Shaun Illingworth: This begins the second interview session with Dr. James Dougherty on March 10, 2023, with Shaun Illingworth. Thank you very much, Dr. Dougherty, for sitting down with me again. To begin this session, last time, we spoke a little bit about your education at Penn Veterinary School. What year did you graduate from Penn?
James Dougherty: 1980.
SI: At that point, as you were graduating, what were your plans for your career? What kind of veterinary work did you want to do and how did you go about pursuing that?
JD: I started out going back to a practice in East Brunswick, New Jersey, that I had volunteered at when I was a grad student, maybe even an undergrad, I can't recall. One of my classmates and I both took a job there and we shared an apartment in East Brunswick. In veterinary school, in the fourth year, you have these, they call them rotations, where you'll go through medicine, surgery, large animal, whatever.
Before I was graduating from Penn, I was on the fence about whether I wanted to pursue a veterinary internship. At the time, they were very rare and, if five percent of the class (ten percent of the class at most) would do it, that would be a lot. Now, I think it's, like, eighty percent of the classes apply.
I had started [one at the Stephen and Christine Schwarzman] Animal Medical Center in New York and at Penn. Then, sometime in the spring or summer, I just changed my mind and decided I was going to try private practice instead. So, I went to East Brunswick.
Around December, I said to Lee, my roommate, in reference back to the senior year, "When's the next rotation start?" I was just bored. It was a nice job and everything, but I didn't see my whole future going at that practice, certainly not to make it financially, because you don't go into veterinary medicine to get super rich.
The person that owned the practice--and these were in terms of 1980 dollars--we started out making eighteen thousand a year and he had promised us that we would never be owners or partners, but that he would always make it financially worth our while to stay. So, [after] one of the rotation ending things, his offer for the next year was 18,500. [laughter] So, that really didn't seem like "making it worth my while to stay."
I applied for internships and actually went back to Penn for an internship, taking a salary of twelve thousand. So, I know that doesn't make sense, but I did the internship, and then, discovered that I enjoyed specialty veterinary medicine and applied for a residency in internal medicine for another two years. So, I stayed at Penn an additional two years, until 1984.
At the time, finishing those, I had applied for jobs at Penn, one at Angell Memorial in Boston and a place in Connecticut. During that time, I had decided--well, I had met someone. He was staying in Philadelphia and I didn't want to break things.
I contacted a friend who was working in a specialty practice in Malvern--actually, it was just surgery, it was a surgery practice in Malvern, Pennsylvania--and said, "Hey, did you ever think about adding internal medicine to the practice?" The guy that owned it said, "Sure, come on out and let's talk." So, I did. I went and I joined that practice in Malvern. That was in 1984.
So, by about 1985, three of us at the practice were starting to think about either buying that practice or maybe starting our own. The person that owned the practice caught wind or his manager overheard us on the phone, one way or the other. We had no serious plans. We were just looking around the area, at real estate and stuff. On April 1, 1986, because I thought it was an April Fool's joke, he called us into the office and said, "Buy this place today or get out." So, the three of us looked at each other and said, 'Okay, bye.'"
So, we left and went to one of the future partner's houses in Media, Pennsylvania, which was not too far away. We sat on his porch, I think drinking bourbon (I'm not quite sure, but it was something potent), trying to decide what we were going to do with our lives, since we had just walked out on where we were working.
We continued our search and decided on a location. I know it doesn't mean anything geographically to you, but what we were trying to think of was, back in that day, without any Internet and cell phones and computers, "Where can we find a building that's easy to get to?"
We found a place off of US 422, which is right outside of King of Prussia, where someone on a phone (if somebody called for an appointment), in, like, three steps could get you to the front door, because of all the highways. The Pennsylvania Turnpike, the Schuylkill Expressway, 202, 422, they all kind of join in that one area. Next, we found a building to rent.
My one partner, Lynne, who unfortunately died of pancreatic cancer maybe ten years ago now, and the other partner, Jerry, who retired about six or eight years ago, the three of us started the practice and slowly started adding other specialists. Jerry did neurology, Lynne did surgery, I did medicine. From that point, with three veterinarians in 1986, we have around thirty-five now and left that location. We moved around the corner to a bigger building in 2008 that was about 25000 square feet.
The practice continued to grow. We became twenty-four hours by adding emergency doctors and something called criticalists, and became, arguably, the largest referral practice in the Philadelphia suburbs (outside of Penn). There are some that are close. It kind of depends on how many people are leaving, giving notice, etc.
The veterinary profession has become quite fickle as far as jobs go, maybe like all professions, especially since the pandemic. It's really become [about] the bottom line of benefits, salary, that sort of thing, which I don't blame anybody for, but it grew to this particular level.
Like I said, we're maybe a quarter of a mile from where the original practice sat. We took on a second building for administrative people, to make room in the original. The building that we're in is 25,000 square feet and we took on another six-thousand-square-foot building for administrative people and people that don't need to interact with animals, basically.
That's what's happened on the veterinary side of things with me--long answer, but that's basically it in a nutshell.
SI: That is very good. It gives me a good overview. When you first started that practice, were your clientele just people with their household pets or did you have a different kind of clientele?
JD: Yes, we've never done general practice. So, we've never done vaccines, spays, neuters, things like that. Each of us had a reputation (or had already) and a following of veterinarians. So, basically, the way veterinary referral works is that a local veterinarian sees something that he either can't do surgically or can't diagnose. Then, at that time, they would call our practice, talk to one of us. Somebody would set up an appointment, and then, they would refer the case to us--so, basically, a secondary-care-type facility.
Just through reputation and, again, back then, without the aid of anything else, we would type out a newsletter, with no graphics or anything fancy, but just, "Hi, how are you? This is what we're doing now." We had a mailing list that, I don't recall, we might've borrowed from the practice that we were working [at] out in Malvern. I don't remember, but we basically sent it out to all of the local veterinarians and started that way in '86.
It wasn't until maybe '95 that we started hiring emergency vets to work the overnights. At that time in veterinary medicine, some practices would have minimum staff and a veterinarian come in at, like, six PM. Then, they would just sit there until eight AM and see whatever emergency case would come in. That became very non-productive for most practices, because everyone was then up twenty-four/seven, and the concept of referring to a center that was just there for that started.
We did it twenty-four hours a day, versus the competition. A lot of times, the client would have to come back at eight AM and take their pet out and take it to their vet or take it somewhere else, but we decided not to practice that way and just did the care twenty-four/seven. That proved to be pretty helpful.
Then, once we went twenty-four hours, everything just spun out of control sort of from there. We hired just about any kind of specialist you could think of in veterinary medicine. They all liked the support of having a twenty-four/seven staff and the way we were growing it.
So, it's all specialty cases, except for what comes in through the emergency room. They're all given the option of either going back to their vet--and most veterinarians are like, "That's okay you can have it,"--or just staying with us and being transferred to one of the specialists, depending on what the problem is.
SI: Do you still work in the practice or have you retired?
