Mr. Chairman, officers of the Executive Committee, Senators, faculty, staff, students, and alumni, good afternoon. Thank you for inviting me to speak before the University Senate. Although I have sent out various electronic messages and videos to the university-wide community, and although I have met with various groups of faculty, staff, students, and alumni, this is my first opportunity to address the Rutgers community live. I sorely wish that I could be doing this in person.

It goes without saying that in the eight months since I was named the 21st president of Rutgers more than a few things have changed in our collective lives. I will not take up our time wondering about all the different agendas we might have been able to pursue were we not facing a global pandemic, a profound moment of racial reckoning, and stunning financial setbacks that have challenged individuals and institutions in ways that most of us have never known. This is a difficult moment, and it is one that will require our collective efforts in order to emerge a better community and a stronger university.

The annual address has been an opportunity for the president to detail a list of accomplishments from the previous year and to present an agenda of measurable targets for the future. This is an important exercise and it may well be that my future addresses will align with that approach. This year, however, is different. I can stake no claim to the accomplishments of the last twelve months, most of them under the leadership of my predecessor, Bob Barchi, and, as we all know, COVID's arrival upended so many different aspects of daily university life, cutting short progress toward goals on a wide range of fronts. Given these circumstances, I am offering you a different kind of address, one in which I will focus my attention on a set of value propositions related to Rutgers that are forward-looking and draw from what I have learned through observations about this great place in my six months of transition and almost three months at the helm. It is important that I share these propositions with you now because they will inform decisions that we will make in the coming years.

For the next twenty-five minutes or so I will talk with you about the ideal of a beloved community, the importance of being relentless in our pursuit of academic excellence, and the need to develop strategic institutional clarity. These are not the only things that will occupy my time as your president, of course, but it is my hope that through my words and actions over the coming years you will be able to look back at this moment and see that I was committed to these values from the very start of my tenure and that they are recognized as hallmarks of my presidency.

Before I get into the main body of this presentation, however, I’d like to take a few moments to reflect on the late Ruth Bader Ginsburg. We have all seen the richly deserved memorial statements about Justice Ginsburg. She possessed a sharp legal mind, an arresting wit, and an unyielding dedication to justice. For someone of such diminutive stature, Justice Ginsburg stood tall. She was unafraid to be pointed in her critique of power, especially when it was directed against those without power, who were overlooked by history, and who were rendered voiceless by the circumstances of their gender, race, paycheck, language, religion, sexuality, and nationality. She was also an excellent historian. When she argued her first case before the Supreme Court in 1973, she quoted 19th century suffragist and abolitionist Sarah Grimké: "I ask no favor for my sex. All I ask of our brethren is that they take their feet off our necks."1  Powerful words when first written in 1837, equally evocative when quoted in 1973, and now, in 2020, haunting for their relevance.

I honor Ginsburg not just for her sharp legal mind and dedication to justice but because she is one of our own. Ginsburg's first position after completing her legal studies and clerkships was at Rutgers Law School. It may sound strange to our ears today, but Rutgers can take pride in the fact that the university extended an offer to a woman in the first place, as there were fewer than twenty female law professors in the country at that time, in 1963. However, Rutgers' pride in this accomplishment comes with a significant asterisk. When Ginsburg was hired, she was told that she would be paid less than her male colleagues because her husband had a well-paying job. Rutgers was forced to address this inequity when Ginsburg and other female colleagues filed a class action federal anti-discrimination claim against the university.

Throughout her career, Ginsburg demonstrated a keen ability to work with others who had starkly different views on key issues—her surprisingly close friendship with Justice Antonin Scalia is the most famous example of this. Ginsburg's commitment to equity and justice did not blind her to the fact that we often share more things in common with our opponents than we care to admit. If Ginsburg held a grudge against Rutgers for the way she was compensated when she was first hired, you could not tell it when she agreed to be interviewed on the occasion of the university's 250th anniversary. In that interview, she spoke about how Rutgers law students "sparked [her] interest" in the role of women in the law and that they "aided in charting the course [she] then pursued." Ginsburg concluded, "Through the years, Rutgers has remained steadfast in its commitment to diversity; advancing opportunities for people long left out to aspire and achieve."2

Ruth Bader Ginsburg. The Notorious RBG. A great jurist and an even greater human being. Remembering Justice Ginsburg and, in particular, her humanity, is an effective way to turn our attention to the first of my three value propositions: the need for a beloved community.

