Nancy Cantor, chancellor of the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, said colleges and universities can experiment with creating safe structures in which to explore cultural, racial, religious and ethnic differences, creating model communities for the world to emulate. Cantor spoke Jan. 26 as part of the President's Lecture Series.

Campuses can model diverse communities, says University
of Illinois chancellor

In a world fraught with racial strife, universities offer a unique setting in which differences can be confronted, explored, discussed and ultimately embraced, said Nancy Cantor in her recent President’s Lecture Series address. “We can build model communities on our campuses and invite the world in as partners,” she said.

Cantor, chancellor of the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, said colleges and universities have a “rare and crucial role to play for the public good.” Because they can offer a safe haven in which students, faculty and staff can come together in ways not available in the outside world, they have a special opportunity to foster “an environment in which differences are neither privileged nor ignored,” she said.

“We experiment by building communities that cannot be built in normal society,” she said. Unfettered by social norms, universities can take a “playful and experimental attitude toward exploring issues that resonate with today’s world.” In addition, universities can offer a context in which the exchange of information and ideas is sustained, rather than occurring as sporadic events.

“Higher education has the luxury to lead the way,” she added.

Cantor, who as former provost at the University of Michigan was one of the principal architects of that institution’s affirmative action policy, warned that the nation is becoming increasingly divided along racial lines and increasingly unequal. The legacy of the Jim Crow laws, she said, has left the country so segregated that “students do not meet as equals until they arrive at our doors.” As a result, enduring stereotypes have led to inequality and injustice.

Disturbing outbreaks of violence, such as those in Benton Harbor, Mich., last year, underline the importance of becoming one nation that can live and work together, Cantor said. The nation thus has a compelling interest in promoting and providing education to bridge the boundaries of race, religion, ethnicity and culture.

It is this compelling interest that ultimately convinced the Supreme Court to uphold Michigan’s admissions plan, which allowed race to be taken into account, she said, and has shifted the emphasis of the national dialogue away from a focus on individual rights and toward the greater good.

“It’s not enough to affirmatively provide access,” Cantor said, adding that universities must also create environments in which differences are affirmed, talked about and shared. It is these kinds of communities that can effect social change, she said.

“Diversity helps to make the world a little smaller.”—Illinois student

Creating these experimental environments cannot be easy and “we’re all novices,” Cantor said, so we must seek models to guide us. She suggested the arts as a “natural prototype” for allowing expressions of self and social structures in a safe way. The arts provide a medium for inter-group dialogue without the silencing that often comes in normal society. Moreover, she said, “Everyone has some standing in the dialogue” when discussing or creating art.

Normal boundaries should be eschewed when building communities for discussing racialized issues, she advised, with students, scholars and community members sharing the same footing.

When people are brought together in a multicultural environment such as a college dorm or classroom, storytelling and social introspection are key components in the process of getting to know one another, she said, just as happens between artists and audience as they critique one another.

“But nothing can quite match what happens when students come together informally, let down their guard and engage in dialogue," Cantor said.

As one University of Illinois student wrote of her experience in living with a roommate of a different race, “Diversity helps to make the world a little smaller.”

However, Cantor warned, it would be naïve to think there would not be racial tensions when students who have had so little experience crossing cultural boundaries in their daily lives come together. Students will have to deal with “very real conflicts in coming to a college campus so inexperienced in living in a multicultural environment.”

There may well be discomfort, ignorance and fear, but these can all be dealt with within the safe structure provided by higher education, she said. ”The best thing we can do is to try to build expectations—person to person, and group to group—that people will be there for them,” she said.

We need to invite people to share in the life of higher education, “to shape it and stretch it to make it fit them.”

Once a university has taken the position that it will affirmatively provide access to people of all backgrounds and tailored its programs to reduce resulting individual burdens, “Don’t retreat!” she advised. “Never retreat, because they [opponents] don’t have a better answer. All the alternative plans have failed.” Including, she added, the so-called 10 percent plans such as Texas has, guaranteeing admission to state colleges for the top 10 percent of all high school seniors.

Making structural changes in hard budget times to intertwine diversity with the university’s central mission—as Illinois has done—has been challenging, she acknowledged, “but faculty and students have gotten on board with the idea that if we’re going to serve the people of the state, who are increasingly multiracial, we have to accept its importance.” The commitment has validated the decision to direct the institution’s scarce resources toward this goal. This differs from most universities, which are committed to diversity on paper but keep it marginal to academic programs and thus never really make it a reality, she noted.

Illinois is not alone in its beliefs, Cantor added. “The National Science Foundation has been in the national vanguard in promoting the idea that the best science is going to be done with a multiracial workforce, and we need to prepare.”