What’s New
Nancy E. Cantor, the chancellor of Rutgers University’s Newark campus, will step down when her contract ends next summer. That announcement came in a Wednesday letter to the university community from Jonathan Holloway, Rutgers’s president, and took some faculty and community members by surprise.
Cantor was previously chancellor of both Syracuse University and the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. She has led Rutgers-Newark for a decade.
The Details
Rutgers opted not to renew Cantor’s contract at the end of her second five-year term, according to Holloway’s announcement. But Holloway praised her commitment to inclusivity and public engagement, writing that “there may be no other chancellor in the country as committed to the impact that a university can have on its host community as an anchor institution.”
A university spokeswoman told The Chronicle that “it would be wholly inappropriate to discuss why” Cantor’s contract was not being renewed, saying it was a personnel issue. Dory Devlin, the spokeswoman, added that Cantor would take a one-year sabbatical at her current salary, then have the option of returning to the faculty as a university professor with tenure. Cantor, for her part, told NorthJersey.com that “I remain deeply engaged and committed to our collective pursuit of social mobility, publicly engaged scholarship, and anchor-institution collaboration on equitable growth.”
The Backdrop
Cantor, 71, has spent nearly 30 years on the top rungs of higher-ed leadership. A social psychologist, she served as provost at the University of Michigan at Ann Arbor, where she helped prepare the institution’s defense in the landmark Supreme Court cases Gratz v. Bollinger and Grutter v. Bollinger. (In the latter case, the court upheld the limited use of race-conscious admissions, a decision that was effectively overruled in June.)
At Newark, Cantor has prioritized expanding college access and forging ties with local leaders, including on citywide public-safety and learning collaboratives, which Holloway’s letter praised. She took a similar tack at Syracuse, where she championed the “public good” and off-campus outreach. But some faculty critics there said Cantor’s external focus compromised Syracuse’s research prowess and led to its voluntary departure, in 2011, from the prestigious Association of American Universities.
The Stakes
Ras J. Baraka, the mayor of Newark, wrote to Holloway on Wednesday, calling Cantor’s removal “a grave error.” A dozen political and community leaders also signed the letter, asking Holloway to reconsider.
“To discard Chancellor Cantor is taking two steps backwards,” the letter says. “It disrupts a long and hard-fought progress that Newark is journeying on. It flies in the face of the collective work that we have been doing many times with Chancellor Cantor’s insistence, her commitment, and sheer will.”
In a response to Baraka on Thursday, which Devlin shared with The Chronicle, Holloway indicated he wouldn’t be changing his mind. He assured Baraka that “we will insist that the new chancellor exhibit the same kind of commitment to community partnerships and empowerment” as Cantor, who he wrote “will be a very difficult act to follow.”
Cantor’s nonrenewal was a “shock” to at least one faculty member, Paul Boxer, whom NorthJersey.com interviewed. (The Chronicle’s request for comment from the chair of Rutgers’s University Senate did not receive an immediate reply.)
