Margaret Marsh
Dean

September 24, 2003

Roger Dennis, Esq.
Provost
Rutgers University - Campus at Camden

Dear Provost Dennis,

I am very pleased to present this year's annual report, detailing the activities of the Faculty of Arts and Sciences and the Graduate School on the Camden campus. I am particularly pleased with the accomplishments of our research centers and our programmatic success at the undergraduate and graduate level.

In September 2002, we welcomed eleven new faculty members in eight departments, ten assistant professors and one full professor. During the academic year 2002-2003 we hired eleven more faculty to begin in the fall of 2003, again in eight departments, ten assistant professors and one associate professor.

Over the course of this past academic year, our faculty received approximately $3.5 million in grant funding, published eleven books and 130 articles, and presented papers across the nation and around the world. Their work also included poetry and short stories, exhibits, and concert performances at places as nearby as the Kimmel Center in Philadelphia and Avery Fisher Hall in New York, and as far away as Austria and Turkey. Several of our faculty were honored with university awards in research and service.

We take pride, as a public research university, in the involvement of our undergraduate students in research, our dedication to excellence in teaching, and a commitment to our host city and region. Last year our students achieved in all these areas. Six juniors and seniors were honored with Dean's Awards for Excellence in Undergraduate Research. The history department inducted its first members of Phi Alpha Theta, that discipline's national honor society. Two juniors and seventeen seniors were elected to Phi Beta Kappa. The Sociology, Anthropology, and Criminal Justice Department received the Rutgers Award for Programmatic Excellence in Undergraduate Education.

Our students volunteered in the city of Camden, dedicating themselves to helping children and youth -- teaching reading and tutoring in academic subjects. One Honors College student created an SAT preparation program for the Camden school district. Our students also participated in study tours to South Africa, Ireland, Germany and the Netherlands, Russia, Northern Ireland, England and Cuba. Our undergraduates held numerous internships in organizations as diverse as NFL Films, Commerce Bank, the LEAP Charter School, and SONY Music Corporation in New York.

On the graduate level, we enrolled our first nine students in the new M.A. Program in Criminal Justice, an innovative program combining courses in public management, law, and administration with criminal justice theory and practice. The Graduate Program in Public Administration added a new concentration in Educational Policy and Leadership, a state funded project that forges a unique partnership with the Camden school district. Although our initial cohort of students for this program will come from the Camden school district, we expect it eventually to serve all of South Jersey and the region and make a substantial contribution in training teachers to be educational policy experts and administrative leaders.

The Center for Children and Childhood Studies, directed by Dr. Myra Bluebond Langner, celebrated its third birthday in March. In addition to the research activities of its faculty associates, the Center has a new book series, a thriving seminar program that brings senior and junior faculty from along the New York-Washington metropolitan corridor together with our own scholars, and a successful minor in Childhood Studies. Its signature outreach project, the Camden Campaign for Children's Literacy, has touched the lives of nearly thirty thousand children and adults in its two years of operation. The Center for State Constitutional Studies, directed by Dr. Alan Tarr, continued its Ford Foundation funded project on State Constitutions for the Twenty-first Century, which is designed to chart directions for the reform of American state constitutions. The Center also sponsored three conferences: on the Separation of Powers; American Constitutions; and a Global Dialogue on Federalism. The Mid-Atlantic Regional Center for the Humanities, a partnership with Temple University that is now being transferred solely to Rutgers, is a new venture directed by Dr. Howard Gillette. Its activities included a conference in Philadelphia on the controversy over interpreting slavery in Independence National Park that brought together activists, scholars, and representatives of the National Park Service; the development of new courses and internships for graduate students in public history; teacher-training workshops; and the creation of an ambitious new "electronic meeting place" that incorporates a "people and places" resource guide for academics and practitioners in the humanities and cultural organizations in the mid-Atlantic region.

The Senator Walter Rand Institute for Public Affairs and the Center for Strategic Urban Community Leadership, both of which are campus-wide ventures, are directed by Arts and Sciences faculty, Drs. Richard Harris and Gloria Bonilla Santiago, respectively. The Rand Institute raised $36,000 in scholarships and received more than a million dollars in funding for applied research and public service. The Center for Strategic Urban Community Leadership, among a host of important projects, took the lead in securing the $1.2 million grant for the new concentration in Educational Policy and Leadership in the graduate program in Public Administration.

Over the last few years the college and graduate school have been attracting more – and more highly qualified – students. We have new programs, new centers, a new general curriculum, excellent new faculty to join the outstanding scholars already here. I believe that we have reached the point where it will be very difficult -- perhaps impossible -- to support our successful ongoing programs, and to develop new initiatives, without concomitant additional resources. We need more faculty, more classroom and office space, more equipment, more staff to support the academic enterprise. Securing those resources will be a major priority for the short and intermediate term.

I am looking forward to working on this exciting challenge with you, my fellow deans, and the university leadership.

Sincerely,

Margaret Marsh
Dean