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Last year, we had a wonderful speaker on race, gender, and class in the 21st century at Southern Vermont College. She was someone whom I had known both professionally and personally for more than 15 years. After the lecture, in a rare quiet moment we had together, she remarked,” We miss you in the academy.”
I wasn’t sure how to respond. At one level and without equivocation, I truly miss my former faculty colleagues and my life as an academic. I was reminded of this again less than a week later when yet another professor friend mentioned that she had just participated in the best conference she had ever attended on a topic of shared interest. Actually, I had known about the conference and would have attended—even in my current position as a college president—had the timing been different. But I needed to be on campus for an Honors Convocation and a donors’ dinner attended by the previous president, with all that that entails (use your imagination). Plus, it was the last day of classes for the academic year.
The comment got me thinking, though. After almost two years, how much do I miss my prior life? And even more pointedly, if I could go back, would I? Neither question produces a simple answer.
When I began my life as a college president, I had a romanticized (some would say misguided) notion of the job. I had conceptualized my role as that of a “scholar president.” I intended to write, speak and publish regularly, as I had done as a faculty member. I thought, naively, that I would be engaged with other presidents daily (okay, weekly) in scintillating conversations about how to improve higher education, and I would work on creating replicable models for affordable private non-elite liberal arts education. I might even tackle the serious problems affecting vulnerable students, including failure to progress, soaring tuition costs, and diminishing loans and grants (other than at the most elite institutions).
The thing that surprised me—and I have had a hard time adjusting to this—is how these deeper questions present themselves to a college president and the ways these topics are addressed within college administration. I kept looking for illumination on these “big” issues in the ways an academic does—by reading, researching, or sitting and thinking, alone or in groups of colleagues. When I attended conferences with other presidents, I was back in my element. Perhaps, I kept thinking, I just need to attend more conferences. When I wrote speeches for convocation or the nurses’ pinning ceremony or commencement, I was reflecting on these issues in ways I was accustomed to—lofty, broad thinking in written form. Too bad, I kept lamenting, that I cannot write even more such speeches.
I was regularly on the prowl for more places where I could think “big” about education.
Then a series of unrelated events made me realize that I had the paradigm all wrong. Instead of the strategies that had worked when I was a professor, I needed to consider the many decisions I had dismissed as mundane or administrative, as well as conversations and activities with students and faculty and staff, to find manifestations of the deeper issues. They are embodied in the details of campus life, and I had neither seen nor appreciated them there.
Small mattered; I had to think “small.” Let me give a couple of examples.
The first is the academic calendar. In my first year as president, I simply rubber-stamped the calendar. A faculty committee had set it, and an academic dean had approved it. I did not pay much attention, other than to ask that events like homecoming not fall on Yom Kippur and the like—and I only asked that because my husband still talks about that happening at his New York City alma mater more than 40 years ago.
Then the dean left midway through my second year, which meant I was the one who had to deal with the next year’s calendar. Coincidentally, the faculty had just read and was talking about Ken Bain’s new book, What Great College Teachers Do. And at about that time I had a conversation with my cousin, who remarked that in running week-long environmental camps, the kids who came from more troubled homes had a harder time adjusting to and then leaving the camp. The first and last days of the week were terrible—Wednesdays were these kids’ best day.
Then it struck me: We started the semesters directly before holidays (Labor Day and Martin Luther King Day). There is too little time before the extra day off for students to settle in at the dorms, to meet each other, to bond with each other and the college. Holidays enabled students to go home, to see old friends and live with parents, but they also required that students adjust all over again when they returned to campus. The same repositioning occurs following a vacation. This disruption affects our students, the classroom, residential life, the faculty, and learning.
I realized that we needed to rethink our calendar and its impact on students. We needed to ponder how to teach the classes that follow on the heels of a holiday or a vacation. We cannot simply say, when students return following a vacation or a long weekend, “Let’s pick up from where we left off in Chapter 12.”
This is not the first time I have failed to find answers in the right places. I remember when I left the private sector and started teaching, I came home one day early on and lamented to my husband that I had wasted hours over a wonderful lunch, during which I had discussed with my new colleagues whether a particular legal argument—outside my field of interest—had legs. “You’re missing the point,” he said. “Those lunches are your work. They’re where you’ll find your intellectual voice.”
Let me give another example.
I recently spoke at a small, on-campus memorial service for the son of one of our non-traditional students. The son had died in Iraq, a story made all the more poignant by the realization that his father had died in Vietnam shortly before his birth. We planted a cherry tree on campus, and I reflected on the son’s deep desire for his mother to go to, and graduate from, college. He had planned to watch her walk across the stage. “He will be with us at commencement,” I said, “and we will be with you.” The power of education—its capacity to lift up a person and a generation—could not have been clearer. I did not need a conference, or a scholarly paper, to appreciate that fact or realize how the bigger picture is comprised of the many small things we do.
On our campus, I regularly say that education happens in many places and spaces, of which the classroom is but one. So too with deep thinking. Yes, it occurs within the academy in traditional ways, but it also occurs in day-to-day activities that allow us to see our academic models in action, that allow us to live our theory and test out the value of what we are thinking.
I miss some aspects of my life when I was an academic, but I do not need to return to the academy. I am there now. It has just taken me a while to realize it.
Karen Gross is president of Southern Vermont College and has been a professor of law (and now a distinguished visiting professor) at New York Law School since 1984.