Major Initiatives of Robert Barchi’s Presidency

Shortly after becoming president, Dr. Barchi led the communitywide creation of a five-year strategic plan to put Rutgers on a path to become a leading public research university. Building on the plan, he championed initiatives  positioning the 250-year-old institution as a 21st-century academic powerhouse. Here are some of the major initiatives the university pursued during his presidency.

STUDENT EXPERIENCE

• Established and built the Rutgers New Brunswick Honors College to attract the highest-achieving students from New Jersey and beyond.
• Developing student-friendly online and one-stop locations for course registration, financial aid, student accounting, and other essential student services.
• Redesigned class schedules, bus routes, and housing assignments to ease overcrowding and reduce student travel at Rutgers–New Brunswick.
• Modernized academic advising across Rutgers to keep all students on course toward a timely degree.
• Installed cutting-edge “telepresence” classrooms at Busch, Cook, and Camden, equipped with synchronous-learning technology that allows students at different campuses to take the same course together without traveling to a single location.

ACADEMIC EXCELLENCE

• More than doubled the number of endowed professorships at Rutgers.
• Charged committees to recommend changes to the university’s academic organization and deepen the use of educational technology to become a model for 21st-century higher education.
• Dedicated $10 million to bolster Rutgers’ outstanding humanities programs and $40 million to further diversify the faculty.
• Installed one of the country’s 10 most powerful university research computers, more than doubling Rutgers’ computing power, to enhance a research portfolio ranked among the top 25 in the United States.

UNIVERSITY INFRASTRUCTURE

• Integrated nearly all units of the former University of Medicine and Dentistry of New Jersey into Rutgers, completing the largest higher education merger in the history of American higher education.
• Created, with input from thousands of students, faculty, staff, alumni, and board members from across the Rutgers community, the university's first comprehensive strategic plan in nearly 20 years.
• Committed $2.5 billion in capital construction, including major new academic buildings for chemistry, life sciences, business, nursing and science, dental medicine, engineering, nutrition, performing arts, and pharmacy.
• Transformed the College Avenue Campus with its first new academic building in a half-century, an honors college, a popular student-apartment building with ground-floor restaurants, and a pedestrian- and bike-friendly avenue redesign.
• Developed a physical master plan to guide construction and redevelopment on all campuses through 2030.
• Overhauled and modernized all business systems and unified Rutgers’ and the former UMDNJ’s operations (part of the largest university merger in American history) into a single platform.

HEALTH CARE LEADERSHIP

• Established Rutgers Health, bringing together all clinical care elements at Rutgers, and the Rutgers Health Group, a multi-specialty faculty practice of more than 900 providers at the university.
• Collaborating with RWJBarnabas Health to form New Jersey’s largest academic health care system, committed to outstanding patient care, medical research, and medical education.