Outgoing president warns of drop in ‘black, brown students’

The focus of media coverage of the Trump administration’s ramping up of pressures on United States higher education institutions has been on the Ivy League – elite private institutions – and top public universities, with the likes of Harvard, Columbia and the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA) in the eye of the political storm.

But what impact is the chaos caused by the president’s executive orders having on universities across the sector as a whole?

University World News talks to Jonathan Holloway, president of Rutgers University, the state university of New Jersey, a public research university with 70,000 students which receives close to US$1 billion a year in grants and sponsorships.

Holloway will be stepping down at the end of June after five years of leadership which began during the COVID-19 pandemic and included the challenge of containing campus conflict during pro-Palestinian student protests and, most recently, the chaos caused by Trump’s executive order against diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI) programmes and international students.

In a remarkably candid and in-depth interview, Holloway, himself an eminent African-American historian, warns that in this context the population of “black and brown students” is going to drop at many universities and that LGBTQ+ students will be “less out”, for fear of “literal violence and also political violence”.

And, he says, while universities are under attack, they’ve done a “terrible job in communicating our value”, including the earnings value of obtaining a degree and the cost of research or attendance. “We made it easy to be attacked,” he says.

Holloway expects the US will suffer four or five years of losing young international scholars, especially from China and India, in the political battle over student immigration and security issues, and accuses the administration of “taking a sledgehammer to something that requires a scalpel”.

In this exclusive interview, he discusses the challenge of addressing divisions in society and widening access to higher education for students from families who are not familiar with how to negotiate college life.

And he explains how he dealt with the potentially explosive issue of campus protests over Israeli operations in Gaza and related claims of anti-Semitism, negotiating an agreement at Rutgers with pro-Palestinian protest groups to peacefully disband their protest camp.

But he also warns that the pressures building up on university leaders are driving a turnover of university presidents that is “picking up at an alarming pace”.

The interview has been edited for length and clarity.

UWN: So we are talking in the context of the unprecedented turmoil created by the raft of executive orders issued by the Trump administration affecting higher education and research and the threat to withdraw funding from particular institutions that don’t comply. How has this impacted Rutgers specifically? And how do you think it will impact higher education and research in general?

JH: As of this moment we have 60 grants that have been frozen or terminated, [with] a total research value of about US$50 million. But we run almost a billion dollars a year in annual research. So US$50 million is real money but not catastrophic – not like you’re seeing at Penn or Columbia or Northwestern or Harvard.

The confusing part is it seems like every week or so we get news of a different federal agency changing its behaviour – recently, for example, the National Science Foundation issued a whole new set of practices.

Then there’s the existential part: that this is just a foreshadowing of what’s going to be happening in the fall, when all these agencies and funding places start a new fiscal year, when they don't have to cancel things but could just not fund things.

For the entire Rutgers community, there is a sense of doom hovering about, because at any moment some radical new way of conducting business could disrupt the landscape.

And then, for my administration, we are running scenarios on a weekly basis based on what we're hearing or what has actually happened.

Our Administrative Council, which are the top 100 administrators at the university, would normally meet five times a year – but we met five or six times in the first six weeks of the semester to update on developments in the federal landscape.

These deans and the vice provosts and such were picking up the anxiety and fear firsthand from faculty. It’s exhausting.

And then the last piece is the rumour mill; you know, one faculty member gets a grant frozen and then misunderstands how institutionally we’re responding to these things.

Recently I had to bat down a rumour of a university-wide freezing of all research from one agency that wasn’t even close to the truth, but it freaked people out.

For the higher ed sector in general – and here I’m speaking mainly of research universities, as that's where Rutgers resides – we’re under attack. I mean, there’s no other way to put it. The relationship we’ve enjoyed with the federal government for the last 80 years has fundamentally shifted.

And the way it has shifted – with no warning and with no rhyme or reason – makes it extremely hard to do business. And we don't know where it ends. So this is a very difficult moment for us and for higher ed.

UWN: You do a lot of research in health and medicine. What are the knock-on effects of freezing grants on your work and the start-up businesses you build on the back of your research?

JH: All research takes many years at its fastest, right? So a pretty straightforward example of disruption would be a freeze in the middle of a five-year grant, meaning you've accumulated all this data but are now in the implementation phase and can't do anything with it.

