Hamilton College President: The Challenge of Covid and the Fight for Racial Justice
Hamilton College President David Wippman
Arguably, no industry has been as shaken up by the pandemic as higher ed. Some commentators even predict a huge shakeout, in which colleges and universities with a shaky business model may start closing right and left. My alma mater, Hamilton College, is led by David Wippman, who earlier this month co-authored a Times op-ed, “How Colleges Can Keep the Coronavirus Off Campus.”
Here we speak with President Wippman about the momentous changes and challenges presented by the pandemic and urgent demands for racial justice
President Wippman, thank you for taking the time speak with us for Tune In To Leadership. How are you feeling?
Thanks for having me. I appreciate the opportunity. I feel like I and the college are trying to run a marathon at a sprint pace. It's exciting. It's overwhelming. It's challenging. It's energizing—it’s everything at once. We're trying to deal with a pandemic and reinvent how we do things, how we teach, how we learn, how we engage. We're trying to manage a process forward around diversity, inclusion, and equity at a time of enormous challenge and systematic protests in our country over racism and policing.
And we have to revamp our Title IX policies, because the Department of Education in May told all colleges and universities that they have to apply a new set of regulations. And to have them in place by August 14. There's a lot going on right now.
What have you learned about yourself, and about Hamilton College as an institution, since the pandemic outbreak and demands for a commitment to racial justice and plans for action?
I think all of us are learning how we function and adapt under stress. The pandemic forced us to completely reinvent how we teach and learn and engage our alumni and reach out to prospective students. We did that in the spring on very short notice. I learned that the college, and higher education generally, is not slow to pivot or slow to change when circumstances demand it. The faculty, staff, and students at the college really rose to that challenge.
In the efforts to deal with issues of racial justice, the college made some missteps. We're trying to work through those. This has been something that our college, and I would say pretty much all colleges and universities, have been grappling with for many, many years. And it's something that our society has been grappling with, not very successfully, for close to 400 years. There's a lot of work to be done. I think the outpouring of interest and concern and support—and sometimes criticism—has been healthy. Challenging but also healthy. I think it's a reflection of the extent to which our community cares about these issues.
In this blog we’ve discussed a principle called antagonistic cooperation, which comes from the archetypal hero’s journey. Enacting this principle means that challenges and antagonisms cooperate to make you stronger. Sounds similar to what you’re saying.
I think that's exactly right. It is a complex set of challenges across many, many dimensions. We're an extended community. We're not simply the students, faculty and staff who are on campus physically at any given moment. We have 20,000 alumni who very much remain a part of the college community. We all have to work together on these things.
In your June 14 letter to the Hamilton community with the subject line: “Hamilton’s Commitment to Racial Justice and Plans for Action,” you outlined three specific steps. What are they?
We start with listening. We're going to host some listening sessions. We want to hear from as many members of our community as we can to get their perspective, their insights, their suggestions.
We want to engage in some planning, which we've been doing, but we need to expedite it. Then we will take action. I'm forming a new Advisory Council to give us feedback and advice and to hold us accountable for progress in this area. It's going to be a mix of our different members of our community: faculty, staff, students, alumni, trustees, and perhaps one or two members of the Clinton community. And we're going to start by expediting a new Equity and Inclusion plan.
This had already been underway for several months. Our Dean of Students, Terry Martinez, and her team have been working on this. The senior staff at the college has been working on it. And with the assistance of the Advisory Council [announced on June 23], we endeavor to make good progress and will report back in September. Then, we're going to increase the resources that we devote to equity and inclusion. I've promised to augment those resources using my discretionary fund. In addition, we received a gift from our alumni community to form a $250,000 challenge grant.
Hamilton’s stance on these matters were very crucial when I was an undergraduate student from 1981 to 1985. The number of students of color was very, very small. Before I came to campus, the college had recently become co-educational, merging with Kirkland College. Today, of course, it's very different, with the number of women and students of various nationalities, ethnic backgrounds and cultures much higher. Even the new president of the Alumni Council, Josie Collier ‘97, P’14, is a sista, a black woman.
In your four-year tenure have you seen tensions over difference increase or decrease?
We've seen both. It ebbs and flows; it's not constant. I think the 2016 presidential election was a turning point. That generated a lot of concern and a lot of activism. In some respects, tensions increased. We're about to go into another presidential election and I think tensions will likely increase this fall again.
