CAMPUS DIVERSITY
TRANSFORMS
LEARNING & SOCIETY
BY RICHARD L. MCCORMICK
Last fall, as thousands of first-year students at Rutgers University
unpacked their suitcases and began their own personal journeys in higher
education, their arrival marked a new milestone. For the first time in the
nearly 250-year history of Rutgers—one of America’s original colonial
colleges—more than half of the first-year class members identified
themselves as non-Caucasian. Once a small, private liberal-arts college
primarily for white men, Rutgers has become a remarkably diverse
52,000-student research university with a public mission as the State
University of New Jersey, one of the most diverse states in the nation.
Rutgers President
Richard L.
McCormick watches
as Rutgers Future
Scholars experiment
with the laws of
motion. The program
is preparing urban
middle- and high-school students for
success in college.
