Nancy Cantor, former Chancellor and President of Syracuse University and the new Chancellor of Rutgers-Newark, is well known for her innovative and ambitious conception of the social mission of colleges and universities. Her project “Scholarship in Action”
[http://www.syr.edu/chancellor/selected_works/], which has been put into practice at Syracuse, provides a valuable model for other educational institutions. Satya P. Mohanty, Cornell professor and founding director of the national Future of Minority Studies Summer Institute (www.fmsproject.cornell.edu), and co-editor of The Future of Diversity: Academic Leaders Reflect on American Higher Education (2010), spoke with Cantor about the educational value of diversity and the social responsibility of universities.
A few months ago, the Supreme Court sent the U Texas affirmative action case back to the lower courts, but what’s extremely significant – and this has gone unnoticed in the national media — is that the majority of the Justices now openly support the principle that a college campus’s racial and ethnic “diversity” has “educational benefits.” This is a claim you and your colleagues at U Michigan developed in preparing for Grutter v Bollinger, the earlier case dealing with affirmative action in college admissions. You must feel very good about this decision by the Court, since you were provost at U Michigan and helped coordinate and organize the case for affirmative action around this claim. This idea is now entering the mainstream, replacing the narrow and exclusive focus on quotas, numbers, etc. So tell us a bit about how the topic of diversity on college campuses could be discussed more productively in the national media — that is, in the world outside the seminar rooms of our Education and Psychology departments.
The conversation about diversity in higher education has long been mired in the zero-sum rhetoric of our very divisive and divided national landscape. Behind this rhetoric is the idea that college admissions can be reduced to a head-head battle between individuals as representatives of single groups whose “right” to a seat at the table depends on a narrow score as a proxy for merit. Not only does this miss the complexity of the multi-dimensional identities that we all bring with us as well as of the many attributes that actually constitute merit, but it also begs entirely the most significant task before our nation – how can we all learn to work together to derive the significant benefits that diversity confers in problem-solving, understanding, social cohesion, innovation.
This positive story, if you will, of the educational and workforce benefits of diversity, goes right to the heart of the values of democratic living – but we can’t reap those benefits if we come together mired in suspicion, supremely protective of our individual rights, and devoid of any empathy of mind for others whose experiences and identities can enrich our own as much in proportion to how different they are as in relation to our similarities. Democratic living and learning and working can neither be predicated on “checking our identities” at the door, nor can it fulfill its potential to stretch our hearts and minds, and challenge us to think freshly about our collective challenges (from climate change to urban education to poverty) if it is fundamentally set up as a game of winners and losers. We need each other to all win. We can’t survive (competitively) as a nation if we continue to leave out and exclude the fastest growing talent pools; we need to educate leaders with legitimacy — be they civic, corporate, military, governmental, or educational — and legitimacy must be inclusive of all of our diverse population, as we face challenges together. We can’t face them together if we don’t learn how to come together. It’s plain and simple to say – and hard work to do in an increasingly polarized and splintered society. Higher education is one place where we get to try to be our best selves.
What you and your colleagues at Michigan argued before the Supreme Court was that diversity is not just a sentimental ideal, but that in fact it has distinct educational benefits. What, according to educators and psychologists, are these benefits? How would you summarize the findings of researchers like your colleague Pat Gurin and others in a non-technical language for those of us who are not psychologists?
I would say that the central argument about the educational benefits of diversity is that diverse learning environments lead to more active and critical thinking on the part of individuals, producing better and more creative problem-solving on the part of groups. This insight is fairly old, grounded, for example, in the traditions and legacy of the great educational philosopher John Dewey, about the social nature of education. Taking this one very important step further, Pat Gurin and her colleagues have demonstrated that because race matters pervasively as one dimension that organizes people’s everyday experiences and perceptions and beliefs in our society, when students – or any of us – genuinely interact, have dialogue, listen to each other in racially and ethnically diverse groups, it raises the level of cognitive and social exploration on all participants’ parts. But it takes real interaction, not just being in the same general environment, to produce these beneficial effects of diversity on learning.
And the importance of direct interaction and inter-group engagement is especially relevant in changing people’s default beliefs and reactions about race, and in motivating what we might call a proclivity toward pro-social behavior – wanting to affiliate, work together, build community and common cause — the ingredients of a good democracy. Interacting in a diverse learning environment can produce these long-lasting effects on civic engagement and tolerance, as Gurin and her colleagues have shown in their work since the Grutter case, but it takes real on-the-ground work on everyone’s part – it doesn’t happen passively. Old habits don’t suddenly go away, especially when we all grow up in such polarized and divided — often segregated — worlds.
Taking it one step further, we also know now that we need to have enough diversity – meaningful numbers of people from any given group with different experiences and ideas – to allow us each to see others as complicated individuals, not as monolithic “representatives” of a single group, racial or otherwise. So, in this sense, numbers do matter to enable interactions to occur in which common experiences can be revealed across race and ethnicity – in ways that actually reduce the (stigmatizing) relevance of race in our minds while valuing the positive identities associated with our backgrounds, social affiliations, and groups.
Congratulations on your new appointment as Chancellor of the Newark campus of Rutgers University, a campus that is well known for the rich diversity of its student body and for its vision of public education. What are you most looking forward to in your new job as the academic head of such an important and vibrant public university?