Or you might be working on a project that relies on the use of federal databases – such as the Centers for Disease Control that gathers up all these databases that one university can’t – and that might be information on measles, tuberculosis, all kinds of infectious diseases. So now you can’t do your work.

Or, consider research being cancelled in the School of Public Health, where you’re examining the ways in which income disparities and other social determinants of health are negatively affecting a particular population that fits a demographic profile.

What such funding freezes are doing – just in these three simple examples – is destabilising research and progress, disease management and social stability.

Then you add in the business function factor; where, you know, I’m an engineer working in a laboratory who’s developed a new way to handle carbon emissions related to production, and I have a company that’s excited to take advantage of the technology once we’ve done some more tests, or maybe I’m trying to start a company because this is such a great opportunity to change the way in which an industry operates. Gone!

And then you have people who just are curious and stumble across some really amazing way to do something and want to find somebody to bring it to market.

But if that person needs, say, US$100 million of seed money to make the whole thing happen and they don’t feel that there is some sort of predictability to the business cycle or financial markets, they can’t get the money, and that innovation is gone or pauses for at least a couple of years.

Depending on what that innovation is dealing with, that pause could have really serious knock-on effects.

Universities are for discovery, and the things we discover actually do change lives for the better. And that’s being disrupted. So I don’t understand what the game plan for this is [or] what positive purpose it serves.

UWN: Is it performative, feeding a culture war?

JH: Yes.

UWN: Do you see this as damaging for higher education in the long term? And how do you respond to that?

JH: I don’t know if it’s long term – and I’m thinking ‘long term’ means 20, 30 years – but I definitely think it’s terribly damaging short term, and with each month it becomes more damaging medium term – meaning the next five years.

I really worry that we’re going to lose four or five years in the US of international scholars, young scholars, you know – grad students, particularly. There seems to be targeting of Chinese and Indian grad students, for example.

And we have to take some of these security concerns seriously. I understand that. That's legitimate.

But this is like taking a sledgehammer to something that requires a scalpel.

And other nations are noticing all of this, of course, and they are starting to recruit American scientists. I think that might be good for science, but not for the United States.

In that case, the damage would be longer term to the United States.

But it depends on the issue. For instance, if this populist anti-vaccination ideology truly catches on and we start seeing fundamental changes in behaviour in the United States or beyond about vaccinating children? Well, that only takes one year for long-term effects to take place. So it depends on the issue.

I feel higher education doesn’t deserve this because we’re the attacked party. But equally, we have not told our story effectively – especially to the kinds of people who are predisposed towards a populist narrative.

Something we know from local polling is that people will tend to really love their university when they live within about 50 miles of it. It’s always a major employer. They know somebody who’s there. It saves the life of somebody they care about, and so on. That's typically how universities garner respect.

But we as higher education have done a terrible job of communicating our value. And we've completely failed in explaining how research is done.

We’ve failed in terms of how we explain the cost of doing research or the cost of attendance. We’ve just completely failed. And now the chickens have come home to roost, unfortunately. We made it easy to be attacked. We just never saw it coming in this way.

UWN: Is one of the reasons why you are being attacked that as access to higher education widens, it leaves a significant minority who are not in higher education, and resentment builds up, especially if whole communities feel left behind?

JH: Absolutely.

Ironically, that’s one of the things that’s gotten us into trouble. It’s this whole narrative of what I’ll call the injured white, lower-class male.

We’ve seen demographic stress on that population in the United States increasing with each year. I don’t remember the precise rate – but they are going to college at a lower rate than ever before, as a demographic group.

We do know that if you get a college degree – and it is still a minority of people in the United States who get a higher education degree – your lifetime earnings are going to be much higher than if you only have a high school degree. We know that, but somehow we have failed to convince people that that's true.

And the fact is, a plumber is going to make more money at age 20 or age 21 after coming out of trades than a 22-year-old with a college degree. That's just true. But in five years it flips; the lifetime running is a totally different thing.

And as we’ve brought in the portals for access to bring in more people who look like the breadth of the country, there is this feeling among some people that they are ‘taking my spot’ – a spot that had been held for this type of person for a very long time.

And there's a whole narrative built up around that, which is also deeply flawed, but it’s compelling because that narrative allows someone to blame another person for their misfortunes, and that's always a sexy thing.

I think as universities are becoming more democratic, by which I mean more diverse, more accessible, it creates a more complicated campus climate. You have so many more voices.

