To the Rutgers University Senate,

Comment to the University Senate on the Interim Report of the Advisory Committee for the Proposed Rutgers University College of Applied and Professional Studies

 This Committee was appointed to deal with eight charges from President Lawrence.  Whether there should be a Rutgers University College of Applied and Professional Studies was NOT one of them.  Therefore, inquiring into that issue is the responsibility of this body, and this body has no report before it on that topic.  There are at least two fundamental questions that this report did not consider that are before this Senate:
1. Is a College of Applied and Professional Studies a good idea?
2.   If so, is having it a Rutgers University a good idea?
I submit that the answers are, respectively, probably not, and definitely not.  In particular, even if CAPS is a good idea, there is absolutely no reason to suppose that a research university is the right institution to run it.

 The Interim Report recommends involvement of tenure track Rutgers faculty with respect to a number of aspects of the proposed college.  An important justification of this proposal is that the CAPS will make money.  While the committee has not presented budgets for the proposed college, and any such budgets for CAPS would be highly speculative, it is my understanding that in the budgets that the committee did see, there was no provision for reimbursing the units for the time and effort of the faculty who would be involved (except when they teach).  Thus, the purported profitability of CAPS is not only speculative, but based upon getting for free from the rest of the University its most valuable asset, the expertise of its faculty.  This is either false accounting or an admission that there will not really be significant oversight involvement of regular faculty.

 No body of scholars has defined or, under this proposal, will define the nature of a bachelor’s or master’s degree in professional studies, to which it is proposed to attach Rutgers’ good name.  The committee report does not discuss dropping the use of Rutgers name from the proposed college all together and does not discuss the impact of the proposed college’s degrees on the reputation of other Rutgers degrees and activities.  In particular, the committee apparently never even considered calling it the New Jersey College of Professional Studies.

 In summary, before this Senate approves a College of Applied and Professional Studies at Rutgers University it has a duty to examine whether creating such a college is a good idea, whether Rutgers is the right place for it, what the resource drain on the rest of the university would be, what control scholars will have in defining the degree, and whether Rutgers name should be used at all with respect to such a “college.”

 Michael H. Rothkopf
 Professor II

I have two comments on the Intermin Report of the Advisory Committee on CAPS.

1.  The report recommends that tenured faculty be involved in the recruitment, appointment, reappointment and promotion of CAPS faculty.  It is extremely important that this be done to ensure that the faculty in this program will provide the quality of instruction that will reflect positively on Rutgers.  It will also serve as a critical link between traditional faculty and CAPS faculty.

2.  The report recommends that student transfers between CAPS and an on-campus school should required the same application review as any other transfers from one campus to another.  As as a College Dean, this is a major concern. Recently, as a  University, we have appropriately taken steps to simplify the transfer of Rutgers University students from one campus to another.  Because CAPS students may have a slightly different prolife as compared to other intra-University transfer students, the issue of how to review CAPS students who wish to  transfer to other Rutgers undergraduate units will require thoughtful examination by the Colleges.
 

Arnold G. Hyndman, Ph.D.
Dean, Livingston College
Rutgers University