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Steven W. Lawry
I am pleased and honored to be invited by Jane Phillips Donaldson and Angela
Henry at Phillips Oppenheim to offer some reflections on my potential candidacy for the
presidency of Antioch College. I hope these remarks are found to be useful and
sufficiently compelling to merit direct discussions between myself and members of the
presidential search committee. In the first section below I offer some reflections on the
Renewal Commission ‘ s report, and particularly on the reports proposals for creating
Experiential Learning Communities and for reshaping and deepening the college’s
commitment to cultural diversity and intellectual freedom. I offer some ideas on college
governance and for building a strong financial foundation. In the second section below I
summarize aspects of my own professional experience and personal values that I hope
will give members of the committee a sense of my strengths and skills as a leader. In the
third and final section I offer some remarks on the relevance of my experience and
qualifications to the specific challenges facing Antioch College.
Reflections on the challenges and opportunities facing Antioch College
Antioch College is facing a complex and difficult set of challenges that, if not
addressed successfully, call into question its ability to sustain its historic commitment to
student-centered, experiential and liberal higher education. I am deeply impressed with
the work of the work of the Renewal Commission. Its report very candidly and in great
detail assesses the key challenges facing the college: declining enrolments and low rates
of student retent ion, diminished revenues and under-investment in capital facilities,
current account deficits and unsustainable dependency on subsidies from the other
Antioch University campuses. The college’s ability to respond flexibly and creatively to
its financial challenges is compromised by an inadequate endowment. The report raises
concerns that off-campus co-ops may not be adequately integrated with the larger
experiential learning experience, contributing to declining rates of student retention.
The Commission’s report provides a principled, strategic and disciplined pathway
for the college’s recovery and renewal. In my view, the most important element of the
plan is a renewed commitment to liberal education and experiential learning.
Experiential learning provides a multidisciplinary, integrated and student-centered
approach to intellectual and social development that remains among Antioch’s distinctive
contributions to American higher education. It must be preserved and strengthened. Its
basic tenets remain valid educationally and attractive to thoughtful and discerning
students from a range of backgrounds. The adoption of Experiential Learning
Communities promises to deepen and strengthen the experiential learning experience, by
more deliberately structuring faculty and student learning into integrated and
multidisciplinary teaming modules, by clustering most co-ops in selected host
communities and by better linking on and off-campus learning and faculty and students
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virtually. HLCs will give greater coherence to the educational experience over the four-
year undergraduate experience and will provide greater focus to faculty academic
collaboration and curricula planning.
I especially admire the college’s determination to “place cultural diversity and .
intellectual freedom at the core of Antioch’s future as an institution unlike any other in
American higher education,” and to put substantial financial and institutional resources
behind this commitment. I also admire the committee for its honest and thoughtful
assessment of past errors in the implementation ofAntiochls historic commitment to
diversity, and for its continuing resolve to fostering diversity as an educational value in
ways that take better account of the needs of the larger society in which the college exists
and in which students live and work. I have been committed throughout my life to social
justice and to the struggle for racial and gender equity in every domain of life and around
the world. These values are most likely to be realized where pluralism, democracy and
intellectual freedom have deep and strong roots in the life of the college and are central to
the educational experience. A vital role of higher education is to create an intellectual
and social environment where students can gain knowledge of the historic and cultural
legacies that have constructed and shaped differences while fostering, through
comparative analyses and studies, an appreciation for the shared values and experiences
of diverse cultural traditions. This inherently hurnani stic enterprise will at its best
broaden students’ identities, and not narrow them. The commitment to building a core
competency in leadership and change should incorporate this larger institutional
commitment to diversity and intellectual freedom.
A key element for the Renewal Plan’s success is reform of Antioch’s governance
structures in ways that better delineate the respective roles and responsibilities of the
president, chancellor, trustees and faculty-the campus leadership broadly considered-
and clarify accountability without ~nduly compromising Antioch’s traditions of
collaborative and democratic decision-making. I would expect the president’s office to
be the locus of responsibility for key elements of the renewal plan, particularly financial
management, budget and enrollment planning, and fundraising and endowment building.
Working closely with the faculty, the president must be involved in all key discussions on
educational policy. The president needs to be particularly concerned with the integration
and coherence of the educational experience across academic departments and units.
