Nancy E. Cantor

Nancy Cantor has served as chancellor of Rutgers University, Newark since 2014. Cantor has held a variety of academic leadership positions, including chair of the department of psychology at Princeton; dean of the graduate school and later provost and executive vice president for academic affairs at the University of Michigan; chancellor at the University of Illinois Urbana, Champaign; and chancellor and president of Syracuse University.

She is recognized nationally and internationally as an advocate for re-emphasizing the public mission of colleges and universities, both public and private. Cantor lectures and writes extensively on the role of universities as anchor institutions in their communities, along with other crucial issues in higher education such as rewarding public scholarship, sustainability, liberal education and the creative campus, the status of women in the academy, and racial justice and diversity.

At the University of Michigan, she was closely involved in the university's defense of affirmative action in the cases, Grutter v. Bollinger and Gratz v. Bollinger, heard by the Supreme Court in 2003. Along with Earl Lewis, she edits the Our Compelling Interests (Princeton University Press, 2016) book series on the value of diversity for democracy and a prosperous society.

She has received several awards, including the Distinguished Scientific Award for an Early Career Contribution to Psychology from the American Psychological Association and the Woman of Achievement Award from the Anti-Defamation League. Cantor holds a doctorate in psychology from Stanford University.