Message of Solidarity from Chancellor Cantor in the Aftermath of the Buffalo Shooting

Dear Rutgers University – Newark community members,

At this morning’s celebration of our glorious graduates and their families and supporters at the Prudential Center in Newark, we paused prior to the festivities in silent solidarity with families and communities across the nation and around the world who are suffering the effects of violent hatred.

The unspeakable horror of the racist massacre in Buffalo, New York brings to a boil once again our outrage not only over the brazen violence, itself, but over the simmering hate we find all too easily in communities large and small from New York to California, Texas to Florida, and myriad places across the globe. Whether it is anti-Black, anti-Latinx, anti-Asian, antisemitic, anti-Islamic, anti-Hindu, anti-LGBTQIA, or any form of hate veiled as political conflict as in Ukraine, hate derives from pernicious lies about who we are as groups and who we are together as members of the human family.

As we close an academic year in which we rejoiced in being able to return to learning and communing together after too long apart, let each of us redouble our commitment to be the ones our nation and our world are waiting for to sow togetherness and peace one person at a time and one community at a time.

In solidarity,

Nancy Cantor

Chancellor