SEASONS OF CHANGE

Pressing Forward While Holding Fast to Our Roots

“Plus ça change, plus c’est la même chose.” —Jean-Baptiste Alphonse Karr, 1849

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 in a couple of years (the so-called “demographic cliff”); 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 through retirements, an early exit program and voluntary reductions in workload, have necessitated reconfigurations of our primary work to maintain relevant, high-quality opportunities for our students. We are also rebuilding our nontraditional student offerings again, focusing on how to provide a distinctly Guilford version of higher education to a population of potential students who live lives of complicated schedules and responsibilities.

It is a facile commonplace that change is difficult, but I think change is particularly complex — and rightly so — for an institution that celebrates and cherishes its past. Guilford’s Quaker heritage, enshrined most powerfully in our core values and our collaborative, inclusive approach to learning, is critical to our college’s meaning and purpose as an institution. The College’s Quaker DNA is an ongoing, vital, vibrant, nonnegotiable part of the very meaning of this place, without which Guilford would simply be an ordinary, generic stopover where one can get a diploma.

But that very DNA contains within it the code that makes change possible, even necessitating it. Long ago, Quakers developed the concept of continuing revelation as a key element of their theology. Rather than relying only upon the Bible as the sole source of unchanging truth, Friends embraced the idea that the world and its history would alter and that it was crucial to remain open to changing truths discerned through collective listening. Tradition was elemental and fundamental, but so are the present and the future.

What remains crucial at Guilford as we change and adapt to new circumstances is living the creative tension that holds our heritage tenderly while we move forward into new programs and new ways of celebrating and being relevant to the needs of a student body that is new and different. Unlike even the Guilford of the late ’90s and early 2000s, to say nothing of earlier years, the College is no longer majority white or majority upper-middle class. Many of our students come from families who make less than $50,000 a year. Leveraging a college education for financial mobility is a very high priority for our students and families. Guilford is not what it was when I moved into English Hall in August of 1975. Yet it remains committed to the same values and principles I encountered then.

In that 2001 article I named the three most important things that would keep Guilford on course during the changes occurring at that time: a deep commitment to our Quaker identity, to academic excellence, and to nurturing respectful relationships. Keeping those three as the guiding lights of our current navigation in the waters of change remains a most excellent commitment.

The creative tension inherent in bridging the present and the past reminds me of the biology of trees. I have the privilege every day of walking under the white, red, and willow oaks; American beeches, sycamores, maples, and tulip poplars that grace our campus and the College woods. Trees root in one place even as they grow and change. And as the discoveries of scientists like Suzanne Simard have shown, trees signal one another constantly through a vast underground network of mycorrhizal fungi. The heartwood of a tree is its past, the remnant of its earlier self. Sapwood, the living part, encircles that heart, transporting nutrients in a vibrant interchange. Trees are past, present and future simultaneously. Guilford must be the same. We are moving again, reiterating while making new, all the while keeping our eyes on those unchanging values and habits of being that allow the College to change in ways that are meaningful, grounded, relevant, and transformative.

Jim Hood '79 Interim President