University Diversity News

When racist, antisemitic graffiti was spray painted at Scotch-Plains Fanwood High School in 2018, officials reached out to the Truth, Racial Healing and Transformation Center at Rutgers-Newark to help address the hatred behind the vandalism.
The effort helped ease tensions, which had long existed in both towns, and resulted in heightened awareness of bias and discrimination. Since, the center has held several “racial healing circles” in Scotch Plains and Fanwood, guiding participants to discover what they share with people of diverse backgrounds.

As grocery prices have increased in 2022, so have the numbers of students turning to the food pantry serving the Rutgers University–Newark community. “We've had a lot of new users,” says Hend El-Buri, director of PantryRUN. “Many are people who have never needed to ask for help.”

Fiserv, Inc. and Rutgers University–Newark celebrated their commitment to minority business owners in New Jersey last week at an event announcing the statewide launch of the financial tech company’s Back2Business program, which will support the state’s minority-owned small businesses with a total of $1 million in funding.

Rutgers Student Affairs will dedicate a reading room of nearly 2,000 books from the personal library of Cheryl A. Wall, a longtime professor at the university and highly regarded scholar of African American literature, American literature and feminist criticism.

Three Rutgers Today staffers recently attended the Tyler Clement Center's first Inclusion Summit, organized to bring members of the Rutgers Community together to explore issues of diversity, equity, inclusion and accessibility. Panels explored issues of race in America, neurodiversity, indigenous history and culture and understanding culturally significant holidays.

Nyeema Watson, the vice chancellor for diversity, inclusion, and civic engagement, is at the helm of Rutgers–Camden’s efforts to expand excellence in equity and education.

Rutgers–Camden Chancellor Antonio D. Tillis, Camden Mayor Victor Carstarphen, and community leaders gathered to celebrate the exceptional contributions of six Rutgers–Camden students who worked alongside Camden leaders this summer.

Read a letter from Keywuan Caulk, director of the Center for Social Justice Education & LGBT Communities, about the power of coming out.

For Hispanic/Latinx Heritage Month, we asked students to write an open letter about their heritage; their loved ones and those responsible for their cultural upbringing and to share what makes them proud to be who they are. These are their stories.

Faculty across Rutgers share why it's important to mark this day and what are appropriate ways to honor the holiday that commemorates the end of slavery in the United States.

“Taking time to recognize members of our community in this way each year speaks loudly and clearly about our values,” said President Jonathan Holloway. “The work that today’s honorees are doing to build a beloved community at Rutgers is so important.”

The initiative grew out of an op-ed President Jonathan Holloway wrote for The New York Times about requiring a year of national public service from all young people before age 25 so they can help others while getting to know others’ similarities and differences through a common purpose.

Rutgers has opened a new building to better serve adults with autism spectrum disorder through vocational and recreational programs, making it possible to expand existing programs to address a growing need in New Jersey, which has the highest autism rates in the country.
The Rutgers Center for Adult Autism Services Community Center, a 10,000-square-foot facility on the Douglass Campus of Rutgers University-New Brunswick, is the first of its kind at a higher education institution in the United States. The $9.5 million project was financed with philanthropic funds.

A renowned scholar of late 18th and early 19th century American history, Alexander joined Rutgers University this year as the new Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. Professor of History and will begin teaching classes this semester.

Fifty-six years after Martin Luther King Jr. told students at Southern Methodist University that “we have come a long way, but we still have a long, long way to go,” Rutgers philosopher Derrick Darby is making a similar argument.
In his new book, A Realistic Blacktopia: Why We Must Unite to Fight, Darby draws on King, W. E. B. Du Bois and the Black radical tradition to explore how to make progress in the antiracist struggle.

Pulitzer Prize-winning Rutgers-Newark professor Salamishah Tillet will co-curate an exhibition of monumental scale artworks created by six artists called Pulling Together for the inaugural exhibition of Beyond Granite, a commemorative program launching on the National Mall and around Washington, D.C. in 2023.

Three professors from Rutgers University Newark’s Department of Earth & Environmental Sciences (EES) recently secured a $4.3 million National Science Foundation (NSF) grant that links RU-N graduate students and faculty with the Newark community to work collaboratively on solutions to environmental issues.

Rutgers University–Camden researcher David Salas-de La Cruz, associate professor of chemistry in the Camden College of Arts and Sciences, is keenly aware that plastics touch every facet of our lives. However, rather than profit from his knowledge of plastics, Salas-de La Cruz has made it his life’s work to replace the petroleum-based materials fueling the world economy with natural alternatives.

Reflecting on a childhood spent among the Hispanic and white populations of the Southwestern United States, Rutgers University–Camden Assistant Professor of Psychology Andrew Abeyta, Ph.D. recalled feeling “in between”—not fluent enough in Spanish to fit in with recent Mexican immigrants, nor part of the narrow definition of “American” held by his white peers. Abeyta lived his formative years feeling like an outsider in his own community, which later provided the focus of the psychological research he conducts.

