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On Wednesday, the University of Medicine and Dentistry Advisory Committee, also known as the Barer Committee, recommended that Rowan University and Rutgers-Camden “unite under the Rowan name.” The goal of such a merger would be “to support Cooper Medical School of Rowan University” and “develop a comprehensive public research university.”  On Friday morning, a Philadelphia Inquirer editorial endorsed that recommendation. I disagree.

            From 1998 until 2011 I served in leadership positions at Rutgers. My views on this issue are shaped by my unique privilege of having served as Dean of Arts and Sciences for more than a decade and as interim Chancellor of the Camden campus for more than two years, as well as my experience in other institutions of higher education. I should emphasize that as a current faculty member I am not speaking for Rutgers but for myself.

Rutgers-Camden and Rowan are both fine institutions. They are also very different, with distinct identities, providing undergraduate students with diverse choices for achieving a bachelor’s degree. These different options represent a strength of the region, not a weakness.

In my judgment, the best and most cost-effective way to ensure that southern New Jersey has a strong research university would be to provide greater autonomy to the one that already exists – Rutgers-Camden – and enable it to grow. Rutgers is an international brand name. It would be foolish to abandon it. Retaining the name and adding the resources that autonomy would bring, Rutgers-Camden could easily grow to 12,000 to 15,000 students over the next decade. Rutgers-Camden has made its home in the city since becoming part of Rutgers six decades ago. It anchors the northern part of the city’s downtown, just as Cooper Hospital anchors the Broadway corridor. Imagine what Rutgers-Camden could do for the city, region, and state with 12,000 students.

Over the past decade or so, and most dramatically over the past five years, Rutgers-Camden has transformed itself from a campus that primarily offered high quality undergraduate education to a more fully-fledged research university; even two decades ago, its research faculty and law school distinguished it from a typical liberal arts college. These qualities set the stage for its accelerated development in the first decade of the 21st century.

 Since 1999, enrollment campus-wide has increased by almost 35%, and the graduate school has grown by more than 70%. The number of graduate programs has doubled. Starting in 2007 the campus has added Ph.D. programs, the essential hallmark of a research university. And because Rutgers is a member of the elite American Association of Universities – a distinction held by only sixty two of North America’s universities – its name conveys instant national and international cachet within higher education and among funding agencies.

Rutgers-Camden’s growth has been fueled by new programs and schools, the quality of its Ph.D. programs, and its focus on undergraduate research and civic engagement. In professional education, Rutgers-Camden has long been known for its nationally-recognized law school. Now, the campus also has a thriving four-year business school with vibrant graduate programs. This year, Rutgers-Camden added a School of Nursing.

Rutgers-Camden does not have an affiliation with the Cooper Medical School. Still, an extensive, expensive, and complicated merger is not the only way to support Cooper’s new medical school. Rutgers-Camden and the Cooper Medical School could develop a formal consortial arrangement, with Rutgers faculty offering science courses, and our outstanding scientists in the Center for Computational and Integrative Biology partnering with faculty in the medical school on research projects. And Rutgers-Camden and Rowan could partner in other areas as well. There are models for formal partnerships, such as North Carolina’s Research Triangle, that we should emulate.

Rather than attempting to merge two institutions located nearly 20 miles apart, with different missions and cultures, it makes more sense for Rutgers to allow it more autonomy and provide it with its own budget. Central services could be paid for by contractual arrangements and could be managed by the existing office of Finance and Administration. This structure would not create a new bureaucracy; it would, however, allow Rutgers to fully serve South Jersey in a much more comprehensive way.

Southern New Jersey already has in Rutgers-Camden the research university that is needed in this part of the state and we should build upon it. Let’s follow the lead of other states that have created very successful formal alliances between universities. That way, each one retains its individual identity and strengths, while leveraging the resources of both to create new opportunities for students and faculty.           

Let’s look to the future, not the past. Shame on us if we allow the takeover of Rutgers-Camden to happen, weakening what strengths are already in place in the region and leaving to the fates to speculate what might happen to make up for those losses many years down the road.

