State of the College Address: February 2019

President Mercer delivered the spring 2019 State of the College Address on February 6, 2019. A summary of that address follows:

The state of the College is strong but we are on a precipice of sorts. The State budget looms ahead as does the release of the Secretary of Higher Education’s Plan. We continue to grapple for our share of students as well and their financial need continues to grow. Indeed, our reputation is strong, but fragmentation within the State, including now four designated research institutions and legislation that favors 60-credit associate degrees, place challenges on our capacity to continue to compete successfully in a shrinking market.

(Transcript not available.)

This is the time for us to innovate.

With respect to our academic programs, I am pleased to share that we have several new developments. We understand that we must continually evolve and actively strive for student success, and for that reason our exploration of fully-online programs continues. This is a re-envisioning of our delivery and one that will not only help us meet the needs of today’s students who often rely on the flexibility and convenience of online learning, but also, frankly,  provide a new revenue stream for the College, consider firstly the potential growth to our summer enrollment. Programs in nursing, business, and education have been tapped to be our first step into this arena, and we expect to launch the first fully-online program for a Fall 2019 cohort.

In addition to online programs based on our current offerings, during this academic year we launched:

• a new Philosophy major;
• a new Sustainability major;
• Management, Marketing, and Finance majors;
• a minor in Museum and Exhibition Studies; and
• a certificate program in Spanish for Healthcare Professionals

There are several other new programs under various stages of development as well. This is important. It is what we need to do. As a member of the N.J. President’s Council, I see our peers presenting new programs but look behind the curtain a bit and many times they are actually introducing old win in new bottles. That’s not good enough. We must be introducing new ideas and new programs.

Among the four goals of the College’s Strategic Plan: Fulling Our Promise is to “Advance Innovation as the College’s Promise and Obligation to its Students, Community, and the State of New Jersey.” Fulfilling Our Promise is accompanied by a visual mapping of indicators tied to the goals and outcomes in it. This mapping, Dashboard 2021, features approximately 60 indicators that will be updated annually and made available to the campus. Dashboard 2021 represents not only our attentiveness to advancing the College under the new strategic plan but also our institutional commitment to assess and continually inform that advancement.

Turning now to Middle States, we are engaged in the MSCHE Self-Study process.  Working Groups have submitted the second draft of the self-study document which is currently under review by the Steering Committee.  They look forward to presenting the Self-Study draft document to the Ramapo community during the month of April for everyone’s review and feedback, and I mean everyone. The chair of the Middle States visiting team will be on campus in the fall followed by the entire team in the spring of 2020; and I have already received suggestions about who will chair the team.

Turning back to Innovation, I am pleased to highlight a few of the recent innovative contributions of our faculty:

• Professor Iraida Lopez has been selected for a 2019-20 Fulbright Scholar award which will allow her to teach postgraduate courses in Fall 2019 at the University of Chile and the Catholic University of Chile. Our track record with Fulbright scholars is truly impressive and speaks to the talents of our faculty.
• Professor Amanda Roberti will receive the Carrie Chapman Catt Prize for Research in Women and Politics. The prize comes with funds for research on a project on conservative women state lawmakers and abortion regulations.
• Professor Naseem Choudhury set up a new virtual reality lab on campus. The lab is an interdisciplinary effort (with psychology, neuroscience, computer science and visual arts) to train students in creating interactive three-dimensional stimulus environments within which responses can be recorded.  This is a dynamic testing and training environment that offers students the option to develop and carry out experiments that are not available using traditional techniques. The future integration of VR technology with brain imaging provides our students with experience in a cutting edge and innovative technologies that makes them competitive for entry into graduate and professional programs.
• Professor Ashwani Vasishth f brought Dr. Biswajit Mohanty to campus several months ago to discuss local grassroots movements in India. The discussion illuminated the adverse impacts of the forces of globalization that act upon local communities and to better understand the innovative ways in which communities of the rural south there react to and resist these adverse pressures.
• Professor Paul Reck sponsored “Driving While Black in New Jersey.” Seton Hall Law Professor Mark Denbeaux, several of his former law school students including Marquis Whitney, Jason Castle, Anthony Osei, and a study participant, Tevin Bell, presented their research on racially and geographically selective police stop and ticketing patterns of motorists in Bloomfield, New Jersey. A fascinating discussion that helped us understand the broader phenomenon of racial profiling in the United States, including how it occurs, why it occurs, and what the consequences are for those targeted as well as the society as a whole.
• A collaborative effort between HGS, TAS and SSSHS, the Cahill Center, Study Abroad and the Grants Office yielded a new Certificate in Spanish for Health Care and Human Services. The program is funded by a $155,000 U.S. Department of Education grant and I want to recognize Professor Natalia Santamaria and all involved in that work.
• Professor Michael Edelstein earned a $294,000 grant from a Hawaiian non-profit to study the Native Hawaiian geothermal psycho-social health impact. I have tremendous admiration for anyone who can secure a research grant in Hawaii.
• We are awaiting the final budget approval of about $400,000 from the NJ College and University Sexual Violence Awareness and Response Grant Program from the Department of Justice. Congratulations to Kat McGee, Marie Attis-Springs, Claudia Esker and the others who worked on this grant.
• Professor Kathy Hajo has had additional grants funded for the Jane Adams Papers
• Professor Sandra Suarez earned additional funding for the Upward Bound Math/Science Program.
• Associate Dean Kathy Burke earned a National Institute for Health grant for her work with the Ramapough Nation on health intervention.
• The Cahill Career Development Center received a $3500 grant from Enterprise Holdings Foundation to increase student engagement. Enterprise, a longtime partner of the Career Center, has over 20 Ramapo alumni working for their company in various capacities.

