Rutgers University–Newark is a leading urban research university that leverages diversity and high-impact scholarship to cultivate the talent essential to transform communities and change the world. An anchor institution in our home city, we are not just in but of Newark. The RU-N community has long recognized that our location is both a defining influence in our story and a distinctive strength. Our long-standing recognition as one of the most diverse research universities in the United States reflects the diversity of our city and region.
We attract and cultivate globally competitive talent on many levels, from generations of students hungry for the opportunities afforded by a first-rate higher education in a major American urban center, to faculty who vigorously embrace the opportunity to produce high-impact scholarship and engage the community while preparing these students for professional success and informed citizenship. Our location is also a magnet for professional staff committed to advancing our research, pedagogy, and social impact within an inclusive campus culture focused on excellence. These factors underlie RutgersNewark’s perennial recognition as one of the nation’s most effective universities at facilitating social mobility
We seek to forge mutually beneficial, sustainable partnerships that pool the talent of our faculty, staff, and students with that of experts across the public, private, and nonprofit sectors, which not only makes for better, more creative solutions to the grand challenges facing our world, but creates more effective learning environments. Our work toward this end is organized under five broad areas that capture much of the scholarly expertise and civic-oriented interests in anchor institution work:
• Building Inclusive Educational Pathways to Increase Postsecondary Attainment
• Achieving Equitable Growth through Urban Entrepreneurship and Economic Development
• The Arts and Culture
• Strong, Healthy, and Safe Neighborhoods
• Science and the Urban Environment
Our strategic activities in these areas range from cross-disciplinary initiatives rooted in community, to partnerships with diverse “communities of experts,” to co-created spaces in the city and region. A few examples include:
• A Center for Urban Entrepreneurship and Economic Development and Center for Law, Inequality & Metropolitan Equity that are core contributors in the City of Newark’s efforts to advance equitable growth while mitigating gentrification that threatens to displace longtime residents, 85% of whom identify as African or Latinx American;
• A broad-based collective impact network of 40+ organizations working together to increase college attainment in Newark, The Newark City of Learning Collaborative;
• A new Honors Living-Learning Community emphasizing “local citizenship in a global world” that has been lauded as a national model in The New York Times;
• Express Newark, a 50,000-square-foot university-community arts collaboratory in the historic Hahne & Co. building downtown;
• Catalyzing the Newark Public Safety Collaborative, a group of scholars, law enforcement, city officials, nonprofits working on re-entry of formerly incarcerated city residents, and community members using evidence-based approaches to increase the safety and security of neighborhoods and decrease recidivism; and
• The work of environmental geochemists from the university working with community groups to identify and remediate the presence of toxins in the soils of community gardens.
When you partner with Rutgers-Newark, you:
• Fuel an engine of economic prosperity and social mobility for diverse new generations of change makers;
• Leverage the ‘diversity bonus’ to create better, smarter solutions that result when people of many backgrounds tackle problems together;
• Increase educational access and pooling ideas and resources across the public, private, and nonprofit sectors to create more sustainable, equitable communities; and
• Spur collaboration and learn what it means to live and work across differences that threaten to divide us.