PBS audiences will get a rare glimpse into the ordinary lives of extraordinary abolitionists Harriet Tubman and Frederick Douglass in a pair of new documentaries featuring two Rutgers–New Brunswick historians.

Rutgers scholar Elie Honig’s short film on the 60th anniversary of the trial of Adolf Eichmann is a contender for outstanding news analysis: editorial and opinion. The project, which was very much a personal one, is up for an Emmy Award.

Built in the mid-1840’s, the Peter Mott House is one of the few surviving Underground Railroad sites owned by an African-American abolitionist in an African-American community.

Roxane Gay, an internationally recognized writer, editor, cultural critic and educator, has been selected as the next Gloria Steinem Endowed Chair in Media, Culture and Feminist Studies at Rutgers University–New Brunswick.

Rutgers music professor Min-Kyung Kwon will be performing the world premiere of James Ra’s "Fantasia on Sae Taryeong" on piano Saturday as part of the New Jersey Symphony’s Lunar New Year celebration.

As the Newark Festival begins October 6, the Paul Robeson Galleries are hosting new exhibitions as part of the celebration and encouraging viewers to check out new murals on campus, created with gallery support. The presentations are in keeping with the gallery’s mission to honor the life and work of activist and artist Paul Robeson, said the galleries’ director and chief curator Anonda Bell.

Cyril Reade, Ph.D., director of the Rutgers–Camden Center for the Arts (RCCA), has unveiled the work of six artists with deep personal and professional ties to the city of Camden in the exhibition “Portraits of Camden.”

Express Newark was conceived as an art-making “third space” in which the university and community would come together with equal voices and experiences. As cultural institutions all across the United States face a reckoning over racial injustice, Express Newark urgently responds to these demands by valuing art’s ability to amplify marginalized voices, address critical issues, and advocate for change. This initiative addresses many of Rutgers’ strategic priorities.

The Global Village Art as Activism House, a Douglass living-learning community focused on the global role of art in social justice, wrapped up the academic year by putting on their annual exhibition, which included student artwork that focused on the theme of creating community.

In this moment of profound uncertainty, reconnection, and newfound creativity, the organizers of the Black Portraiture[s] conferences invite the submission of abstracts summarizing a paper, panel, or performance related to the role of “play” in past and contemporary African Diasporic art, performance, liberation struggles, and cultural work.

For the first time in 48 years, all three student theater groups at Rutgers-New Brunswick are being led by artistic directors of color.
It’s no coincidence, said the trio – Cabaret Theatre’s Uchenna Agbu, College Avenue Players’ Kyle Cao and Livingston Theater Company’s Kira Harris. Their diversity reflects a growing trend toward inclusion both at Rutgers and in the arts, media and society at large, they said.

International student AnnMarie Bediako guided teens in Philadelphia and South Jersey in explorations of career possibilities.

The Rutgers–Newark Debate Team, founded in 2008 and sponsored by the School of Public Affairs and Administration (SPAA) and the Office of the Chancellor, was chosen to host the event in part because of its track record of historic wins. Since 2014, it’s been ranked among the 20 best debate teams in the nation.

Rutgers Summer Service Internship Initiative taught Danna Green about the power residents have to make a difference.

After graduation, Murillo Salazar is considering law school and is interested in pursuing immigration law, where the knowledge she has gained from the School of Criminal Justice will give her a better understanding of how the law can be used to help struggling immigrant families, she said.

Rutgers student Olena Shutko interned with the Healthy Homes impact team, which is part of a community organization called Believe in a Healthy Newark. Her experience helping the city implement lead-free housing policies inspired a new career outlook for her own future and positively affected living conditions for Newark residents.

The president of RCC for the 2021-2022 school year, Sabrina Lew, reflected on the club’s major growth. “We’ve more than doubled in size since then—with nearly 100 members coming to our meetings—despite the challenges of sustaining it in a virtual setting due to COVID.”

Rutgers University–Camden graduates celebrated with four commencement ceremonies and the inaugural Rites of Passage ceremony for Black and Latinx students.

In high school, Gary Carter had a mentor who taught him about accounting. “It inspired me to become an accountant,” Carter said. “He shed light on how having your own assets, your own business would bring you generational wealth. I wanted to learn more.”

Every Wednesday after school this spring, students at the Paul Robeson Community School for the Arts in New Brunswick have been moving, dancing, leaping and twisting, all while learning about community, emotions and identity.

When Tom Pisano started making rounds in his wheelchair, he worried his patients would consider him less capable than his Robert Wood Johnson Medical School peers. However, he quickly found it had the opposite effect on patients and put them at ease.

