When Rutgers University leaders voted unanimously last week to consolidate its two medical schools under the same banner, the controversial move took many people by surprise.
But planning for a jointly accredited Rutgers Medical School began nearly five years ago. And it will likely take until 2028 before the state university welcomes the first freshman class to the unified program, according to the latest proposal, which notes that decisions about everything from curriculum to governance to parking must still be addressed.
“Yes, it was a pivotal decision. But it doesn’t dictate what the final thing looks like, except that the resolution is clear: co-equal campuses, neither one subordinate to the other,” said Dr. Brian Strom, chancellor of Rutgers Biomedical and Health Sciences, which oversees the medical schools and a suite of other clinical health programs. “This is just the beginning of what will be a long process,” he said.
Strom and other advocates for the change insist Newark’s New Jersey Medical School and Robert Wood Johnson Medical School, in New Brunswick, can together offer better academics, research opportunities and clinical care, while also garnering more funding and respect. “New Jersey deserves a top medical school and the point is, dividing it in half doesn’t achieve that,” Strom said after the vote.
The current system was created in 2013 when then Gov. Chris Christie dissolved what was the state-run University of Medicine and Dentistry of New Jersey. The structure was reorganized with New Jersey Medical School in Newark and Robert Wood Johnson Medical School in New Brunswick — along with colleges of nursing, public health, dentistry and more — under the Biomedical and Health Sciences umbrella, both overseen by Rutgers University.
What critics fear
Critics — including elected officials from Essex County, Newark leaders, faculty, staff and health care providers — claim there is little support for the shift, which they fear will erode services in already underserved communities like Newark. They believe it will harm University Hospital, the state’s only public hospital, which provides training for New Jersey Medical School students and essential services to Newark’s majority community of color, thanks to an agreement codified in the wake of the city’s 1967 uprising.
‘The Black and brown communities in Newark have been hurt by this.’ — Dr. Catherine Mazzola, University Hospital
“The Newark community deserves better,” Dr. Catherine Mazzola, a pediatric neurosurgeon at University Hospital, testified; she was one of a dozen people who spoke out against the consolidation at the meeting last Monday of Rutgers’ Board of Governors. University Hospital is already losing neurosurgical residents to other facilities, she said, and there’s a fear that merging the two schools would exacerbate this brain drain. “The Black and brown communities in Newark have been hurt by this,” Mazzola said.
The Rutgers Senate, a democratically elected group of faculty, staff and students that is required to weigh in on academics and major changes, also questioned the move and voted before the board’s decision to urge the Board of Governors to delay any decision. Despite the widespread opposition — the only person who spoke in support of the plan was Strom — the board voted to advance the process July 10.
“We hear you. We respect you,” board chair William Best, a banker, told opponents before calling for a vote. He noted his own career started in Newark and added, “We have an obligation to our communities.”
‘Not a done deal’
Some critics of the plan said the board vote is not the final word on consolidation. “This is not a done deal,” said Diomedes Tsitouras, executive director of the union representing biomedical faculty, which has been a leader in opposing what they call a merger. “We are looking at options to continue to fight this. Those include legislative, legal, shared governance. We have asked our faculty to boycott any faculty summit,” scheduled as part of the consolidation planning, he said.
Rutgers officials said additional details on next steps will be available in the weeks to come, but the work will initially focus on launching the multiyear effort to secure a single accreditation from the Liaison Committee on Medical Education, which oversees medical schools in the U.S. and Canada. This task will be led by the two schools’ deans — Dr. Robert Johnson at New Jersey Medical School and Dr. Amy Murtha at Robert Wood Johnson Medical School — and will involve “equitable representation and allocation of resources” between the two campuses, officials in Strom’s office said. Academic leadership, faculty, staff, students, community members and outside organizations will be consulted as this work continues, they said.
On their list to consider are things including admissions — whether students will apply to a single school or one of two medical campuses in the future — changes to the curriculum and what appears on the diploma, Rutgers officials said. Governance, administrative structure, faculty advancement and even the school’s name are also up for discussion.
Strom has repeatedly said the evolution will not impact the size of classes or student-to-teacher ratios and that both New Jersey Medical School and Robert Wood Johnson Medical School will remain committed to their respective urban hubs. Combining the accreditation will enable Rutgers to attract greater talent and funding, he said, make it more competitive with out-of-state programs and better prepare doctors for tomorrow’s clinical care.
“This isn’t the case of moving resources out of one place and into another,” Strom told the board. “Combining the schools gives more opportunity.”
Minimal costs?
Success would be defined not on growing the program overall, the plan states, but by increasing the diversity of applicants, luring more students from out of state and boosting scholarship levels. The cost of the move itself is predicted to be minimal, it notes.
According to the proposal, the Robert Wood Johnson Medical School ranked 62nd nationwide based on the $68 million it received in federal National Institutes of Health research funding in 2021 — a common measure of academic achievement — and New Jersey Medical School was 74th with $51 million in federal funding. Combining the two under one banner would result in a program ranked 47th with a combined $119 million in NIH funding, the proposal notes.
‘This isn’t the case of moving resources out of one place and into another. Combining the schools gives more opportunity.’ — Dr. Brian Strom, Rutgers Biomedical and Health Sciences
Critics aren’t swayed by these arguments, however. “For medical schools, bigger may not always be better,” Dr. Laura Willett, an internist at New Brunswick’s Robert Wood Johnson University Hospital, the teaching hospital for its medical school, testified last week. “Compared with the risks, the benefits are moderate.”
The push for consolidation dates to at least 2019, when Strom created a committee with six representatives from each medical school to consider the future of academic medicine, according to the plan. The committee’s report led in early 2020 to a town hall meeting and a presentation to the Rutgers Senate before the process was stalled by the COVID-19 pandemic.
The timeline
Rutgers Biomedical and Health Sciences also adopted a new five-year strategic plan in early 2020 that outlined the potential benefits of a consolidated medical school. Change has also been fueled by the biomedical program’s alignment with RWJBarnabas Health, one of the largest hospital systems in the state, an alliance that began in 2017. RWJBarnabas is giving Rutgers hundreds of millions over 10 years for health care research and training, in return for the payments generated by the 2 million patients treated each year by 1,300 clinicians in Rutgers Health, who work throughout central and northern New Jersey.
When the pandemic ebbed and the medical school consolidation process restarted in 2022, the Rutgers Senate raised a host of questions, prompting the creation of additional committees that provided more feedback early this year. But senate members said they were still seeking answers to some questions when the consolidation resolution appeared on the Board of Governor’s agenda just days before the scheduled vote.
According to the timeline outlined in the plan, conversations with the Liaison Committee on Medical Education — the body that accredits medical programs in the U.S. and Canada — began earlier this year with a site visit to the Newark campus. A formal consultation with the committee’s secretariat could come in November and by December Rutgers is expected to submit a financial report to the accreditation body. The formal application won’t be filed before 2026 at the earliest and the first graduates of the new, joint program would be celebrated in 2032, under the schedule outlined.
