Here’s the new University of Minnesota president’s plan for the challenges awaiting her

Rebecca Cunningham takes over as University of Minnesota president on Monday and almost immediately faces big decisions about how the U should run its medical programs and navigate tensions stemming from the war between Israel and Hamas.

Cunningham, a longtime emergency room physician, worked most recently as vice president of research and innovation at the University of Michigan, which reports one of the largest portfolios in the nation. In recent weeks, she has been attending Board of Regents meetings, scheduling introductions with Minnesota lawmakers and meeting with student groups making competing cases for whether the U should divest from Israel and how it should distinguish between free speech and hate speech.

“I’m so excited to be here,” Cunningham said. “What is actually happening on the ground is just tremendous, and I’ve been so impressed all along the way.”

Already her research background is being called upon. Two landmark U research papers — one focusing on Alzheimer’s disease and another on stem cells — were retracted over concerns about their integrity after researchers elsewhere struggled to duplicate their findings and raised questions about images within them.

The Star Tribune sat down with Cunningham last week to talk about her preparation and plans for tackling some of the most immediate challenges. This interview has been edited for length and clarity.

Q: It’s been a rough week for research at the U, with the news that two major papers were being retracted. What’s your analysis of the situation, and how will you prevent that from happening during your tenure?

A: I can speak in broader brushstrokes. Every major institution across the country right now has been facing this. I think it’s unfortunate when poor choices are made along the way that can impact the reputation both of research as a whole and cause concern for the public, when the vast majority of researchers are doing amazing research and are publishing with high integrity.

I dealt with this a lot last year, especially in papers from 20-plus years ago, when it maybe wasn’t quite so easy to spot all of these inconsistencies. I know that there has been a number of policies and procedures put in place here to try to do more education with faculty in the meantime to help them understand what it really means to alter a figure, and that that will be noticed.

To the prevention side: Faculty, unfortunately, are under a tremendous pressure to publish. And we have to work on the climate and support for them so that we they can focus on feeling good about the science they produced, even when it doesn’t produce the results they were hoping for — which is true science.

Q: Have you been involved in the discussions with Fairview Health Services over the future of the U’s teaching hospital? Are you expecting any big changes in trajectory?

A: I’ve been doing learning on the 20 years of detailed negotiations that have been going on, getting familiar with the current, public [letter of intent], have begun to meet the assorted players. That’s where we’re at for right now, and then it will certainly need to be a focus for these next couple of months. I think everyone wants to see that through, in the timeline it was envisioned.

Q: The university is still navigating tensions over the war between Israel and Hamas and the controversy over hiring a director for the Center for Holocaust and Genocide Studies. Have you been consulting on those issues, and what’s your approach?

A: I’ve been updated on them. Obviously, academic freedom is critically important. I have not been involved in the decisionmaking to date. I did get to meet with both the Divest group and the group of Jewish students that [interim] President [Jeff] Ettinger had been meeting with. I think that they were great conversations, and I’m just proud to have students that are engaged and sitting down in this manner, really respectfully looking for collective solutions.

Obviously, we are bound by free speech. We’re a public university. However, we have to have a welcoming climate for all of our students and we have to be mindful of when that free speech transitions over into individual harassment. And, more than that, whatever we can do to help our students also just be mindful of how they’re coming off to each other … whatever we can do to help our students work toward feeling inclusiveness, even when they disagree, is going to be critical.