Charting a Pathway to Our Future

September 24, 2010

Members of the Rutgers Community:

Today at the first University Senate meeting of the year, I delivered my eighth Annual Address to the University Community.

As I pointed out this afternoon, our students, faculty, and staff continue to achieve distinction—two examples are the recent Wall Street Journal survey of corporate recruiters, who ranked Rutgers 21st in the nation, and the more than $430 million in grant funding won by our faculty. But Rutgers faces difficult budget problems, and my speech focused on the causes of those problems, our short-term response to them, and our long-term plans for solving these problems in order to achieve our ambitions.

Below is a link to the full text, which I encourage you to read, but here is a brief summary of the key points of my speech:
The most significant cause of our budget problems is the decline of government support for higher education. Our operating aid has fallen back to the actual dollar level of 1994, when we had 10,000 fewer students and the dollar was worth more than it is now. Other causes include the recession, increasing government regulations, and the pressure to compete with well-funded private universities.
The short-term response has included a salary freeze that has been a significant burden on our employees—but the alternatives at hand, such as furloughs, pay cuts, and massive layoffs, are even worse. Along with the salary freeze, we are finding savings and efficiencies, increasing enrollment in targeted areas, and making strategic investments that will preserve the excellence and fiscal soundness of the university.
For the future, our decisions should be marked by three qualities: cost savings and efficiencies, strategically chosen investments, and the generation of new revenues. We will be working to attract more international, out-of-state, and nontraditional students to Rutgers; increase online, off-campus, and other revenue-generating programs; and expand our international efforts, with a particular focus on increasing our presence in China.

On October 13, we will launch the public phase of a $1 billion fundraising campaign–entitled “Our Rutgers, Our Future”—to increase scholarship support, bring more world-class scholars to Rutgers, carry out our mission as the state university, and ensure that our facilities match our ambitions.

A copy of my full remarks is available at www.president.rutgers.edu/address10_speech.shtml. As always, I welcome your thoughts, questions, or comments on any of the topics raised.

Richard L. McCormick
President
Rutgers, The State University of New Jersey