By Melissa Kvidahl Reilly
It was 2013, and Cathryn Potter had just arrived “on the banks of the old Raritan” as the School of Social Work’s newest dean. She was ready to hit the ground running and was impressed with the work that had already been done to make the school a leading institution. “I was coming from the University of Denver, where I was associate provost for research, so it was important to me to be with a program that had a strong emphasis on research,” she recalls. “But I was also drawn to Rutgers because of its highly ranked MSW program, and its commitment to training students to be strong clinical social workers and effective leaders in management, policy, and advocacy.”
In the decade since, Potter has built on the school’s existing reputation as one of the largest and most diverse in the country, to become a leader in teaching, community engagement, student experience, and research. The result has been a significant rise in the school’s US News & World Report ranking, from 26 to 16, over the course of Potter’s tenure as dean. “This is because of the dedication of our whole team,” she says. “I’ve been fortunate to be the dean of a great group.”
As the school prepares to transition to new leadership, here are just some of the advancements Dean Potter is most proud of.
Expanding the Faculty
In the years before Potter’s arrival, the School of Social Work had nearly doubled the size of its MSW class without making many changes to the number
of its faculty or staff. “One of the accomplishments I’m most proud of was our focus on faculty and staff hiring,” Potter says. This included a real push for high level researchers, seasoned teachers, and experienced practitioners as professional practice faculty. Most notably, 65 percent of these new hires are BIPOC.
“I’m incredibly proud of that, even though it’s not entirely my work,” Potter says. “We had strong senior faculty when I got here, but expanding our junior level faculty has been very exciting. This has allowed us to improve our student-to-faculty ratio and also continue to improve the quality and quantity of our research. Additionally, we have added top-notch staff to support our educational innovations and research advances.”
The Five-Year Strategic Plan
One of Potter’s most proud moments was unveiling the school’s new five-year strategic plan, called Toward a More Just Future. The process began in 2018, when she convened a committee to gather data from students, faculty, staff, community members, and competing institutions about what it means to envision a future for our country and world that’s grounded in justice. Out of that committee emerged six priority areas for the school to focus on in the coming years.
All was set to launch in 2020, just as the COVID-19 pandemic began and rocked the higher education world practically overnight. “I’m proud to say that, even during a pandemic, we’re on track to implement all of our goals,” Potter says. “I’m proud of the engagement we had with so many members of our community during the development of this plan, and the plan itself is fantastic.”
The One Square Block Initiative
Many alumni will recall the School of Social Work’s facilities as a scattering of small, dated buildings across from the Johnson & Johnson heliport, some rental space in downtown New Brunswick, and additional offices about a mile away in the public safety building on Commercial Avenue. This is not the case today.
During her tenure, Potter launched the One Square Block initiative, designed to concentrate the school’s footprint in downtown New Brunswick. Currently, it benefits from a significant amount of visible rental space all within one block on the corner of Albany Street and George Street, enabling face-to-face meetings in a matter of minutes—a feat that was impossible just a few years ago. Dedicated classrooms are still on the school’s wish list (classes are currently being taught in general university space) and will likely be a project for the next dean.
“Our goal was to centralize our footprint,” says Potter. “Short of having the resources to create a new building, the One Square Block initiative has accomplished our goal in a creative way.”
Navigating the Pandemic
When Potter arrived at Rutgers in 2013, she never could have predicted that her time as dean would entail navigating a global pandemic. But this soon became the reality for about one-third of her tenure. “It was a terribly heavy lift for everyone involved,” she recalls, especially in the early days of March 2020, when the school transformed—over spring break—from being a mostly on-campus program to developing asynchronous, synchronous, face-to-face, and remote online class options for roughly 2,000 students. “Our team’s ability to pivot, be successful, get our students graduated, and take care of one another throughout the pandemic has been nothing short of amazing,” Potter adds. “Our students are also one of the most diverse bodies in the country, made up of highly engaged and tremendous leaders, and watching them navigate the pandemic has been inspiring.”
Despite its challenges, the pandemic accelerated the school’s interest and investment in technology. On one hand, it revealed what the future could hold for students interested in online or other alternative paths to a social work degree. On the other, it also prepared students for what practice might be like in a telehealth setting. “The way that a lot of social work practice is being done is changing,” adds Potter. “That flexibility and the ability to position ourselves for the future speaks well for our school.”
Looking Ahead
Dean Potter plans to take a one-year administrative leave at the end of the 2023 academic year. But she’s not slowing down. “I plan to reconnect with some of my scholarly interests,” she says, which include organizational health, child welfare, juvenile justice, and mental health. In the meantime, she looks back fondly on her successes as a team effort. “A dean gets to be a leader, but they’re not the person doing all the strategic thinking, all the work, or even any of the implementation in a lot of ways,” she says. “The success of a dean is the success of a team.”
