"Ruminations" from the President
weekly message to the community from Dr. Robert Myers

July 13, 2005

Dear Colleagues and Friends of Daniel Webster College,

This is my second set of ruminations I’d like to share with you.  I give you fair warning, it is long.  However, I think its length reflects a lot of thinking, talking, and intellectual “chewing” that has transpired these last two weeks.  Perhaps, as the old professorial story goes, I apologize for the length; had I more time to prepare I would have written something shorter. 

Next Thursday, July 21, the members of my Cabinet will join me in a day of retreat.  This represents for us an initial window to begin discussions that, eventually as you’ve had an opportunity to join the dialogue, will result in our having a dynamic, exciting, and compelling vision for Daniel Webster College.

In preparation for that early discussion and to help me get a bit better grounded, I’ve asked each of the members of the Cabinet to give me a two-level SWOT analysis (their personal assessments of the Strengths, Weaknesses, Opportunities and Threats facing both the College and their respective operating units).  The results have been simultaneously enlightening while not terribly surprising.  Let me share a summary of those observations with you …

Our Strengths
Clearly, we have a strong sense of who we are (mission), where we’ve come from and how far we’ve come as an institution, that we have highly capable and extremely loyal people, and that we have an enormous sense of pride in the special kind of educational experiences we provide for students at Daniel Webster College.  We have a strong Board and strong support from that Board. We also have another formidable strength that typically results from adversity and a struggle: this institution seems willing, nigh-to- eager to engage risk and try some very different things to help us realize what we all believe is enormous potential.

Our Weaknesses
We’re not sure where we’re going or what our destination will look like once we get “there,” wherever “there” is.  We have a lot of ideas about “things we ought to do” to improve what we already have.  But what that, and other initiatives, might mean in terms of what we’ll be and what we’ll look like in 3-5 years is open to discussion, debate, interpretation.

We have limited, almost non-existent resources at our disposal to do anything beyond maintaining the status quo (and, perhaps “maintaining” is a bit too charitable).  One could argue that, at best, we’ve slowed down our loss of altitude if we’re looking at our future not so much in terms of stability but having the wherewithal to step out smartly with new, strategic initiatives.

Resources, or their lack, more than any other single contributing factor have hampered Daniel Webster College’s ability to move dramatically forward as a matter of organizational evolution.

Our Opportunities
The biggest opportunity we have right now is that for a fresh start, with fresh, new thinking, a sense of excitement and energy, and an urgency to “get on with it.” 

Our Threats
One of our biggest threats is failing to act quickly on our limited window of opportunity.  We may also be threatened by a natural tendency to focus on “fixing a lot of little things” and avoiding the difficult, intellectually-challenging task of looking out 3-5 years.  The latter falls under the somewhat hackneyed old saw about “it’s hard to engineer a solution to draining the swamp when the alligators are biting at your backside.”

In many ways, the initial impressions and perceptions shared with me are along the lines of the reaction I’ve had to my newly acquired home here in Nashua: the basic structure is sound, it is small, manageable and charming, there are a great many things I love about the place, there are a number of things I’d like to “fix”, and a number of things I’d like to “add” to enhance both the basic structure and the “curb appeal.”  As Gretchen, my wife, keeps reminding me, Let’s set some priorities and begin attacking the most critical ones first; we can’t logically do everything at once and, of course, we can’t afford to do everything at once.  A very wise woman indeed.  Still – and I know she’s right – everything about me wants to race ahead and try to envision what the house will look like 3-5 years from now, how it will feel, how I’ve been able to mold and form its functionality to truly make it our own, to leave our mark.  It will be incumbent upon me, indeed all of us, to strike that appropriate balance between the extremes of enthusiastically gorging ourselves on everything we’d like to do and succumbing to paralysis and accomplishing nothing.  Rather than finding ourselves seduced by happenstance, we will be “energetically selective.”

So, with those self-admonitions in mind – carefully assessing and examining, recognizing the differences between that which should be done quickly and that which requires time, careful discussion, and consensus – what positions might the Cabinet begin to probe next week?  I sense some general “buckets” of themes are beginning to emerge from early discussions.  Those buckets tend to group themselves in terms of the following: Size, Strength, Relevance, and Recognition.  Here’s what I think each of them represents.

Size
The now-shopworn tagline of the movie Godzilla is correct: Size does matter.  Especially for smaller institutions like Daniel Webster College where even a small shift up or down – in numbers of students, faculty, staff, programs, resources – can make a substantial and probably immediate difference. 

The sense I get from members of the Board, from the Cabinet, and from admittedly limited conversations with some of you is that we can talk about size for Daniel Webster College in two distinct ways:

1) We have capacity to sustain growth of the traditional residential student population and, when that capacity is maxed out for current infrastructure, we still have sufficient residual real estate to consider adding to that infrastructure for still more growth of the campus-based student body.  Ultimately, this begs a number of questions; for example, how large do we want that traditional student population to grow, to what end, and does the essential nature of what makes us Daniel Webster College change in the bargain?

