Rutgers University

• 1. Introduction

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  Rutgers University began teaching in 1771 with one instructor, a single sophomore and a handful of first-year students. Their classroom was a tavern called the Sign of the Red Lion. A tavern is an odd place to hold class for a college founded by a church. That cramped start leads to a set of questions. How did a school with that beginning grow into one of the largest universities in the United States? Why is scarlet its only color, when students once argued for orange? And why do so many people call this campus in New Brunswick, New Jersey, the birthplace of college football?

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• 2. A Charter for Ministers

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  In 1746, New Light Presbyterians founded the College of New Jersey, now Princeton University. Two decades later, ministers of the Dutch Reformed Church wanted a college of their own. They were seeking more control over church affairs in the Thirteen Colonies. Their church would later become the Reformed Church in America.

  Theodorus Jacobus Frelinghuysen and Jacob Rutsen Hardenbergh drove years of effort toward that goal. Hardenbergh would become the college's first president. The charter arrived on the 10th of November 1766, signed by William Franklin, New Jersey's last royal governor and the son of Benjamin Franklin. It named the school Queen's College, in honor of Queen Charlotte.

  Hackensack lost out to New Brunswick as the site. The New Brunswick Dutch had the backing of the Anglican population, which made a royal charter easier to win. The charter set out the school's purpose in these words: to "educate the youth in language, liberal, the divinity, and useful arts and sciences." Training future Dutch Reformed ministers was the central aim.

  The same charter created the Queen's College Grammar School, a preparatory school governed by the college. Today it is the private Rutgers Preparatory School. It remained part of the college community until 1959.

  The first degree went to Matthew Leydt in 1774. When the Revolutionary War began, the British came to suspect that taverns were hotbeds of rebel activity. The college left its tavern and met in private homes instead. Two of its earliest students, Simeon De Witt and James Schureman, soon served the new nation. De Witt became Surveyor-General for the Continental Army, and Schureman sat in the Continental Congress before becoming a United States senator.

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• 3. Colonel Rutgers and Old Queens

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  Twice in its early years, lack of money forced Queen's College to close for long stretches. At one point, the trustees came within a single vote of merging it into the College of New Jersey at Princeton. They also weighed moving the whole school to New York City.

  In 1808, after raising $12,000, the college reopened for a time and broke ground on its own building. The architect was John McComb Jr., and the building was called Old Queens. Ira Condict, the college's third president, laid the cornerstone on the 27th of April 1809. Soon the New Brunswick Theological Seminary, founded in 1784, moved from Brooklyn and shared the space. The grammar school and seminary joined them. All three institutions, overseen by the Reformed Church in America, fit inside Old Queens.

  They did not stay together. The grammar school crossed the street in 1830. The seminary moved in 1856 to a seven-acre tract less than half a mile away.

  The college closed again after an economic depression that followed the War of 1812. It reopened in 1825 under a new name, Rutgers College. The name honored Henry Rutgers, a hero of the Revolutionary War who lived from 1745 to 1830. The trustees said he embodied Christian ethics.

  A year after the renaming, the colonel sent two gifts. One was a $200 bell, which still hangs from the cupola of Old Queen's. The other was a $5,000 bond that put the college on sound financial footing. A federal law passed in 1862 would soon give the college a very different mission.

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• 4. Becoming a State University

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  Under the Morrill Act of 1862, Rutgers College became New Jersey's land-grant college in 1864. That led to the Rutgers Scientific School, with departments of agriculture, engineering and chemistry. Over the years it expanded into the New Jersey Agricultural Experiment Station in 1880. It then divided into the College of Engineering in 1914 and the College of Agriculture in 1921. Rutgers also created the New Jersey College for Women in 1918 and the School of Education in 1924.

  In 1924, as graduate education developed, this collection of schools became Rutgers University. Rutgers College carried on inside it as a liberal arts college. University College followed in 1945 to serve part-time, commuting students. Livingston College arrived in 1969, created by the trustees so that ethnically diverse New Jersey students would be served.

  The New Jersey Legislature designated Rutgers the state university in 1945 and again in 1956. Even so, as successor to the college chartered in 1766, it kept some private rights and protections over its basic character. The trustees were reluctant to give the state direction over certain business affairs. That reluctance pushed the state to create a board of governors in 1956. Of its 15 voting members, eight are appointed by the governor of New Jersey.

  Expansion came fast. The university absorbed the University of Newark in 1946. In 1950 it took in the College of South Jersey and South Jersey Law School. These became Rutgers-Newark and Rutgers-Camden. On the 10th of September 1970, the board of governors voted to admit women into Rutgers College.