Faculty and students from Lives in Translation, a RU-N effort recruiting undergraduate volunteers to serve as interpreters, testified in front of the New Jersey State Senate Government Committee, advocating for a bill that would improve accessibility for residents with limited English proficiency.

Charles A. Brown began leading Rutgers Business School’s Office of Diversity Programs nearly a decade ago, overseeing programs to attract historically underrepresented students to business fields and to prepare them to take on leadership positions in the corporate world.

The conference, called the Annual New Jersey Convening on Diversifying the Teacher Workforce, will be held in coordination with the New Jersey Department of Education (NJDOE) and the New Jersey Association of Colleges for Teacher Education (NJACTE). It will feature policy makers, district leaders and Rutgers-Newark faculty and researchers discussing efforts to increase the number of Black and Latinx educators in New Jersey.

Rutgers–Newark is proud to be named a Fulbright Hispanic-Serving Institution leader for the second year in a row by the U.S. Department of State’s Bureau of Educational and Cultural Affairs (ECA). This designation recognizes the noteworthy engagement that selected Hispanic-Serving Institutions (HSIs) have achieved with the Fulbright Program, the U.S. government's flagship international educational exchange program.

When Sandra Harris founded the Douglass Development Disabilities Center (DDDC) in 1972 little was known about autism, and the services needed to help children with this neurological developmental disorder were scarce.
Fifty years later, as the DDDC commemorates a half-century supporting the autism community and providing training for professionals, the prevalence of autism has risen with 1 in 44 8-year-old children in the United States and 1 in 35 in New Jersey on the autism spectrum.

The university’s first diversity strategic plan, announced in a message from President Jonathan Holloway to the Rutgers community, identifies five key priorities: developing a diverse community, promoting inclusive scholarship, defining substantive community engagement, building capacity for inclusive climates and developing the infrastructure to drive change.

Jonathan Holloway is a leading scholar of Black history, a professor at Yale University for many years, a deep-dive academic who has written and edited several tomes on the topic.

During the opening night, virtual Alumni Mixer for Access Week, a participant wrote a racist message in the Zoom chat and the “N” word across the screen. We identified the participant and promptly removed the person from the meeting. The incident was reported to university authorities. Our guest speaker was gracious with his time and stayed until everyone who had a question received an answer.

The Institute for the Study of Global Racial Justice at Rutgers (ISGRJ) named four of the university’s most distinguished academic scholars in civil rights, history, literature, and creative writing as directors of campus branches across the university and launched a postdoctoral program supporting research in anti-racism and social inequality.

Michelle Stephens is steering the work of the new institute, funded through a $15 million five-year grant from The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, that will bring together scholars from across the university to use humanistic theories, methods and approaches to study global issues of race and social justice.

Rutgers is taking new steps to acknowledge its connection to slavery and racial injustice with the creation of four additional historical markers that tell the story of its early benefactors whose families made their fortunes through the slave economy.

President Jonathan Holloway promoted Enobong (Anna) Branch, sociology scholar and author, who also manages the division of diversity, inclusion and community engagement at Rutgers University-New Brunswick, to her new role in August 2020. Branch’s first order of business: lead the University Equity Audit Holloway commissioned to identify areas for improvement and the next steps to make Rutgers a national leader in diversity, equity and inclusion.

“It is really about helping people understand the social mechanisms that create, maintain, and reproduce social inequalities,” said James Jones, an assistant professor in African American studies at Rutgers University-Newark who studies race, politics and culture and is one of 12 faculty members from across the university recently selected as fellows at the institute.

Black History Month is nearing a close, but the effort to build a more inclusive community at Rutgers is just getting started. This month Rutgers Today spoke with two women who are leading that charge: Enobong (Anna) Branch, senior vice president for equity at Rutgers University, and Nyeema C. Watson, vice chancellor of diversity, inclusion, and civic engagement at Rutgers University-Camden.

The Black Camden Oral History Project, led by Kendra D. Boyd and Jesse Bayker, will tell the stories, through first-person accounts, of life and activism in the city, including the Black student protest movement at Rutgers University–Camden.

Academic stress takes a toll on the mental well-being of certain groups of college students more than others – a correlation further exacerbated by the COVID-19 pandemic, according to a Rutgers New Jersey Medical School study.

Rutgers researchers provide guidelines for fertility preservation counseling before gender-affirming medical procedures for transgender men.

School of Communication and Information Associate Professor Charles Senteio and his research collaborators based in Brazil seek to use Natural Language Processing (NLP) to examine words and phrases used in medical records to identify biases which can help inform interventions.

Rutgers professor of sociology Karen Cerulo, Ph.D. analyzes what it means to dream and imagine future possibilities, and how people’s dreams differ based on a variety of social factors.