In 2019, the Berrie Center for Performing and Visual Arts is celebrating its 20^th anniversary. The Center was the first building on our campus with a $1Million donation behind it.  The Center will host the Les Paul Festival, which is generously supported by the Les Paul Foundation,o n  February 16 and will feature guitarist Bill Frissell and Grammy-award nominated hip-hop producer and 2014 alum Brandon Korn. Concurrently, our art galleries will be filled with exciting and provocative work in our semester-long exhibition curated by gallery director Sydney Jenkins.  Entitled !!!PUBLIC ART??? INQUIRIES, ENCOUNTERS, the exhibit will include graffiti art by Lady Pink, works on monuments by Howard Skrill, and a series of lectures, performances, protests, and provocations around the campus, including a dance workshop from Black Lives Matter choreographer/activist Shamell Bell at the Arch on April 4. The very next day, our Theatre Program will present Shakespeare’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream in the Sharp Theater. There is a nice symmetry here that the production will be directed by Professor Terra Vandergaw, who directed the same play as the first production on the Sharp Theater stage in 1999.

The College’s 13th Annual Diversity Convocation and Pre-Convocation Luncheon will take place on Wednesday, February 13th. Convocation will feature Emmy Award winner John Quińones, from the ABC News Program “What Would You Do?”  In addition, the Pre-Convocation Luncheon will feature Guest Speaker, Dr. Kevin Kumashiro, award winning author and education consultant.  All are welcome and there is no charge to either event, but seating for the Luncheon is limited.

As mentioned in the Fall, plans are currently being finalized for Diversity & Implicit Bias Training for all Staff, including Administrators, to take place in late May or early June. The training will be mandatory for all Staff and will last a minimum of two hours.  The training will be similar to the one provided to Faculty in April of last year and it will be offered at least two different times to accommodate employee schedules. A Bias Reporting Form has been set up online on the EDIC website. Individuals can now report claims of Bias on campus anonymously. In addition, the Bias Response Team that was announced last fall will have its first meeting within the next few weeks.

Banner 9 is fully live with Banner 8 having been decommissioned as of the start of the year and the Ramapo College “BUG” (Banner User Group) had its inaugural meeting in early January and will continue throughout the year. ITS has also been instrumental in advancing Mobile Print campus wide.  You can send an email to print@ramapo.edu and print the attachment in any computer lab, including in the Fishbowl, by swiping your Ramapo ID. ITS is also rolling out a new help desk ticketing system that will greatly increase the visibility of requests and provide feedback to clients at every step of the resolution process, with the ability to create requests with an email, from a web site, or even an app on your phone.  WiFi upgrades will be coming to Overlook over spring break and once Overlook is complete, The Village is up next, with WiFi upgrades planned there for the summer.

The College was recently inspected by NJ Department of Environmental Protection for compliance with hazardous and medical waste. The College was found to be in full compliance. In addition, we completed a Public Employee Occupational Safety and Health (PEOSH) safety consultation to assure safe roof work for employees. All of the recommendations from that consultation are now in place.

Other physical enhancements to campus include Ramapo’s much anticipated Dunkin’ which officially opened in the Fall semester, after a complete renovation of the Adler Cafe over the summer break.  The grand opening was held on November 28^th and for the total of four weeks that Dunkin’ has been open, here are the results: 13,939 Total Customers serviced, 4,860 Donuts purchased, and $61,385 in Gross Sales. What I like most about this bit of news is the anecdote that opening Dunkin’ was not born from an institutional desire to get you to spend more money, but rather to simply spend the money you were already expending elsewhere here on our campus.