JD: I don't. I mean, I'm still an owner and I'm still a partner. In that interim, the one partner, the one guy, like I said, he retired and sold his shares. Basically, there's three of us. I'm the only original one left. I'm mostly retired, I guess, but I'm still an owner. I still go over and bother people, but I don't see appointments anymore.
SI: What were the biggest changes that you saw in how you did your job? You talked about how the practice grew and changed, but how you did your job in medicine change as applied here?
JD: You mean how often I worked? I'm sorry.
SI: No, just if treatment or practices changed.
JD: Yes, everything changed. The advent of computers changed a whole lot, medical records, inventory, things like that. It made jobs for more people that knew how to do that and to service and maintain [the machines].
We went from having a radiologist, where we just had an X-ray machine and a fluoroscopy machine, if you recall what those are (I don't even know if they exist anymore), but, from there, we moved into ultrasound. The radiologist was doing ultrasound, which is still very popular, but, then, that generated, when we built the newer building, having a room with a CT scanner. Now, we have that and a trailer outside with an MRI machine.
MRIs in veterinary medicine operate out of trailers. They're hardly ever inside the building. That's mostly because it's a whole room that has to be built for those things. They go out of style or new models come out so frequently that you basically lease them and they just keep getting replaced every few years. So, you'd have to kind of demolish a room to get one out, I think, not quite that bad, but a lot of hassle. So, literally, it's this permanent trailer that's in the back of our building and connected by a walkway. That's how that works. So, imaging went gangbusters.
People went from, "What's a specialist?" to, "That's the only person that I want to see." So, that changed. The profession itself changed. It went from--I'm going to make up numbers, but just to give you an idea--maybe seventy-five percent male, twenty-five percent female in the '70s. My class was fifty-fifty, a hundred people, fifty of each. Now, the entering classes are maybe eighty-five percent female. So, that switched.
This is leading into a meeting I have after us, but it's still a profession (I read one article on diversity, DEI [diversity, equity and inclusion] article, a few months ago), it has the--I don't want to use the word distinction, the opposite of distinction--of being the whitest profession in the country. So, that's a problem and that hasn't changed.
My class had one Black woman and one Latina and the rest was white, male-female equal. That hasn't changed a whole lot in the profession. So, I read--and this is getting a little bit off the course, but it's on my mind, because it's what my next meeting is.
SI: No, this is great.
JD: Well, I went to an online CE [continuing education program] during the pandemic, since we couldn't go to meetings. It said that most people decide to become a veterinarian before they're twelve or thirteen years of age. I mean, I was very late in that, but it was a high percentage. So, I thought, "Well, the kids that are coming into the pre-vet programs at Rutgers, let's say, they've decided years ago."
One of the last classes of, say, twenty-five students that were admitted to veterinary school out of Rutgers, and most of them out of SEBS [the School of Environmental and Biological Sciences]--there was one Camden grad, I'm very proud of him--but out of the SEBS grads, twenty-three were women and they were all white. So, for Rutgers, that's really disproportionate as far as everything else goes.
So, what I'm meeting with [Rutgers about] coming up is, I decided to contact (I've been involved with anyway) the Rutgers Future Scholars Program and with the pre-vet advisor at SEBS. We're going to get together with the new director and try to work on how we can introduce veterinary medicine to the kids in the Future Scholars Program, because many of them--I'm probably guessing, but I think maybe I'm correct--are told by people in their household, "We can't afford it," or, "You can't do it," or a lot of negative type stuff might come [out].
So, we're going to try and figure out ways of introducing it. There's books that have been written for kids that are interested, and try and see if we can generate some interest out of that class. We're not going to change the proportions of the profession, but I hope that we can find some kids that never thought that they were going to be interested in it [to] be interested in it.
In my area, where I live, there's one Black, male veterinarian and there's a set of brothers that are specialists up in Easton that are Black. So, we're going to try and get a hold of them and see what we can do for our little corner of the world, of Rutgers, and for Rutgers in general to have [better representation].
It's probably the only pre-whatever club in the University that's almost all-white. I don't know what it is this year, but that's what it's been in the past. So, I got a little bit off the track, but that's what I [am doing].
[Editor's Note: The Rutgers Future Scholars Program provides honors courses, mentorship and guidance to students of low-income backgrounds to help them attain acceptance to a college or university. Every year, the program selects over two hundred middle school students from five specific school districts in New Jersey.]
SI: No, that is fascinating. It is interesting to hear the steps that you are trying to take to address it at Rutgers and elsewhere.
JD: That's what's happening. I mean, veterinary medicine, too, has gotten [distressed]. With the pandemic, it went from all the shelters emptied out when the pandemic started, people adopting, not with very good hearts, because the shelters are overfilled again by people returning them when they went back to work. So, that's been bad.
A lot of people-- maybe not a lot, but enough--have either reduced their scheduling or stopped working, [for] whatever reasons, but it's become very difficult for people to just make a general vet appointment these days, unless there's an emergency.
I stopped over to get some medication for my dog the other night at, like, six o'clock. Usually, that was the time when the staff would be catching dinner and whatever, people that were working around the clock. The people that were walking in were being told that there was a six-hour wait for the emergency doctors, unless the pet was dying.
That's because all the other practices around us have stopped seeing emergencies and they shut down. Even Penn closes their emergency service some nights, with a recording giving other options. So, that's a change for the bad and I don't know everything.
Technicians, they're never paid enough, just like nurses, but, probably, a well-paid (or at least an acceptable) salary was maybe twenty dollars an hour before the pandemic. It's now, like, forty. Where does that come from? It has to come from the client. Then, the client gets annoyed, because, "Holy cow, this stuff is expensive." So, it's a mess.
SI: Why do you think the profession went so far, gender-wise, in the direction of women making up eighty-five percent of incoming classes?
JD: I'm sure someone with better research experience than me has tried to look into this and there might be an answer. When I talk to other people, we're just (especially, I'm going to say "the older guys," like me) like, "What happened?" and this is, like I said, no basis, pure theory, pure guess. We're wondering, a couple things--one is, it's a great part-time job. You can be a veterinarian Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, if you want, Tuesday, Thursday, Friday, Mondays, and have a family--I mean, not that men don't have families, but, in the traditional roles, families.
A lot of times, when a veterinarian becomes pregnant, she changes her mind. She has the baby and she was planning, very honestly, to come back full-time, has the baby, decides that that may not be for her and asks to work part-time. So, that might be it.
It is a good part-time job. You almost can call your hours at this point. If your husband has a job that's certain hours, if you want to work Monday evenings, there's probably a place near where they live [that] you can do that.
The other potential might be in that corporate America has started buying veterinary practices with gusto and that takes away any management responsibilities. One of the real pain-in-the-you-know-what aspects of owning any business is the management of it and sort of being on-call for building emergencies or what-have-you, twenty-four/seven. So, with all of these corporate takeovers, you don't have those responsibilities. So, it literally can be, "I work ten-to-four, Mondays and Wednesdays, and no one bothers me any other time." That's a pretty good deal.
