Dear colleague,
The Rutgers administration has made a mess of the temporary relief that our union won in Trenton to offset the impact of New Jersey’s inflated fringe rate—and researchers at Rutgers will pay a steep price if we don’t organize and fight back.
We’re holding a town hall meeting this Thursday, July 18, at 4 p.m. to discuss how we can respond to the administration’s latest bungling and keep fighting to save research at Rutgers. Click here to register for the Zoom link.
We have been fighting for years to fix New Jersey’s fringe rate—the money that comes out of every grant to pay for fringe benefits for grant-funded faculty and staff—which is two and even three times higher than researchers at peer institutions pay. We fell short in our efforts to get a permanent legislative fix, but we did win $75 million in state funding this year to offset the impact of the inflated rate. That’s a $5 million increase from last year, and we estimate that Rutgers’ share is at least $52 million.
Importantly, the governor and legislative leaders removed, at our urging, language that would have required the offset funding to be used only for federal government grants. Roughly half of the grant funds won by our research colleagues at Rutgers are from non-federal sources.
But the Rutgers administration has inexplicably continued to discriminate against grants from non-federal sources, announcing that the effective fringe benefit rate on federal grants for 2024–25 would be 37.61 percent of the salaries of grant-funded faculty and staff—and 80.59 percent on grants from non-federal sources!
This will be a crushing blow for the half of all research at Rutgers done on non-federal grants—and it is completely unnecessary thanks to our union’s lobbying efforts. We succeeded in undoing an arbitrary distinction between grants introduced only last year, and the administration decided to maintain it!
This Thursday, July 18, at 4 p.m., we’ll come together as a union at a town hall meeting to discuss how we can get the administration to reverse its damaging fringe rate policy. Please join us! Click here to register for the Zoom link.
In solidarity,
Rutgers AAUP-AFT and AAUP-BHSNJ
Rutgers AAUP-AFT Facebook page: https://facebook.com/RUaaup/
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Freedom School YouTubeChannel: https://rutgersaaup.org/YouTube
AAUP-BHSNJ website: https://aaupbhsnj.org/
AAUP-BHSNJ Facebook page: https://www.facebook.com/RUaaupbhsnj