Numerous reports have demonstrated declining public confidence in higher education, even as students themselves continue to report positive experiences on campus. In a recent interview with The EDU Ledger, Dr. Nancy Cantor, president of Hunter College, said part of the challenge institutions are facing is that they aren’t leveraging their positions as anchor institutions capable of driving regional socioeconomic stability and cross-sector innovation.
Dr. Nancy Cantor
“There's so much emphasis these days on institutional neutrality and institutional autonomy, and yet we talk so much about the lack of public trust,” said Cantor, who argues colleges and universities around the country should be serving as the intellectual vanguard for the public square, where academic research translates into scalable community solutions.
Speaking on the heels of a March 18 event on campus hosted by Hunter College’s Roosevelt House Public Policy Institute at Hunter College, Cantor echoed the panelists’ ideas that colleges and universities have a critical seat at the intersection of race, class, and democracy. In her view, this translates to a responsibility to serve the communities in which they are located.
“We can’t have this sort of Ivory Tower mastery approach to education,” she said. “We can’t think of what we’re doing as a gift to access. ... We need to be in the community and of the community working with the community on issues of wealth equity.”
Cantor believes colleges and universities have a huge role to play in leading the conversations around mass incarceration, health equity, and climate change and environmental justice. This means partnering with local community organizations and joining boards of social justice-oriented nonprofits – not just in name, but with the aim of leveraging the institution’s research capacity to work with the community and solve the problems they’re facing.
“We need to really think about what it means to be a genuine on-the-ground partner where we bring our expertise, but we [also] really listen to our communities,” she said. “There is a whole interconnected set of inequities that we need to work on, so access and inclusion within our own university table is hugely important, but what we really need is a two-way street, where we’re in the community really working on ... all the issues that really impact the ability of families and the next generation to really move up in the economic mobility atmosphere.”
Doing the work
Cantor is very proud that many Hunter faculty members are walking the talk on community engagement.
For instance, Dr. William Solecki, a professor of geography at Hunter College and the Director of the CUNY Institute for Sustainable Cities, is currently working through a federal grant to study flood resiliency in five New York communities, with a particular eye toward whether infrastructure decisions prioritize marginalized communities or inadvertently reinforce existing inequalities. Instead of relying solely on rain gauges and topographic maps, Solecki and his team use collective storytelling to uncover adaptation solutions that were previously hidden from planners, such as specific neighborhood-level vulnerabilities that official data missed.
Dr. Mayra López-Humphreys, an associate professor in Hunter’s Silberman School of Social Work, leads the Staten Island Equity & Belonging (SIEB) Study, a mixed-methods academic-community partnership that identifies opportunities for spacial justice. Her research on restorative approaches and community-led interventions helps minoritized populations navigate systems like housing and the justice system.
“That's a messy world,” said Cantor of her faculty’s community-informed research. “It's not something that you’ll easily and quickly publish ten articles on. But it’s great science, it just unfolds on a different time span and it looks different.”
“I am a huge advocate that we are not going to really fulfill our mission of ... contributing to the public good, of being in the public square unless we think about the role of reward systems for faculty,” she continued. “Faculty reward systems need to take into account publicly engaged scholarship.”
“If you think about rewards [only] as quantitative counting and competitive rankings, you are never going to be able to reward the kind of collaborations faculty are able to make” that really move the needle for communities, Cantor said. “I’m not against the traditional scholarly model, but it shouldn’t be all we do.”
Preparing the next generation of talent
A huge part of collaborating with communities, said Cantor, is working with local school districts to make sure students are being prepared for college; the access conversation starts in elementary school. Dr. Jennifer Tuten, a professor of literacy education, runs the Youth Educator Program, in which Hunter faculty and education students partner with public schools in East Harlem to lead workshops and early-college courses for high schoolers.
The school of education also partners with area schools by embedding residents into partner schools to serve as full-time co-teachers. The residents earn a subsidized master’s degree through the program, which has a 100% job placement rate, further supporting schools by ensuring educators have direct experience working in the communities before they come on to lead a classroom.
“We need to all be out there, so we need to complete a seamless pathway that’s not just to go out to the community to recruit students who you think already can be admitted, but to engage with [the] K-12 [sector] in the kinds of recruiting [and] counseling” that will help students be college-ready, Cantor said, adding that dual-enrollment is also a huge piece of the puzzle of working with local schools to prepare students for success.
“We have to really understand that the next generation ... needs to have access to the right preparatory work,” she said. “We are so obsessed with selectivity ... that we’re not as obsessed with cultivating talent. The mindset of selectivity works against wealth equity.”