So, that's the only thing I can think of. I mean, I don't want to say men ran away because it didn't pay that well. I don't know if that would be the case, because it's always been that way. So, why, in the '80s, '90s, did that exodus start happening? I don't know.
SI: You brought up another subject I wanted to ask about, the impact of corporations getting into the field. How has that unfolded? Do you have any personal experience in your business? Did they try to come after you?
JD: Sure. Just thinking out loud, it probably started out very tiny somewhere in the 2000s, 2005, somewhere in that range, where the people doing these purchases, because we were approached throughout the years, I mean, they had no idea how to run [a veterinary practice]. They just figured it would be a business like any other business. There were a lot of stumbles.
Then, there would be, I don't remember any of the names, but "Corporation A" would buy you. In four years, they would sell you to "Corporation B," who's also bought "Corporation A." There were just venture capitalists all over the place and just kept buying different things. Then, this big company would buy the bigger company.
It's kind of evened out, took a long time, but Mars owns many. They own a chain called Blue Pearl and a chain that used to be called VCA. I think they own that or it's some kind of strange legal connection. There's a few others that are larger. So, I think the dust has settled on all that. It's come down to a handful of very large corporations that at least have more experience in it. So, I think those kinds of things slowed down.
The prices, one of the problems with having a large practice like ours (and throughout the country like that) is that none of the younger people working there can afford to buy it. They've become too big.
When you [apply] all these kind of formulas that you use--I learned the term EBITA over the years. Now, you're going to ask me what that means. It's earnings before interest, taxes and assessments [amortization], something like that. It's a common way of coming up with a number of the income of the practice, so that [you can make an] "apples-and-apples" comparison when you're trying to buy practices. So, that's what most of these people used.
The way they offer to buy is that they offer it in multiples of this EBITA. So, if you were earning, if you were grossing, if this EBITA [was] three million for the year, a company, let's say they could offer you ten times EBITA, so, they're offering you thirty million. It's a gross exaggeration, but, I mean, that's basically how it works. So, these multiples went crazy about five or eight years ago. They were offering, I mean, I heard things as high as twenty-five times that number.
So, no one that's working with you, even if they're earning one or two hundred thousand dollars, is going to be able to buy when a practice could sell to the corporation. Plus, the new graduates, unless they had some kind of financial help, I think somebody that went to Penn now, they graduated with about 250,000 in debt. So, that's a lot. That's a mortgage.
When I went, all the loans were ten-year repayment loans and they were put on deferment for interns and residents. I wasn't finished repaying my loans until 1994, graduating in '80. Now, they're all thirty-year loans. They're essentially mortgages. You have a mortgage and it's difficult for some of the young people to buy a house, buy a new car or whatever.
So, it's tough, but I think that's the way of the world. I don't know how many practices are owned by corporations, but it's becoming more and more. You can't really tell. Most of these corporations, their name is not on anything. Blue Pearl does now, when they've owned it for a few years. There's, like, three or four Blue Pearls in Manhattan, there's three or four surrounding us, but the other ones, you can't tell.
I mean, somewhere, maybe on a piece of stationary or if you do a deep dive into their website, there might be a logo somewhere else that's not the logo of the practice, but they maintain that "still original, still your neighborhood vet" kind of thing. So, it's the new age.
SI: Do you think that has had a negative, positive or indifferent effect on the field and service to customers?
JD: Veterinarians used to be--maybe they still are--very independent people. If you knew me, you'd see that I'm stubborn at times. I have my opinions and nothing stops me from giving them. That was a hard kind of profession to reign in, I think, to make them be corporate "yes people." So, that has changed. Some of the corporations, I think they learned the hard way.
One of the money-saving methods is that--I forget, I think you said you have pets, right, yes--you know, like, Hill's pet food, that brand of pet food? So, they would come in and say, "You can only sell Hill's, because we have a good deal with Hill's."
Then, the veterinarian would say, "Well, what do we do with [special cases]? I'd like to use i/d from Iams." It used to be Iams--no, that's Hill's, I'm sorry--or something else, Purina One, "I really love Purina One." "Well, you have to tell them to go somewhere else or to a store, because we're only going to stock Hill's." Same with other drugs, "I like X antibiotic for bone infections." "Well, you're going to like Y, because we're not buying X. We have a deal with..."
So, that's how the cost savings came in with corporate ownership. Some people shrug their shoulders and other people get annoyed. So, I think there's probably been laxity in that. That was the original rules, when they were really trying to pare things down. People revolt against that.
No veterinarian likes to be told how to treat something, especially if they have a few years' experience. A new graduate might be happy to get a booklet. Some of the companies, early on, there'd be an instruction manual, "If a cat comes in with an abscess on the ear, this is what you do," not what you learned. "You will do this, this, this, and you will use that drug," and people were like, "What is this?"
So, I think the corporations learned that you don't tell veterinarians quite that much of how to do their job, but it's still a little bit of a stumbling block, I think. It might take longer. When you're privately-owned, someone can say, "Hey, can we buy whatever, because I learned from a seminar that it's good?" Usually, it's like, "Sure." You order it and it's there the next day. With a corporation, you have to go through a lot of steps and, maybe or maybe not, you won't get it.
So, it's a different world, but I think the new graduates probably don't know anything different. That's not to be derogatory, but they've only lived in this world. So, they don't know how things might've been, unless they take a job somewhere in some rural area of Iowa or, I don't know, something like that.
SI: What would you say was the biggest challenge for you in your career, whether it was an individual thing or something that was just a regular part of your job?
JD: Well, probably the biggest challenge that we had was, we went from the only shop in town to always being under the threat of somebody else trying to open what we had close to us. No one ever came geographically closer than maybe a half-hour, which is fine. Especially in a congested suburb [area] like Philadelphia, a half-hour, nobody wants to do that or it's not a threat. That was always it, because there would always be, "Hey, did you hear So-and-So's looking at such-and-such a site?"
Over the years, maybe we got a little cocky and [said], "Let them. People have known us forever. Unless they're mad at us for some reason, they're probably not going to go to the new kid in town." I think pet owners, for the most part, are pretty loyal people and they respect who they've seen for a long time. They could go to a PhD in brain surgery, but they're going to ask their veterinarian if what's being recommended is the right course. People probably do that sometimes with their doctors, but I don't know, maybe.
SI: Have you been active in professional associations as well?
JD: Not as much as some people are. We've always belonged to the Pennsylvania Veterinary Medical [Association], VMA. I got their Lifetime Achievement Award about three or four years ago; the AVMA [American Veterinary Medical Association], not so much. We each belong to the organization of our specialty. So, the specialists have, there's an American College of Veterinary Internal Medicine, American College of Veterinary Surgery, on and on and on. So, each of us, individually, have been involved with that, pretty much just that as far as I know.
SI: Now, you are doing some work with Rutgers and SEBS. In the course of your active career, did you do a lot of work with either Penn or Rutgers? Did they play any role in keeping you up on what was going on professionally?
