As I write my last dean's newsletter note, I'd like to give a personal perspective on our school.   

SC&I is exciting, dynamic, and forward-looking. Here outstanding faculty do leading-edge and creative research across various topic areas drawing on diverse theoretical perspectives. There is a vibrant history of theoretical and methodological innovation; and as a professional school, it has educated the leaders of various institutions and businesses. Here a dedicated, nimble, and energetic complement of staff continually strives to improve systems and delivery; they are fundamental to SC&I’s success. I have been honored to lead that community—and I look forward to continuing to contribute as I transition to a faculty position.

It was probably in the first faculty meeting after arrival that Nick Belkin, one of SC&I's great scholars, told me: you work for us! And by us, he meant specifically faculty. There is a sense in which he was right, but it is much more complicated. In the org chart, the dean works at the pleasure of the chancellor. My vision, however, was that I was working for the long-term success of the entire school. That involves juggling a focus on sustaining an environment in which brilliant scholarship can flourish, recruiting the brightest, and enhancing the infrastructure that supports grant identification and capture, publication success, and scholarly communication through conferences and journals. It involves drawing on an understanding of the complex university dynamics that the school works within. It also involves supporting a high-quality, engaging, and rewarding student experience that sets our students up for the workplace with knowledge and skills suitable for a very fast-changing world of work. There is no algorithm for doing this. It involves judgment, and it involves compromise.

From the day I started (17th August, 2015), it was clear that the merger with Rutgers Biomedical and Health Sciences had created huge opportunities for research and teaching. SC&I has begun to exploit that but has yet to fully build on the opportunities available. The Master of Health Communication and Information (MHCI) has started to perform (its first students will graduate this spring), but it is not yet performing to its potential. That may be partly a consequence of COVID, but we also need to buttress the Information elements of the program with courses not buried under "special topics."  I believe this program will become a key part of our graduate delivery in the future, adding a valuable platform for connection and collaboration with RBHS faculty.

When I first arrived, I emphasized that SC&I’s success would be enhanced by building partnerships—locally within Rutgers, with other institutions in the region, and internationally. Many will remember me standing on a chair at Rutgers events at NCA or ICA and emphasizing this to the audience. There was already a web of connections between SC&I and public health, Rutgers Cancer Institute of New Jersey, Computer Science, and Women's, Gender, and Sexuality Studies. The Data Science major starting in 2024-5 is a really great achievement—it shows how smart cooperation driven by complementary and overlapping skills can succeed, and that the teaching program can, in turn, provide a platform for advanced research collaboration.

A core attraction to me in coming to SC&I was the school’s combination of disciplines. There is no precisely equivalent school in North America (Alabama and Boulder are the most similar). I have felt throughout my time that these disciplines work brilliantly together and add to something missing in, say, single-discipline departments such as Psychology and Sociology, Computer Science and Statistics, or a stand-alone iSchool or Communication department. It is imperative that SC&I not get bogged down with internal turf wars: combining and complementing is so much more effective. It is wonderful that our students can now do a double major. Our teaching needs to continue to be fluid, nimble, and boundary-defying. It is not an accident that most of our centers, clusters, labs, and working groups are populated by faculty from across the three departments.

Historically, our school continually modernizes and reinvents itself. You can see this most vividly in the ITI major and the MI, which have ridden the wave of innovation in digitization and platforms. I have spent some of my time here trying to facilitate a model for a master-level program that combines the core set of knowledge and skills involved in journalism with the broader fast-changing terrain of digital platforms, new forms of delivery, news bubbles, and apps. Such a program would recognize the blurred lines between entertainment and high news, between creative and factual production. And it would need to have an international dimension—perhaps with strong partners (Brisbane and London were top of my list, and they were keen to partner with us) and maybe with a version that could be done fully or mainly online. The need for such a program has not gone away.

Under RCM, SC&I's success in teaching and scholarship is underpinned by our strong student recruitment. Put simply, the money follows the students to the school, and that 'income' is taxed to pay for HR, OIT, the libraries, etc. Our students (and their parents) pay most of our salaries. This income fluctuates between programs for various reasons, and our resilience is helped by the way that recruitment often increases in one area while another goes down. We cannot take this for granted. We need to constantly be reinventing ourselves. Furthermore, we need to keep focused on making this work efficiently—I believe we owe that to our students.

A big challenge in the next few years will be space. Space is expensive. And as we come out of COVID and consider the future of work, we need to explore new models. A building where most faculty offices lie empty 90% of the time is hard to sustain (particularly as physical books and desktop computers cease to be essential). This is empty space our students are paying for. Exactly how we sustain community and culture while making work attractive and personalized is a significant challenge; we are already facing that challenge. Maybe this year or next is too early to tackle this challenge as things are still cloudy, but the pressure to do so will become inexorable.

In a healthy academic unit like ours, there is always a turnover of faculty and staff. People are attracted by new challenges, possibilities that we don't have, or need to respond to personal or family considerations. That is how it should be. And we attract to the school because of what we offer as a wonderful scholarly community in a great university. Throughout my time here one of my strongest emphases has been on establishing and supporting a warm and collegial community. Such an environment is the foundation for everything else. I believe we have done very well. But we mustn't take it for granted in the future. We all have a responsibility to care for one another—staff, faculty, and students—and give each other support and respect.

I look forward to being part of SC&I's evolving future and continuing to work with you.

Jonathan Potter