Before I got here, there was a group on campus called The Movement. They submitted a list of demands to the college—they had a lot of ideas about what the college should be doing differently. I think similar lists were circulating at many colleges around the country. That was a moment of tension.
I think we're in another moment now. And sometimes those moments of tension can be positive impetus for change. And sometimes they can go in the other direction. We're trying to take this current moment as a basis for making progress and really getting our community to think collectively about how best to do that.
If students can’t return to campus in the fall due to Covid-19, what will be the financial impact?
If students can't return to campus, it would have a major financial impact on the college. We wouldn't have room and board revenues. We would lose nearly $10 million. That would be a significant financial hit for the college. We had to refund about four and a half million dollars of the spring semester’s room and board charges. We're spending quite a bit of money to prepare for the return of students. [See the just released Returning to Campus Operating Plan for fall 2020.]
What's the size of the endowment and might you need to tap into it more because of shortfalls?
We are fortunate. We are one of a relatively small number of schools that has an endowment that's over $500,000 per student. The total size of the endowment is around a billion dollars. And that supports a good share of our operating budget. That money is needed for current expenses. Much of it goes, for example, to financial aid. Other funds will support faculty or programs.
So the endowment doesn’t operate like a bank account that you can tap for rainy day purposes. Much of the investment in the endowment is either restricted for particular purposes like financial aid, and some are in illiquid investments. But you can’t simply draw down on those investments whenever you like. If needed, we could draw on a line of credit.
We’ve been very careful to reduce spending to try and offset the additional expenses associated with the pandemic. We’ve paused many of our ongoing construction projects. We have largely frozen hiring, unless it’s really necessary to support our students. For the most part, we will not be doing salary increases this coming year. These measures have enabled us to weather this pretty well so far. We’ll see what happens this coming school year.
Please speak about Hamilton's need-blind policy and how it demonstrates the values of the college. As an alum, it makes me proud that we're one of a handful of institutions that maintain a need-blind policy.
I think the decision to move to the need-blind policy was one of the most important decisions that college has made in the last 25 years. It has had a transformative impact on the college; it has helped us attract the most talented, the most able, the most deserving students to the college. We can consider their applications without respect to their need for financial aid. We can admit them purely based on their qualifications. So, it has helped us be a more inclusive community, a more diverse community, a richer and stronger community—in pretty much every regard. I think the alumni of the college are proud that we have made that commitment.
We celebrated the 10th anniversary of the need-blind policy last December. It's part of the overall commitment of the college to access and affordability; it's part of the broader commitment to financial aid. And we have made that the centerpiece of our ongoing Because Hamilton fundraising campaign. The largest component of that campaign is for financial aid. It's more important now than ever, as many, many families have suffered financially, and in other ways, from the pandemic. We’ve seen the highest level of unemployment since the Great Depression. It's an incredibly difficult time for many, many people. That will be reflected in demands on the college's financial aid budget. And we are in a position to meet those demands because of the generosity of so many of our alumni.
Greg Thomas, Clark Terry, Don Cantwell, and Mark Kellog
That's beautiful. I minored in music as an undergrad and had incredible experiences such as playing a song together with Clark Terry in the chapel in 1984. There’s quite a jazz legacy at Hamilton, for instance the Fillius Jazz Archives, established in 1995. Please speak about the importance of jazz to Hamilton.
We have a wonderful jazz legacy here and you probably are better equipped to talk about it than I am. I'm proud of it. We’ve got the wonderful archive that you mentioned: Monk Rowe does such a terrific job. We've got lots of faculty who are interested in jazz. I hear from “Doctuh” [Michael] Woods and he occasionally sends me some of the things that he's performing. There are many others in our community really devoted to jazz.
Jazz has a long history and a proud legacy at Hamilton as part of a broader commitment by college in recent years to supporting the arts at Hamilton. That's reflected from the creation of the Kennedy Center for Theater and the Studio Arts to the Wellin Museum of Art. We've seen a real flourishing of the arts in Hamilton. And jazz is an important part of that.
Thank you, President Wippman. I definitely appreciate your time. Here’s wishing you and our beloved Hamilton the best in these very trying times.
And thank you, Greg.