JD: Penn?
SI: Either Penn or Rutgers, but more likely Penn.
JD: Right. No, we didn't. The first year, I mean, I had some friends that still worked there and we'd talk, but there was no relationship until--I'm going to be fuzzy on years. Everything I say seems to be "five to six years ago," but I'm sure it's not all true. [laughter] We developed a legal relationship with Penn. They called it Penn Affiliates, where we had some great aspirations of what it could be, like sharing residents and sending our people there and they wanted to send their people to us, all sorts of various things.
So, it started out very grand. The guy that was leading the program at Penn quit and went--I forget where, went somewhere else. It became not really very productive for either of us. So, we ended that maybe a year or two ago, but we tried. It was hard to work with a university. So, that was our one attempt there.
I haven't done anything with Rutgers as far as veterinary medicine goes. I mean, this thing with the Rutgers Future Scholars is probably the first. I've given talks and things to the Pre-Vet Club, but nothing on a permanent or regular basis. Most of the things I've done have been with what's now SAS [the School of Arts and Sciences]. So, yes, if this gets off the ground, this will probably be the first veterinary project that I've tried to start.
SI: You started getting involved in the governance boards at Rutgers in the early 2000s. How did that start? What first got you interested in that?
[Editor's Note: Dr. Dougherty served as a member of the Rutgers Board of Trustees from 2012 to 2020. He was Chair of the Board of Trustees during his last year. Since 2020, he has served on the Board of Governors. Dr. Dougherty also serves on the Rutgers-Camden Board of Directors. Rutgers University, originally governed by the Board of Trustees, became the State University of New Jersey in 1956. The Board of Governors was then installed as the governing body of the University, with the Trustees serving in an advisory role.]
JD: It started initially through the [Rutgers] Foundation and that was through giving. A favorite story of some of the Foundation people is, I really wasn't a big donor. I would just give a small amount every year.
My mother died young. She died in '88. My stepfather was living in the house where I grew up, through this thing called a life estate, which I understand doesn't really happen that much anymore. Basically, it was my house, but he could live there until he died or didn't want to live there, but had to maintain it and all this kind of stuff.
We had a good relationship, so, that was fine. In the beginning, it was a little bit odd for him. So, he would call me up and say, "I mowed your lawn." I'm like, "Okay, I get it." [laughter] Anyway, when he had to go to a long-term care facility in the early 2000s, I was then legally able to sell the house, because I had no reason to go back (from my previous interview with you) to Deptford for any reason.
So, selling the house, I had to clean it out and, I mean, just a long process, where nobody has touched anything for years. If you have any parents in a situation like that, I recommend you make sure it's empty early on. It was the summertime and I recall this because the house had no air-conditioning. I was in this dank, dark basement going through boxes and lifting them out of one of those, whatever they call those metal doors that fling open on basements to the outside. I was just tossing boxes up there and sitting on the grass (or weeds, at that point) and looking through them.
So, I found a box. My mother called me "Jimmy." So, this box said, "Jimmy--Rutgers," on it. So, I opened it up and inside was all the EOF and this National [Defense] Student Loan, Rutgers financial aid [paperwork]--so, basically, everything that I signed to not pay any money to go to Rutgers. So, I was like, "Jeez, I totally forgot." I mean, it just slipped my mind.
I mean, free money shouldn't slip anybody's mind, but I just totally hadn't thought about it, because I was just out from under the debt burden of going to Penn. So, that was the only thing that was ever on my mind in those years, was paying those loans back. I decided that I had to pay it back to Rutgers, so that other students could do it.
[Editor's Note: The New Jersey Educational Opportunity Fund (EOF), established in 1967, provides financial assistance and services to students of educationally and economically disadvantaged backgrounds who attend universities in New Jersey. The National Defense Student Loan program was created by the National Defense Education Act of 1958. The first federal student loan program, it sought to augment education in math and the sciences in response to the Soviet Union's launch of Sputnik I in 1957.]
So, I started increasing my donations. I was contacted by a super nice guy that was a Director of Development named Jason Kroll, who I've kept in touch with over the years. He no longer works there. He works for another university in New Jersey. He wrote me or something and said, "Hey, I noticed your donations are increasing. Do you want to direct them somewhere, because you're just giving money without any direction?" So, I said, "Sure." He invited me up to campus. I hadn't been there in maybe fifteen years.
He asked me, "What do you want to see?" I probably responded, "I don't know." So, I just started naming buildings and he showed me some new things. We drove around, got along great, had lunch with Carl Kirschner, who was Dean of Rutgers College at the time, and somebody named Muffin Lord, who worked with the Rutgers College scholarship office. I mean, everybody knows Muffin, I guess. She's the greatest, sadly retired--not sadly for her--but a couple years ago. We still keep in touch as well. They were opening up opportunities for me. So, I started trying to direct some endowments for scholarships and things, trying to pattern them similar to my upbringing or "big break" background.
[Editor's Note: Dr. Carl Kirschner joined the Rutgers faculty in 1976 as a Professor of Spanish and later served as the Dean of Rutgers College for thirteen years. Muffin Lord served as the Administrative Director of the Honors Program and as the Scholarship Administrator at Rutgers from 1988 to 2017.]
One day, I got a call at work from Mark Hershhorn, who used to be on the Trustees, Governors, etc., who lives not too far from me, Media, [Pennsylvania], and said, "We'd like to have you join the," then Overseers. So, I did. Then, through them, I met people that were Trustees, mostly a gentleman named Bob Mortensen, the namesake of Mortensen Hall on Mason Gross, who lived in Philly. We both had subscriptions to the Philadelphia Orchestra. So, we had a couple of common things.
[Editor's Note: Mark Hershhorn, Chair and CEO of CKS & Associates, served on the Rutgers Board of Trustees from 2002 to 2010 and the Board of Governors from 2010 to 2016. Robert "Bob" Mortensen, RC '63, also served on the Rutgers Board of Trustees. In 2013, the Robert E. Mortensen Hall, a rehearsal and performance space of the Mason Gross School of the Arts, opened on the Douglass Campus.]
Bob wanted to recommend me to the Trustees. So, we did that. I went through that process and became a Trustee. Then, six years into the Trustees, I became the Vice Chair for two years, and then, the Chair for my last year--well, for my eighth year. It wasn't my last year of the Trustees, but, then, I was put on the Board of Governors. So, I had to leave the Board of Trustees early to go on to the Board of Governors.
Moneywise, I just became more fortunate at work and just kept finding new areas that I wanted to support. So, along with the endowed scholarship, I give to different emergency funds and the food pantries, which I had a soft spot for. When I was Vice Chair, we started the beginnings of the Scarlet Promise grant program. I kind of championed that, I think, through the Chair and getting the donations. We had a three-million-dollar goal, which then became a ten-million-dollar goal. So, we did okay with that and it's still doing well.