  Growth also brought losses. The first came in 1967, over a National Science Foundation grant in physics.

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• 5. Mergers and Protests

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  The 1967 Centers of Excellence Grant would have paid for several new physics faculty each year for three years. Associate and full professors hired this way were to become tenured afterward. The governor and the chancellor rejected that condition, and Rutgers lost the grant.

  In 1970, the new Rutgers Medical School hired major faculty from other institutions. In 1971, the governor's office pulled the school out of Rutgers and placed it in the New Jersey College of Medicine and Dentistry. Many faculty left, including the dean, Dewitt Stetten, who later directed the National Institutes of Health. Ph.D. programs begun in the medical center were lost, and students had to finish elsewhere. The two paths rejoined in 2013, when most of the University of Medicine and Dentistry of New Jersey merged into Rutgers. That brought in the New Jersey Medical School and Robert Wood Johnson Medical School. The unit was renamed Rutgers Health in July 2023.

  Before 1982, the New Brunswick residential colleges each had their own liberal arts faculty. President Edward J. Bloustein centralized them that year into a Faculty of Arts and Sciences, which had no students of its own. Admission, good standing and graduation rules still differed by college. In January 1987, around 2,800 non-teaching employees went on strike for higher pay, and it ended after nine days. In 2007, the colleges merged into a single School of Arts and Sciences with one set of admissions criteria. That change ended the 241-year history of Rutgers College as a distinct institution.

  Protest shaped the 2010s. Students rallied against rising costs and shrinking state support in 2011, using marches, sit-ins, letters and forums. That same year, Governor Chris Christie and some legislators tried to merge Rutgers-Camden into Rowan University. Campus protests and pushback from Camden faculty, students and alumni helped defeat it. In June 2012, outgoing president Richard L. McCormick announced that five acres along George Street would join the College Avenue Campus. Rutgers agreed to rebuild the seminary that had occupied most of the block.

  In 2016, Rutgers marked its 250th anniversary, and Barack Obama became the first sitting president to speak at its commencement, on the 15th of May. That November, the university released research on its own past. It described an untold history of founders who were slave owners and of Native Americans displaced from land later transferred to the college. Researchers had also traced the college's early benefit from slave labor, and its founding on land taken from the Lenape.

  In January 2020, Jonathan Holloway became the first African American named president of Rutgers. On the 9th of April 2023, three unions began the first strike by academics in the university's 257-year history, suspending classes and research for a week. In September, the faculty senate voted no confidence in Holloway. William F. Tate IV took office as president on the 1st of July 2025.

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• 6. Campuses Across a State

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  Six municipalities in Middlesex County hold Rutgers-New Brunswick, the largest of the university's three campuses. Its historic College Avenue Campus sits near the New Brunswick train station and a crowd of food vendors, which makes it a popular weekend destination. Old Queens remains the seat of the university there. Douglass and Cook campuses are intertwined, and Cook has farms and woods stretching into North Brunswick and East Brunswick.

  Across the Raritan River in Piscataway lie the Busch and Livingston campuses. Busch holds the Ernest Mario School of Pharmacy, the golf course and the football stadium. Livingston is home to Jersey Mike's Arena, a trapezoidal building once known as the Rutgers Athletic Center. The glass Rutgers Business School building at the campus entrance is nicknamed "100 Rock," after its address at 100 Rockafeller Road. Linking it all is a campus bus system, the second-largest bus service in New Jersey, which carries six million passengers a year.

  Newark lies in the north of the state and Camden in the south. Rutgers-Newark enrolls 12,011 students, and in 2008 U.S. News & World Report ranked it the most diverse campus in the country. Rutgers-Camden enrolls 6,343 students in the Cooper's Grant and Central Waterfront neighborhoods. Chancellors at both campuses hold significant autonomy over some academic matters, though the university is administered from New Brunswick.

  In Fall 2023, over 69,000 students enrolled across the three campuses. About 9,000 faculty teach in 175 academic departments. Partnerships with Atlantic Cape, Brookdale, Mercer, Morris, Camden and Raritan Valley community colleges also let students take Rutgers classes closer to home.

  The university's reach extends to young students as well. In 2007, it launched the Rutgers Future Scholars Program for 7th graders from low-income families in New Brunswick, Piscataway, Newark and Camden. The program admits as many as 200 students a year. Those who later gain admission to Rutgers receive four years of full tuition.