Universities have done a good job of opening the doors to let in people who don’t come from a college-going tradition, but that's a population that gets very confused.

They lack the cultural capital to navigate this weird space called a college campus. They get disaffected, they drop out, they have debt. And, you know, all the arguments take root from that place and spin out from there.

So universities, to do their job properly, need to be committed to finding excellence wherever they can.

They need to be committed to the research enterprise.

They need to be committed to making themselves accessible and affordable.

And they need to be committed to making sure, once they admit somebody and matriculate them, that they take care of them.

Not in a patronising, matronising kind of way, not in loco parentis, but making sure students have the tools early on that they need in terms of how to navigate college: the hours of lectures and tutorials and why they are important, why you should get to know your professor. If we don’t do that, we're setting students up for failure. And setting ourselves up to be attacked.

UWN: Do you feel that you’ve made progress in that regard during your tenure as president at Rutgers?

JH: We’ve definitely been focused on that at Rutgers.

So here’s a really important thing that most people don't understand about higher ed in the US context. The great majority of the conversation about what’s wrong or right about higher ed is focusing on what we call the ‘Ivy plus schools’: the Ivy League and the likes of Chicago, Berkeley, UCLA, Northwestern – so, elite private and a few public schools. We're talking about 20 schools, and they dominate what I'll call the cultural conversation about higher ed.

And this is for reasons that we understand. I mean, they generate Nobel Prize winners, all kinds of discoveries. That’s great. But they represent something like only 4% of the total college-going population in the country.

Most schools like Rutgers, in terms of research universities, are much bigger than the Ivy plus schools; at Yale, there are 12,000 students, compared to 70,000 at Rutgers.

And more than a third of our students come from low-income families. That’s what was compelling to me about applying for the job; the idea of being able to be part of change at a scale I'd never experienced before.

So the large public universities, research universities, are doing the kind of work already that I’ve been talking about as so critical.

Now where we can do better is to make sure that once we bring students in, we make them feel they are part of this ecosystem. That's just a hard thing for a really large university to do.

At Rutgers I’ve started programmes that provide research opportunities and internship opportunities for students from low-income and moderate-income families.

Most of our students have to work at a real job as well as being students. They don't have internships in the public sector, for example, or at a non-profit like an NGO, because they have to get a paying job over the summer.

So I’ve started a programme where we’ll pay them to take that job. And although it’s limited – just because we're resource capped – we’ve created opportunities.

This is the third year for about 400, 450 students to have internships on Capitol Hill, working for a Boys & Girls Club in a poor city in New Jersey, working in a research lab for discovery projects.

So that’s bringing the university to people who would not otherwise have those experiences: lower-income undergraduates, for instance.

Also, university-wide, we’ve now reduced the cost of attendance significantly for people of limited means. So, if your family’s income is less than US$65,000 a year, Rutgers is free. And if it’s between US$65,000 and US$85,000, you pay a few thousand dollars, and between US$85,000 and US$100,000, you pay a few thousand more.

The normal cost of attendance in state is US$15,000, but we’re reducing it either all the way to zero or to no more than half for lower-income families, and that has been a tremendous benefit to our students.

It's also tremendously expensive. We fundraise for that all the time.

It would be great if we could lower the cost of attendance for everybody, but our endowment's not big enough to do it. It’s just over US$2 billion, which is a nice endowment, but not for 100,000 people. Our payroll keeps going up, and fixed costs are fixed costs.

And now this federal destabilisation will make it more expensive to run the university.

The only available lever to us, the only really easy lever, is tuition. So we’ll raise tuition and get yelled at for making it more expensive. And we say: ‘Well, if you give us the money we need, to do the research that you want us to do, then we can keep the cost down’. But that argument gets lost.

UWN: People often have this idea that if you've got an endowment, you can just take the money out, but presumably it's in lots of different pots and not necessarily accessible.

JH: Yes, they say, ‘just tap it’; but we literally cannot. It's against the law to do so. You know, the money is locked up. Look at Harvard. It's something like the wealthiest institution on the planet. But it doesn't really have access to its own endowment.

I know, when I was at Yale – I was there for 20 years – it was fabulously wealthy, but there were many endowments that were 100, 200 years old, for example, that were for very specific things. I mean, very specific things.

