Rutgers University-Newark chancellor and social psychologist Dr. Nancy E. Cantor will soon embark on a new journey to lead Hunter College, the largest college in the City University of New York (CUNY) system.
Dr. Nancy CantorRutgers University - Newark
The seasoned higher education leader will become Hunter’s 14th president this summer, adding yet another leadership position onto her already impressive resume.
“My term here at Rutgers-Newark is coming to an end,” Cantor told Diverse in an interview on Wednesday. “And Hunter has always been just a real beacon of all the things I believe in—social mobility, scholarship that really addresses pressing issues in the world, and a very clear footprint in the city of New York.”
This will be Cantor’s fourth stint as the leader of a higher ed institution. Before her time at Rutgers-Newark, she led Syracuse University as chancellor and president for more than nine years and the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign as chancellor for three.
She blazed trails at all three by becoming the first woman to serve as chancellor at each of them.
Throughout her long and storied career in higher education, Cantor has served as a department chair at Princeton University and has been a provost and executive vice president for academic affairs at the University of Michigan.
When it was announced that Rutgers president, Dr. Jonathan Holloway declined to renew Cantor's contract when it expires this summer, the decision was met with fierce criticism from faculty, students and city officials, most notably Newark's Mayor Ras Baraka who said that he was "deeply disheartened and disturbed," by Holloway's decision.