Assata Davis’s passion for racial and social justice was sparked in middle school at the start of the Black Lives Matter movement and continued to grow at Rutgers University-New Brunswick’s Honors College, where she thrived as an academic standout and student leader.

Ralph always wanted to attend Rutgers because Princeton native Paul Robeson, star performer-athlete and activist, had studied there, she told OWN’s “Where Are They Now.”

An expert on how race, politics, history, and popular culture intersect in America, Jelani Cobb happily shares the twists and turns of his lifelong love of learning. From attending elementary school in Queens to storming the administration building at Howard University to earning his doctorate at Rutgers University and serving as dean of the journalism school at Columbia University, Jelani (which means “strong, powerful”) Cobb has blazed a trail of accomplishment.

In some ways, the chance to direct Lorraine Hansberry’s theatrical masterpiece “A Raisin in the Sun,’’ which opens at Newark Symphony Hall on Sunday, is the result of a dream deferred for Rutgers-Newark alumna and retired vice chancellor Marcia Brown.

Rutgers alumni Sandy Jaffe and Linda Stamato have funded the creation of a research fellowship at the Honors Living-Learning Community (HLLC) at Rutgers University–Newark. A key admissions factor at HLLC is a commitment to social justice and community building.

Carolina Cabrera DiGiorgio’s journey taught her about its destination. It began in Honduras, grew in New Jersey, and flourished at Rutgers–Camden and in the practice of corporate law. Now it is blossoming as DiGiorgio shines in a new role: president and CEO of Congreso de Latinos Unidos.

Rutgers–Newark alumna Nancy La Vigne is a widely recognized criminal justice policy expert who last month was appointed by President Biden to direct the National Institute of Justice, a component of U.S Department of Justice’s Office of Justice Programs, which works to reduce crime, assist victims, and advance racial equity in the administration of justice.

RWJBarnabas Health, the largest, most comprehensive academic health care system in New Jersey, has been recognized by Newsweek as one of “America’s Greatest Workplaces 2023 for Diversity.” RWJBarnabas Health is one of 1,000 companies in the United States to earn the designation. RWJBarnabas Health, in partnership with Rutgers University, is New Jersey’s largest academic health care system.

For decades, the U.S. has partnered with African nations to meet shared health challenges. A recent U.S.-Africa Leaders Summit marked an opportunity to announce new actions and renewed commitments from the U.S. to combat cancer across the continent of Africa.

For millions of Americans who suffer from epilepsy, advanced monitoring is essential for diagnosis and effective treatment. But in New Jersey, accessing these services is difficult for patients from racial and ethnic minority groups, according to a Rutgers study.

Three associate deans from the Rutgers School of Public Health recently designed and obtained funding for a scholarship program that will cover half the costs of tuition for 84 students, according to a press release.

Rutgers medical students from the community service organization North American Disease Intervention (NADI) were providing the on-site screenings as part of a health fair organized by Rutgers Global Health Institute in collaboration with multiple local partners.

The grand opening of a new model for medical research and innovation from Robert Wood Johnson University Hospital and Rutgers Robert Wood Johnson Medical School took place recently with the unveiling of the Center for Innovation, located on the main campus of the hospital in New Brunswick.

Coral Omene, MD, PhD, medical oncologist in the Stacy Goldstein Breast Cancer Center at Rutgers Cancer Institute of New Jersey has been awarded a $50,000 grant from the V Foundation for Cancer Research in partnership with ESPN to increase clinical trial awareness and enrollment of Black women with breast cancer.

Whatever your role or practice environment, as a nurse, you are called to lead. Nurse Leadership through Crisis: Examining COVID-19, Health Equity, and Care a free, on-demand webinar, offers experience-based insights from seasoned nurse leaders, with practical pointers to help you meet challenges effectively.

Rutgers University–Camden has received a $306,000 grant from AmeriCorps and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention as part of a new initiative to enhance public health resources across the country.

Rutgers is launching a new initiative to improve the health and quality of life in economically disadvantaged communities dealing with food insecurity, high unemployment, low high school graduation rates and shrinking household income – funded through a $10 million grant from the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation (RWJF).

A health clinic run by Rutgers School of Nursing–Camden now offers a safe space for guests to receive basic medical care and advice. Many of the guests have no insurance and previously had to rely on emergency room visits to address routine conditions.

Join host Mary Marchetta O’Dowd as she welcomes Dr. Denise Rodgers, RBHS Vice-Chancellor for Interprofessional Programs, to discuss the relationship between race and health, the state of health disparities in minority populations, and the steps we can take to change the landscape.

A conversation led by Camden native George Hill, a nationally renowned microbiologist and educator, enlightened city residents and Rutgers University‒Camden students, faculty, and staff about COVID-19 vaccines.
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