Rutgers
University
Administrative
Assembly

^The Administrator

...the Administrative Assembly Newsletter

The views and opinions expressed in The Administrator are those of the authors identified or of the Administrative Assembly and are not necessarily those of Rutgers University.
Editor: Charles R. Olszewski Busch Campus 65 Davidson Rd Room 101 ASB phone 5-5061 fax 5-5493
e-mail olszewski@acs.rutgers.edu

Contents:

Assembly Election

Early Retirement Incentives

Lambert Jackson

Current Officers

Why Pink?

Homebuyers Program Gone

Let's Talk (Editorial)

Assembly Election Due

The Administrative Assembly will hold elections for delegates for the 2002-2003 Assembly session during February 2002. We will seek to fill eighteen seats.

Delegates are normally elected to serve for three years, with one-third of the delegate positions being up for election each year. A delegate is expected to attend each of the four regular meetings held during the year, and to take an active part in one of the standing or ad hoc committees of the Assembly.

Due to a failure to hold elections for the 2001-2002 Assembly session, and to attrition, delegates elected this February, along with those currently serving, will participate in a lottery at the June regular Assembly meeting. This lottery will determine whether an individual delegate will serve for one, two or three years. This is being done to re-establish the practice of a classified delegation whereby only one-third of serving delegates are up for re-election or replacement each year. This ensures continuity in the deliberations of the Assembly, and reduces the difficulty of finding sufficient candidates to fill seats open for the election.

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Administrative Assembly Home Page

Early Retirement Incentive Bills Introduced

On January 8, 2002, bills A1394 and S451 were introduced into the State Assembly and the State Senate, respectively. These bills provide for a service credit of 5 years (PERS) or a lump-sum increment to pension savings (ABP) for employees who elect to retire before July 1, 2002; have 25 or more years in eligible service, and will be at least 50 years old at the time of their retirement. The bills also provide that those under 55 years old will not have their pension amount reduced due to being under-age. Both bills have been referred to committee. A1394 is in the Assembly State Government Committee; and S451 went to the Senate State Government Committee. For more information, check the World-Wide Web at http://www.njleg.state.nj.us/.

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In Memoriam: Dr. Lambert Blunt Jackson

On October 6, 2001, Rutgers University and its Administrative Assembly lost one of its most prominent and active people. Dr. Lambert Blunt Jackson died at the age of 61. Lambert served the University as Director of EOF Programs in Camden. He served the Administrative Assembly and its constituents at various times as Vice-president and editor of the Administrator; as committee chair; and, at times, as our sole delegate from Camden. To describe the breadth and depth of Dr. Jackson’s contributions would take both broader knowledge and greater command of language than I can summon. Let it suffice to say that he will be missed, most acutely.

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Current Officers

The Administrative Assembly has five elected officers, each serving a one-year term. For the 2001-2002 Assembly year these officers are:

• PRESIDENT – Rosemarie Kulp, Livingston. The president chairs the regular meetings of the Assembly, establishes and appoints members to the ad hoc committees as needed, and appoints the membership of the single standing committee other than the Executive Committee, the Election, Nominations and Membership Committee. This officer also has the authority to call special meetings.

• VICE PRESIDENT and President Elect – Charles R. Olszewski, Busch. The vice president chairs regular meetings when the president is unavailable and replaces the president if that officer leaves office before the end of the year. The vice president also is charged with publishing the Administrative Assembly newsletter, The Administrator. To ensure continuity from one Assembly year to the next, the vice president is also automatically the president-elect for the following year.

• RECORDING SECRETARY – Sue Beaudrow, Livingston. The recording secretary keeps and publishes the official Minutes of all Assembly meetings and is responsible for keeping track of the delegate membership of the Assembly. In the latter role, the recording secretary is nominally responsible for informing the president if a quorum (one third of all currently serving delegates) is present for a meeting.

• CORRESPONDING SECRETARY – Christine Sohn, Livingston. The corresponding secretary conducts all external communications for the Assembly including initiating and responding to correspondence from non-Assembly sources. While this can include transmitting motions and other actions of the Assembly to the President of the University, this latter duty is usually undertaken by the president of the Assembly as a courtesy to the President.

• TREASURER – Anneliese Grasemann, Douglass. The treasurer keeps the accounts of the Assembly, providing reimbursement to delegates for expenditures made on behalf of the Assembly, and reporting the current status of each Assembly account to the delegate body on a regular basis.

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Why Pink?

Many years ago, when the first issue of The Administrator was being sent to press, the Director of Duplicating & Mailing had a discussion with me. (I was the first editor of the newsletter.) I had specified printing on plain white paper. "Charles," he said, "everybody in the University gets dozens of pieces of white paper pushed across their desk every week. One more will just be one more entry into the round file. Use colored paper, so people know that it's there, and it's special."

Unhappily, straw, green, blue and gold were all being used for other documents. The last three were being used to publish job postings. What was left? Pink.

This newsletter is no longer published on paper. It no longer gets "pushed" across your desk. It remains special and worthy of your attention. At least for the remaining issues I publish, the "paper" stays pink.

Charles R. Olszewski, Editor

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Homebuyers' Program Gone

The State of New Jersey de-funded the College and University Homebuyer's Program as of last July 1. We told you of this program in the last issue of The Administrator, and wanted to keep you up-to-date.

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Editorial: Let's talk

The non-union, non-faculty Administrative, Supervisory and Professional employees of Rutgers, the State University of New Jersey, have one, and only one, source of representation before the President and his cabinet. That is the function for which the Administrative Assembly was created nearly thirty years ago. It is the function that it has filled rather well over those years, albeit with occasional lapses. It is, I believe, a function that you, the aforementioned A/P/S employees have needed, and continue to need.

The Assembly, however, has problems. Over the coming months, I intend to address one or two of the major ones. The biggest problems are that we have too few delegates to develop a critical mass of ideas on what the A/P/S community within Rutgers needs; and that we have (as always) far too little feedback from our constituency about their (i.e., your) opinions as to what is needed.

We, the delegates, ought to be buttonholing each of you and asking what you want. Right now, though, we have less than one delegate per 100 A/P/S staff, and all of us are expected to put in full working hours at our normal jobs. For us to hear your needs and wants, we need you to get in touch with us. Of course, for you to know what we are presently doing, we need to feed back information to you. That, of course, is what this newsletter, “The Administrator,” was meant to be all about.

“The Administrator” has functioned at its best when it is published regularly, preferably once a month, and when it represents a strongly opinionated editorial viewpoint. We lost the ability to publish the paper version frequently many years ago due to rising costs of printing and distribution. We lost opinionated op-ed pieces to a contingent of Assembly delegates who found it difficult to tolerate strong opinions other than their own, an even longer time ago.

We now publish on the Internet, so cost is not an issue hampering frequency of publication. As always with a newsletter, “The Administrator” does have a serious lack of contributed materials for publication, but on the Internet we don’t have a fixed set of pages to fill as with a print publication.

As to the opinions, since I now edit the newsletter, and have never lacked for strong opinions, I think we can hope for a return of that commodity as well.

Now, what we need is your readership. I hope that, reading “The Administrator” will spur some of you on to respond to our news stories and especially to our editorials. I also nurture the hope that in some cases your response will take the form of seeking to be an Assembly delegate, if only to tell me how much you disagree with me.

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NEXT ISSUE: 24-7-365 – Bad Arithmetic and Bad Management

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