TCNJ

20 FALL 2017 and salt content) in crabs. He also received a coveted Goldwater Scholarship, to which he attributes "the hours of attention" he received from Lovett. These days he's pursuing a PhD in biomedical sciences at Harvard. "I really took advantage of the research opportunities there," Goldfarb says. "TCNJ was really unique in that I could get involved early. I wasn't limited. I wasn't told no. If I asked and tried hard enough, I could do it." ANOTHER MATTER Gitenstein addressed in her presidency was TCNJ's graduation rate. Believing that higher education's standard six-year long yardstick set the bar too low, Gitenstein declared the college would start tracking the rate of students graduating within four years, and she set about to improve it. During her tenure, TCNJ's four-year graduation rate climbed from 58 percent to 76 percent. Two years ago, in a survey of four-year graduation rates among public colleges, Money ranked TCNJ sixth in the nation. Meanwhile, applications to the college skyrocketed. In Gitenstein's first year as president, 5,755 high school seniors applied to TCNJ. This year the college received 12,896 applications, an increase of 124 percent. Gitenstein's first major initiative as president came to be known as the academic transformation — a top-to-bottom reimagining of the college's academics. The idea, she says, was to reinforce TCNJ's liberal arts core. Under the transformation, students would take four courses each semester instead of five, and faculty would teach three courses instead of four. The change was designed to enable students to dive deeper into their coursework and boost research opportunities for both students and faculty. Michael Robertson, an English professor and former president of the Faculty Senate, says Gitenstein achieved the transformation not by managing it herself — he calls her "the opposite of a micromanager" — but by allowing faculty to take the reins. In fact, he believes Gitenstein's collaborative nature has been critical to her success as president. In 2009, the American Association of University Professors presented Gitenstein with its award for shared governance. It was the TCNJ faculty that had nominated her. "She's a straight talker," Robertson says. "It's refreshing to talk with a college president who's so informal, frank, and funny." By the time the transformation was formally enacted in the fall of 2004, Robertson says, "We had a curriculum that was much more like a top liberal arts school. It really increased the academic quality of the college." Those changes have enabled countless TCNJ undergraduates, such as Syndi Barish and Andrew Goldfarb, both '16, to work in research laboratories alongside faculty. Barish, a double major in biology and applied mathematics, recently published a paper, co-authored with mathematics professors Jana Gevertz and Michael Ochs, in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. Their work applied mathematical models and statistics to gauge the effectiveness of certain cancer treatments. "I wouldn't have done that until graduate school if it wasn't for this experience," says Barish, who's now pursuing a PhD in genetics at Yale. Goldfarb, a biology major, worked with biology professor Don Lovett, studying the process of osmoregulation (how organisms regulate water Gitenstein, top, shines when she spends time with students. New Jersey Governor Chris Christie and Gitenstein, bottom, stand at the Campus Town groundbreaking in 2013. In Gitenstein's first year as president, 5,755 high school seniors applied to TCNJ. This year the college received 12,896 applications, an increase of 124 percent.

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