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PRESIDENTIAL SPEAKER SERIES: Higher Education & The Public Good

The Office of the President hosted a Fireside Chat on December 4, 2023 with President Jebb and Dr. Nancy Cantor, Higher Education Leader & Chancellor of Rutgers University- Newark.

In addition to the Fireside Chat and Q&A with students, faculty, and staff, Dr. Cantor spent time with Leaders in Service participants and students in Professor Kristin Kenneavy’s Social Inequality class. In addition, she lent her counsel to a team of Roadrunners who are working toward expanding Ramapo’s civic engagement and community involvment efforts.

Dr. Nancy Cantor, Higher Education Leader & Chancellor of Rutgers University- Newark

Nancy Cantor is chancellor of Rutgers University – Newark. A distinguished leader in higher education, she is recognized nationally and internationally as an advocate for leveraging diversity in all its dimensions, reemphasizing the public mission of colleges and universities as engines of discovery, innovation and social mobility, and achieving the fulsome potential of universities as anchor institutions that collaborate with partners from all sectors to help their communities thrive.

As a social psychologist, she has focused on understanding how individuals perceive and think about their social worlds, pursue personal goals and regulate their behavior to adapt to life’s most challenging social environments. Cantor lectures and writes extensively on the role of universities as anchor institutions in their communities, along with other crucial issues in higher education such as rewarding public scholarship, sustainability, liberal education and the creative campus, the status of women in the academy, and racial justice and diversity.

A fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and member of the National Academy of Medicine, she previously led Syracuse University and the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign and was provost at the University of Michigan, where she was closely involved in the defense of affirmative action in 2003 Supreme Court cases Grutter and Gratz. She is co-editor with Earl Lewis of the Our Compelling Interests book series published by the Princeton University Press, with the support of the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation. She has received the Robert Zemsky Medal for Innovation in Higher Education; American Council on Education Reginald Wilson Diversity Leadership Award; Frank W. Hale, Jr. Diversity Leadership Award from the National Association of Diversity Officers in Higher Education; Anti-Defamation League Woman of Achievement Award; National Council for Research on Women Making a Difference for Women Award; and 2008 Carnegie Corporation Academic Leadership Award. (source: Case.org)