the garden state

I had a very enjoyable, inspirational and educational five days touring the Garden State last week with the Rutgers Faculty Traveling Seminar which was designed to connect faculty members at The State University of New Jersey with the state that they serve. We learned about


state politics,





agriculture--NJ is one of the three largest producers of cranberries


and is the "horsiest" state in the nation with more horses per square mile than any other state.





We got insights into land use and environmental issues in the state from the South Jersey Pinelands to the Highlands in the Northwest.


Did you know that the largest waterfalls in the Northeast US after Niagara falls are surrounded by the struggling urban landscape of Paterson, NJ? Rutgers professor Steven Handel, a specialist in urban restoration ecology [which sounds like a profession I might have aspired to had I known it existed] is helping to preserve and beautify the area immediately surrounding the falls so that they can once again become a tourist destination.



Day 4 of the tour took us to the heart of urban New Jersey with a whirlwind tour of Newark, the largest urban center in NJ and the nation's third oldest major city.


We toured the brand new Prudential Center home of the New Jersey Devils ice hockey team,


the magnificent (mainly inside) and historic Newark Symphony Hall which is scheduled for major renovations.





We had a stroll around Lincoln Park where our gracious host Professor Clement Price introduced us to community leaders in the arts and in other community service such as


drug rehabilitation institutions



We also had a chance to visit the church of Reverend Dr. M. William Howard, who also happens to be chair of the board of governors of Rutgers. While there we were inspired by the work of Bethany Cares, a project coordinated by

the dynamic Tynesha McHarris that works with young men who have had some run ins with the juvenile justice system.



In the evening we stopped by a panel discussion at the studio of WBGO public radio station which was commemorating Martin Luther King's 1968 visit to Newark.
We had dinner at the New Jersey Historical society in the presence of a picture of American poet Walt Whitman who lived in Camden, NJ in his later years. We also were able to view the exhibit about the "urban rebellion" that took place in Newark in 1967. Whew! This was a powerful day.




On the final day, the traveling seminar ended with a trip to Ellis Island where we were able to visit parts of the island that have not yet been opened to the public or even renovated. It was fascinating to walk through the vast maze of hospital wards where immigrants were screened and given what appears to have been top quality treatment for the time.





Not only did the five days of the traveling seminar give a sense of the diversity that characterizes the landscape, economy and population of New Jersey, it also offered a precious opportunity to interact with a diversity of wonderful and brilliant professors teaching in departments from astronomy to political science. I learned as much from my interdisciplinary colleagues as I did from the astonishing array of people from all walks of life who were given the microphone to speak to us. It was fascinating to hear the questions that professors asked of different people. People trained in different disciplinary backgrounds have such intriguingly different ways of understanding the world and thus have different types of questions that bring to light different aspects of reality. Yet more evidence that diversity of all types lends important richness to our lives.