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