I’ve begun working on a new project with my long-time collaborator, my sister Wanda Ronner. If you’ve read our previous books, you may know that I’m the historian and she’s the physician, and that we’ve now spent more than two decades reading, writing, and talking about reproductive matters in their myriad medical, cultural, ethical, and historical contexts.

For our new book, which one family member teasingly calls “volume three in the infertility trilogy,” we’re turning our attention to the recent history of infertility, reproductive medicine, and assisted reproductive technologies. Its working title is “Beyond Infertility” and our goal is to provide a long-range perspective on the unprecedented ways – deeply unsettling to some and profoundly liberating to others – whereby families can be created by means of the new reproductive technologies. Although we’re concentrating primarily on the United States, we’ll situate this country’s experiences within the global transformation in reproductive practices. We start the book at around 1970, because that was when it became clear that babies conceived through in vitro fertilization could be reasonably anticipated to be born within the next decade, and we will end in the present.

Robert Edwards (l), Jean Purdy, and Patrick Steptoe with Louise Brown, the world's first IVF baby, just after her birth in 1978

Gestational surrogates in India with their physician, 2011

“Beyond Infertility” will weave together the medical, cultural, social, and political histories of infertility and assisted reproduction. It will also pay particular attention to egg and embryo donation, gestational surrogacy, and fertility preservation.

Given our areas of expertise in the history of women, gender and the family (Margaret) and in obstetrics/gynecology and women’s health (Wanda), we believe we can approach the subject in a distinctive way, crossing the boundaries between the humanities and medicine and providing a much-needed historical perspective on a subject of enormous contemporary significance.

Recently, Congressman Cliff Stearns of Florida, who chairs the Oversight Subcommittee of the House Energy and Commerce Committee, asked the Planned Parenthood Federation of America for financial records for the past thirteen years. Congressman Stearns and the other Republicans on the committee intend to investigate what they say is a possible misuse of federal funds on the part of the Federation.  This request follows on the heels of attempts, thus far unsuccessful, to eliminate federal funding for the national organization. (Several states, however, have cut funding for the Federation’s affiliates.)

2011 has been a tough year for women’s reproductive rights in general and for Planned Parenthood in particular.  For the most part, conservatives in Congress, governors’ offices, and state legislatures who want to eliminate government funding for Planned Parenthood say that they are taking a stand against abortion. But Planned Parenthood doesn’t (and can’t) use government funds to pay for abortion. The organization strongly supports abortion services and has done so since abortion became legal in the 1970s – but not with public money.  Government funding does pay for the family planning and other women’s health services, such as cervical cancer screenings and mammograms, that Planned Parenthood affiliates have for years been providing to low-income women across the country. In recent years, some offices have added services for men, too.

Margaret Sanger coined the term “birth control” nearly a century ago and was twice arrested for her efforts to help women prevent unwanted pregnancies. She died in 1966 believing that at least in the United States, the battle for a woman’s right to decide whether and when to bear a child had been won when the birth control pill was approved in 1960. If she could see us now, what would she make of our current reproductive landscape?  Today, women with low incomes can find it difficult – sometimes impossible – to secure reproductive health care. At the other end of the spectrum, however, women of means have access to a full range of reproductive services, from birth control and abortion to high-tech fertility treatments.

Margaret Sanger’s name was synonymous with the birth control movement for a half a century after she founded The Woman Rebel in 1914. A radical in those days (the slogan of The Woman Rebel was “No Gods, No Masters”), she later became more conservative politically, but she remained an unabashed feminist and never swerved from her core belief that access to birth control, on an unfettered, democratic basis, was both a fundamental right of all women and the bedrock foundation of social progress.

In 1928, Sanger’s Motherhood in Bondage appeared. By then, she had abandoned her radical past to court the physicians and politicians on whom she counted to make her vision a reality. Anti-birth control laws – and sentiments – were still strong in these years.  Sanger believed, correctly, that without the support of powerful men (yes, they were nearly all men) in medicine and politics, the birth control movement had no chance of succeeding.

