular focus on educating students who will use this knowledge and experience to contribute to a more inclusive society." —Rutgers University–Camden Office of Diversity and Inclusion Vision Statement
"We are committed to becoming an inclusive learning community that fosters respect, belonging, and value for all with zero tolerance for bias, racism, and other negative ‘isms’... We support community engagement and connections with our local, national, and global communities to advance diversity, equity, and inclusion and eliminate health disparities." —RBHS Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion Statement
