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Credit: Nick Romanenko
Tranquility Farms owner Larry Freeborn,
left, discusses sprawl, smart growth and
agriculture with faculty members (left
to right) Jimmy de la Torre, Julia Sass
and Deborah Carr.
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Dan Morgenstern, (right) director of
the Institute of Jazz Studies at John
Cotton Dana Library on the Newark
campus, educates Elizabeth Leake,
assistant professor of Italian, on some
of the holdings of the largest archive
of jazz and jazz-related materials in
the world.
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Credit: Nick Romanenko
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Inaugural ‘New Faculty Traveling Seminar’ connects faculty to state – and each other
Five days on a bus is certain to bring a group of people close together, and the 33 new professors who took the New Faculty Traveling Seminar in May will likely have stories to share in the years to come.
“The trip opened my eyes, and I think those of many of my colleagues, to collaborative ventures with each other,” said Tim Raphael, an assistant professor in the department of visual and performing arts on the Newark campus. “Many ideas were tossed around, some of which are already under way.”
President Richard L. McCormick, who led the May 24-28 tour, brought the idea of a
“mobile classroom” to Rutgers. The staff of University Relations’ Office of Community Affairs designed the seminar – dubbed “Garden State 101” – with the help of a faculty advisory committee. The tour’s architects had several goals in mind: to acquaint new faculty with the places students call home, to help them understand issues and challenges unique to New Jersey and to help people realize how Rutgers affects the lives of New Jersey residents.
“We saw the communities where our students come from. We saw the varieties of industry and agriculture of cities and of challenges that New Jerseyans face,” McCormick said. “We saw it in ways that I think will permanently connect those 33 faculty members through their teaching and research in ways they may never have imagined.”
The tour group, all tenured and tenure-track faculty, spent five days and four nights exploring different parts of the state. The bus took participants from north to south, from Paterson and Allamuchy to Trenton to Vineland and Atlantic City. They met with mayors, legislators, teachers, high school students, farmers, business people, members of the arts community, current faculty members and Rutgers alumni.
Charles Kuperus, the state secretary of agriculture, said that the tour introduced farmers to faculty from across Rutgers’ many disciplines.
“Historically the farming industry has always had a strong relationship with Rutgers,” Kuperus said, citing relationships with Cook College and Rutgers Cooperative Extension. “What this tour did was bring the other parts of Rutgers University to the table to hear some of the issues that are confronting agriculture in New Jersey.”
For the faculty members, perhaps the most important aspect of the tour is that it gave them a better understanding of New Jersey, the home state of their new institution and, for many, a newly adopted residence. clearly was touching people in very personal ways. The faculty members were sort of connecting as citizens and sensing the analogy to their own hometown,” said Eagleton New Jersey project director Ingrid Reed, who accompanied the faculty for a day, joining the tour for dinner with several New Jersey mayors.
Raphael agreed. “While grueling, often baffling, always fascinating, it was most of all for me a connection to a place that is both the home of the students I’m teaching and the site of my family’s new life.”
The following vignettes offer a glimpse of the kinds of connections and comaraderie that can develop when you bring people who share common interests and values – as well as rich differences – together on a bus for five days.
Day I: A welcome to a state of contrasts
The golden dome of the Statehouse gleamed as the tour bus rolled into Trenton. It was the first stop on the first day of a week that would be filled with stark contrasts, rich history, proud people and myriad landscapes. Along the route from New Brunswick, Ingrid Reed, director of the Eagleton Institute of Politics’ New Jersey Project, and Sharon Ainsworth, director of state relations, laid the foundation for the next four and a half days with a primer on the state’s politics and peculiarities.
Reed noted that New Jersey is “crisscrossed by roads” along which thrive numerous settlements dating as far back as Colonial times. With little consolidation over the years, New Jersey remains a state of small communities, parochial attitudes and home-grown politics – admirable for their local community spirit but often bewildering for their bureaucracies and intense self-interest. As the professors-turned-students would learn, it is rife with fiercely proud citizens striving to meet the challenges of their own corners of this strikingly diverse state.
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