chair from 1976 to 1980. He was promoted to Associate Professor in 1980, and was appointed chair in that same year, a position in which he served until 1984. By the end of his tenure as chair, the department had grown in size and scope, with 18 full-time faculty and staff, and 800 majors with 6,000 student enrollments per year in interpersonal, intercultural, organizational, international, health, speech and mass communication. Consistent with his curricular and administrative work within the department during those years, Ruben's scholarship and publication focused on general systems theory (General System Theory and Human Communication, with J. Kim, 1975), and other interdisciplinary conceptualizations of communication. Ruben's interest in integration of the multidisciplinary theories of communication led to the publication of a work entitled, Approaches to Human Communication (With R. Budd), which was created for use as the introductory text at Rutgers and was also adopted at a number of other departments of communication nationally. Approaches to Human Communication provided a broad perspective on the field exploring 24 disciplinary orientations to communication from Anthropology to Zoology. In 1984, Ruben authored Communication and Human Behavior (CHB) to provide an integrated, interdisciplinary book on the role of communication in human affairs. In 2020, the 7th edition was published, with coauthor L. Stewart. In 1977, Ruben proposed the creation of a Communication Yearbook and the leadership of the International Communication Association agreed to sponsor the publication. The goal of the series was to promote theoretical integration and coherence by annually publishing state-of-the-discipline overviews along with exemplary research in various subareas of the field. Ruben served as editor of volumes 1 and 2 of the annual series, which has been published for 40 years. In 1983, Ruben was appointed to a university committee charged with developing a plan to form a comprehensive school composed of the various disciplines related to communication and information at Rutgers. Bylaws and a structure for the new unit were proposed, and what was then named the School of Communication, Information, and Library Studies, was chartered. Later, the name was changed to the School of Communication and Information. The new school included communication (speech, interpersonal and mass), journalism and mass media, and library and information science. Ruben was named Ph.D. Program Director for the new school. He created a theoretical and programmatic framework to incorporate the various disciplines in a single hybrid Ph.D. program—which became the first of