Together In Excellence

A child of the 1950s, Bonilla-Santiago and her family came to the United States from Puerto Rico. Operation Bootstrap—a series of federal initiatives aimed at growing the territory’s participation in industry—enabled her family to build a business through farming, and they traveled back and forth from South Jersey to Florida every six months. Although the family business was highly industrialized, education was at the forefront of Bonilla-Santiago’s upbringing.

“My father believed education motivates you and is the only way out of poverty,” Bonilla-Santiago said. “He told me that if I worked hard and got good grades, I would go to college.”

Fatherly advice proved correct, and in Sociology 101, she learned about poverty for the first time. Her family had limited resources, but she never knew they were poor. Receiving a bird’s-eye view of poverty and its causes gave rise to an abundance of questions in her mind: Why are there so many gaps between the rich and the poor? What causes discrimination? And, knowing that academics were her path out of poverty, how could she help to transform education so that it could be more accessible to people like her?

Bonilla-Santiago’s interest in education intensified during her postdoctoral studies at Harvard in in the 1980s, when she took note of two states that were making inroads in education reform: Michigan and Minnesota. Both were proving the effectiveness of the public charter school model, but with one key difference: Minnesota’s public charters were populated largely by wealthy white students, while Michigan attained success with integration. What was happening in Michigan was precisely the educational model she aimed to establish in Camden.

“In Camden, there was a pipeline from cradle to prison,” said Bonilla-Santiago, speaking of the city’s problems in the 1990s. “There was corruption, a 50 percent poverty rate, and a 45 percent dropout rate in public high schools.”

Bonilla-Santiago—who joined the Rutgers faculty in 1983—offered the youth of Camden an escape from that pipeline when she founded LEAP Academy, a charter school tailored to Black and Latino students and based on the principles of leadership, education, and accountability. Begun in 1997, the school flourished with a 100 percent graduation rate, 100 percent college attendance rate, and 90 percent college matriculation rate. To date, the school has seen at least 148 graduates go on to study in the Rutgers University system.

Bonilla-Santiago recognized that more than just great public schools were needed for the Paraguay experiment to become a success. Paraguay also needed to experience a transformation of culture, wherein corruption was rooted out and ethics took hold. To this end, grant funding was used to establish Higher Education Center for Ethics, Equity, and Transparency (HECEET) in Paraguay.

Funded through a $3 million USAID grant, the project developed the country’s first behavior-change program that uses education as a tool to fight corruption. HECEET will spearhead a comprehensive educational training and capacity-building initiative for Paraguay targeted at public, government, legislative officials, young professionals and students, and education leaders. The initiative focuses on strengthening Paraguay’s capacity to build and sustain public structures that are grounded on transparency, ethics, and equity.

Just as Bonilla-Santiago worked to root out Camden’s corruption by making LEAP Academy available to the city’s students, UNA and Rutgers–Camden are acting in tandem to do the same. They are starting a tenure process and coming here to Camden to learn how to set it up and create a more equitable university. Chancellor Tillis has put about $200,000 into the collaboration.

“As we all know, the world is getting smaller and smaller,” Chancellor Tillis said. “The global world is upon us, and international exchanges are important not only for research faculty and our staff, but to provide even more valuable experiences for our students.”

The first step in putting HECEET’s mission into action was a call-to-action conference attended by 800 stakeholders from Rutgers–Camden and UNA. At this event, 200 ambassadors were trained on principles of democracy and civil society, and in turn were able to provide more training throughout Paraguay. In November 2021, a delegation from UNA traveled to Rutgers–Camden as the project officially got underway.

“Our university is dedicated to making changes, not only for our students, but for our local and national community,” said Zully Vera de Molinas, UNA’s rector (the equivalent of a university president).

In July 2022, a Rutgers–Camden delegation featuring Chancellor Tillis and Bonilla-Santiago traveled to UNA. Both received honorary degrees from UNA, and the two universities signed a memorandum of understanding that formally cemented the partnership.

“They have been through so much with dictators and are trying to build democracy. We brought six departments together to help them publish for the first time,” Bonilla-Santiago said. “We will also have a yearly academic conference to keep the collaboration going.”  

Bonilla-Santiago is already at work on the next phase of the collaboration, which is supported by an additional $4 million USAID grant. A delegation of 15 deans and the UNA rector came to Rutgers–Camden in January 2023; they met with Rutgers–Camden deans to begin learning how to build graduate programs in Paraguay. This phase also includes significant investment in Paraguay’s K–12 pipeline—an effort Bonilla-Santiago will lend her expertise to each step of the way.  

“I see myself as a citizen of the world and a scholar of the world,” Bonilla-Santiago said. “Rutgers–Camden has been a critical part of my work; without them, I could not have done this. Rutgers has given me a forum to change and save lives. I’m loving what I’m doing. Do I get tired? Never. Universities are anchors of change, and Rutgers has incredible assets that faculty can utilize to change the world.”