When I introduced myself to the university in late January, I spoke about my belief that a university should aspire to be a beloved community. Since then, I have made it a habit to talk about this ideal whenever I have met with groups of administrators, staff, faculty, students, and alumni. On all of those occasions I have pointed out that a beloved community is not a place where everyone agrees with one another. That would be a boring community. Rather, I have spoken about the value of a true marketplace of ideas and opinions, and the need, often an uncomfortable one, to listen to others with whom you may have deep disagreement. In that act of authentic listening, one is demonstrating that the disputants have something more valuable in common: an acknowledgement that they both belong to the same community and that they both share the obligation to take care of it. This form of acknowledgement is powerful and can be transformative.

In order for this acknowledgment to be effective, however, we must all be prepared to ask hard questions of ourselves: whom do we acknowledge and how? Who matters to us and why? To whom should we turn in times of need, when we are looking for the best possible answers, when we want to maximize our potential? In asking these hard questions we may come across some uncomfortable truths—that we prefer to talk to our own type, whatever that means; that we don’t know the names of, or worse, won't make eye contact with, the people who do the hard work of maintaining this great institution on a daily basis; that we prefer an easy path toward an acceptable answer instead of the challenging path that will lead to the best results.

I believe in a beloved community and I am only interested in securing the best results. In order to realize the first and achieve the second we need to do everything we can to make sure that we are seeking talent everywhere it is expressed and that we are mindful of our own challenges while we are in pursuit of that goal. Rutgers is known for being an incredibly diverse university. This makes sense as most of its students and alumni hail from one of the most diverse states in the country. But is that diversity the product of happenstance or is it intentional? And if it is intentional, is it understood as a strategic advantage? 

In order to answer those questions and others, this summer I called for the first internal equity audit of the central administration. Anna Branch, professor of Sociology and, prior to September, the Vice Chancellor for Diversity, Inclusion, and Community Engagement at Rutgers-New Brunswick, led the audit. She surveyed more than 150 administrative leaders across the university, both in central administration and in the chancellor-led units. She also coordinated a self-study among senior leaders and worked with our institutional research team to develop a scorecard of key equity indicators. The purpose of this study was to take stock of where we are, to identify areas where we need to improve, and to start the process of articulating what appropriate next steps need to be taken in order to become the national leader on this topic. We released the findings to the public on September 15. If you have not yet taken a few minutes to process the audit's findings—something I encourage all of you to do—let me summarize them with broad strokes here: the central administration is viewed as a unit that cares deeply about diversity and inclusion. It is less clear, however, how the administration operationalizes its vision and how it measures success. Put another way, it is not enough to say that one values a diverse workforce or an environment of diverse ideas, the central administration must hold itself accountable for setting standards for the rest of the university to follow when it comes to the value proposition that an equitable workplace embodies.

Because I believe deeply in the ethical and pragmatic importance of a diverse and inclusive community, and because I also see the strategic value of such an environment, I have taken the first step toward holding the administration accountable by creating a new position within the central administration that will be dedicated to these issues. I announced a couple of weeks ago that Anna Branch will be the inaugural Senior Vice President for Equity. As the SVP for Equity, Anna is charged with developing and implementing a strategy for diversity, equity, and inclusion at the university that embraces diversity as a core institutional value, formulating strategic university goals, and ensuring the coordination of priorities across central administrative offices and chancellor-led units.

She will pursue these goals when she conducts audits of other university units by deploying many of the same qualitative and quantitative methods used in the first equity audit. Anna will be in close communication with the diversity and inclusion leaders throughout Rutgers in order to improve our local cultures on these matters, and she will bring greater coherence to the resources we currently deploy at Rutgers as we work to achieve our ambitions. I want to make clear: the first order of Anna's work is not about pointing fingers and assigning blame. These audits are not being conducted as weeding-out exercises. Rather, we should look at these moments of internal reflection as opportunities for all of us to find ways to be better. There are, undoubtedly, certain places at the university that are top performers on issues of diversity, equity, and inclusion. But we cannot claim that the entire university operates at that level. I deeply believe, however, that if an organization wants to be a strategic leader of its field in the mid-twenty-first century it must demonstrate a deep, intentional, and authentic commitment to equity. The university-wide diversity strategic planning process that Anna will lead will be critical to making that commitment concrete and a part of all we do.

So far, I have mainly spoken about the critical role that a commitment to equity plays in achieving a beloved community. I want to take a moment, though, to emphasize that this is not the only factor in building such a space. While we are searching for ways to articulate a new commitment to an equitable community, we also need to imbue that quest with a healthy dose of respect: respect for one another's humanity, respect for differences, and a respect for the important roles that each of us plays in the university community.

