Making the Ideal of a Beloved Community Real

November 11, 2020

Dear University Community, 

I am writing to offer warm greetings and introduce myself to many of you in my new role as Senior Vice President for Equity.  

We are a compositionally diverse community, but we have work to do to value our differences and cultivate mutual respect.

President Holloway has shared his vision for Rutgers as a beloved community, recognizing our inherent complexity but pointing us toward an aspiration to work on behalf of each other, to see our fates as linked. A beloved community is a transformative idea, an invitation to build the community of our aspirations—one Rutgers committed to advancing excellence through diversity in all of its forms.  

The equity audit made clear we have much work to do, but in launching the universitywide diversity website we also aim to showcase the great work that has been done that we will build on. In the coming months, we will launch the diversity strategic planning process and invite you to share your perspectives on how we can chart a more inclusive path forward. However, we must start by making the ideals that are guiding our work concrete. 

To that end, I am delighted to share with you the poster series, Picturing a Beloved Community, which introduces our core values, beautifully illustrating how Rutgers University aims to make the ideal of a beloved community real. These principles shape our action-oriented goals and provide a roadmap as we work to become a more equitable and inclusive university community.

Beginning today and over the coming months, we will introduce a new poster in the series, nine in total, connecting each value to ongoing initiatives that make us a beloved community. Our hope is to inspire you to engage with the values, tag us @RUDiversity on Twitter, Instagram and Facebook, and share what the values mean to you and how you have lived them out. 

Building the community of our aspirations will require all of us, and shared values are important even when we fall short because they clarify what the ideal is. This is your community—take action today to ensure it is beloved.

In Partnership,

Enobong (Anna) Branch
Senior Vice President for Equity and Professor