People know the name. It existed for years, but no one knew about it. It was called Rutgers Assistance Grants and nobody gave to it. The University gave money to it every year. Then, when we started looking into student aid, there's a Tuition Assistance Grant that exists in the State of New Jersey. We're in this meeting and people kept calling it "rag-tag." My reaction was, "I can't. This is not good. This is horrible." [laughter]
Nevin Kessler was the President of the Foundation at the time. I said to him, "We need a new name." He said, "Okay, well, we'll work on it." I remember saying, "No, we need a new name, today. So, I don't know what your version of working on it is, but let's work on it in this next week."
Within two or three weeks, because we had turned down a couple of names that they came up with, but, in a couple of weeks, maybe in a month, they came up with that. Then, I remember, he said something to me like, "Nothing has ever happened this fast at Rutgers." I said, "Okay, good." So, they started a whole marketing campaign with that and it became quite successful. Then, [I], in my own sideline, donated to that.
I became involved with the School of Public Health when the new--he's Dean for six years now--when Perry Halkitis became Dean six years ago.
He's an out gay man and was very instrumental in the movement in the 1980s to bring the AIDS crisis in New York in elsewhere to everyone's attention. He worked for NYU for a long time. So, I got involved in his endeavors. That's become one of my foci of interests, where we're working on establishing an endowed professorship in his name, because Perry, if you ever get the chance to hear him, he's very dynamic and very engaging, but he's not going to be Dean forever.
[Editor's Note: Dr. Perry Halkitis has served as the Dean of the School of Public Health at Rutgers since 2017. He served as an administrator and Professor of Psychology at New York University from 1998 to 2017.]
He started--there's an LGBTQ specialty public health certificate under him, there's a whole division in the Public Health School for LGBTQ health. My concern was that when Perry leaves, you could get "Ron DeSantis Light" [Governor of Florida since 2019] become Governor of New Jersey and abolish all that. So, I thought, "Well, the one way somebody can't abolish something is to make something endowed." So, that's what we're working on doing. That's one of my other things that I'm working on now; sure I'm forgetting something.
I do some things with Camden, because I'm the Chair of the Camden Board of Directors as well as a Governor. I didn't go to Camden. I didn't want to go to Camden when I was in high school--not for any reason other than the fact that since I didn't know what I wanted to do when I grew up, I knew New Brunswick offered more. Camden was too close to home and they would've made me live at home. That was definitely not an option, [laughter] but I enjoy the students at Camden. I think they're going through a lot of challenges, and so, I like to help there whenever I can. I'm babbling, so, if you want to pick on something, please.
[Editor's Note: Governor Chris Christie signed the New Jersey Medical and Health Sciences Education Restructuring Act into law in 2012. The act merged Rutgers and the University of Medicine and Dentistry of New Jersey (UMDNJ), thus giving Rutgers two medical schools. In the same act, Rowan University received UMDNJ's School of Osteopathic Medicine and the Rowan University/Rutgers-Camden Board of Governors was established. The Rowan University/Rutgers-Camden Board of Governors focuses on accomplishing economic and educational initiatives, as well as civic engagement in Camden and the region.]
SI: No, this is good. I like to get a sense of what you saw as the biggest challenges or accomplishments during your time there. I think you were on the Trustees in 2012, that timeframe, when there was the move to try to combine Rutgers with Rowan, which sort of happened through this board, in some sense, but, basically, there was a conflict between Rutgers, the State and other entities. Were you on the Trustees then? How did you see that play out?
JD: It was an interesting time to be there. I had just started my term on the Trustees. Thanks to the leadership that we had at the time, Dorothy Cantor, Sandy Stewart, Dudley Rivers, the chairs that were around that period of time were very strong in Rutgers' position. It was mostly the government that was trying to sort of take Camden away from us.
[Editor's Note: Dr. Dorothy Cantor is a psychologist, Rutgers Trustee Emerita, and member of the Hall of Distinguished Alumni at Rutgers. Sandy J. Stewart is a retired biotechnology researcher and Rutgers Trustee Emeritus. Dudley H. G. Rivers was a Rutgers Trustee Emeritus and Governor Emeritus who also served as the Chair of both during his terms.]
What they didn't know was that according to the Act of '56, the Rutgers charter that made us the State University--oh, well, part of that thing was either disbanding the Trustees or doing something to harm the Trustees--was that in the charter, the only way that the Trustees can go away or change substantially is by a vote of the Trustees. So, no matter what they did, they couldn't touch us. Dorothy and the other people at the time, they fought very strongly for keeping Camden and were successful.
[Editor's Note: The New Jersey Legislature passed legislation that designated Rutgers as the State University of New Jersey in 1945. The "Rutgers, The State University Law (NJSA 18A:65-1 et seq)" of 1956 also named Rutgers as the State University of New Jersey and created the Rutgers University Board of Governors.]
The only thing that came out of that, which ended up being good in the long run, is that we had formed an ad hoc committee or something on making the Trustees more efficient. Someone in the state government (a name you would probably know) somehow got a hold of it or found out about this document. It was purely an ad hoc, "let's-knock-around" [report], but, basically, the document said that we could get by with fewer Trustees. It was true, because there were seventy-five at the time.
So, I think the document recommended what it is now, which is forty-one. So, they made that their [demand], "We'll leave you alone if you reduce the number of Trustees." "Well, it was in our plan anyway, so, fine. We'll make like it's your idea, I guess," or something along those lines. We agreed to lower the number of Trustees and they formed the Camden Board of Directors, which, like I said, I'm Chair of.
I was Chair when I was a Trustee, and then, dropped out for a year, and then, came back as Chair as a Governor. There's not much power behind that board. It was created to give Camden some autonomy. It's great getting to meet the Chancellor and hearing what they're doing down there, but, really, there's not a lot of power behind the board so much.
What they did create, which I'm also on as a Governor, is the Rowan/Rutgers Board of Governors (it's Rowan/Rutgers-Camden Board of Governors). That is a very powerful instrument and it has to do with maintaining the "Eds and Meds" Corridor, in association with Cooper and Rutgers-Camden. It's run very well and it was probably a good idea, in my opinion. So, that was good.
[Editor's Note: Cooper Medical School of Rowan University was established in 2012 as a partnership between Rowan University and Cooper University Hospital.]
When we got ordered to reduce our numbers, I thought it was going to be hard. I was Chair of our Nominating Committee at the time. Basically, through attrition of members that were finished their six or twelve years and through not admitting new members only for maybe one year or two, we got the numbers to drop down in a few years. It ended up not being too hard. I mean, of course, no one came on to the Trustees for that small window, but we were able to get to the forty-one.
I think it became much more efficient, much easier. Everybody on the Board of Trustees wants to be there and wants to work and wants to help Rutgers, which is great. Not that the seventy-five didn't, but it's kind of hard to herd in seventy-five people and have committees and make sure everybody's on a committee, everybody that wants to be on a committee.
