Chancellor Nancy Cantor spoke Thursday afternoon to a packed Goldstein Auditorium about her experience as provost at the University of Michigan during the school’s Supreme Court fight that culminated last year with the upholding of its affirmative action admissions policies.

Cantor, as well as David Rubin, dean of the S.I. Newhouse School of Public Communications, and Paula Johnson, dean of the College of Law, spoke under the theme of the Intellectual and Academic Life in Service of the Larger Society, each in different locations on campus.

‘Private universities have a special place to play in the playground of public good,’ Cantor said.

The case of Gratz and Hamahcer v. Bollinger began in October 1997, when plaintiffs Jennifer Gratz and Patrick Hamacher filed a lawsuit in the Detroit U.S. District Court alleging that the University of Michigan undergraduate admissions office gave preference to students of color. In 2000, it was ruled that Michigan’s policies were constitutional.

Another plaintiff, Barbara Grutter, filed a lawsuit in 1997 against the university’s Law School admissions. The court ruled in 2000 that the Law School’s policies were unconstitutional.

The Supreme Court heard both cases in 2003, and ruled that the undergraduate admissions’ point system was unconstitutional, but the Law School’s policy was valid. Justice Sandra Day O’Connor cast the swing vote in the 5-4 ruling.

Cantor became the university’s provost only a month before the cases were filed, and although she would rather have focused on her job of running the university, she said she realized that like any large school, including Syracuse, Michigan had the responsibility of defending its values.

‘There’s no good timing for these types of discussions,’ Cantor said. ‘But there was no walking away from these cases.’

Growing up in New York City and taking the subway to school for 45 minutes each day, Cantor interacted with people from all races and ethnicities. She also worked for a summer in a poor coal mining town of West Virginia and one summer in Bergen, Norway.

‘It gets in your spinal cord; you somehow see and feel the richness of that diversity,’ Cantor said. ‘You get tunnel vision when your core values are attacked.’

Cantor and her coworkers began defending the cases, realizing that because the university’s area had a century’s worth of political activism and tension surrounding race, it would be especially sensitive to the cases.

‘Race was written into the history that had seen Detroit go through the riots, the white flight on education,’ Cantor said. ‘Detroit is the second most segregated city in America. Schools are largely separate and unequal. The context was a powerful force.’

The plaintiffs argued that they had been denied admission because of the university’s affirmative action policies. But that argument by odds alone held no ground, because the school had received thousands of applications, and students of color composed a smaller percentage of accepted students than white students, Cantor said.

When the case became more and more heated in the media and within the community, both began to attack fellow professors and coworkers that Cantor had asked to help her defend their case, Cantor said.

‘I can’t tell you what it feels like to turn on ’60 Minutes’ and see someone viciously attack a colleague that I put on the line,’ Cantor said.

But the community and the media started to side with Michigan when they began to consider the greater meaning of the case’s repercussions, and not the individual rights of the plaintiffs, Cantor said.

Detroit automaker General Motors vocalized its support for Michigan, arguing that people could not succeed in global work if white students and students of color could not learn to work in a diverse workplace. The university also created campus dialogues on diversity among student groups and encouraged supporters of both sides of the debate, Cantor said.

Justice O’Connor, like Cantor and the automakers, argued that diversity in a university setting results in the most beneficial outcomes for all, regardless of race, and prepares all for real world working and living environments, Cantor said.

‘At the end of the day, my view is that the Supreme Court did firmly uphold the notion that race is one factor in many factors that must be considered,’ Cantor said. ‘It’s not an undue burden on white students.’

After Cantor ended her lecture, several audience members expressed their thanks for her support of affirmative action and hope to enrich the Syracuse community.

But Thor Ritz, a junior geography major, asked Cantor how she plans to further connect SU with the surrounding city, saying the university lacks programs that get most students off of the Hill and into the community.

‘You are absolutely, dead-on right,’ Cantor said. ‘We want to be cooperating with our city. It’s our responsibility to build an environment where boundaries are permeable.’

Published on August 29, 2004 at 12:00 pm