Chair of the board of directors of the American Association for Higher Education, Chancellor Cantor specializes in the fields of personality and social psychology, and personality and cognition. In 2003-2004, the Chancellor’s office will support, among other events, the Brown Jubilee Commemoration (a full year of activities commemorating Brown vs. Board of Education of Topeka) and Martin Luther King, Jr. Commemorative Symposium: “Renewing the Dream: A New Season, A New Reason.”
Chancellor Cantor's presentation is titled:
Moving Together: The Arts in Higher Education
Surrounding each university is a world – actually, many worlds – as divisive, insular, bounded, and contested as one can imagine. We are now just one generation away from a time when white children will be the minority in our public schools, and different races and ethnic groups still live in separate neighborhoods, attend different schools, churches, synagogues and mosques, and grow up without attending each other’s birthday parties, proms, weddings and funerals.
Because we do not know each other, the stereotypes we hold have led to great injustices and inequalities at home while ethnic, religious, and inter-group conflict can be seen in virtually every corner of the globe.
To make matters worse, we have reacted to very real pain and losses on our own shores with a turn inward, a “battening the hatches” that poses real problems for the kinds of free and vital exchange of people and ideas at the heart of our democracy. At the same time, we are enveloped by the astonishing and fast-moving revolution in technology that has made our world smaller and accelerated our sense of tragedy and dread.
In this world of foreboding, artists and humanists working at the boundary between campus and community can provide a medium for participation in a dialectic in which intra-cultural expression and intercultural dialogue are intimately intertwined, just as the growth of the self is inextricably bound with one’s interdependence with others.
The arts, broadly defined as “expressive culture,” can be today the medium, not just the reflection, of intracultural affirmation and intercultural dialogue. They can express difference while building trust, rather than conflict or separation, and they make possible a creative, dynamic coexistence that richly affirms each part.
Across our institutions and around the globe, scholars, artists, citizens, and students are teaming up—often, but not always, aided by some form of cyber technology—to explore differences, preserve and interpret and share cultural heritages, and foster new dialogues.
Read more about Chancellor Cantor at:
University of Illinois Profile
Programs emphasizing cultural understanding that are sponsored by the Chancellor's office are listed at:
Campus Events Supported Through the Office of the Chancellor