The Potter Library moved to its temporary location in Linden Hall over the winter break and opened on time on January 22nd. The lovely renovated space is fully open, providing all regular Circulation and Research Help services, computer labs with new printers, group study rooms, study spaces, Interlibrary Loan, and print book collections. If you have not yet walked through the space, do so. The beauty and ease of it exceeds its transitional status.  The Center for Holocaust & Genocide Studies is on the 1st floor and The Center for Reading and Writing is on the 2nd floor.

Further, the Learning Commons project is currently on schedule and hitting all of its milestones. The 90% Design Plans are currently under permit review by the DCA, and bids for the interior demolition work in the existing Potter Library building were received on January 17th.  Contract award is expected by February 15th, with construction activity starting by the end of February.  You will witness the building peeled back to its studs, it will be transformed, but it will also be noisy. The Learning Commons Campaign has now reached more than $9.5 million in gifts and pledges toward our goal of $15 million. I am most grateful to the Board of Trustees for their 100% participation in the campaign and their $1 million Challenge Grant to attract new alumni donors who have never given a restricted gift before.  We also are working with our Campaign Cabinet on a special 50^th Anniversary Appeal to support the Learning Commons at the $50,000 level.

This year nearly $1Million will be awarded in student scholarships, faculty support and college support through endowment income and annual scholarships. Students receiving more than 480 named scholarships will be honored by the Foundation on April 9^th at the Annual Scholarship Dinner.  Further, we are pleased to share that total gift income for both current operations and capital purposes, as reported on the Voluntary Support for Education (VSE) / CASE Higher Education Survey grew by 25.2% from 2017 to 2018.

The Student Governors and SGA will be hosting our Annual Day of Giving next week. An interesting factoid, February 12^th, 1969 was actually the date the Ramapo College Board of Trustees met for the first time but they didn’t actually know that they were the Ramapo College Board of Trustees at that time because the college was not yet even officially named. Student Governors, Jennifer Noctor and Ryan Greff, are working with the Foundation to organize this effort which begins February 12 and will run just beyond February 13. Faculty and staff may wish to know that anybody who donates by February 13 will be entered into a raffle for a parking space.

The Commerce and Industry Association of New Jersey recently recognized Ramapo College and the Foundation at its 5^th Annual Best Practices Conference saluting innovation in the workplace.  Our Allocations Grants Program was cited for its innovative way to create “workplace heroes at all levels.”  This program provides an opportunity for faculty, staff or student organizations to advance a project with an emphasis on leadership, engagement and diversity.  In the last five years, grant awards have increased by more than 30%. The successful spring grant recipients will be announced on February 28th.

As part of Ramapo’s continued commitment to addressing campus sexual violence, the College applied and was accepted to join NASPA’s Culture of Respect Collective. The Collective is an ambitious two-year program that brings together institutions of higher education who are dedicated to ending campus sexual violence and guides them through a rigorous process of self-assessment and targeted organizational change.  The program is grounded in an expert-developed public health network, cross campus collaboration, and peer-led learning to make meaningful programmatic and policy changes.  As part of our participation, we will receive strategic support and technical assistance throughout the process, as well as detailed documentation of campus-initiated changes that support survivors, prevent sexual violence, and communicate that violence is utterly unacceptable. Ramapo College of New Jersey will be connecting with 40 other institutions, both national and international, in this third cohort of the program.

In Fall 2018 and for the third semester in a row, the All-Greek GPA average, All-Greek Women’s GPA average, and All-Greek Men’s GPA average was higher than the undergraduate average. Further, in the fall, the Greeks completed 5,278 hours of community service and raised over $17,000 for numerous causes.

In November, the Civic and Community Engagement Center hosted the annual OXFAM hunger banquet.  The event explores the global issues of food insecurity, poverty and injustice. Approximately 101 students and staff attended the dinner this year.  The participants experienced world poverty firsthand through a simulated event whereby they were placed in high, middle or low class income brackets and experienced classism while partaking in a meal.  The participants experienced the imbalances of food distribution and access to food and processed how they felt going through the simulation as the event transpired. The College has almost doubled the number of participants who experience the dinner, as the 2016 dinner had 60 participants. The event also offered discussion around Ramapo’s We Care Program (food pantry and student emergency relief fund), as well as the Hunger Free Campus bill promoted by Assembly Speaker Craig Coughlin.

In January, 10 students and 1 trip leader, attended the CCEC’s first-ever Alternative Winter Break to India.  In the city of Bengaluru, the students worked with and learned from some of the most dynamic non-government organizations advancing equity and human dignity in South India.  The students also worked with Fireflies, a center promoting Earth spirituality, the resolution of ethnic violence and deepening civil society in India.  Students drove through a safari and a forest that is home to wild bison, tigers, and elephants.  There was still 10 that returned.

