Rutgers helping shape policy for new administration

2/4/2009 12:00:00 AM

Read more.

As the Obama presidency begins to take shape, it will carry a strong Rutgers flavor. On matters ranging from universal internet access to funding for the humanities, scholars from all three campuses are helping define national policy for the next four years.

Among the academics whose talents the fledgling administration has mined are Ellen Goodman, Heather McKay, Clement Price, William M. Rodgers III, and Jorge Reina Schement.

“I felt honored and excited to be asked to participate in one of the great presidencies of my time,” said Schement, dean of Rutgers’ School of Communication, Information and Library Studies and an expert on the social consequences of the production and consumption of information.

He said Obama’s outreach to the academic world has been more extensive and systematic than that of any of his predecessors.

A veteran of administrations reaching back to Jimmy Carter’s, Schement said he received an email around Thanksgiving asking him to participate in the transition effort. Specifically, he was asked to contribute papers focusing on ways to broaden Americans’ access to communications systems as they relate to the Federal Communications Commission (FCC). His research focuses particularly on policy involving ethnic minorities.

Schement worked for the FCC when Bill Clinton was president, frequently commuting to Washington on the same Amtrak train as Vice President – then Delaware Senator – Joe Biden.

The Rutgers dean said as many as 7 million Americans, representing 7 percent of the nation’s households, have neither a phone connection nor a way to log in to the internet. In his work with the Obama transition, Schement outlined ways the FCC and Congress should address this inequality, which disproportionately affects African Americans, Hispanics, the elderly, single mothers, people with disabilities, and people living in rural areas.

Like her colleague up the turnpike, Rutgers–Camden law professor Ellen Goodman was a member of the committee advising the FCC transition team, specifically regarding the digital-television conversion process. Congress has mandated that all full-power television stations stop broadcasting on analog airways and move to digital-only. That move is expected to take place by February 17, unless it is delayed by several months as the transition team has recommended.

Goodman, who also advised Obama Administration officials on technology innovation, specializes in the law of information technology, including intellectual property. As an outgrowth of her participation in the Obama campaign and subsequent transition process, she hopes to invite colleagues from the Obama Administration and former transition team to address her law school students next year.

In addition to lending her expertise to the transition effort, the legal scholar has spoken at the National Science Foundation, the Brookings Institute, the National Press Club, and the Aspen Institute, as well as at many academic institutions and industry groups. She is Of Counsel to the Washington law firm of Covington & Burling, also the home of Obama’s attorney general nominee, Eric Holder.

Goodman and Schement have contributed chapters to a book … And Communications for All: A Policy Agenda for a New Administration, which they hope will serve as a blueprint for a new telecommunications initiative over the coming four years.


The troubled economy is of particular concern to two Rutgers academics whose expertise focuses on employee training and the impact of the economic downturn on American workers.


Heather McKay is director of the Sloan Center on Innovative Training and Workforce Development at Rutgers’ Center for Women and Work. A paper on online training she wrote for the Communications Workers of America attracted the attention of transition team members, who asked her and co-author Eileen Appelbaum, professor in Rutgers’ School of Management and Labor Relations, to propose a series of guidelines for the policy-makers.

McKay’s memo suggested ways the internet can provide adult learners with access to skills to help them find jobs in a faltering economy.

“The fact that the Obama transition team reached out to all of us says a lot about the innovative work happening at the university,” McKay said. “Traditional academic research is important, but it’s also imperative to put research into practice. Our participation in the transition demonstrates the value and the quality of the academic work occurring at Rutgers today.”

William M. Rodgers III, a professor and chief economist with Rutgers’ John J. Heldrich Center for Workforce Development, has been advising the incoming labor secretary on the impact the stressed economy is having on workers. He also conducted both internal and external reviews of the Bureau of Labor Statistics, a process involving interviewing senior staff members at the agency.

In a recent profile in the Courier News, Rodgers recalled meeting the future president at a 2004 panel discussion on globalization. He found Obama to be “a really passionate, brilliant individual.”


Clement Price, Board of Governors Distinguished Service Professor of History at Rutgers–Newark, shares Rodgers’ high hopes for the new regime in the White House. The community activist has been overseeing the transition for the National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH), the independent arm of the government that supplies grants for research, education, preservation, and public programs in the humanities.

“I am honored, truly, to be a member of the Obama transition team, especially given my tasks at the NEH,” Price said. “So far I have spoken to scores of NEH staffers and members of the public and academic humanities movement in the United States and am all the more convinced that the agency will benefit from an Obama presidency. The Endowment's commitment to historical literacy, civic engagement, lifelong learning, and scholarship will be enriched, I believe, by President Obama's call for a more perfect union.”

Fredda Sacharow