And she was determined that it would succeed. Motherhood in Bondage consists of hundreds of letters Sanger received in the 1910s and 1920s, mostly, but not entirely, from women who were desperate to stop having babies. Some of the letters are heartbreaking. A typical one began, “I was married when I was fourteen years old. Now I am a mother of sixteen children. . . . and am on my way with the seventeenth.” Another woman wrote, “I have been married twelve years and I am twenty-six years old.” She then recited a litany of too-frequent pregnancies, births, still-births and miscarriages.  Many of the women grew up in households marked by poverty and violence, only to find themselves in the same situation in their own marriages.

Marrying at what we would consider today a startlingly young age, these women also remind us that teen-aged motherhood is not a new phenomenon. Marriages at fourteen and fifteen were not uncommon among them, and some were even younger. “I got married at twelve years of age,” one wrote, “and now I’m twenty-three years old with six children.” Unlike many of today’s young mothers, these teenagers were married; but they were no better prepared for the hardships of rearing children with few resources. They were desperate for useful contraceptive advice that would allow them to gain some control over their lives.

Sanger could be a polarizing figure within the birth control movement, and she also made questionable alliances with people whose eugenicist agendas were hardly progressive. But she was also a monumental figure, who never abandoned her central belief – that a woman’s ability to control her reproductive life was the foundation of social progress. As far as she was concerned – although there were those who disagreed – her contention that the poor should have fewer children did not conflict with her conviction that for the poor, having fewer children would lead to a route out of poverty for their families. More generally, she insisted, it would also engender overall prosperity and greater autonomy for women.

Sanger and other birth control advocates gained ground in the 1930s, helped along, no doubt, by the economic hardships of the Great Depression. By then, physicians and Americans in general were expressing more favorable attitudes towards contraception. Except among Catholics and some conservative Protestant denominations, cultural opposition to birth control began to wane, as it became viewed as a means for couples to space their children rather than a way for women to evade childbearing altogether. Laws against the sale and use of birth control devices began to crumble. (Even so, as late as 1960 some thirty states had laws that in various ways restricted the advertisement or sale of birth control devices.) The birth control movement, which had splintered during the Great Depression, re-united in 1939 as the Birth Control Federation of America. In 1942, to cement its new, more moderate reputation as a “family planning” organization – and in spite of Sanger’s vehement opposition – it became the Planned Parenthood Federation of America.

Planned Parenthood had entered the mainstream. In the 1960s and 1970s, it was more likely to be criticized by left-leaning activists than by establishment Republicans. Not today. Planned Parenthood’s focus on a combination of reproductive rights and reproductive health elicits approval from progressives and criticism from conservatives.

It’s easy to blame the abortion wars, but doing so might not tell the whole story. By the first decade of the twenty-first century, journalists and others began to see a larger, if decentralized and somewhat inchoate, anti-birth control movement gaining power among social conservatives.

Could that be what’s fueling the drive to defund Planned Parenthood?

I admit I was skeptical when I first read Russell Shorto’s 2006 New York Times Magazine article about the new anti-contraceptive movement. How could such an idea possibly succeed in an era of so many reproductive choices? I simply could not see that a movement opposing birth control could have staying power in an age when both women and men have become accustomed to having the ability to control their reproductive lives. Surely they would be unwilling to give that up.

But now? I’m not so sure.

___________________________________________________________

If you want to know more about some of the ideas talked about here, please see:

Margaret Sanger, Motherhood in Bondage. Reprint: (Ohio State University Press, 2000). Forward by Margaret Marsh

Ellen Chesler, Woman of Valor: Margaret Sanger and the Birth Control Movement in America (Simon and Schuster, 1992)

Russell Shorto, “Contra-Contraception,” New York Times Magazine, May 7, 2006.

Gail Collins, “The War Behind the Abortion War,” New York Times, April 13, 2011.

In a few weeks, I’ll be saying  goodbye to thirteen years of what I’ve called, tongue firmly in cheek, the “boss biz.” I had nine years as Dean of the Faculty of Arts and Sciences here at Rutgers-Camden before spending more than two as Interim Chancellor. Now I serve as Executive Dean, but soon I’ll be returning to my intellectual roots in the archives and the classroom.

