Colgate at 200 Years — Fundamentals for Colgate's Future
On the verge of entering its third century, Colgate is a distinctive, strong national institution. It is one of the most important undergraduate universities in the nation, if not the world. Its history has created unique characteristics for the university, and its intangible qualities make it appealing for leading students, faculty, and staff. It thus looks toward to its third century with enormous possibility. Our task now is to understand these characteristics and history, and to push the institution to new heights. This will be achieved to the extent we are focused on the following fundamentals for Colgate’s future and are committed to being one of a handful of leading undergraduate universities in the nation and the world.
Related to this, we must introduce our students to the challenges and power of rigorous, academic discourse. In an era of heated rhetoric and political divisions in which shouting is prized, we will give our graduates a profound gift should they leave the campus with the power to summon reason, to gather facts, and to engage in a discourse that is sound, fair, and powerful. Through those tools, we will send into the world the next generation of Colgate graduates able to shape our world as accomplished, empathetic leaders.
An equally important part of the academic environment at Colgate is the student culture we build on campus. While our students are at Colgate, we must ensure that they contribute to an academically dynamic community. Colgate professors should be as enlivened and motivated by the interests, passions, and skills of our students as our students are inspired by our faculty. We need to cultivate a student body that leads to our reputation as a great place to teach and pursue one’s academic interests because of the engagement and skill of the students.
In sum, Colgate must be known as an academic institution committed to intellectual rigor, an academic institution of the first order, an undergraduate university distinguished by a world-caliber faculty engaged in rigorous scholarship, and a university whose students demonstrate the habits of thoughtful intellectual engagement. To accept anything less than this would be to deny the arc of the long trajectory of Colgate’s history.
Attracting Outstanding Students
A university is, at its most essential, the product of the people it attracts. Talented students, a leading faculty, and professional staff all must be in place on the campus should Colgate wish to be consistently regarded as among the finest colleges and universities in the nation.
In the arena of admissions, Colgate faces an ever-increasing challenge: how to attract and enroll students of profound promise and achievement when faced with increased costs of attendance. Colgate has long relied on the enrollment of a sizeable portion of the entering class who can meet the fully stated price of a Colgate education. While this will remain true for the foreseeable future, Colgate must seek additional funds to make its education available to all those who will bring energy, intelligence, and talent to the campus.
A university is, at its most essential, the product of the people it attracts.”
It may seem that undertaking overt efforts to nurture loyalty, pride, or affection is hopelessly retrograde. It is not. It may seem that to call for development of community must come at the expense of individual development. It does not. When authentic and based on genuine experience, a shared culture can be a source of considerable energy and spirit for any institution. Through these efforts, all will feel included in a greater project that animates the university. They will belong to, and with, Colgate.
Much of this is connected to the residential and social life of the campus. Colgate has long offered an extremely wide range of residential options, unusual among the liberal arts colleges. The Colgate residential inventory includes traditional residence halls (e.g., Andrews and Stillman halls), a small number of multiunit residential complexes (e.g., Bryan Complex and 113 Broad Street), numerous quasi-independent townhouses and apartments, Broad Street theme houses, and fraternities and sororities. This complexity allows students to forge their own paths, yet it also tends to divide the campus and creates systems in which there might appear to be social-residential “winners” and “losers.” From a residential and social perspective, Colgate — long a place marked by community and bonding — can often feel divided.
Colgate needs to develop long-term programs to enhance the quality of student housing and the overall quality of student life. Further, Colgate should ensure that all students belong to the university and that they share this institutional bond while they are also developing those more individual social bonds that sustain them.
It is important to state here that it is not the role of the administration to engineer all relationships built across our campus. We need to acknowledge that the character building and maturing that occurs at Colgate occurs most often in informal ways — between students and faculty, between students and students, and, indeed, between students and the surrounding Hamilton community. The role of the administration is to ensure that settings and contexts exist to facilitate such encounters, and that all students who come to Colgate have equal opportunities to enjoy the social dynamics of our institution and be included in all its gifts and opportunities. This involves building out meeting places, living spaces, and social spaces that give outlet to our students’ innate social tendencies.
There is one additional, deeply important consideration when speaking of these matters. It is clear today that the future of this country will belong to those who are culturally dexterous. To be culturally dexterous is to be able to navigate across diverse cultural perspectives with authenticity and skill. We would be doing a disservice to our students, and would relinquish our standing as a leading American institution of higher education, if we did not take seriously our charge to enhance our students’ cultural understanding and adroitness. These are qualities that depend not only upon the classroom but on what happens in our residence halls and social spaces. It depends upon friendships and authentic intimate contacts between students of different backgrounds, cultures, and belief systems.
In short, Colgate should take overt steps to nurture a culture where bonds of community are developed and where one develops a sense of institutional pride. These ties should be nurtured and expressed through our residential programs, our athletics program, our ceremonies and traditions, and through the overall experience of the campus.
Sustaining and Improving a Campus of Striking Beauty
Finally, Colgate must carefully steward one of its most precious assets: the beauty of its campus. The experience of the place that is Colgate has shaped the lives of students, faculty, and staff for generations. Ensuring that this beauty is sensitively enhanced and passed on to future generations must remain a university priority.
When graduates from the 1960s and 1970s return to the Colgate campus, they hardly recognize it because there has been such significant building and improvements made. Predictably, there will be more. However, when such buildings and improvements take place, we must ensure that the basic relationship of the campus to the nature that surrounds it, and the group of buildings that define Colgate, are not degraded. We should never let progress detract from that beauty but must be supremely sensitive to the marvels of the place.
We also must make sure that the environs of Colgate and Hamilton provide for our faculty, staff, and students a comfortable as well as engaging place to reside. The livability of the campus and the village will serve Colgate as it will allow us not only to attract leading faculty and students, but will also allow them to work and live in a place that is engaging, connecting, and amenable.