On this last point, from the moment I put my name into the hat as a candidate for the presidency, I have been acutely aware—more so with each passing week—that the history of labor-management relationships at Rutgers is fraught. Understandably, that relationship has been strained in the current fiscal climate as labor feels exposed and under threat and while management feels stuck in an impossible situation that demands remedy but lacks a clear and financially secure way forward.

I do not believe for one moment that my arrival will automatically change the difficulties that have burdened this relationship. However, I am going to do everything I can to see if we might establish a new way forward. I have made it clear to my senior management team that I want to approach negotiations from the standpoint of collaboration. Any negotiator who is driven by a desire to win is not paying attention to the fact that we are all on the same team. In my conversations with labor leaders I have said the same thing: we need to find ways to work together. This means that management must listen to labor. But this also means that labor must listen to management. We all need to step away from our past disagreements, recognize the extreme challenges of this specific moment, and start laying the foundation for a new future.

By coming to the table as negotiators who are willing to replace cold-hearted tactics and political theater for honest, if difficult, conversations among team mates, I am certain that we can find solutions that protect our most economically exposed employees, that stay within the boundaries of state and federal law, that provide a safe and healthy workplace, that acknowledge the fiscal realities of any given moment, and that demonstrate a commitment to transparency when reasonable requests for information are made.

If we do all of the above it does not mean that we will agree on everything. That would be an unreasonable expectation. What it would mean, though, is that we have done the important work of acknowledging one another and that we understand that we share more in common than not. When healthy, these differences make the community interesting and vibrant. I worry that in our current state of affairs in this country, the default runs in the opposite direction, where differences are seen as opportunities to separate people and turn them into negative caricatures of who they are in reality. We all must do better than that if we ever want to live in a beloved community. I hope everyone listening to me will join me in this work.

Around this time last year, I was approached by a representative of the presidential search committee, inviting me to apply for the Rutgers presidency. I declined to do so on a number of occasions for purely personal reasons. If I were to become the president it would mean a year of commuting since my wife and son would remain in Evanston, Illinois, for his senior year of high school. As much as I admired Rutgers, I was not interested in spending that much time away from my family. Well, it is obvious that the thing I didn't want to do from a family perspective has happened, and I now find myself spending more hours than before in Facetime calls and family group chats. One of the main reasons that I decided to apply for the position is because of what Rutgers already represented. I knew the university to be a top tier, major research university that had a proud history of being accessible to populations who had historically been overlooked by other institutions: first-generation students, immigrants, students from low socio-economic backgrounds, underrepresented minority students, students for whom English was not the primary language spoken at home. These are the hard-working students who, on a daily basis, demonstrated that excellence could be found anywhere as long as an institution was willing to look for it. Put simply, Rutgers' commitments meant that it was an institution that transformed people’s lives, and I wanted to do what I could to be part of that story.

As I entered the presidential search process I discovered a different aspect of Rutgers that confounded me and that continues to be a puzzle: in the academic arena, Rutgers punches below its weight. Academic excellence abounds at this university. We have an amazing faculty who populate some of the strongest departments of their kind in the nation. We can boast of facilities throughout our system that are best-in-class. We hire faculty from the best doctoral programs in the country. We attract undergraduate and graduate students who have the potential to make transformative contributions to the world. We have staff who deploy their considerable skills and expertise to ensure the organizational excellence that propels the institution. We are all of these things, and yet our academic reputation lags. I see it as one of my key jobs to do everything possible to change that dynamic and to help my peer presidents and provosts realize that Rutgers is a major player that they should respect.

I start this work by recentering the academy within the university. This may sound like a strange statement given that research and teaching are at the heart of our entire reason for being, but I heard too often during my transition that faculty often felt ignored by the central administration; that faculty voices only resonated at the dean, provost, and chancellor levels of the university. Part of this, no doubt, is due to Rutgers' overly complex administrative structure. But part of this reflects the fact that faculty may not feel fully connected to the central direction of the university in ways that would help us create faculty bridges between the chancellor-led units. By building these bridges—mainly through inter-campus initiatives—we will be better positioned to amplify the already excellent work of our faculty. And once we find ways to highlight our scholars' great achievements we will be able to start to move the reputational indicators that, to this moment, are lagging Rutgers' reality.