Then, you have committee overpowering and something to do with that Open Public Records [Act], I don't know, something to do with when you have a certain number of people. Then, something else kicks in. I should know those laws better by now, but I don't. So, hopefully, that answered your question.
SI: Tell me a little bit more about the Rowan/Rutgers-Camden Board. What kind of activities do you do as a Director? What are the challenges or interesting things about that job for you?
JD: From the Rutgers side, there's two Governors and the Rowan makeup might be one or two of their Trustees. There's people from outside of Rowan, somebody named [by] Cooper. Sorry, I should know it better. It's not a big board. There's only six or seven people at most.
The CEO is full-time. It's a paid position. Dana Redd, who was the Mayor of Camden before that, was the CEO for five years. Now--I'm bad with names--I can see his face in front of me, but it's easy to look up. The new CEO of the Board does a lot of work with the people that are full-time employees of the Board.
[Editor's Note: Jeffrey L. Nash has served as the CEO of the Rowan University/Rutgers-Camden Board of Governors since 2022. Dana Redd, the Mayor of Camden from 2010 to 2018, served as the CEO from 2018 to 2022. The Board's offices are located within the Joint Health Sciences Center in Camden.]
Rowan and Rutgers each contribute money every year to that joint board. It's used to build projects that, like I said, are going to help with the Corridor and things that are health related. Within that building, which is a really nice building, there's labs and offices for Rowan, Rutgers, Camden County College, Cooper. There's some space dedicated to each. There's teaching labs for nurses and things.
It's an interesting concept, and they get things done very quickly. It's not like what I'm used to at Rutgers. I mean, we meet close to once a month--thank you, Zoom [laughter]--and it's mostly to hear about the projects.
I like to think of myself there--and the other Governor that's a member is Bill Tambussi, who's an attorney in South Jersey, so, he's got his finger on the pulse of things--I like to look at myself there as a guardian of Rutgers-Camden, to make sure that Rutgers-Camden is getting its due and that it's an equal partner.
We were very fortunate, through a group of--I can't list everyone--but what was that baseball field (I think it was called Campbell's Field) along the river at Rutgers has become an athletic facility that the Joint Board participated in getting funding, because it's [for] the public health of the city. The City of Camden can use it, but, also, it's for Rutgers-Camden sports.
So, they have this. When they first were talking about it, I thought, "Who's going to schedule this stuff? I mean, you have, like, a kids' softball league wants to play there, but, then, you have..." So, apparently, it's all worked out quite well, or [is] working out quite well. So, that's a really positive thing for the community to see.
[Editor's Note: The Camden Athletic Complex opened in 2022 on the Camden Waterfront. It was built on the site of the former minor league baseball stadium Campbell's Field.]
There's more plans now for some more education spaces, but, like I said, I look at myself more as a Rutgers-Camden guardian. I'll read through the documents and say, "Hey, what's Rutgers get out of this?" or that sort of thing. So, I don't pretend to have any kind of expertise in any of the things that they were getting involved in, but I do know I just look through and make sure that I feel like we're getting something out of it. I mean, definitely, Rowan-Cooper is a big hospital. They're growing. So, we might as well get some opportunities out of that, I think.
SI: Were there other issues that came up during your time on the Trustees that stand out in your memory?
JD: COVID. [laughter] COVID hit when I was in March of my year as Chair, so, just March, April, May and June. We had a bit of a learning curve at once, because we had a meeting coming up where we couldn't attend in person. Rutgers was just using Webex.
So, I asked Kim Pastva, the Secretary of the University, since it's an open meeting, "Some of our members are more technically challenged than others." "We need a sort of social get-together on Webex to make sure everybody knows how to work it," back then, microphones and knowing how that's on or not on or muting yourself.
[Editor's Note: Kimberlee M. Pastva has served as the Secretary of the University since 2016. The Secretary of the University supports the Rutgers President, the Board of Governors and the Board of Trustees.]
So, we had a couple of fun [meetings]. I think I called the first one, "Chatting with the Chair." I mean, it had to be very comical. You couldn't talk about University business, etc. So, it had to just be, "What have you been doing in isolation?" kind of thing, but it was kind of a "try to speed up the learning curve" [effort].
I think the end of March, we had our first meeting. So, it went okay, probably a few glitches. Every once in a while, like, somebody's ring would go right up to the camera and you'd have to say, "Please, move your hand." That was it.
I got to be on the Nominating Committee for three years and I was Chair of that committee for two. It was interesting to be involved in the process of [meeting] people that are recommended to be on the Board of Trustees and the interview process and, at that point, pre-Zoom, a lot of driving. I think we had nineteen evening meetings one year, but it was all very enjoyable. I loved meeting the different people that were being recommended to join the Trustees.
There was an ad hoc committee on diversity when I started, and I'll plead ignorance--I didn't know what ad hoc meant. I just knew that there were these meetings. So, I looked it up and it said something [like], "A group set up short-term to find a cure for a problem or fix a problem, and then, it's disbanded after it's fixed."
I said to our Chair at the time, "Well, this is never going to be fixed. You have to be on it all the time." So, I worked [at it] unsuccessfully, but the Chair after me, the Chair of the ad hoc committee, was able to finally [get it]. We got it to become a full board committee.
The importance of that is that it's not only permanent, but you get Secretary's Office support and more organization. As an ad hoc committee, you just sort of met and nobody was taking minutes. So, we got it to be that, and then, added the words, "Diversity, Inclusion," and all the others--they expanded it even further since I left. It might be, "Community Engagement," or something like that. I apologize for not remembering their name.
SI: Equity?
JD: But, that was a proud moment, too, because what the goal was (and still is) is to have the Board of Trustees reflect the diversity tables of the State of New Jersey. So, if New Jersey is fifty-fifty male-female, we want the Trustees [to be also]. You get the picture.
So, that's a constant. It's proven to be true that it couldn't have been ad hoc, because it's a constantly evolving situation. We still haven't met some of those requirements, but it's gotten better. Then, somebody finishes their term. Then, they're replaced by someone that's not like them, which is fine, but, then, the statistics re-juggle again. So, that's why ad hoc did not work. So, that was another one of my, I guess, prouder involvements.
I got involved with the Honors College as well in New Brunswick, when that was first getting started, because I thought, "Boy, I would've loved to have gone to something like this," if I could've gotten in. So, I was involved in some scholarships there. There's a lounge with my name on it on the second floor. If you ever go in the Honors College, there's a nice, two-story lounge looking up at "Willie the Silent."
I got involved with the two deans. Now, the current dean, J.D., he, last week, asked me to be their convocation speaker. So, I have that nervous event to look forward to in May--not blowing my horn, but you asked me things that I was proud of.
[Editor's Note: The Rutgers Honors College, an academic and residency program established in 2015, located at 8 Seminary Place on the College Avenue Campus, admits five hundred students annually. Dr. J. D. Bowers has served as its Dean since 2022. On Voorhees Mall stands a statue of William I, Prince of Orange ("William the Silent") donated in 1928 in recognition of the University's Dutch heritage.]