2) We have virtually unlimited capacity to grow, perhaps exponentially, the offerings and resulting enrollments of Graduate and Continuing Studies.  In a national environment in which the majority of college-attending students are now defined as “non-traditional” and in which employer-subsidized education for workforce development is a multi-billion dollar business, we must maintain our relevance as an engine of professional career preparation by spending as much time attending to those already advancing in careers and not just those who aspire to enter a career.  Similar questions arise here as well: are we comfortable with an institutional model in which, say, 3-5 years from now non-traditional students (remember, they are the majority) far outstrip the numbers of traditional campus students at Daniel Webster College?  Particularly if that model provides enhanced financial wherewithal for people, bricks and mortar, and other badly needed infrastructure?

Strength
Size is not necessarily synonymous with strength.  Being the proverbial “800-pound gorilla” is fun if your only raison d’être is to sit on smaller, equally clumsy gorillas.  I’ve been in academic environments in which the institution was flush with resources, big, with a big name and a big reputation … and the institution suffered from a poverty depriving it of imaginative and entrepreneurial thinking or creative and decisive action.  I’ve also been with underdogs, underestimated, underweight, and under-valued … and witnessed a richness of creative output as the miracle of turning adversity into success slowly unfolded.  The former had size, but not strength; the latter had character, and resulting strength, resiliency, and staying power.

Small size, adversity and character we got plenty of.  We know that.  How to put solid academic, fiscally-responsible, student-centered muscle on this scrawny frame without the often-attendant body fat is the question.  We can enhance our traditional efforts to bring more resources to the College through traditional revenue streams – more tuition dollars from more students, greater philanthropic activity through strategic investments in our development efforts, beginning the process of attracting extramural funding for faculty and academic program activities in the form of contracts and grants – but my sense tells me that we desperately need to look at the non-traditional sources for new dollars as well to get strong – unique partnerships (academic and operational) with others to lower our cost basis, thus freeing up dollars for other uses; vigilance for opportunities to outsource current or new activities of the College that are important but which others can do better and more cheaply; going to the capital markets for consideration as a target for investment by venture capital with interests and standards that are compatible with ours.

While I’m confident that the fiscal medicine currently prescribed has saved us from financial disaster and staying that course will only improve our collective lot, I’m also certain that ultimately we all want to be strong and very healthy, and not simply feeling better.  I would want us to look together, therefore, for the organizational equivalent of frequent shots of vitamin B-12 with a few PowerBars thrown in.

Relevance
Academic and fiscal strength are necessary but not totally sufficient means to a desired end which, in my view, is our relevance to current students, prospective students, alumni, and friends both old and new.  When I talk about relevance, I’m thinking in several different ways: the extent to which our current set of academic offerings are relevant to our current students and those prospective students who are very much like them; the extent to which we can fashion new programs that will be relevant to prospective students who are unlike our current students ...  to attract more women, people of color, individuals with different career aspirations; the extent to which we’ve reached out to industry and other external stakeholders to learn of their future workforce development needs and responded accordingly and relevantly with new academic offerings.  And then there is the whole question of making the student experience once they come here relevant and meaningful … continuing the tradition of close interaction with our faculty, enhancing the amenities they find here that will keep them here (athletics and recreation facilities, a student union, for example), providing state of the art learning support and experiences that will mirror what they expect to find in the real world once they’ve graduated.  All of these, as we consider them and act upon them in meaningful ways, can make a marked difference in our moving from “preparing students for their first career” to “preparing students for lifelong learning” and multiple career changes (which they will inevitably encounter).  They can also make a huge difference in terms of talking to potential supporters about what we can do and already do for them, an obvious advantage in the competitive world of fund- and friend-raising.

Recognition
At the end of the day, all of us want to be recognized for our accomplishments.  Organizations, as living repositories of human capital, are no different and most if not all of us would like to see Daniel Webster College recognized for its academic excellence and entrepreneurial attitude, its robust and creative stewardship of its fiscal resources, and its innovative nurturing and mentoring of future leaders and citizens of a global community in a learner-centered environment. 

We have far to go in this regard, ironically even at the local level.  Already, I’ve personally encountered Nashua citizens who have lived here more than 20 years and who are abysmally ignorant of our presence, our contributions to the community, or our points of pride.  I worry that if local ignorance is any indication of regional (let alone national) awareness of who we are and what we stand for, we have some major missionary work before us.  I plan to take an abiding and personal interest in rectifying this; nothing works so effectively in calling attention to one’s accomplishments, as the political wonks are wont to say, than the bully pulpit of the President.

As next week’s retreat approaches, I plan as part of our initial discussion to put in front of the Cabinet a set of questions to consider.  We don’t intend to decide the answers then and there; the questions are sufficiently provocative to stimulate some forms of discussion that perhaps haven’t been had here for some time.  I look forward to sharing both the questions and our discussion with you shortly.  I think it will be important as well for us to start moving those discussions out to ever-increasingly larger groups to enrich, leaven and improve the sense-making we all take from these discussions.  I look forward to sharing that process with you as well.

Meanwhile, as you think of the major challenges we face and the opportunities knocking at our door, do they readily fit any of these general themes?  If so, make sure we know about them.  If not, let us know that as well.

Regards,

Robert (Skip) Myers
President

Talk to me at remyers@dwc.edu