These years have flown by, and although it’s been more than a year since I’ve announced my plans to leave administrative leadership at Rutgers, even now it seems a little bit unreal. Still, I am generally pretty good at looking ahead rather than backwards, and I’m eager to see what new challenges are in my future.

The best parts of my career have arisen out of serendipity, and I’ve always tried to make the most of timely accidents.  That’s how I got to Rutgers in 1998. I had absolutely no intention of becoming a dean — again — when a friend on the faculty called to say he wanted to nominate me for the Arts and Sciences deanship.  I declined.  Then he said,  “But wouldn’t you want to come back and do something for a place that did so much for you?”  He knew I had been an undergraduate here many years ago, and he also knew that Rutgers–Camden had  changed my life.  “Couldn’t hurt to talk to them,” I found myself saying.  A few  months later, here I was.  The decision was made easier when my husband, the distinguished urbanist Howard Gillette, concluded that uprooting himself from a 29-year career at George Washington University to come to Rutgers-Camden would be the perfect next step in his career as well.

with Kathy Boyle, Nancy Rosoff, Andrea Ohrenich, Maria Garcia, Julie Strasser, Chris Dougherty, Luis Garcia, Tyler Hoffman, Mike Palis, Iris Rodriguez, and Louise Waters

In  1998 Rutgers–Camden was still largely an undergraduate institution, with a small number of graduate  programs at the Master’s level, a recognized and respected Law School, and a relatively new School of Business.  The entire campus had fewer than 4600 students. How much we have grown! Last fall, we had more than 6300 students, and more than 4300 were enrolled in the several schools and colleges of Arts and Sciences — the College of Arts and Sciences   (which also houses an Honors College), the Graduate School, and University College.  The Law School under Dean Ray Solomon takes pride in an excellent national reputation, and the School of Business under Dean Jai Ganesh has a full four year program and plans for significant growth.

But we’re not just bigger. We’re better – as a campus and in Arts and Sciences, where we’ve transformed graduate education with the creation of innovative interdisciplinary Ph.D. programs, developed new master’s programs, and introduced a professional doctorate and an MFA.  Undergraduate research and international study undergird programs in the Honors College and the College of Arts and Sciences more generally.  University College-Camden retains its roots on campus but has also extended its operations to multiple South Jersey locations. Recently, it became the first Rutgers college to apply and be accepted to the Servicemenbers Opportunity College Consortium, and it is still the sole unit of Rutgers to have achieved such membership.

Chris Dougherty, Assoc. Dean, University College

With Roger Dennis, my nephew Lukas, and a Riversharks staffer

I’ve been so privileged to have led Arts and Sciences — and for two plus years as Interim Chancellor, the campus — during this exciting period of institutional transformation, and I’d like to thank many of the people who made our success possible. First, of course, I’m grateful to Roger Dennis, the provost who hired me, who was a wonderful boss and a great mentor.  In Arts and Sciences, I want to start with Marie Cornelia, who took on the twin duties of serving as associate dean for  the Graduate School and University College in my second year as dean, and who during her tenure implemented an astonishing 12 new graduate programs.  Dan Hart, my first associate dean for the College of Arts and Sciences, not only systematized the operations of  the college but was also a driving force behind the creation of the Center for Children and Childhood Studies, with founding director Myra Bluebond Langner, and the Ph.D. program in Childhood Studies. He now serves as director of the former and he recruited the inaugural faculty for the latter. Also, Dan took on the difficult task of “keeping the dean from doing stupid things.”  I suspect I still did a few dumb things anyway, but I hope fewer than I would have otherwise.

When I began to serve what ended up as a two-and-a-quarter year stint as Interim Chancellor, campus enrollment had been declining significantly for two years.  More than reversing that loss, Rutgers–Camden needed to grow substantially if we ever expected to achieve our goal of developing into a nationally respected public research university.  It is true that mine was the voice leading the charge, but it was Arts and Sciences Associate Dean Nancy Rosoff who coordinated a group of more than 50 administrators, faculty, and staff who worked to ensure that all of us knew what needed to be done to grow and at the same time maintain student quality and the personalized education that is the hallmark of this campus. And then we went on actually to do these things.