SI: Of course, yes.
JD: Have you seen the "Pride Bus" going around? You know the one I mean, with the rainbow stripes around it? That was me. I donated the funds to create the wrap and to do that whole thing, because I had asked the Center for Social Justice a year or so ago, "What can I do to help you out?" They gave me a list of projects and I was like, "Oh, I want to wrap the bus." So, that was good.
[Editor's Note: Rutgers debuted Dr. Dougherty's pride-themed campus bus in the Fall 2022 semester. The Center for Social Justice Education & LGBT Communities at Rutgers was established in 2005.]
SI: I have seen it. It stands out.
JD: Yes.
SI: When I was telling the students about this upcoming interview, they were like, "Oh, yes, the Pride Bus."
JD: Oh, yes. [laughter] I'm glad I remembered it. I've only seen it at the dedication and I've never seen it [on the road]. I was driving around twice in this past week and I thought, "One of these days." I was sitting in J.D.'s office in the Honors College on Tuesday, which looks out on to George Street. I was trying not to make like I wasn't paying attention, but I had my eye on George Street, thinking, "I want to see my bus," but I never saw it. Someone told me to hang out in front of The Yard [a lawn and courtyard area, surrounded by restaurants, on the College Avenue Campus] and that, eventually, it would show up, but I haven't had that chance yet.
SI: When did you join the Board of Governors?
JD: Three years ago.
SI: Three years, after COVID hit.
JD: Yes, right, so, it must've been 2020, July 1st of 2020, yes.
SI: Do you have a sense of how COVID impacted the Board of Governors' work?
JD: Very unlike me, I'm not in any of the leadership roles. I'm not on the Executive Committee, but I serve on joint committees. I'm on the Health Affairs Committee and the Academic and Student Affairs Committee.
I can't speak for Bill Best, the Chair, or Mark Angelson, but it doesn't seem like [it has impeded the Board]. From my point of view, it hasn't affected [our meetings]. All of our meetings are--what do you call it?--you could either Zoom or you can show up if you want [a hybrid meeting]. The five meetings that are required a year have been held, except for, well, the last one. There was supposed to be snow in Newark, so, we had to do it by Zoom. So, we didn't have a meeting, but, yes, it's different.
[Editor's Note: William Best has served as Chair of the Rutgers Board of Governors since 2022. Mark Angelson has served as the Vice Chair of the Rutgers Board of Governors since 2022.]
Is it okay to say it's not as fun as the Trustees were? I mean, I really felt involved in the Trustees and we had a lot of really cool projects. I like to think that we made a lot of changes and helped a lot of people. The Governors is a much more serious board. I think a lot of the work is probably done by the Chair and Vice Chair, from my perspective, not so much on my end, but that's okay. I've found enough other stuff to get in, as they say, "good trouble."
SI: Can you give me a sense of some of the issues that have come up on the two subcommittees you mentioned?
JD: We're getting into [the area where] I don't know what's confidential and what's not. Basically, Academic and Student Affairs looks at issues with the students--the tuition, tenure, things like that. The Health Affairs, obviously, looks at all of RBHS [Rutgers Biomedical and Health Sciences]. That's an incredible organization in and of itself. I mean, Bob Barchi was such a champion for bringing on those schools. What they've become and how they've been improved by Brian Strom and his people is just amazing; so, a lot of that.
There's a Finance and Facilities Committee that I hope to be on one time, because you get to see all the blueprints then of new [buildings]. I love new construction, so, you get to see that. I've seen images of, they call it HELIX, the building that's going up across from the train station. So, I've seen cross-sectional things, like, the Medical School has four or five floors of that building, which is really cool. There's a two-story atrium halfway up that's part of RWJ [Robert Wood Johnson], the Medical School. So, that's been interesting, yes.
[Editor's Note: Under Dr. Brian Strom, its inaugural Chancellor, Rutgers Biomedical and Health Sciences (RBHS) oversees the two medical schools at Rutgers, Robert Wood Johnson (RWJ) Medical School and New Jersey Medical School, as well as the School of Dental Medicine, the School of Pharmacy, and more. Dr. Robert Barchi served as President of Rutgers University from 2012 to 2020. The New Jersey Health + Life Science Exchange (HELIX), a three-building development planned for downtown New Brunswick, was approved by the Rutgers Board of Governors in February 2023. The Robert Wood Johnson Medical School plans to relocate into one of the HELIX buildings.]
SI: Going back to your work as a vet, you have also been part of a group called AGVets. Can you tell me a little bit about that?
JD: That's an acronym that's probably changed every three years. In fact, I don't even know what it is now. What you're saying stands for Association of Gay Veterinarians and that's what that was. That probably started out in those dinners that I talked to you about last time that we had, and then, spread through the country through our national meetings.
The name has changed over the years and it's an organization of, now, LGBT veterinarians. I haven't been to any of their meetings and such in the last few years, because it's a very young crowd. I don't know, whatever, but it should be not--but it is--because it ends up being social and that sort of thing.
So, I can't speak a whole lot for them, but it's good that there is an organization that's lasted through the years, through different names, that people can relate to and go to and meet people of like findings or like philosophies or like lifestyles, however you want to call it.
There's usually a group meeting when the AVMA meets or, even the smaller organizations, there'll be, like, a little subset of meetings. They support students, so [that] students in vet schools can get some attachment and learn and get social connections and business connections through that. I don't have a whole lot of experience with them as well, at least since the '80s. I'll prove what I already said--when I was younger, I was a lot more involved in it.
[Editor's Note: The Association of Gay Veterinarians (AGVets), established in the 1970s, became the International Membership of Gay and Lesbian Animal Doctors (I'M GLAD) in 1991. The named changed again in 1993 to the Lesbian and Gay Veterinary Medical Association (LGVMA). The organization rebranded itself as the Pride Veterinary Medical Community (PrideVMC) in 2017.]
SI: Were there any other organizations that you were either a part of or supported that were focused towards LGBT rights?
JD: No, not really. I'd like to say yes, but I've not been all that involved. When I get involved with organizations, including Rutgers, I don't like to go to meetings just to go to meetings and to have a drink or food. I like to be able to feel like we're doing something, because it's been tried. It was tried a number of years at Rutgers. I would go to these things and we would try to get some LGBT alumni together. It just falters or it's just hard for people to get organized.
Recently, I was asked by the RAA to try to help them, the Rutgers Alumni Association. That's the New Brunswick organization, not the RUAA [Rutgers University Alumni Association], which is the whole University, but with the RAA, with their diversity initiatives. They asked me about, it's called, the rainbow something.
I contacted somebody at the Center for Social Justice. She was [saying], "Yes, that really doesn't [exist]. It sort of exists, but doesn't exist. They don't have meetings and it's a few alumni from the '90s." So, [we] haven't been able to find any well-organized pathway. There might be and I'm just getting too old to know what's available or what's out there. The very younger alumni probably have a lot of events or they go to just whatever their community is and just do community events and not particularly vet-related stuff or Rutgers-related.
