Interview with Courtney McAnuff

Courtney McAnuff is Vice Chancellor for Enrollment Management at Rutgers University. Heroes Around Me interviewed him on Zoom on November 22, 2024, at 8:00 PM EST. Zoe Zhang later published the conversation as “An Educational Hero” in The Green and Gray.

McAnuff moved to the United States from Jamaica at age seven, grew up in New York City, and graduated from the City University of New York. He worked at the State University of New York and Eastern Michigan University before Rutgers. In 2007 he started the Rutgers Future Scholars Program, which brings first-generation, low-income seventh graders onto campus for summer courses, seminars, and tutoring, and offers a four-year scholarship if they later attend Rutgers. He told the group that students from the first class are now physicians, engineers, a state police lieutenant, and a partner at Ernst and Young.

One story he returned to was walking a seventh-grade girl to the bus. Asked what she liked most about the day, she said the Rutgers bus had pulled up on her street, the whole block came out, and she told them it was for her. He also described holistic admission with a concrete example: a student whose SAT math score is below a program cutoff can still be far ahead of the average at their own school, and that gap is grit the university can recognize.

He closed by resisting the word hero. “I don’t relish being called a hero. What I do is a love of passion.”

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