What is Rutgers One?
Rutgers One is an alliance of students, staff, faculty and alumni united to defend quality public higher education. We love Rutgers and want our university to be among the best public universities. Rutgers One is all about students.
Rutgers’ management consistently fails to set an example of good citizenship. A handful of executives make the meaningful decisions without appropriate consultation, often ignore student opinion and violate faculty and staff contracts. Actions like these send a powerful message that to the management, students, faculty and staff do not matter and that education is unworthy of the full support of university resources.
It is time for other voices to be heard. Another university is possible—one in which the people that make Rutgers work participate in the decision-making process.
The failed policies of the Rutgers’ administration are part of a troubling national trend. Thirty years of declining state funding and poor leadership has led to management practices that do not reward, but in fact penalize, the people that make Rutgers work. While management claims to value academic excellence, resources are diverted away from the academic mission and spent on athletics, fancy dorms, entertainment, and ever higher pay for ever increasing numbers of top executives. Students and their families bear those costs as high tuition, crushing debt and dimmed futures while faculty and staff face reduced compensation, layoff threats, and substandard working conditions.
Rutgers One is an advocate for public higher education. Together we will take action to:
- Restore education, service and support for students as Rutgers’ first priority.
- Increase public investment for higher education: our economy and democracy
need a broadly educated population for critical thinking, innovation and
citizenship. Education is a public good. - Keep RU affordable by freezing tuition and addressing student debt: a Rutgers
education should be accessible to all. Student debt threatens economic recovery. - Enforce fair labor standards: faculty and staff require the institutional support
needed to do state-of-the-art work. Respect for collective bargaining is essential. - Eliminate mismanagement. No-bid contracts, executive-level bloat and spending scandals hurt Rutgers’ reputation and undermine support from the state.