[Editor's Note: The Rutgers University Alumni Association (RUAA) includes all graduates of Rutgers University's three campuses. The Rutgers Alumni Association (RAA) is an alumni association for graduates of the School of Arts and Sciences, the former degree-granting undergraduate colleges, and other schools of Rutgers-New Brunswick.]
SI: You mentioned last time that veterinary science seems to be a very LGBT-friendly field. Is there any reason for that? Has it changed over the years?
JD: Yes, I don't know what the reason is. A lot of--I don't want to say a lot--but I probably met, in vet school, more gay women than men. I don't know what [that means]. Without making any of the common things that people will say about pets and people, I mean, gay people, before we could get either married or when it was not so easy to have children, there were a large number of pet owners, but, yes, I don't know. It's always been a very accepting [field].
Now, that's not universal, that's for sure. I'm sure, perhaps (here's a real generalization), small-animal veterinarians might be more liberal than large-animal veterinarians. That might be more geographical versus anything [else]. If I look at Pennsylvania, I would guess [that], but one of my classmates is a gay guy who's an equine vet, so, I've already made myself wrong. He's Chester County equine, which is a whole other world than horses that are out in a field doing something.
Yes, I don't know, I think anyone that's in a minority of one type or another, you always wonder what people are saying behind your back, if somebody would say, about our practice, "Oh, I never refer there." My one partner that died, she was a lesbian, but I don't think I mentioned that. So, when people would say, "I never refer there," Lynne and I would think, "Do you think they know about us or do they just not like to refer to us?" So, whether it was true or not or how much of it was [being] paranoid, that always goes through the back of your head.
Plus, it's not like being black or Asian or anybody that looks different. If you were in a room or a group of people, they don't know what your orientation is and can say things that are hurtful or prejudiced. They think that they're in a safe crowd. The profession, in general, except for those kind of instances, I never really felt uncomfortable, but, like I said, out of paranoia or maybe truth, would always wonder, if something wasn't going our way, "Is it because..." but you don't know.
SI: Do you think you faced any prejudice in any other aspect of your life, like housing or anything like that?
JD: Again, not so much housing. When I was finishing my residency at Penn, the head of the department, he really didn't like me. I never knew why, other than that. I had applied for a position there and I know he blocked me from staying. So, again, no one would ever come out and just say that or you'd have to keep asking around, but it was in the back of my head, always, "Is that why?" Other times, no one really said anything, but, again, you don't know what implicit biases are going on with anything in life. It's hard to say.
When we were first starting the business, we met with some attorneys. I don't remember why we were meeting, but we were meeting. It was a new firm. We were looking for a corporate firm. In a way, it works against people sometimes, because this attorney comes in and they had offered us coffee. So, Lynne and I and our other partner, who is straight, are sitting there and the mugs, for some reason, were pink. He says, "Oh, looks like we're in San Francisco."
So, he didn't know it, I never said it, but we decided to not go with that firm. That was the reason. He exposed his prejudices by making some snide, sarcastic comment. Typically, it doesn't work in our favor like that, [laughter] it works the other way, but Lynne and I walked out of there and agreed, "Well, keep looking."
So, those are the kind of things, that you wonder what goes on all the time. I mean, I think, nowadays, [bigots] seem to have more boldness in calling people names and being nasty, not as much as it was always implied before. You would wonder, "Is that probably it?" or that sort of thing.
I'll give you one last example. When I was living with a previous partner, many, many years [ago], in the '80s, in Philly, we had a yard and wanted to hire a landscaper. He came to the house. It was just two guys in the house. He's giving the bid and [said], "Where are your wives?" sort of thing. "Well, there aren't wives," that kind of stuff.
Then, when he was giving the bid, he said, "There's two bids," and we're like, "Why?" He goes, "Well, one bid is if you're going to stay in the house and stare at me and the crew." We responded, "Oh, well, here's the easy decision--no, for either bid." [laughter] So, things like that, people boldly just feel like they can say stuff like that. I like to think that, hopefully, in the end, it screws them and not me.
SI: Yes.
JD: There's one less job for you, no lawyer work for you. Hopefully, that's all there is.
SI: I have another question to wrap up, but are there any other topics that we skipped over that you want to talk about?
JD: I don't think so. We've been pretty thorough. I feel like I should pay you for a psychoanalyst session. [laughter] No, I think I've hit on the things that I'm proud of; you can always follow up and send me an email or something like that as well.
SI: You can add to the transcript if you feel like you want to flesh something out.
JD: Sure.
SI: You have been involved quite a bit at Rutgers over the last twenty years. Do you feel like people of your generation have a place at Rutgers? I hear all sorts of things, "Oh, it is so big. I do not know where I would fit in." How do you think somebody of your generation fits in at a place like Rutgers as an alum?
JD: Well, I think you have to go out and look at Rutgers. I don't think anyone's going to hand you a pamphlet on what you can do, like maybe a small school would, but no matter how big the University is, everyone has some small niche that they belonged to at the time.
I mean, granted, the School of Arts and Sciences is large. It's larger than what Rutgers College would've been, [for] people from my Rutgers College era. In that School of Arts and Sciences, whatever their major was or whatever their affinity was, if they were in the band--I mean, the band has a great alumni organization, as an example--but there's all the smaller organizations that I think they could grab on to, if they want to, and become active members.
The RAA is a very open organization for all the New Brunswick schools. The School of Engineering just split off and they're going to have their own alumni organization. Everyone is welcome, in the RAA, to join different committees and go through their different organizations. They have civic functions, they go to every event possible, one group of them or another. So, I think that's probably a missed opportunity that many people don't appreciate or think about.
That's one angle, but you have to look. Like I said, I don't think Rutgers is going to send out invites with a profile saying, "You fit in the School of Social Work crowd," but, yes, I think everyone [can find a place] if you look. I didn't look for the first fifteen years or so, but, like many people my age, I was building a business, I was in a new relationship, my mother was dying for a few of those [years]. So, I mean, life was happening and I didn't have the time to investigate.
If not for Jason, the Director of Development, if he didn't reach out to me and say, "Hey, do you want to come up here and see what's going on?", I don't know what course I would've taken. Maybe I would've just kept plodding, trying on my own, or somebody else would've approached me, but he opened up the floodgates of getting me involved. That's, I think, what makes some good recruiters of alumni versus others.
People try--like, in things like the alumni magazines or things like that, there's always links or always invitations. There's Regional Clubs that some people belong [to today]. I've never gone to the Philly Rutgers Club. I feel like I go to New Brunswick enough that I don't need to go. It's usually at bars, around sporting events or something. So, it's not quite me. Yes, I think Rutgers is good for always making everyone participate and finding a way. When you find that niche, then, you're golden, because everybody wants people to join them in those groups.
SI: Thank you very much, I appreciate all your answers this session and last session.
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Reviewed by Shaun Illingworth 10/30/2023
Reviewed by James Dougherty 1/29/2024