One of them, ironically, was for a cutting-edge technology in the late 19th century called the railroad, and that was a huge gift generating lots of money. But then, I think by the 1930s, they couldn’t spend the money because there wasn't innovation happening in that space.

Now, ironically, in the last seven or eight years, starting around 10 years ago, they started to be able to tap that money again because of new possibilities of railroad technology. But that was just sitting untouched and just rolling over because they couldn't use it for anything else.

In the last 100 years universities were able to start writing in a final sentence that runs along the lines of, you know, this whole gift is for all these things, or if we can’t find the use for it, it’s at the discretion of the university.

In other words, there’s a caveat now that has opened up gifts in the last 100 years, but most of Harvard’s wealth and Yale’s wealth and such are going back to gifts that have been sitting around for 200 years.

There was one endowment at Yale, for instance, that could only be used for tulips, and the university tried to open it up as, clearly, this is not the best use of these resources.

But they were told, ‘we can’t let you cherry pick’. And so apparently there remains one heck of an endowment for tulips for this one residential college at Yale; but, wow, you can't use the money.

UWN: Getting back to the issue of supporting wider access, what impact do you think banning DEI programmes will eventually have on widening opportunity for minorities?

JH: It’s too early to tell because of a couple of things.

Trump's mandate for doing away with DEI has yet to be defined legally. He’s calling it illegal DEI, but no one knows what that actually means. So there is a legal question, as in: let’s suppose this is a rational decision, then there must be guidance in terms of what that actually means. And we don't have that.

So, at the federal level, it's confusing right now. And at the state level there's incredible variation across the United States.

I know in the state of Ohio, the governor recently signed – and I'm summing up in broad strokes – legislation that made it illegal to teach divisive topics. You know, DEI being one of them, climate change being another, I think LGBTQ topics being another – this whole series of divisive topics.

Well, that will never work in New Jersey, not in this current governor's administration. The current governor [Phil Murphy, a Democrat] has been very clear about the importance of diversity, equity and inclusion.

If you look at the state demographics, New Jersey is one of the most diverse states in the country. So there the majority voice is saying this is a strength of the state, and we're going to lean into it.

The net effect of the DEI order and lack of clarity, though, is chaos, instability, unpredictability. You don't know what you are going to be doing, and so it's increasingly convenient just to walk away from it entirely or change the names.

What that will mean is a little unclear, because in our hyper-diverse state of New Jersey we can change names of things, but we're probably still going to have a really diverse university, just because of the population from which we're drawing.

Going back to something I was saying earlier, identifying a talented population is one thing; making sure they're ready is another thing. That's the work that has to be done.

So that, to me, is the real work of DEI at this moment. The Supreme Court still says a diverse population is an important element to education – even this Supreme Court.

The question is: How do we cultivate a sense of belonging for everybody? And it should be for everybody. But we don't know what this means right now. We don't know how we're going to get to that place.

I do think, in this moment of confusion, we're going to see the population of black and brown students drop at many universities.

I do think we’re going to see people who are very out in their sexual politics, being lesbian or gay, you know, becoming less out, whatever that means, for fear of literal violence, and also political violence.

So we’re going to see less diversity on campus. There is no doubt about it. I think you can’t put that back in the genie's bottle.

And then it will be more difficult to teach awareness of the different kinds of challenges – the kind of awareness that comes with a more democratic, diverse population.

So there’ll be bigger battles, to be honest.

UWN: The impact of slavery and the Jim Crow laws on American society is well-documented and the continuing impact of racial biases in American society remains an issue. As an African-American, are you shocked by the animosity towards DEI?

JH: One of the things that is – I can't say shocking, as I’m just so used to it in this country now, but I'll say – frustrating, is that there is the presumption that everybody with black and brown skin in what has historically been a white place, the university, historically, needed assistance to get there; that they didn't earn it on their own merits.

It’s also frustrating that, for generations, long before affirmative action started – when the university, especially elite universities, was quite homogenous, quite white – legions of those young men only got in because their dad was at the university before them or because they were benefiting from some kind of programme. Not a federally structured one, but like the old boys’ network, right?

And so you have a long history of people getting preferential treatment. That's created the elite classes around the planet for as long as people have been around.

It's not just a US phenomenon. It just looks a certain way. And once that practice, or the phenomenon of who can be in elite circles, started to become more democratic or more representative of the demography in the United States, that's when we started to have problems with it.

