Actually, this particular Tuesday starts in New York City, but it will end in Houston. For me, as for most of my fellow college presidents, travel is a huge and unavoidable part of the job description these days. I travel to board meetings, speaking engagements, development visits, education association meetings, award ceremonies, alumni club meetings — sometimes I feel as if I spend more hours in airplanes and airports than in my own office. Yet, over the nearly 13 years that I have been president of Connecticut College, the nature of my travel has changed — reflecting an evolution in the identity of the institution itself.
In the early years of my tenure, most of my trips had a distinctly evangelical feel. As the first Connecticut College alumna to serve as president, I was the college’s biggest fan, but, often, I had to work hard to convince audiences to share my enthusiasm. Connecticut College was an academically excellent liberal arts college, but it was relatively unknown outside New England. I needed to let people know not only about our bedrock liberal arts tradition, but also about our dreams of reinventing and reinterpreting liberal arts education for a new generation of students. I also needed to help the college raise a lot of money fast. Our endowment in my first year stood at about $31 million, only a fraction of the amount enjoyed by liberal arts colleges of comparable academic stature.
That was then. This is now. I am in New York for a meeting of the Luce Foundation Board of Directors, to which I have been elected at least in part because of the college’s extraordinary record of achievement in the last 13 years. Applications for admission have risen 46 percent just since 1994 and the college has climbed from No. 41 to the mid-twenties in the U.S. News and World Report ranking of top liberal arts colleges. We have established four innovative interdisciplinary academic centers and become a recognized leader in international studies, service learning, and experiential learning. The endowment has quintupled to $166 million, and $60 million in new construction and renovation, including the state-of-the-art Olin science building, has been completed. Most exciting for me is our third strategic plan, which we passed and began implementing last year. This five-year plan was very heavily the direct work of our faculty; and it lays out a brilliant blueprint for the kind of educational experience that the current generation of students richly deserves — different from earlier versions of liberal arts education, yet grounded in that rich tradition.
These days, I no longer have to convert my audiences; now, I am more likely to be invited to sit on boards, receive awards, participate in panels, or give speeches because people have heard about what the college is doing and they want to know more. Of particular interest to many audiences is the college’s unusually active role in promoting economic prosperity and social justice in our home city of New London. A wide range of faculty, staff, and students are involved in community service projects in the city, many under the umbrella of the interdisciplinary Holleran Center for Community Action and Public Policy. I personally have taken on the unpaid (and often controversial) job of heading up a non-profit development corporation that is bringing $715 million in new investments to this city of 25,000 people. Later in the week, for example, I will travel from Houston to Santa Clara, CA, to talk about our community development experiences at a conference on Justice in Jesuit Higher Education.
Of course, fundraising remains a priority. The new strategic plan comprises six innovative academic initiatives including a commitment to give every student a funded summer internship and a Traveling Research and Immersion Program (TRIP) that takes entire classes of students and professors to wherever in the world learning can happen most effectively. In Houston, I will talk to past and potential donors about the substantial investments necessary to make the plan reality.