Dear President-Elect:

Congratulations on your selection as the next president of Hamline University! As you know all of higher education including Hamline is facing fiscal challenges, a declining and diversified population of new students, competition from non-traditional educational providers, and demands for colleges and universities to respond to changing circumstances.

But the real challenge for Hamline is one of identity: Who is or what does Hamline University represent? Correctly navigating this question is key to its survivability into the future.

Schools are businesses–legal corporations–but not traditional ones.  Hamline’s goal is not to provide a return to its investors. Its outputs are fostering the next generation of democratic  citizens, transmitting knowledge, and subjecting ideas to critical scrutiny. In the old days, one said that the job of the university was the pursuit of truth; bringing out the best in the people and fostering what the Germans say is Bildung–personal growth and enrichment. Students are not customers, but learners. Professors are not means of production, but the heart of what a university is about. Let’s be honest–no one ever decided to go to college because they thought it had great administrators. The task of administrators–including its president–is to  stay out of the way, learning and providing the resources to make the search for truth possible.

Somewhere along the way higher education lost its way. A  basic rule of management declares that you cannot be everything to everybody; you need to find what you are good at and do it. Hamline too needs to do that– γν θι σεαυτον–“Know thyself” as the Ancient Greeks declared. Hamline needs an identity–to define what its mission is, what it wants to represent, and stick to that.  Simply opening the admissions door is not a strategy.  This is the trap so many schools have fallen into, watering down standards to balance the budget. They expand professional programs at a whim–often without investing in them–or create new majors or programs in a rudderless attempt to chase students and dollars. These are inevitable mission creep failures.

Schools such as Hamline have to stand for something or they stand for nothing. The universities that will succeed in the future are the ones that are about something basic–academic excellence. Avoid giving lip service or making annual platitudinal statements about the term. It is hiring the best faculty you can and letting them define and sustain excellence.  It is admitting increasingly better students and demanding they work hard. Academic excellence is what has historically separated the good and successful universities from the bad ones. The best public relations any business can have is producing a good product that people want. This is the key to survivability.

What does not make a great school are the latest technology toys, shiny new buildings, or lots of administrators with private sector-like salaries. Mounting evidence shows no correction between these things and how good a school is. Learning and knowledge is a conversation that happens in the classroom dorms, and in places where students can talk to one another, their professors, or where professors can interact and research. Why I and others became professors was because we loved ideas and learning. This is what we know how to do, let us do it.

Philosopher Immanuel Kant famously declared the Enlightenment’s motto was “sapere aude”–dare to know.  That too is the motto of good schools, but so should be “experiri  audere–dare to try!  The best advice I ever receive about teaching was always feel free to take chances, experiment, and simply play. The stereotype of bad teaching is the old professor with the yellowed notes who does the same lecture over and over again. 

What you as president can do then is to create a culture that dares to know and try. Remember, it’s not about you, your salary, or where you live. I am so glad that you are a real academic who has actually taught, written a book, and thought deeply about ideas, and that  you are not simply some export from the corporate world who thinks of schools as just another business. With your experience I look forward to working with you as Hamline’s next president.

Sincerely,

David Schultz, Professor

Department of Political Science