The narrative of, for example, ‘safe spaces’, which has been demonised. Like, you know, you're raising a generation of people who say they need safe spaces. But there have always been safe spaces at a university; they were just called ‘the fraternity’ or ‘the locker room’.

So a lot of this is politics; it is the bad-faith politics of what things are called. And I’m not saying every programme is pristine or perfect, not saying that at all, but there's a sort of hyperactivity around bad faith and theatre.

UWN: And isn’t there another aspect to the cutting of funding for things that mention DEI or climate change, that so many US states and now the federal government are trying to control what universities can teach or research, which amounts to a direct attack on university autonomy?

JH: The irony is not lost on us that politicians who are unhappy with what they would claim to be ‘DEI woke politics’, which they claim tells people how to think, are themselves doing the same thing, without even blinking an eye, saying, ‘This is just about getting back to good American values’. Well, frankly, I thought the American value was dissent.

UWN: That irony extends to the executive order that bans federal funding of programmes that use the word ‘diversity’ while also demanding that universities ensure intellectual ‘diversity’ among their staff.

JH: It really is a big hijacking, right?

I mean, universities aren’t perfect. We should always be doing the work of trying to become better and more representative. We should have more intellectual diversity on campuses, absolutely. And we are not above self-examination or reproach. That’s just healthy.

But, my goodness, we are places of expertise where there’s been massive investment by states, by the federal government, by companies, by individuals, because they know that universities are actually trying to make the world better…And to think, I mean literally, we can’t do the work. I just don't understand the logic here.

UWN: Is it a slide towards authoritarianism?

JH: Oh, absolutely. You cut off the dissent. You cut off intellectuals. Then you go after the journalists. That's the map.

UWN: Coming to the end of five years as president of Rutgers means you actually began early on in the pandemic, and have also had to deal with crises like the pro-Palestinian protests and the charges of anti-Semitism, and now the Trump administration’s executive orders targeting higher education. What has it been like to lead a university through these kinds of crises?

JH: You actually left out one crisis at Rutgers: we had our first strike in our entire history. So I had just one peaceful year.

What we are seeing across higher ed is that, of the many people who started their presidencies in roughly the summer of 2020, over half are now walking away. And I’m part of that statistic. So the turnover rate for presidents at US universities is picking up at an alarming pace. And that's a sign of the job becoming more difficult, the expectations becoming more difficult.

Universities are not built to move quickly. We just aren’t. We move slowly, and that’s a good thing. But in a very fast-moving context – and we are at an incredibly impatient and capricious cultural moment, political moment – we are out of line. And that’s a structural concern. I can ring the alarm bells about it, but I don't know how to fix it.

These are really interesting jobs. When things are working well, you’re helping structure environments where people can think and discover and help the world, and that’s great. Increasingly, though, universities are feeling a lot of external and internal pressure. This is ignoring things since January, so even before the Trump administration.

There are increasing pressures to behave, in the US context, in a more corporate structure – return on investment, hyper efficiency – and these are things that are not built into universities’ DNA, and so that requires someone with a different set of skills to lead these complex entities.

I know half a dozen people who were retired corporate executives who were tapped to run a university, and who found this way more complicated than running a corporation – because at the corporation you can fire people, or you can stop a whole line of production.

At the corporation you aren't woven into the community in this powerful way. You aren't bound by rights and rituals, and your most privileged workers can be gone the next day and someone can fill in their place.

This is not how higher ed works.

I'm worried that with this rapid, increasing turnover – and again, I'm part of it – higher ed boards will start hiring people who really don't understand higher ed; they know how to manage structures, but they don’t know higher ed.

UWN: In 2024 you faced the challenge of the pro-Palestinian campus protests and anti-Semitism, one of those extremely divisive issues that has undermined trust – from different viewpoints – in higher education institutions. But at Rutgers you negotiated an agreement to end the protests on campus. What was the key to finding a solution there and what is your advice to university leaders who are trying to tackle these kinds of divisive issues?

JH: I think the most important thing is to bring clarity to whatever you're doing. Whatever your approach, be clear about it.

Now, also as a rule, I never respond to demands, because once you do, then you lose the ability to manage through other means.

But this was a new situation for me in my career, because it was an emergency, there was a literal threat to property, and these activists broke an agreement we had made, which was that they could be there peacefully assembled, but they couldn't disrupt the day-to-day operations, especially heading into finals.

