Chancellor's First Year: Getting to Know Newark and Rutgers University

This is Part 2 of a four-part Q&A series on Chancellor Tonya Smith-Jackson's first year at Rutgers.

A crucial aspect of Rutgers University–Newark Chancellor Tonya Smith-Jackson’s job involves working with the city of Newark and forming relationships with municipal government, nonprofits, grassroots organizations and long-time stakeholders, such as Prudential and NJPAC. As an anchor institution, RU-N’s involvement with the city is central to its identity. 

Getting to know the Rutgers University system, and RU-N’s place within it, has also been an ongoing process. As part of our series on the chancellor’s first year, she described gaining an understanding of both Rutgers and Newark.

What have you discovered about Rutgers-Newark and its role in the city and state?

The most striking thing has been how proud people are. Our faculty, staff and students are proud to be a part of Newark, and they have found ways to have this mutually beneficial relationship. How many universities are there where students, staff and faculty go out en masse to spend a day participating in a program? But here it happens all the time. I’m also impressed by the influence that our staff have in terms of engaging with K-12 students and helping them see they can be what they want to be. We’re getting this anchor mission thing right. We have it down to a fine science: how to be a real partner in the community and an equal partner. All we need to do is scale it up.

In the listening sessions we organized this year, what emerged was yes, we’re an anchor institution, but we’re also an anchor-empowered research institution. We want to leverage that to increase our economic impact and attract external funding. And we can do it in ways that contribute to economic renewal. More external funding, facilitates partnering with the community to create your own workforce, tackling urban problems that are such a big focus of our research. 

What has been very inspiring is the way that the state, and in particular the Essex County delegation, along with President Tate, advocates for Rutgers-Newark to help provide us with the resources we need. They also help the state recognize what we return to them as an institution, in terms of the workforce and our overall economic impact.

What have you learned about Rutgers and the role of Rutgers-Newark within the university-wide system?

This past year I’ve been understanding more about what Rutgers actually is: e pluribus unum, from many, one. It recognizes that although it's one university, each of us has a different personality and we serve different constituents. It was good to find out that we were recognized and appreciated. We have a unifying theme of access and opportunity, but we go about it differently. At Rutgers-Newark, it’s also about designing a system so that we better align with access and opportunity for certain groups, especially first-generation students and those from low-income backgrounds, that will yield social mobility.