Patricia Findley is the New Associate Dean for Academic Affairs
If you ask Patricia Findley about her career path, she’ll tell you she’s a clinical social worker first and foremost. “That’s the most important thing,” she says, referring to her 15 years in practice working with patients in rehabilitation hospitals, retirement homes, and nursing facilities. After earning her doctorate in public health, she transitioned into research, first at Northwestern University and then at Rutgers, where she worked with the Social Security Administration to determine how people receiving disability benefits could use those benefits to secure meaningful work, get off of the benefits, and earn higher wages. After a brief stint with the Veterans Administration’s War Related Illness and Injury Study Center, she returned to the School of Social Work as a faculty member. This year, she’s bringing her extensive experience in research, teaching, and administration to the position of Associate Dean for Academic Affairs at the School of Social Work.
One of Findley’s goals for her new position is to leverage her interdisciplinary background to bring the school’s expertise to academic and clinical centers across Rutgers’ campuses. Her first target? Health care. “There are so many ways to bring the role of social work to health care environments across the university, including direct care, substance use disorder treatment, working with children, and more,” she says. “The School of Social Work is sometimes overlooked within health care at Rutgers, but that’s what I’ve been actively working towards for the last 10 years—bringing social work into the forefront of health care.” Beyond this, she also sees a role for the school to get involved in business management and leadership research, and advance advocacy across the university. “It’s about bringing the power of what we do as social workers to the university and state,” she says, “and sharing the resources so everyone can benefit.”
When it comes to the student experience, Findley plans to strengthen the school’s supports for those pursuing bachelor’s degrees as well as for those in the larger master’s degree program. This includes working to develop agreements with community colleges to recruit students into the bachelor’s program, and engaging with practicing social service workers who may be interested in the Intensive Weekend MSW Program. As the desire for online education grows, she also hopes to build a more robust online program for social work students at Rutgers. “I enjoy programming and thinking creatively about how to attract students and work with them to get their degrees,” she says. “This role gives me a lot of opportunities to do that, and I arrive at work in the morning energized for the day and excited for what we can accomplish.”
At the center of Findley’s new role is her dedication to students, both while they are at Rutgers and as they prepare to leave. Top of mind for her, currently, is the nationwide licensure exam bias, making it difficult for Black and other minority students as well as older students to pass the MSW exam. To that end, she’s currently hosting monthly meetings for all the MSW directors in the state about how to address this and other challenges social workers face, from telehealth to business advocacy. “My emails in the morning solidify my schedule for the day, because if there’s a student issue, everything else gets set aside,” she says. “I work with the students first.”
Edward Alessi is the New MSW Program Director
As the School of Social Work’s newest MSW Program Director, Edward Alessi plans to build on its already stellar reputation by infusing Inclusion, Intersectionality, Diversity, Equity and Advancement (IIDEA)-related initiatives throughout the curriculum. “Americans have faced turbulent times over the last few years, and an MSW curriculum that is grounded in IIDEA-related initiatives makes certain that Rutgers prepares social workers for contemporary clinical and policy practice,” he says. “The result will be a cohort of leaders prepared to advocate for their clients, all in service of promoting racial, social, and economic justice and eliminating health disparities in New Jersey, the United States, and globally.”
Alessi, a School of Social Work faculty member since 2011, brings to his new role substantial research experience. Generally, his work centers on the topic of stress and trauma among sexual and gender minority (SGM) populations, as well as how clinical practice, policies, and programs can align more closely with the needs of this underserved population. Currently, his research focuses on how traumatic stress among SGM migrants intersects with the psychosocial and structural issues of their host countries to impact health and mental health outcomes. He takes this one step further to also examine what kinds of community-based interventions might serve to buffer some of these negative effects on the SGM migrant population. This research has taken him all over the world, and has been published in journals like Trauma, Violence & Abuse, Psychological Trauma: Theory, Research, Practice, and Policy, Psychotherapy, Psychotherapy Research, and others.
Alessi’s extensive teaching experience will also benefit him as MSW Program Director. In June 2017, he was named a Rutgers Chancellor’s Scholar, an award created to support faculty excellence at the associate professor level, and in March 2021, he joined Rutgers Global Health as a core faculty member.
Alessi has taught a range of courses at the master’s and doctoral level at the School of Social Work, including Qualitative Research, Theory Development, Clinical Social Work, Clinical Assessment and Diagnosis, and Sexual and Gender Diversity in Social Work. He received the Outstanding Professor of the Year Award four years in a row (2013 to 2016) and earned the Rutgers University Presidential Fellowship for Teaching Excellence in 2017. A clinical social worker since 2001, he has a decade of full-time social work practice experience, primarily in outpatient mental health settings.
“The Rutgers MSW program is one of the best in the country,” Alessi says, “and I look forward to continuing its mission of preparing social work students to confront the most pressing social issues of our time.”
The School of Social Work is pleased to announce additional leadership changes effective July 1, 2023:
Dr. DuWayne Battle, Assistant Dean for Bachelor’s Programs, Director of the BA in Social Work Program in New Brunswick
Dr. Natalie Bembry, Director of the BA in Social Work Program in Camden
Dr. Erica Goldblatt Hyatt, Director of the DSW Program
Dr. Judith McCoyd, Associate Director for Doctoral Programs
Dr. Lia Nower, Associate Dean for Research
Christine Morales, Assistant Dean for Part-Time Lecturer Development
Dr. Cassandra Simmel, Director of the Ph.D. Program
