By Jane Elgass
The University Record

Discussing the challenges facing the University from her perspective as provost, Nancy Cantor described to a University audience the three contexts or values from which she views the issues that daily cross her desk.

The University creates a structure and community that encourages undergraduates "to stretch beyond their intellectual comfort zone, and that is one of the special things a great research university has to offer," Cantor said in September, as the second speaker in the 1998 lecture series on American values sponsored and hosted by the Horace H. Rackham School of Graduate Studies. "This is at the core of why we need to cherish interdisciplinarity and multidisciplinarity."

This, at the same time, produces a contradiction. "Exploration rarely comes without a sense of place and security," she said. "A toddler, for instance, rarely ranges beyond the security of a care giver unless there is a sense of security."

Cantor was quick to point out that this mixing of ideas, people and experiences, pushing all members of the community beyond comfortable boundaries, is not easy. "Exploration is hard," she said. "It is tension provoking. Our most fundamental problem is how we get together and learn from one another. This is hard because it's new. It's uncharted territory. There are no rules for stretching beyond boundaries."

Cantor noted that, as a public research university, U-M also plays an important role in shaping society's values. This impact goes well beyond the traditional concept of a university as a place where knowledge is created and transmitted. "A place like Michigan, which has an historical imperative to be inclusive and wide-ranging, does more than that," she said. As institutions, universities really are "grand societal experiments" in which we do things for society that it would like to do but cannot.

Universities, she said, "have the luxury to play with crossing boundaries and building new, different communities, and Michigan has always played that role." We take people in at a time in their lives when they are leaving a community that is very well-defined and "bump them against each other to create a new community and smaller sub communities."

The University is a layered community, Cantor said. It is one university but has nested layers of communities within. One of the challenges imposed by this structure is to determine how to "preserve engagement in the University as a whole while also preserving the layers."

Cantor said that the budget model she and her staff have developed is one of the ways in which she confronts this challenge. The units have their own resources, which they can use as they see fit, but "they all have a common fiscal fate." There are units that are vital to the University that cannot be self-supporting--what Cantor calls public goods--so others must in some way share in their support.

These public goods include visible institutions such as the libraries, museums, Hill Auditorium and the stadium, as well as less obvious ones--the transportation system, safety, student financial aid, a civil community in which the rights of all are respected--that all combine to create the whole of the University. Maintaining and enhancing the public goods requires sacrifices from all parts of the University.