Last week, American higher education was rattled by an event whose epicenter was not a vaunted university capital like Boston, Berkeley or New York, but Newark, New Jersey. The news that Nancy Cantor, chancellor of Rutgers University-Newark, one of America’s most diverse universities, was effectively being fired became the lead story in national higher education media overnight. But the diversity of Rutgers-Newark’s students is only one facet of why the summary discharge of an academic leader is groundbreaking.
The deeper reasons start with the fact that the impoverishment of cities like Newark took decades of concerted neglect, institution by institution, until low household-incomes, a lack of homeownership, retail exit, weak schools and high unemployment came to represent the struggles of mostly Black and brown working-class families. Higher education is one of those institutions and its complicity has contributed to its precipitous drop in trust among Americans. But Dr. Cantor has become known far and wide for working to reverse that. For the past decade, she has led a relentless effort to rebuild trust in her institution and, through extensive partnerships within the city of Newark, trust in our other institutions, as well.
Dr. Cantor has spent her career trying to make public universities live up to their obligation to extend their resources, expertise and partnership to the schools, city government, law enforcement, corporations and community-based organizations, centering diversity of people and perspectives throughout. The “anchor mission” programs she initiated since her arrival in 2014 have advanced intergenerational opportunity among all Newark residents — from the children of pipeline programs in the arts, job training and university attendance to their parents and grandparents who were empowered to take on leadership positions few ever trusted them to achieve.
It is a record of inclusion unmatched in academia. University President Jonathan Holloway, who frequently borrows terms like Martin Luther King, Jr.’s “beloved community” to describe his own vision, said as much in announcing his decision not to renew her contract. In a long letter “celebrating” her tenure, President Holloway wrote: “Chancellor Cantor has made Rutgers–Newark an ever-increasing force for positive change within the city and the region, as well as a strong partner with the city government and community organizations in their own efforts to create educational, economic, and cultural opportunities for their residents. She has shown again and again the power of publicly engaged scholarship to advance academic excellence and higher education’s public mission.”
Unceremonious announcement
Indeed, it is hard to find a corner of Newark life that Dr. Cantor and her team have not touched. From public-school enrichment programs to alliances with local businesses, from the creation of an Honors Living Learning College to public-private partnerships to promote housing and residency — thousands of students, workers and professionals learned to appreciate, rather than loathe, the university in the middle of their oft-forgotten city. And myriad faculty, we learned, were eager to join the work.
The unceremonious announcement earned the public outrage of Newark’s Mayor Ras Baraka, a productive partner with Chancellor Cantor, whose two-page press release called the firing “two steps back” for the revitalizing city.
University presidents answer to few and make decisions, like this one, with little explanation. After 3 1/2 years, President Holloway may want to pick his own team of chancellors across the four-campus state university system, in order to create what he calls “One Rutgers.” Whatever that means, it’s hard for a region of working-class Black and brown communities to comprehend why that entails the undoing of a legacy that, by his own admission, was admired nationally for its unprecedented success.
This is why this termination hurts so many so deeply. Diversity is hard. Mobility for marginalized people is probably even harder to achieve. It requires not only vision, but the stamina and foresight to build trust, engage local decision-makers as equals, build programs and institutions, suppress elitism and marshal resources. This was the quiet miracle of Rutgers University-Newark under Dr. Cantor. Her abrupt dismissal sends a damaging message, puts years of relationship-building at risk and makes her successor’s job infinitely more difficult.
Diversifying opportunities for people left out is more than a “beloved community.” It means the democratization of society from the bottom up. Dr. Cantor, a homegrown New Yorker, didn’t come upon her strategic plans overnight, but from decades of experience as a provost at the University of Michigan and the president of the University of Illinois and Syracuse University. Her career is an example of living life’s lessons into leadership. Her tenure at Rutgers was the achievement of impossible dreams. Her loss is all of ours and shows how fragile the true work of diversity really is.