Diversity Timeline: Page 4 of 8

Diversity Through Time: 1960s

         1900s-1930s | 1930s-1940s | 1950s | 1960s | 1970s | 1980s | 1990s | 21st Century

Rutgers Law School-Newark hires its first woman professor, Eva Hanna Morreale.

The Black Organization of Students is founded. Over the next four decades, numerous student groups are organized, reflecting the growing numbers of diverse cultures embraced by Rutgers-Newark students. These groups raise awareness of their cultures’ individual history, art, music, literature, food and beliefs, and by creating strong ties to the greater Rutgers community, strengthen the diversity of the campus.

Following the Newark civil disturbances in 1967, the Rutgers Business School begins a concerted effort to recruit black students, recruiting at historically black colleges and universities across the country as well as bringing Southern educators to Newark to tour the campus.

In the wake of the 1967 disturbances, the business school also begins the Rutgers Minority Business Program to “help ensure that minority groups have an opportunity to participate in the mainstream of American economic life.” Within two years, Rutgers Business School forms the Rutgers Minority Investment Company (later renamed University Ventures), investing in minority small businesses.

In 1966, US Supreme Court Justice William Brennan, at the dedication of Ackerson Hall (then the new home of the Rutgers Law School-Newark) challenges the law school to graduate students who more truly represent the composition of the state of New Jersey and the city in which it is located. Two years later, the law school launches the Minority Student Program to increase the school’s numbers of racial and ethnic minorities as well as the economically disadvantaged.

Members of the Black Organization of Students and their supporters occupy Conklin Hall to protest the scarcity of black students, black faculty and minority-oriented academic programs on campus, and to demand changes, both on the Newark campus and in the entire University. The occupation helps trigger a chain of events that forever alters Rutgers, through initiatives such as the Educational Opportunity Fund (EOF), the Academic Foundations department, and new recruitment policies that increased the diversity of the student body and faculty.

The Institute of Jazz Studies, now the world’s largest jazz archives, makes its home at Rutgers-Newark.

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