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Credit: Photo by: Roy Groething
Assistant Professor of music Nanette
DeJong looks on as Music 101 student
Israel Isales thumps out a salsa beat on
his conga drums. Introduction to music
is one class that has been revised to be
more multicultural under auspices of the
Bildner Campus Diversity Initiative.
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In the 1950s anti-Semitism was blatant and unabashed. This, after all, was a time when some businesses posted signs reading “No Jews or dogs allowed.”
Although Allen Bildner lived a successful life in a small town in Union County, he sharply remembers many of his first encounters with bigotry. There was the time two of his classmates beat him up while calling him “rabbi” and telling him to “go home Jew.”
“I went home crying, because I never knew anything about anti-Semitism and I never had that experience,” Bildner says.
And Bildner would like it if it never happened again – to anyone. His experiences sparked the funding of the New Jersey Campus Diversity Initiative. Seven colleges and universities, including Rutgers, received money in 2002 to execute programs encouraging cultural interaction. Entering its third year, the initiative is poised to change the way humanities, hard sciences, social sciences and the arts are taught at Rutgers and the way students from different cultures work together.
Bildner is quick to emphasize that brushes with anti-Semitism did not occur on a daily basis and never hindered him from becoming a success. He was president of the student body in high school, and he went on to help propagate the family supermarket business. The Bildner family built the King Kullen chain in Long Island before moving to New Jersey to start the upscale Kings supermarkets.
Still, even later in life, after Allen married his wife Joan – a member of the Rutgers Board of Governors – the biases continued. Once the Bildners tried to book a room at a Pocono Mountain resort. It went well until Joan Bildner’s brother, Larry Schechter, filled out a form. Upon seeing a more “Jewish-sounding” name, the staff claimed they made a mistake and had no more rooms.
The Bildners wanted to do their part to eradicate racism and discrimination. After donating to Allen Bildner’s alma mater, Dartmouth, the couple looked beyond one institution.
“Joan and I then looked at New Jersey and said, ‘you know, we certainly are not able to encourage change at every college in the United States, but maybe we can help in New Jersey,” Bildner recalls. So the couple, cooperating with the Association of American Colleges and Universities, invited 47 colleges and universities in New Jersey to apply for grant money.
Thirty-five accepted the Bildners’ invitation and through a competitive application process, seven of those schools, including Rutgers, were selected to receive between $75,000 and $225,000 from the Bildner Family Foundation.
The project, dubbed the “New Jersey Campus Diversity Initiative,” was launched two years ago this fall. The Bildners hope that at the end of this year, the participating schools will share some experiences with other higher education institutions in the state.
The projects at each of the seven colleges and universities around the state hardly resemble each other. Allen Bildner said that the level of faculty involvement makes Rutgers’ initiative stand out.
As a result, several courses are changed for the long term, beyond the three-year funding from the Bildner initiative. And by emphasizing cultural interaction in the freshman English composition class, some 5,000 students each year will get a taste of interculturalism, according to the Rutgers proposal.
Rutgers has a distinguished record of multiculturalism. Several campus centers that highlight ethnic groups and programs of study dedicated to these groups have emerged over the past couple of decades. Among them are Africana studies, Jewish studies, Middle Eastern studies, Puerto Rican and Hispanic Caribbean studies, and Asian Languages and Culture. But multiculturalism isn’t the same as assimilation.
“We found that we had a lot of activities and a lot of courses – a lot of everything, really – that addressed cultural issues,” says Susan Forman, who was the vice president of undergraduate education when she co-wrote the Bildner proposal. Forman is now on the faculty at the Graduate School of Applied and Professional Psychology. “We thought what we needed to do was start to teach students about cultural interaction.”
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