Graduate School’s reputation soars in half a century
Archived article from Oct 6, 2003
By Amy Vames
A half-century after its founding, the Graduate School–New Brunswick is celebrating its past and looking ahead to many more years of graduate education and service to the state.
While the school is marking 50 years since it was formally established, graduate courses were offered at Rutgers College as far back as the 1870s. In 1882, the college’s trustees approved a set of requirements for earning graduate degrees: a master’s degree took one year of courses and a thesis; a doctorate took two years of study in two related disciplines and a thesis. But graduate education was pretty much a sideline at Rutgers until about the 1930s, according to Harvey Waterman, associate dean of the Graduate School. A graduate faculty was formed in 1932 and there was talk then of creating a graduate school.
At that time, the private universities in the East and the state schools in the Midwest had particularly strong graduate programs, but the public universities in this part of the country lagged behind, Waterman said. World War II, however, changed all that, as servicemen returned home and the demand for highly skilled workers grew. The Graduate School, which also encompassed the Newark and Camden campuses until the 1970s, was finally established in 1952.
“There was enormous growth between the late 1960s and the late ’80s in the size of the Graduate School,” said Waterman. “In the 1980s, the quality of the students, faculty and programs also grew tremendously.” Around that time, there was also a big change in the nature of the school: There was now more emphasis on doctoral degrees and less on master’s degrees, he said.
In addition, the infusion of state money for graduate fellowships and new research centers, and the hiring of “world-class scholars” by the university “had a revolutionary impact on the Graduate School and made us more competitive with other schools,” Waterman said. Several of the school’s 59 programs are nationally esteemed, including philosophy, English, history, physics and mathematics. “Our reputation has skyrocketed,” said Jolie Cizewski, vice dean of the Graduate School. “We can attract better students and when we attract them, we attract even better faculty members.”
Rutgers’ Graduate School–New Brunswick is also a leader in a nationwide movement to better prepare teaching assistants, particularly those from other countries, for whom language can be a problem.
What’s ahead for the Graduate School’s next 50 years? Waterman looks forward to the likely restructuring of Rutgers and UMDNJ, saying that a merger would increase the efficiency of operating programs that are now jointly run by the two institutions. Cizewski added that the role of postdoctoral students, who have long been undervalued in the life of the research university, is being more closely studied. “There is no salary structure for them or career services, but this is something we’re working on,” she said.
Graduate education will continue to be a crucial element of Rutgers’ service to the state. “Graduate students are important recipients and providers of education,” said Waterman. “They are an important factor in the recruitment of faculty members and in the representation of the university to the outside world.”
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