UWN: Were there anti-Semitic acts as well?

JH: Some would claim yes. Others would claim no on that. But they were peaceful and quiet. That was during the reading period here before final exams. Then on the first day of exams, the activists pivoted, made a radical turn and made as much noise as possible.

So that moment broke all the agreements, and we were going to bring in the police to shut this down. The people who had been talking with us, who were the more moderate of the group, reached out in panic. We said, “But you broke the deal so we are following through,” and they said, “Please can we just talk about these things?”

And when we looked at the list of their demands, we saw there was a path towards clearing out the encampment within a few hours.

But this is where clarity is important. Their two biggest demands, we said, we’d never do those things, we'd already said no to those things, it wasn’t changing.

But with regard to another three things on the list, we were actually already doing these things; the activists just didn’t know.

And there were a few other things on the list that we thought were actually perfectly reasonable.

And they said, “Okay, that sounds like a good deal” – and they broke down the encampment about two hours before the police were about to do something different.

Remember, this is right when Columbia [University] was really breaking down in terms of people taking over buildings, but in Rutgers no buildings were accessed, no one got arrested, no one got injured. We had to move one day of exams into other places. I was quite angry about this, but given what you saw at UCLA, which literally turned violent, like we were [glad to get a deal] done.

But because of the theatre of this era that we're in, what we agreed to was seen as a capitulation, supporting anti-Semitism. Nothing could be further from the truth. But an activist put out an Instagram post saying, you know, “We won”. So right there we got outwitted by Instagram.

UWN:What were the key concessions you made that people were concerned about?

JH: The two biggest demands were immediate and categoric ‘No’s’.

Were we going to sever our relationship with Tel Aviv University? No, we were not.

Would we immediately divest from Israel? No, we have a process, and anyway, that’s been followed through once. We can do it again, if you want us to, but we don't do it this way.

One demand was that we establish a relationship with a Palestinian university. But we already have one.

The activists wanted to make sure that we would open the doors to Palestinian students. We said that’s fine; they have to be able to get in but we will work to help them get here. That's not controversial.

And they wanted an Arab Cultural Centre on campus in New Brunswick and our main campus. And that's totally fine. We have a very large Muslim population at the university, one of the largest in the country, actually. And the fact that we didn't have a cultural centre was kind of surprising.

So that’s most of it.

Oh, and even though I said no to immediate divestment, I said, you know, I’m happy to sit down with you, with the person who oversees our investment portfolio, and talk with you. I was thinking this defuses things; we sit down, we listen to them for an hour, they walk out, and we're done.

But it was seen as, you know, breaking our protocol. And I’m thinking, ‘Oh, for goodness sake, we’re just listening to people talk for an hour’. It’s a low-risk proposition.

But in this era of radical purity, even doing that was seen as a concession.

So, it seems there’s no room in these kinds of dynamics for, ‘Hey, you know, at a university we talk to each other’.

And the fact that I brokered that arrangement got me summoned to testify in front of the House Education Workforce Committee who, during that hearing, said that I negotiated with ‘the mob’.

But they weren't a mob, they were our students, and we should be able to talk to our students.

UWN: So now the new post you’re going on to is president and CEO of the Henry Luce Foundation, from October. Is that because they are now orienting some of their work towards trust in institutions and democracy? Higher education really needs that.

JH: Well, yes. You actually hit on the thing that drew me in.

So I was not on the market. I'd been approached by a couple of places to be a candidate for presidencies. I'm like, ‘No thank you. I'm taking a year’s sabbatical, and I'm going to reorient myself.’

Then Luce appeared and invited me to be a candidate. And I was confused, because they're most well known for their Luce Scholars Program, which is an Asian immersion programme for young leaders in Asia. They also work in American art and religion, theology and indigenous cultures, and women in STEM [science, technology, engineering and mathematics].

These are all great things, but nothing I have content expertise in.

But this last piece that you mentioned, that they have a new funding stream devoted to democracy, ethics and public trust. I'm like, wait a second, that's been at the centre of my agenda for the last three years at Rutgers.

The idea of being able to work in that space still – to be able to support others who are working in that space – was too special to ignore.

And so I actually gave up time off – which is something I tell people never to do! But this is too important, it lines up too neatly with the things I really want to do. And so here we are.