Celebrating Nancy Cantor's Outstanding Chancellorship

August 16, 2023
 
Members of the Rutgers Community:

With enduring admiration and gratitude for Rutgers University–Newark Chancellor Nancy Cantor’s leadership, I am writing to inform you that, at the end of her second highly successful five-year term on June 30, 2024, her service as chancellor will conclude. The university will soon launch a nationwide search for her successor.

Chancellor Cantor arrived at Rutgers in January 2014, having served with distinction as provost at the University of Michigan, chancellor at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, and chancellor and president at Syracuse University. Drawing upon that deep experience and building on her many achievements at those institutions, Chancellor Cantor has provided exemplary, nationally recognized leadership, vision, and innovation to Rutgers University–Newark.

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. In carrying out this commitment, Dr. Cantor has offered a sterling example of how to make higher education more inclusive and more publicly engaged.

Chancellor Cantor has championed many transformative initiatives at Rutgers–Newark to advance social mobility, publicly engaged scholarship, and collaboration among anchor institutions, including:

• A new Honors Living-Learning Community (HLLC) that expands the metrics used in identifying talented candidates by going far beyond GPAs and SAT scores. The HLLC, which emphasizes “local citizenship in a global world,” has been featured in The New York Times and celebrated as a national model.
• RU-N to the Top, a financial aid program that has made an exceptional Rutgers education available to a much larger pool of individuals and families, resulting in even greater diversity in the Rutgers–Newark student body.  
• Express Newark, the remarkable arts collaboratory located downtown in the historic Hahne & Co. building, bringing university and community together around civic dialogue, artistic discovery and expression, and new talent development, as well as in celebration of the rich diversity of the city and university.
• Newark City of Learning Collaborative, of which Rutgers is a vital partner with numerous local organizations in a mission to ensure that all residents of the city have access and opportunities to attend, afford, and complete college and find good jobs.
• Newark Public Safety Collaborative, a citywide effort based at Rutgers¬–Newark that is using data- and evidence-based approaches to increase the safety and security of Newark neighborhoods.  
• The Fiserv-Rutgers Program for Inclusive Innovation, a joint project with one of the world’s leading financial services companies to increase both diversity and innovation in the field of financial technology.
• Newark Anchor Collaborative, the public-private partnership among the city’s anchor institutions that she co-founded and co-chairs, which is setting a national standard for cross-sector action to advance equitable economic growth.

In addition, she has secured legislative support for centers of publicly engaged scholarship, including the Center for Local Supply Chain Resiliency, the Center for Politics and Race in America, and the Center on Law, Inequality and Metropolitan Equity.

In these and other ways, 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.

Throughout her tenure, Nancy Cantor has passionately supported students and lived and breathed the university’s commitment to diversity and inclusion. Among many examples, she has advocated strongly for DREAMers, launching the first UnDocuRutgers college fair; supported the university’s leadership in the NJ-STEP consortium to help formerly incarcerated individuals reenter the educational pathway; and secured Rutgers–Newark’s designation as a Hispanic-Serving Institution. 

Indeed, she has played a leading role in higher education on such issues nationally as co-chair of the Presidents’ Alliance on Higher Education and Immigration steering committee and co-chair of the Anchor Institutions Task Force Advisory Council. Her leadership has been recognized and celebrated by organizations such as the New American Colleges and Universities, which selected her for the Ernest L. Boyer Award and proclaimed her “globally recognized as an advocate for higher education, a catalyst for social mobility, and leader for universities serving as a public good in their communities.”   

In my time at Rutgers, I have been inspired by Nancy Cantor’s deep commitment to the Rutgers–Newark community, energized by her national leadership on issues of social justice, and enlightened by her wise counsel on any number of issues related to the welfare of our university.

I know you join me in applauding Chancellor Cantor, and I will continue to count on her excellence and vision as we move into the academic year and begin the search for her successor. 

Sincerely,

Jonathan Holloway
President and University Professor