“Plus ça change, plus c’est la même chose.” —Jean-Baptiste Alphonse Karr, 1849
Friends, TWENTY YEARS AGO, IN THE FALL OF 2001, I wrote a Viewpoint piece for Guilford College Magazine that described the many changes taking place at the college. I had recently been appointed Associate Academic Dean and was involved in some additional strategic planning work, much of which focused on rebuilding the continuing education program. Looking back at that article recently reminded me how much it seems the case that “the more things change, the more they stay the same.” Although Karr’s phrase is often delivered in a tone that bemoans retreading ground we have walked before, it delivers a truth. Much as we might wish human endeavors to chart a linear path of continual progress, historians know that narrative is a false and seductive one, obscuring the suffering of those it excludes. Life is more recursive. We inevitably cycle back over where we have been, but by keeping our eyes open to that very fact we discover new paths forward. Change is the order of the day again at Guilford, prompted in large part by forces outside our control. The number of 18-year-olds in the U.S. will slide downward
Pressing Forward While Holding Fast to Our Roots
the liberal arts model has been so criticized and so defended that the debate has nearly lost its substance; the sticker price at many colleges has become an outrageous joke even as the real price (because of scholarships and Pell grants and institutional awards) remains within reach for many, though not enough, families; and the COVID-19 pandemic has changed utterly how we think about education, though in ways we will not know fully for years to come. Both in response to those external forces and as a result of our own internal assessments, Guilford is shifting and changing again, perhaps most fundamentally through a reorganization of academic and co-curricular programming that began last spring. The layoffs that came during the COVID crisis, coupled with the faculty downsizing that occurred
PHOTO BY JULIE KNIGHT
SEASONS OF CHANGE
in a couple of years (the so-called “demographic cliff”);