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• 7. Minds and Discoveries

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  In 1952, Selman Waksman received the Nobel Prize for Medicine. He had earned two Rutgers degrees, in 1915 and 1916. At Rutgers he found a run of antibiotics, among them actinomycin, clavacin, neomycin and grisein. With graduate student Albert Schatz he found streptomycin, the first antibiotic applied to cure tuberculosis.

  Rutgers research also produced water-soluble sustained release polymers, tetraploids, robotic hands, and artificial bovine insemination. Ceramic tiles for the Space Shuttle's heat shield came from Rutgers too. The RCSB Protein Data Bank, cohosted with the San Diego Supercomputer Center, serves researchers worldwide as the authoritative source on protein structures. The Rutgers University Cell and DNA Repository is the largest university-based repository in the world. It has received awards worth more than $57.8 million from the National Institutes of Health.

  The Edison Papers hold roughly 5 million documents tied to Thomas Alva Edison, and nearly 175,000 of them are digitized. In Newark, the Dana Library houses the Institute of Jazz Studies, one of the world's largest jazz archives. On the College Avenue Campus, the Zimmerli Art Museum keeps over 60,000 works, with a focus on Russian and Soviet art. The Geology Museum displays a mastodon from Salem County, a dinosaur trackway from Towaco and a Ptolemaic-era Egyptian mummy.

  Famous teachers have worked here too. Ruth Bader Ginsburg taught at Rutgers Law School for nine years, from 1963 to 1972, before joining the Supreme Court of the United States. Historian David Levering Lewis won the Pulitzer Prize twice, in 1994 and 2001, for the two volumes of his biography of W. E. B. Du Bois. Endre Szemerédi was awarded the Abel Prize in 2012. Mario Szegedy won the Gödel Prize in both 2001 and 2005.

  Among alumni, Milton Friedman earned a Nobel Prize in economics, and novelist Junot Díaz won the 2008 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction. Paul Robeson, a singer, athlete, attorney and civil rights activist, graduated in 1919. His name now marks a library in Camden, a cultural center on the Busch Campus and the campus center in Newark.

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• 8. Scarlet and Sport

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  In May 1869, the student publication Targum urged that scarlet become the school color, partly because scarlet ribbon was easy to get. Some students had pushed for orange, citing Rutgers' Dutch heritage and the Prince of Orange. Scarlet won out. The trustees made it official in 1900. The Targum grew into the Daily Targum, now the second-oldest college newspaper in the country, after The Dartmouth. Poet Joyce Kilmer and economist Milton Friedman both edited it.

  On the 6th of November 1869, Rutgers played Princeton on College Field in the first intercollegiate football game. Rutgers players wore scarlet turbans and handkerchiefs so they could be told apart. Rutgers won, 6 to 4, though the game is believed to have been closer to soccer. Four years later, on the 19th of October 1873, Rutgers, Yale, Columbia and Princeton met at the Fifth Avenue Hotel in Manhattan to write rules for the new game. Harvard was invited and did not attend.

  The school's athletic nicknames have wandered. Athletes were first called The Scarlet or Queensmen. In 1925, the mascot became Chanticleer, a fighting rooster from the medieval tale of Reynard the Fox that Chaucer also used in the Canterbury Tales. The student humor magazine carried that name, and its early arts editor, Ozzie Nelson, was quarterback from 1924 to 1926. Many mocked the rooster as a chicken. Football coach Harvey Harman said bluntly that everyone knew it was a chicken. After a campus-wide election in 1955, the Scarlet Knight replaced it, beating Queensmen, Red Lions, Redmen and Flying Dutchmen. The costumed mascot today is called Sir Henry.

  The school's Latin motto, Sol iustitiae et occidentem illustra, adapts Utrecht University's motto, Sol iustitiae illustra nos. Both come from a Latin Bible translation of Malachi 4:2.

  On the 9th of November 2006, Rutgers beat third-ranked, undefeated Louisville and climbed to seventh in the AP Poll. The team finished 11-2 after winning the first Texas Bowl, 37-10 over Kansas State. Its final AP ranking of twelfth was the highest of any season. Women's basketball under C. Vivian Stringer won the 1982 AIAW National Championship and reached the 2007 national championship game. The men's basketball team had reached the Final Four in 1976.

  Rutgers joined the Big Ten Conference on the 1st of July 2014, becoming its easternmost school. In 2021, the men's basketball team returned to the NCAA tournament for the first time since 1991. In 2022, the men's lacrosse team reached its first Final Four and lost 17-10 to Cornell. In 2025, the women's rowing eight won the Island Challenge Cup at the Henley Royal Regatta.

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