Building off of this theme of leveraging diversity to break down simplistic default notions we have about “others,” and to positively celebrate the contributions to a vibrant social learning environment that come when we “mix it up,” and talk and work across difference — that is one of the main attractions for me of going to Rutgers-Newark, a place where students come from so many different backgrounds that there is literally no majority group to point to at all. In this regard, I’ll break my rule about eschewing rankings and note that Rutgers-Newark is ranked as the number one national research university in diversity, precisely because it is such a vibrant mix. Then add to that a gem of a faculty – first-class scholars – with a commitment to these students and to the City of Newark and its “reintroduction” to the world (to borrow Newark’s own favored son, Professor Clement Price’s phrase). How can it be any better, for an educational leader who believes firmly in the synergy between diversity and excellence in learning and publicly-engaged scholarship, and in the role of higher education as a partner deeply embedded in the places in which we are as anchor institutions, there as a force of the public good for the long haul?
For almost a decade, as Chancellor and President of Syracuse University, you’ve developed a model of engaged scholarship called “scholarship in action.” What is scholarship in action? How can it adapted to urban, public universities such as Rutgers-Newark? How can other colleges and universities, urban or rural, private or public, use this model?
At its most elemental, Scholarship in Action is a re-commitment to the public mission of higher education, both for public and for private colleges and universities. After all, if Lincoln, in the midst of the civil war, could create land grant universities expressly to encourage both economic and educational opportunity, then can’t we fast forward and leave our ivory towers long enough to recognize the community-building power of public scholarship and the essential responsibility to make education a reality for more of the diverse next generation of talent in the cities and towns in which we are anchored as place-based institutions? Every discipline has a role to play here, from STEM to the cultural disciplines, from biomaterials that create health innovations to art, architecture, and design that build new narratives of social possibility and technology that change the ways we communicate, and so much more. We can all partner and collaborate in deep and sustained ways with a diverse “community of experts” – residents, business leaders, elected officials, school children and grandmothers, faith leaders, social activists and entrepreneurs, to together change the odds for individuals, neighborhoods, and whole cities and regions. And, when we do it close at home, we find that though all work is local, there is much that resonates and ripples across the nation’s and the globe’s geographies of opportunity. So, just as Syracuse and Central New York are deeply marked by a history of industrial innovation and social movements for opportunity, and by a contemporary reality of decades of white flight, environmental degradation, and economic stagnation, so too is Newark and its Northern New Jersey metro reality shaped in very pointed ways by decades of post-riot history, rich cultural and social assets, and a hunger for new possibilities. Every place is different; but no place is without both these assets to build upon, or hands to join with, and dreams to make. And every university and college, public or private, two-year or four-year, has a place and a role to assume at this collective table of change. More important yet, we, the “ivory tower” (and the students, faculty, and disciplines we represent) can become changed places in the process – reinventing ourselves for what is to come, not for what has been, as the Carnegie Commission once intoned.
“Public” institutions of higher education all across our country are under considerable financial strain these days, and there seems to be a general move toward privatizing so many social institutions. You’ve held leadership positions at both private and public universities. Is there a special reason to value public institutions — such as state universities — in our globalized 21st century economy? What roles have such institutions, especially urban ones like the City University of New York, played in our history?
Having argued forcefully for the last decade that even a private institution like Syracuse has a public role, responsibility, and reality as a place-based institution – one that isn’t likely to up and leave even in this overly-mobile “flat world” – I want to be careful here in attributing exclusive relevance of the public mission to public institutions. At the same time, historically at least, there is a very interesting contrast to be made between the ways in which many public institutions gained identity by their connection to their communities (regions, states) and the waves of immigrant populations who resided in them and took some “ownership” of these institutions as places of opportunity, while private institutions became destinations more at a distance. You mention CUNY, and I have only to think about the role City College in particular played in the life of my father, a Jewish son of Russian immigrants living in a tenement in Brooklyn, for whom it both opened the doors of intellectual and economic opportunity and yet remained deeply identified with and connected to his community, even if it required a subway ride. And that is precisely what I see, fast forward, as the special, though not exclusive, role of public anchor institutions today: They are avenues of possibility not just for the private gains they offer to “local” students as individuals, but also for the public good they represent to whole communities, and the economic, social, and problem-solving impact they can have as institutions embedded deeply in the identity of their places, their homes. At the risk of being accused of lowering the rhetorical standards, let me suggest that they are more akin to the impact that Major League Baseball has when it embeds a “farm team” within a local community (and by the way, Newark has just such a minor league team) – a team that both represents the training and cultivation of future talent for all of baseball, and yet also takes on the identity and aspirations of its home community – than when basketball plucks the homegrown kid out of a community and sends him or her to college to become a star. To be sure, if this nation is to reinstate higher education as a realistic road to social mobility for the fastest growing populations in our many geographies of opportunity – our many urban and rural communities that now feel disconnected from that reality – we need to do both – send those who are ready and desirous of going to Harvard to Harvard (and as Hoxby and Turner have shown there are many more than one might think), and yet champion the home teams too, as the Rutgers-Newarks of the world can hold their own pretty well if given the opportunity.
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