Appointment of Senior Vice President and General Counsel

February 4, 2016

Members of the Rutgers Community:

I am very pleased to announce that John J. Hoffman, currently the Acting Attorney General for the State of New Jersey, has been appointed as Rutgers University’s new Senior Vice President and General Counsel, effective March 14, 2016. As Senior Vice President, Mr. Hoffman will report directly to me and will be the chief legal officer for Rutgers, including our boards and administration. I am deeply impressed by his intelligence and legal acumen, the wide range of statutory and regulatory issues he has handled, and his record of excellence in state and federal service, and I am eager to bring his leadership and expertise to Rutgers.

Mr. Hoffman, who has been Acting Attorney General since June 2013, has also served in state government as Executive Assistant Attorney General and as director of the Division of Investigations for the State Comptroller’s Office. He also has extensive experience in federal government—for seven years as Trial Attorney for the Civil Division of the U.S. Department of Justice and from 2004 to 2010 as an Assistant U.S. Attorney for the District of New Jersey, focused primarily on economic and white-collar criminal prosecutions.

Among his achievements as Acting Attorney General, Mr. Hoffman led an initiative to equip police with body-worn cameras and established a new policy directive on police-involved shooting incidents, improving the relationship between law enforcement and diverse communities. At the State Comptroller’s Office, Mr. Hoffman led a division that investigated and reported on issues of local and state government fraud, abuse, waste, and corruption. As Executive Assistant Attorney General he was instrumental in developing strategies for handling a docket of more than 10,000 cases in areas ranging from health care to consumer protection to securities to education financing.

A graduate of Colgate University and the Duke University School of Law, where he was editor of the law journal, Mr. Hoffman served as a post-doctoral fellow on the law faculty of the University of Tokyo and as judicial clerk for the Honorable Al Engel of the U.S. Court of Appeals, Sixth Circuit. He has also served in private practice in Washington, DC.

I thank the search committee members, led by Senior Vice President Barbara Lee, for their exemplary and expedient work in producing an outstanding pool of finalists for this critical position at Rutgers. Let me also take this opportunity to thank Lisa Wahler for her leadership as Interim Senior Vice President and General Counsel, a position she will continue to hold until Mr. Hoffman’s arrival.

I know you will join me in welcoming John Hoffman to Rutgers.

Sincerely,

Robert Barchi