On January 20, students and staff from the Center for Student Involvement attended the Apollo Uptown Hall: Unsung Champions of Civil Rights from MLK to Today where they participated in interviews and panelists discussed Dr. Kings’ legacy and its impact on modern social justice movements.

As I mentioned earlier, the Office of the Secretary of Higher Education hosted three forums about higher education in New Jersey to help inform the state plan. According to OSHE, the forums focused on affordability, preparation for post-college employment, and student success. SGA President, Stephan Lally, served on the panel at Rowan University on November 19, 2018 and the College hosted a live stream of the event.

On November 10, 2018, the College Programming Board and Student Government Association hosted the College’s most successful concert to date.  A Boogie Wit Da Hoodie (known as “A Boogie”) performed in the Bradley Center to a sold out student crowd of 1300 individuals.  A Boogie is an American rapper, singer, and songwriter.  In the weeks leading up to the event, the Center for Student Involvement hosted 2 student auditions for the house DJ and opening act.  A student was selected to be the house DJ for the event where music was offered while students were welcomed to the arena and in between sets.  Omiette Allisson, a junior majoring in Music with a concentration in Music Production and a minor in Music Industry, competed against 9 other student acts and was selected as the opening act for A Boogie.

Implemented with the Registrar and ITS, the Center for Student Success is developing customized degree plans for all first-year students using U. Achieve software.  Faculty will be invited for continued training through the Academic Advisement Council and their Unit Council meetings.

Via our Transfer Advising Corps (TAC), Enrollment Management, Student Success and Admissions continue to focus on advancing the College’s efforts to partner with county colleges in order to facilitate a seamless transfer of students from the Associate’s degree to the Bachelor’s degree.  This semester, we have added both Raritan Valley Community College and Hudson County Community College as our newest partner institutions in the transfer advising corps model.  In this model, we continue to have a Ramapo staff member spend one day per week at the county college building brand and meeting with students in an attempt to increase the number of transfer students from each partner school.  This has also been identified by the new Secretary of Higher Education as a key priority and so Ramapo is positioned well to support this state initiative.  VP Romano and I are also in conversations to begin advancing this work with Passaic County Community College this spring.

A special acknowledgment to our Public Safety, Facilities and Housekeeping teams who helped when a pipe burst on Jan 24th and flooded parts of the 4th and 3rd floors of Gwing. Residents of Gwing greatly appreciate the work of Public Safety, who was on site within minutes of the alarm, Facilities for the repair, and Housekeeping for the spectacular cleanup, as well as the Dean of Students and the Registrar who found alternate classroom and lab spaces for us. After the cleanup, the TAS lab staff made sure that all equipment was up and running and safe to use.

The Honors Program took four students to the National Collegiate Honors Conference in Boston in November. Junior Finance major Stephanie Guzman won second place in the national poster competition. Her research examined the use of migrant labor in the US agricultural industry. The Honors Program is sending fifteen students to Nepal for the first Honors Alternative Spring Break, and taking ten students to the Northeast Regional Honors conference in Baltimore in April.

The President’s Committee on Campus Sustainability is launching a survey to assess the opportunities and possibilities open to the College in our campaign to become a leader in sustainability. The College is participating in the 2019 RecycleMania Contest, to improve our recycling rates and to reduce the volume of solid waste and trash we are generating.  It would be really helpful if we could all pay particular attention to how much stuff we throw away and how effectively we recycle.

Professor Neriko Doerr has launched a Fair Trade Campaign, with help from Professor Ashwani Vasishth and the support of the President’s Committee on Campus Sustainability. They will be hosting a series of events–starting with a film screening during Valentine’s Day week. Students, staff and Faculty can now share rides using Wheeli, a Ride Share App and your Ramapo College email address. For any questions, concerns or suggestions with regard to sustainability at RCNJ, send an email to ramapogreen@ramapo.edu.

The Krame Center for Contemplative Studies and Mindful Living has been working to imbue mindfulness and stress-reduction strategies for Ramapo Faculty, Staff and Students. Everyone is welcome to the free weekly meditations in ASB 420. There are now 5 and 30 minute meditations being held in classrooms.  To support faculty, there is a Mindful Fellows Program with the deadline for sign ups this week and convening group meditations beginning next week.

Finally, the Ramapo Staff Association is continuing to undertake efforts to build community and staff cohesion and provide professional development activities.  In January, RSA partnered with Human Resources to host “Personality Styles at Work” and RSA extends an invitation to all to join them at Biggie’s tomorrow after work for Happy Hour.  See you there.

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