Dear colleague,
Yesterday, you got an email from Chief Financial Officer J. Michael Gower and Senior Vice President for Research Michael Zwick that claimed to be a “clarification” about the state fringe benefit rate. But it misleadingly ignored the main issue: the administration is putting the future of ALL research at Rutgers at risk by setting an absurdly high fringe benefit rate of 80.59 percent on grants from non-federal government sources, which make up nearly half of total grants at Rutgers.
As we wrote several weeks ago, our unions won a temporary fix for New Jersey’s inflated fringe benefit rate: $75 million in additional funding for New Jersey colleges and universities to offset the unfair burden of paying into a state pension plan that almost no one at Rutgers qualifies for. Crucially, we—not Gower or Zwick—persuaded Governor Phil Murphy and state officials to remove legislative language, added for the previous fiscal year 2023–24, that restricted the additional funding to federal government grants only. In his budget recommendation for the 2024–25 fiscal year, Murphy confirmed that the $75 million in additional funding was meant to help public research universities be “more competitive for federal, state, and privately funded research grants.”
But the administration defied Governor Murphy’s explicit intent and continued to discriminate against non-federal grants for the coming year, setting the non-federal fringe rate at more than double the 37.61 percent fringe rate for federal grants.
Gower and Zwick claim that setting equal fringe rates for all grants would cause the federal rate to increase to 47.07 percent, with “devastating” consequences for researchers with federally sponsored grants. But how much more devastating is it to pay an 80.59 percent effective fringe rate on the nearly half of all grant projects at Rutgers that come from non-federal sources? Gower and Zwick didn’t even acknowledge the sky-high non-federal fringe rate—nor the fact that Rutgers is the only public university we know of with such massively different rates for federal and non-federal grants. No other public college or university in New Jersey, which also bear the burden of an unfair fringe rate, comes close to Rutgers’ non-federal rate.
The administration’s misguided decision is a threat to ALL of us. Many faculty at Rutgers work on a mix of grants from different sources: federal, state, and private foundations. And this is not only about scientific research: grants for training, service, and other purposes have been put at risk, too.
Our unions have worked for years with legislators and state officials to bring down New Jersey’s fringe rate, and we’ll keep at it until we get a permanent fix. Thanks to our organizing, we did recently get a fix that cut the fringe rates for postdocs in half. But by imposing a blatantly unfair and damaging policy, the administration has undone our ongoing efforts on behalf of everyone at Rutgers.
If Gower and Zwick think the fringe rate they’ve set on federal grants can’t be changed because of previous negotiations, then they need to dip into their nearly $1 billion in unrestricted reserves to protect the critical work being done at Rutgers under non-federal grants. These kinds of subsidies are commonplace at other universities. Why not ours?
We want to thank those of you who came together at town hall meetings in July to discuss how we can bring pressure to bear on the administration to change their policy. As disappointing as it was, we think Gower and Zwick’s message was a response to our colleagues raising their voices. Be assured: we will keep speaking out, as individuals and as a union, until Rutgers does the right thing!
In solidarity,
Allison Friedman-Krauss, Associate Research Professor, GSE-National Institute for Early Education Research
Anand Sarwate, Associate Professor, SOE–Electrical and Computer Engineering
Annika Barber, Assistant Professor, SAS-Molecular Biology and Biochemistry, Waksman Institute of Microbiology
Andres Morera, Postdoctoral Associate, SAS-Molecular Biology and Biochemistry
Colm Atkins, Research Associate, SAS-Cell Biology and Neuroscience
Derek Sant’Angelo, Professor, RWJMS-Pediatrics and Pharmacology, and Associate Director, Child Health Institute of New Jersey
Ellen Frede, Research Professor and Senior Co-Director, National Institute for Early Education Research
Hal Salzman, Professor, E.J. Bloustein School & J.J. Heldrich Center
Jennifer Duer, Assistant Research Professor, GSE-National Institute for Early Education Research
Kim McKim, Professor, SAS-Genetics, Waksman Institute of Microbiology
Lisa Denzin, Associate Professor, RWJMS-Pediatrics, Child Health Institute of New Jersey
Martha Soto, Professor, RWJMS-Pathology & Laboratory Medicine
Matthew Buckley, Associate Professor, SAS-Physics & Astronomy
Milagros Nores, Associate Research Professor and Co-Director for Research, GSE–National Institute for Early Education Research
Monica Driscoll, Distinguished Professor, SAS-Molecular Biology and Biochemistry
Pingping Hou, Assistant Professor, NJMS-Department of Microbiology, Biochemistry and Molecular Genetics, Center for Cell Signaling
Ravi Mill, Assistant Research Professor, SASN-Center for Molecular and Behavioral Neuroscience
Samhita Srujana Yadavalli, Assistant Professor, SAS-Genetics, Waksman Institute of Microbiology
Tara Matise, Distinguished Professor and Chair, SAS-Genetics
Todd Wolfson, Associate Professor, SCI-Media Studies and Co-Director, Media, Inequality, and Change Center
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