Education Commons^™

Exploring The Soul Of Syracuse, Together, Nancy Cantor

Chancellor's Collection

Thank you all for joining together at this great university for a ceremony that combines medieval academic costumes with the sights and sounds of the 21st century.

Today’s event is rooted in a distant past while reaching expectantly for the future. This seems only right, for in universities we examine and learn from the past even as we try to inspire those, inside and outside our walls, who will make and change the future. Today we mark that continuity and the possibilities ahead.

From Individual Rights To Societal Health: Before, During, And After The Michigan Cases, Nancy Cantor

Chancellor's Collection

We are reminded of just how large the gap is between the principles and dreams set forth 50 years ago in Brown v. Board and the practices of daily life in this country today; practices that block access to opportunity at every turn. We learn of race disparities in health care, employment, and criminal justice sentencing, painting a stark portrait of life in this country if you are not white.2 We hear from the latest surveys of the Harvard Civil Rights Project that our schools are substantially segregated and differentially resourced by race, and that residential segregation is apparent all …

Thoughts On Art, Truth, And Higher Education, Nancy Cantor

Chancellor's Collection

I want to take a few moments tonight to walk the two-way street, starting from the core purposes of higher education: to make discoveries that change lives and to prepare better citizens for our collective future. How does the training, sustaining, and presenting of the arts in higher education serve, as Barbara White so beautifully captured it, to cultivate the garden of – "experience-oriented imaginative space," in ways that give us hope about our collective future?^v