I took my first step down this path when I started the search for Barbara Lee's replacement—such that one could ever replace Barbara. You will recall that Barbara served as the Senior Vice President for Academic Affairs. Although she was by university statute the chief academic officer of the university and second in rank only to the president, her title did not reflect that status. I signaled a critical change in this place when I restored the chief academic officer's position to where it belongs as Executive Vice President for Academic Affairs. The search committee I empaneled this summer did an excellent job vetting a very strong applicant pool, and I was pleased that I was able to tap Prabhas Moghe, Provost and Executive Vice Chancellor for Research and Academic Affairs at Rutgers-New Brunswick, as my new EVPAA. By area of expertise, Prabhas, a professor of Biomedical Engineering and Chemical and Biochemical Engineering, serves as a very nice disciplinary complement to my standing in the humanities and qualitative social sciences. More than that, however, Prabhas will bring enormous energy and vision to the position. Although he does not officially start until October 5, Prabhas is already hard at work thinking through how he will align his team with key strategic initiatives that will set Rutgers apart from its peers.

As Executive Vice President, he is charged with coordinating academic programs throughout the university system in collaboration with the provosts and chancellors. As Barbara Lee did before him, Prabhas will chair the Promotion Review Committee and manage the tenure and promotion process across all academic units. He will oversee the university’s global programs as well as its online and continuing education—areas we need to enhance so that Rutgers can be better positioned in these markets as it emerges from the pandemic.

Prabhas and I also agree that we have to be more focused in our recruitment and retention of leading scholars. One way in which we plan to do this is by securing the resources to develop opportunities for inter-campus exchanges through new academic initiatives, some of which emerged through the Big Ideas selection process that started before my arrival. There were many excellent proposals that emerged through that process, but we were compelled by projects that crossed unit boundaries and addressed major problems of our time. Research programs exploring artificial intelligence, climate resilience, public health, and infectious disease will be areas where we pursue special funding opportunities.

There is no doubt that we must have our best minds in the relevant fields focusing their attention on the pressing needs associated with these areas of inquiry, and I look forward to making announcements when we find those resources to support new initiatives on these topics. I am certain that Rutgers has an out-sized role to play with regard to AI, the climate crisis, health inequities, and pandemic sciences because we already have leading faculty who are operating in these spaces. But we cannot afford to be satisfied with what we already have, we must always be on the lookout for new scholars and new ideas.

Keeping this in mind, it brought me great pleasure to announce yesterday that we have secured a $15 million grant from the Mellon Foundation to fund a new initiative at Rutgers that reflects the kind of creative energy that the Big Ideas symposia generated. The Institute for the Study of Global Racial Justice will be a scholarly project that spans the breadth of the university with centers based on the New Brunswick, Newark, and Camden campuses—and, to be sure, will encourage involvement from RBHS scholars. The Institute will be aligned with the Mellon Foundation's humanistic orientation and will be committed to the idea of the humanities as a discipline that travels beyond the concept of "art for art's sake." The Institute will fuel and amplify the scholarship of researchers who are based in the humanities or lean on humanistic methods and whose work has consequences in applied spaces such as policy reform, K-12 education, social justice work, and the carceral state.

With this new institute, Rutgers will be declaring its deep investment in the areas of inquiry related to anti-racism and social inequality, at home and abroad. In this way, Rutgers will be demonstrating that, as a university, it will be a welcoming place for scholars who are committed to the study of race and related systems of inequity that emerge from their instantiation in systems of governance, culture, commerce, and social control. This grant allows us to recruit more emerging and top scholars who work in these areas, regardless of academic discipline, and also provides resources that will help us build compelling retention cases of our top young talent. The Institute also gives us the opportunity to fund post-doctoral fellowships so that we will have an early look at the next generation of academic leaders on these critical topics.

Finally, I turn to the issue of strategic institutional clarity. If Rutgers is going to live up to its potential, if it is going to secure a reputation that is in line with its excellence, we must commit ourselves to developing a new culture that is committed to strategic clarity. Linguistics and organic chemistry can be confusing, but Rutgers as an institution can't afford to be. As many of you know, I spent most of my career at Yale. If you include my five years of graduate school, I was actively engaged at Yale for twenty-three years before moving to Northwestern. Given my long tenure at Yale it won't come as a surprise that I can tell you in fewer syllables than a haiku what separates Yale from its peers: it is a humanities-based research university. And even though I was only at Northwestern for three years I don't require that many more syllables to articulate what helps that school stand out: it is a research university with a deep investment in interdisciplinary scholarship. The situation at Rutgers is considerably more challenging and not only because it's larger than Yale or Northwestern.