Two of my other priorities were economic development and community partnerships.  Vice Chancellor Larry Gaines and I would spend afternoons discussing  what we needed to do, and then it was Larry who went out and did it — hiring our first director of economic development, Gregory Gamble, and working regularly with our community partners.  Nyeema Watson, then Associate Director of the Center for Children and Childhood Studies, and I spent a lot of time together as we sought opportunities to partner on programs with the city’s public schools.

Dean of Students Mary Beth Daisey, who knows more about students’ lives outside the classroom than anyone else on campus, made sure I always kept the students’ entire lives, and not just their academic interests, at the forefront of my mind. And Director (now Associate Chancellor) of Communications Mike Sepanic may not have completely succeeded in teaching me to be more tactful and less direct, but he could always be counted on to have just the right way to handle any public situation.  Kristin Walker, (below) who became Director of Campus Events Planning during my first months in the chancellor’s role, made sure that the campus always put its best face on view. And Ray Solomon,  Dean of the Law School and for eighteen months Executive Dean of the Professional Schools at Rutgers–Camden, continued to build the excellence of Law School, move the Business School forward during a time of major transition, and spearhead several additional campus initiatives.             

Mike Palis

During the time that I was serving as interim chancellor, Interim Dean Mike Palis took the lead in implementing the recommendations of the 2006 Task Force on the Future of Arts and Sciences, a task force he had co-chaired, along with Associate Dean for the Graduate School Luis Garcia, whose outstanding leadership of the graduate school will be a lasting legacy. I commissioned the task force and gave its charge, but it was Mike and Luis who led a large and diverse committee of faculty, students, administrators, and alumni. The two of them, along with Associate Deans Tyler Hoffman, Nancy Rosoff,  Chris Dougherty (recently named provost at Rosemont College), Allen Woll, who also heads the Honors College, and the rest of the task force members brought the vision we had created –  transforming Arts and Sciences in order to propel the campus’s transformation into a top small public research university –  into reality.

Luis Garcia

The alumni and friends who constitute  the Arts and Sciences Dean’s Leadership Council also were critical to the implementation of that vision.  Every time I walk through the monumental glass sculpture “Gateways” at 4th and Cooper Streets, created by the brilliant Clyde Lynds, I think about the afternoon in which the Council decided to embark on a mini-campaign to raise funds for  scholarships and other student and faculty support. 

Ed Kiessling (L) and Brian Baratz at Gateway Dedication

Ed Kiessling and Brian Baratz headed up the effort. Our development professionals, first Sharon Beales and then Jonathan Boiskin, provided the expertise.  In short order we raised close to $4.5 million, nearly $2 million more than we had originally envisioned. The Council did not stop there.  JoAnn Mower, who succeeded Ed and Brian, stepped down as chair last year.  Pat Egan Jones heads the Council now, and Ed Spell is coordinating its fundraising efforts, ably supported by the development staff led by Suzanne Shaffer.  For the new capital campaign, publicly launched last fall, Arts and Sciences had already raised almost $7.4 million, on our way to our $20 million goal.

I’ve saved several very important thanks for the end:  First, to Wendell Pritchett, our chancellor, who is a distinguished urban scholar and an exceptionally able administrative leader with a commitment both to the growth of this campus — in size, achievement, and reputation — and to its  public role as an urban research university.

Thanks also to Executive Vice President Phil Furmanski (on the left) and President Dick McCormick for believing in our vision and supporting it with the university’s financial resources.

And once again, thanks to Mike Palis, whose outstanding leadership continued this year, among the highlights of which was the exceptionally successful recruitment of a record cohort of outstanding junior and senior faculty members. Next, to the terrific faculty of Rutgers-Camden, who excel both in teaching and research, with special thanks to our chairs and to graduate and undergraduate program directors.  I was so fortunate to find, when I came to Rutgers-Camden, an excellent faculty in Arts and Sciences, who combined outstanding teaching, first-rate research, and a strong commitment to service.  Without such a core strength, the transformative change that I intended for us to accomplish would likely have been impossible.  Building a great faculty, if we hadn’t already had one, would have been a struggle. Continuing to build on excellence, however, was truly a pleasure.  Third, to the directors and associate directors of Arts and Sciences’ Centers and Institutes who have enhanced the campus’s reputation regionally, nationally, and globally. Fourth, I want to acknowledge all my friends and colleagues in the School of Business and the Law School. It has been a delight to get to know so many terrific people in the professional schools.

