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december 4, 2013
t h e i n de pe n de n t s t u de n t n e w spa pe r of s y r acuse , n e w yor k
Bird by bird
Text by Marwa Eltagouri, staff writer Photo by Allen Chiu, staff photographer
W
ith a few weeks remaining in her last semester at Syracuse University, Nancy Cantor’s nine-year rapid of policy-making has settled into a quiet backwater. She stares absently though the large glass windows of her office that faces Crouse College. In her opinion, it’s one of the best views on campus.
Then with just three words, she captures her approach to transforming higher
education, her method to leading SU and her secret to living a gratified life. “Bird by bird.” At 61, Cantor — SU’s first female chancellor — has held a sui generis tenure. No chancellor has advocated for women and minority rights as passionately. No SU leader single-handedly transformed the city of Syracuse, pouring money into its development with the finesse of a mayor. She’s spent most of her chancellorship in additive mode: increasing undergraduate enrollment by about 22 percent, expanding interdisciplinary programs and figuring out how to widen SU’s gates to a more ethnically, socioeconomically and geographically diverse student body. At the same time, she’s been a figure of controversy, a leader criticized for what
some faculty describe as an authoritarian rule. She pulled SU out of the American Association of Universities, and saw a slip in the university’s national ranking. Cantor, who will leave Syracuse mid-December to become chancellor of Rutgers University’s Newark campus, reflects on her tenure without regret. “I don’t mean this at all to sound in any way arrogant, but it’s not about wishing that things could’ve gone differently. You look back, and things were tough.” Above all, she does things quickly and efficiently. “Bird by Bird.” That’s the title of Cantor’s “all-time bible” and Anne Lamott’s book of instructions on life. In it, Lamott describes her frustrated brother working on a bird report as a child, immobilized by the swarm of information in his bird book. Lamott’s father tells him, “Just take it bird by bird.” The birds have earned Cantor her nickname: Nancy with the Velocity Pace, as a handful of faculty and administrators call her. If you want to get some sleep, they say, don’t work for her. Whether things were going very well or very badly around her — whether she was succeeding at her billion-dollar fundraising campaign or dealing with the sexual abuse allegations against former assistant men’s basketball coach Bernie Fine — she did what she could. She took it bird by bird.
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