Page 24 - BusinessWest February 6, 2023

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Royal
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those, we had a few others emerge over time, includ- ing mental-health support and digital literacy.
“We knew that, in order to really support students, not only through wrap-around services but particular- ly with other barriers to them successfully completing, we had to address these other basic needs,” she went on. “The public at large tends to think of colleges as needing to focus on academics and the curriculum
in order to set up students for success, and that is certainly a key priority — we’re focused on having the academic rigor that can allow for students to transfer successfully to our four-year colleges and universities. And in doing so, we needed to set students up out- side of the classroom for success, and that is helping to address the other barriers that sometimes hinder their ability to stay continuously enrolled.”
Forward Thinking
The decision to move on from this work and to the next stage of her career came at a time of great change and reflection in her life, said Royal, who turned 50 last summer, traveled to Bali with her part- ner for an extended vacation, got engaged, and, amid all that, started to think about what’s next.
“I didn’t necessarily want to leave HCC ... it was more about creating space for me to expand and engage in some creative projects and simply have some space,” she noted. “This job is an intense job, and I wanted to give it its due respect. And as I turned
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50, I thought, ‘here is an opportunity for the next chapter.’ But first, I wanted to have some space to fig- ure out what that might look like. So I didn’t want to rush into something; if I wanted to move into another presidency or another CEO position, I could have eas- ily done that, but I wanted to focus on HCC.
“I’ve had a lot of opportunities come my way, but
it felt too soon to commit myself to something else because I wanted to take a break,” she went on. “And that’s very important to me; I’ve been running hard for a number of years.”
Indeed, she has, with the pandemic years, especial- ly, testing her in ways she could not have imagined. And they have left her reflecting on how those years have changed education, the world, and, yes, what she wants to do next.
“I’m a very intentional and reflective leader, so I make this shift with a great deal of intention around creating space for reflecting on this extremely unique and significant period in our lifetime — at least in
my lifetime,” she said. “This has been an incredible journey ... I think about how much I’ve grown in this role. I never imagined leading through such uncertain times, with a pandemic that few saw coming and for which there was no playbook.”
With that, Royal returned to 1968 and that fire that forever changed the college, and drew some direct comparisons to how the two disasters, more than 50 years apart, forced leaders to challenge themselves —
improve, and what the next steps should be for their education.
“Our mission is to transform higher education, to always try to figure out what people should be doing at other colleges, to adopt bits and pieces of that.”
Recently, that has meant shifting the way course work is offered so that students build their course of study around four “distinct, urgent challenges,” Wing- enbach explained. Specifically, faculty teach half of each course around one of four shared questions the college has chosen to focus on:
• What is our responsibility in the face of a chang- ing climate?
• How do we understand truth in a post-truth era?
• How can creative processes address trauma, whether historical, collective, or contemporary?
• How can we disrupt and dismantle white supremacy?
These questions serve as organizing principles
for the curriculum in which students build their own course of study. Each one of the questions is cross- disciplinary, meaning one question can apply to many fields of study.
Wingenbach believes the point of a liberal-arts education is to prepare a student for a world in which they can’t know what’s coming.
“I mean, the jobs the students graduating next year are most interested in didn’t exist 10 years ago, 15 years ago. That will be true 10 years from now,” he said. “So to give students the experience of work- ing with ambiguity and building and making sense of things while they’re students, rather than having a path laid out for them, part of the job is making sure they think like an entrepreneur.”
And that’s where the Change in the Making cam- paign comes in.
When Wingenbach stepped into the role of presi- dent in the summer of 2019, he knew the brand
and others — to find answers to complex problems. Indeed, there were large amounts of learning and
leading over the past three years or so, she went on, regarding everything from teaching from a distance — and supporting students at a distance — to simply reopening the college when the conditions allowed.
“It made me a better leader, and it certainly took a lot out of me,” she said of that period, adding that such experiences help explain why a large number of college presidents have moved on from their jobs in recent months, and more have announced intentions to do so.
For Royal, the pandemic provided large doses of perspective on what she could do next — and should do next.
“I feel excited for the next chapter, I feel excited about the possibilities, and perhaps something the pandemic did for me was invite me to expand those possibilities in my imagination of what can come next,” she said. “It was one of the most palatable reminders of just how short life is, and that in the blink of an eye, we’re dealing with an international crisis and health threats that were unprecedented in my lifetime.
“All that had a significant impact in shifting my perspective on what I want to do with the second half of my life,” she went on, adding that she won’t get around to figuring that out for a while.
After all, she still has a college to lead. BW
and identity of Hampshire College needed to be re-established.
It needed to grow enrollment, but also to inspire people who care about the college to support and nur- ture its role as an innovator in higher education. And both efforts have found success; enrollment has been growing dramatically with each entering class, and
so have the donations and gifts sponsors are giving to the college.
The campaign has taken in $39 million in pledges and payments, and Wingenbach said that’s right on track to hit the $60 million goal. That includes several seven-figure gifts, including a recent gift from alum- nus Gary Hirshberg, CEO of Stonyfield Farm. With the campaign seeing plenty of success with a large base of small donors, too, Wingenbach is confident in the model set up to get Hampshire College to the $60 million mark in the next two years.
“Part of what will help us is that success breeds success, so as we continue to attract large-figure donations as we have over the last couple of years, other people who are engaged with Hampshire look at that and think, ‘OK, this is worth supporting, and we’re getting farther away from the events of 2019. It’s looking like this is actually working.’”
He hopes that, following the example of a “savvy entrepreneur” like Hirshberg, others will donate and support the future success of the college. And he was proud to note that almost all of the $39 million has been raised remotely.
“We’re not out of COVID, but we’re coming out of people’s reluctance to meet in person. Now I’ve got this time to start doing more in-person fundraising, and I think that’s going to help as well.”
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Hampshire
has more than 500 students, and once the number is back at 1,100 to 1,200 students in a couple of years, Wingenbach said, enrollment revenues will match expenses. Until it reaches that point of sustainabil- ity, the college is spending more than it’s bringing in to provide the environment and resources students need.
That was the impetus behind launching Change in the Making, a five-year capital campaign to raise $60 million for operating support. Wingenbach told Busi- nessWest that higher-education campaigns are often aimed at building endowments, restricting the funds to particular purposes.
“This is a campaign for operating support,” he went on. “We’re saying to people, ‘what we’re doing matters — you care about Hampshire College, you want to support the experiments that we engage in, you want to support the students that we have, you want us to be an independent institution, so what we need right now is direct support to our operating bud- get. So help us get to that point.’”
What Is Hampshire College?
Hampshire College was founded by its four sister colleges — UMass Amherst, Amherst College, Smith College, and Mount Holyoke College — to be an experimenting institution. The idea was to figure out what higher education should be trying to do to make learning and work student-centered.
The college allows students to design their own curriculum; that means there are no standard majors or programs. The students decide what they want to study and how they want to study it by putting togeth- er a set of classes that will best fit their goal. There are also no grades given, just narrative evaluations.
Wingenbach equated the student evaluation to an employee evaluation on the job. It is a detailed narra- tive of what they did well, where the student needs to
Hampshire
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24 FEBRUARY 6, 2023
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