As I was conducting my due diligence prior to my interviews as a candidate for this job, I still recall the effort I had to expend in order to explain what Rutgers is. Due to the accidents of history, politics, circumstance, and non-strategic thinking, there is no single essence or mode of engagement for Rutgers. There is no haiku-length description that can capture Rutgers' complexity: it is a research university with one president, four chancellors, five provosts; two chancellor-led units that comprise that segment of Rutgers that is part of the Association of American Universities as well as the Big Ten Academic Alliance; it is Carnegie Research 1 and 2, and NCAA Division I and III; and some consider it a system while others, like our accreditors, the Middle States Commission on Higher Education, understand it to be one university. This kind of narrative complexity encumbers my ability to tell a concise and effective story about the university to alumni, legislators, donors, investors, foundations, and businesses. Given that one of my most important jobs is to be the university's chief fundraiser, this is a problem that we must address.

For this reason, I created a new position within my administration: Senior Vice President for Strategy. Brian Ballentine, formerly my chief of staff, now occupies that seat. This unit is a four-year pilot project and I have charged Brian with building a small team, mostly composed of Rutgers faculty and staff, who will be responsible for working across the chancellor-led and central offices to develop and support the execution of major strategic priorities for the university. Brian and his team will be charged with pushing forward projects that will bring coherence to university strategy and that will strengthen the university's position in New Jersey and in the national landscape of higher education. They will evaluate existing and new strategic initiatives, assure alignment with the institution's vision, and lead inclusive, cross-cutting planning efforts.

I want to reassure those who are feeling anxious that this new position is my way of trying to exert control over the entire university. That is not the case. Rather, as president, I believe that I am in service to the university wherever and however it is expressed. And while I certainly have my own views about the university's values and the need to develop agendas that are aligned with those values, my first impulse is to identify those attributes that make Rutgers special and to do everything I can to amplify them. For example, Rutgers-Camden, Newark, New Brunswick, and RBHS each has its own attributes—areas of excellence, areas on the cusp of greatness, and areas in need of a critical reassessment. By working closely with the chancellors in each unit, the Office of Strategy will help identify ways in which the central administration can lend its assistance and direct or redirect resources accordingly. Further, the Office of Strategy will ascertain what campus systems or processes are doing well but would be even better were they to be unified under a common purpose and direction.

Starting from this point of general purpose and principles, the Office of Strategy will also be taking on discrete and time-limited projects that are essential to our university mission. Brian is working with me and with the senior leadership team to define a comprehensive list of projects and time-sensitive initiatives that we must begin addressing as soon as possible. For example, when the RCM budget model was established in fiscal year 2016 the university leadership promised a future review so that the system could be refined as needed. As it happens, this is the year that the administration agreed to launch the review. This is the top item on Brian's to-do list—more details will be forthcoming on that front later this semester. Also on Brian's plate will be conversations with Enrollment Management about the arrival of the so-called enrollment cliff that will put significant pressure on universities' ability to operate; a wide-ranging reflection on what a post-COVID landscape looks like for Rutgers and how we can position ourselves for success; and a strategy for how Rutgers defines and communicates its value.

In mid-December last year, I sat down with my wife Aisling and we talked about what it would mean to put my name into consideration for the Rutgers presidency. While we knew that if I were to be named to the position it would mean a period of dislocation for the family, it was clear to the both of us that this was an opportunity too important to let pass. Not quite six weeks later I was introduced as the president-designate. To this day, despite the challenges of a viral pandemic, despite the financial difficulties that emerged, and despite the upheavals associated with a global moment of racial reckoning, I have not once wavered in my belief that this is the right job for me. Of course, I would not have scripted this kind of scenario for me to accompany the start of my tenure, but try as we might, we can only be the authors of so much of our destiny.

From the moment I joined this community as president-designate it has been clear to me that I would not be working alone as I did what I could to write Rutgers' destiny. No, this is the collective work of the entire Rutgers family: the staff who maintain the physical plant and who keep us safe and secure; the students who energize our campuses and challenge us to be our best selves; the faculty who teach, write, mentor, and explore, and in so doing contribute to improving the world; the administrators who work tirelessly to ensure our systems and processes are sound; and our alumni who carry their Rutgers pride with them and who understand the ways that Rutgers played a transformative role in their lives. All of us, working in our own spaces, have already helped to craft a story that is impressive and enduring. If we can find ways to work together, to embrace the idea of a beloved community in which we acknowledge one another and respect our differences while still moving forward; if we can find ways to elevate our pedagogy and research practices as we seek to discover new solutions to challenging problems; if we commit ourselves to building an organization that embraces clarity and that is able to align itself with university goals…if we can do these things I know that we will be able to stand back and marvel at what Rutgers will have done for the state, the nation, and the world.

Thank you for your time and attention this afternoon, thank you for all the hard work that you have done in the years that have preceded my arrival, and thank you in advance for joining me in writing the next chapter for The State University of New Jersey.