The Bildner Foundation awarded Rutgers, The State University of New Jersey a grant in the amount of $225,000 to promote and enhance intercultural interaction among students, administrative staff and family.

The university-wide initiative will reach students in and out of the classroom through curricular and co-curricular activities that will include new courses in a variety of disciplines and modifications to existing academic programs on the New Brunswick, Newark and Camden campuses, according to Susan Forman, Vice President for Undergraduate Education.

Forman noted the grant will help to facilitate the implementation of recommendations by the Rutgers Multicultural Curriculum Task Force to incorporate activities related to intercultural activities into the undergraduate experience.

Isabel Nazario, Director of the Rutgers Center for Latino Arts and Culture and Executive Director for the Office of Intercultural Initiatives, will serve as project director for the new initiative.

“How can we foster positive intercultural interaction? Is one of the great questions that remains to be answered by our society,” said Forman. “Rutgers’ continuing focus on this issue has been consistent with our service and research mission. This grant assists us in implementing new programs that will allow us to promote and build intergroup understanding, and reduce prejudice and bigotry.”

The grant from the Bildner Family Foundation is part of its New Jersey Campus Diversity Initiative, which seeks to build on existing efforts in higher education “to effectively use the diversity in our state and our nation as an educational resource to adequately prepare graduates to live and work in an increasingly diverse, but still unequal, society.”

“The multiplicity of cultures and ethnic groups enriches the academic and social experience at Rutgers, but we truly become a community by understanding each other and by learning and developing together,” said Joseph J. Seneca, University Vice President for Academic Affairs. “This grant enables us to realize many components of this goal across the University.”

In addition to creating new courses and activities, the initiative will seek to connect and enhance many existing activities related to diversity. The goal is to make the issues of diversity and intercultural interaction central to the undergraduate curriculum and nature of the Rutgers community, Forman said.

The project’s impact is being felt by this fall’s incoming students on the New Brunswick campus, all of whom are required to take a basic composition course. The latest version of the “The New Humanities Reader,” edited by Richard E. Miller and Kurt Spellmeyer, directors of the writing program, incorporates new readings that address intercultural issues and provide an impetus for critical thinking and examination in writing assignments. In Camden, the English department’s required composition course also will be used as the basis for learning about intercultural interaction.

Click here for other goals and components of the initiative