Tyler Hoffman, Assoc. Dean

I also want to thank all the talented people who support our students, beginning with our assistant deans Nancy Gulick, Danyelle Thurman, Jennifer Thiel, Natasha Tursi, and advising assistant Krista Whelen. Thanks also to the EOF staff to all the dedicated people in Student Affairs and Enrollment Management. Next, to my friends in the professional and administrative staff all over the campus, to the secretarial and support staff,  to those in the Rutgers Police and security forces, in maintenance, facilities, dining, and the trades.  These are the people who make this institution function every day, and they are among the best and nicest people on the campus.  I owe a great deal of gratitude to the FAS  tech staff, whose long-time director, Harold Winshel, lost his battle with brain cancer last October, and whom we miss very much. The unit is now ably led by Rich Buonpastore, and I am grateful to him and his staff for their tolerance and exceptional technical expertise. To computing specialist Scott Kuhnel for his help with The Fertility Doctor and other technical matters, and to Emily Corse in Instructional Design for demystifying the creation of web pages and blogs.

I don’t want to forget my friends and colleagues across the university, from Karen Stubaus, Nancy Winterbauer, Bruce Fehn, Barry Qualls, Mike Pazzani, Tony Calcado, Kim Manning, Ray Caprio, Carol Konscol and many others in Central Administration who have provided support over the years, to Carol Herring, Tracy Elliott, Joyce Hendricks and everyone at the Rutgers University Foundation, to Chancellor Steve Diner and to my fellow deans in New Brunswick and Newark who have been such great colleagues. At the Alumni Association, Chuck Mannella, Donna Thornton, and RU Alumni President Jim Rhodes make me proud to be counted as an alumna.

Associate Dean Allen Woll

And next, to the excellent FAS dean’s office staff –  Julie Strasser, Louise Waters, Edwin Alicea, Pennie Prete, Pat Piccoli, Andrea Ohrenich, Kathy Boyle, and our honorary staff members, security guard Wayne Adair and Marie Ragin Lee, who takes care of our offices.

Iris Rodriguez

Last and most importantly, my great gratitude and admiration goes to two people who have been with me right from the start — Executive Assistant Iris Rodriguez and  Business Manager Maria Garcia. Exceptionally talented and accomplished, Maria and Iris are the heart and soul of the dean’s office.  Over time they’ve also made me feel like a project under construction. Iris has kept me on time and Maria kept me under budget!

Maria Garcia

These past thirteen years at Rutgers–Camden have been the most meaningful and fulfilling of my professional life. I’m looking forward to the next stage of my career with deep gratitude to all of those who have made these years such happy and productive ones, and who have been real agents of transformation.

The Fertility Doctor (Johns Hopkins University Press, 2008) is the second book I’ve co-authored with my sister Wanda Ronner.  I’m a historian, she’s a gynecologist, and we’ve spent the last two decades thinking, talking, and writing about the history and cultural significance of reproductive medicine and its practice.  Our  first collaboration resulted in The Empty Cradle: Infertility in America from Colonial Times to the Present.  Also published by Johns Hopkins University Press, it was honored as a Choice Outstanding Academic Book in 1997.

We had always known how important John Rock was to the history of birth control as the co-developer of the oral contraceptive, but until  we were working on The Empty Cradle, we hadn’t realized how central he had been to the development of the entire field of reproductive medicine.  As we learned more about his life and work, we decided that this was a story we wanted to tell, and that with her expertise in obstetrics, gynecology, and women’s health, and mine in the history of women and gender, we were uniquely prepared to do so.

The Fertility Doctor is a biography of one of the leading figures in twentieth-century medicine. It is also the story of the origins of the reproductive revolution, with its twin symbols of the Pill and technologically assisted reproduction.