This will aid the college in financial planning and in making considered choices about
how best to implement agreed educational policies and plans over time. Obviously, the
president must play a central role in representing the college to the larger Antioch ,
University community and to external constituencies, including government agencies,
accrediting institutions and donors. The president must have regular and open contact
with students, as a basis for understanding their educational aspirations and responding to
their ideas and concerns and to explain the underlying rationale for decisions taken by the
college leadership.
The financial health and well-being of the college are central responsibilities of
the president. The president must provide overall and vigorous leadership in the areas of
budget planning, revenue generation and cost management and control. The president
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must also develop a trusting and mutually-informed relationship with trustees and the
chancellor as a basis for successfully advocating the college’s budgetary requirements.
Successful external fundraising and particularly the building the college’s endowment
will depend upon careful strategic planning, the support of the trustees and the alumni, a
strong and well-funded development office, and a strategy for convincing donors to
contribute to Antioch College; in sum, the commitment of a large amount of the
president’s energy and time.
The Renewal Commission sets out a financial strategy that would better link
institutional, budget and enrollment management and that would build endowment
resources very adroitly linked to key elements of the renewal plan, including the diversity
and intellectual freedom elements. The strategy sets clear and realistic performance
targets and benchmarks, is carefully-reasoned and, it seems to me, sound in every respect,
A dedication to leadership for social change; to building strong institutions
I would like to turn now to the question why I believe I am qualified to take up
the challenges of Antioch College’s presidency.
I have been committed throughout my adult life to working with others in
building a more just and equitable world. This commitment has had many expressions,
but important among them has been building strong institutions that can sustain the hard
work of social change over the long-term. I am essentially an institution builder,
recognizing that successful institution building has many facets. Among these are
leadership that is clear, focused and determined- but that also seeks and shapes consensus
and broad commitment to shared goals and values.
I have been able to exercise this kind of leadership in a number of settings.
At the University of Wisconsin-Madison, I served from 1988 to 1992 as senior
social scientist and eventually associate director of the Land Tenure Center, an
interdisciplinary research and training institute concerned with the study of land reform,
social change and rural development. While at the LTC, I developed a strongly
collaborative set of research and training initiatives with African universities and research
groups, including the Makerere Institute for Social Research in Uganda and the Center
for Applied Social Sciences at the University of Zimbabwe, among others. As associate
director, I was responsible for fund-raising for all of the Africa program’s research
initiatives, and was successful in securing stable, long-term support from USAID and a
number of sizeable project grants from international agencies and foundations.
Particularly noteworthy was a grant that I secured from the Ford Foundation in 1990 that
supported a collaborative relationship with the Land Commission of the African National
Congress. The grant brought a number of soon to be returning South African exiles to
Madison for an intensive, specially-designed training program in land reform policy
analysis. Many of the participants eventually took up leadership roles in shaping South
Africa’s post-apartheid land reform.
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I was recruited by the Ford Foundation in 1992 to open a new Ford field office in
Windhoek, Namibia. There I developed grant-making programs on governance, civil
society and urban and rural poverty alleviation. From my base in Windhoek I served as
Ford’s program officer for rural poverty and resources in South Africa. These were
exciting times to be working in South Africa, and our grant initiatives were firmly
focused on supporting the transition from apartheid to democracy.
In 1997, Ford asked me to take up the position of representative for the Middle
East and North Africa, based in Cairo. As head of the office, I hired and guided five
talented program officers, most of whom are nationals of Arab states, working in the
fields of human rights, governance and international relations, reproductive rights,
community development and arts and culture. I worked hard to bring strategic focus to a
program that had previously consisted of a large number of small grant-making initiatives
spread across the Arab world in ways that unduly detracted from programmatic
coherence and impact. My colleagues and I agreed to focus the grant program and its
$1 8 million average annual budget in the Occupied Palestinian Territories and in Egypt.
In both Palestine and Egypt, I gave particular importance to building a liberal arts
tradition in key universities and colleges and to strengthening university strategic
planning. At Birzeit University in the West Bank I helped shape a major grant that built
Birzeit’s capacity to do effective strategic planning and financial management. I worked
with Birzeit’s president in shaping major endowment grants for the law institute and the
community health program. I believe that effective organizations are ones that are strong
at every level, administrative and programmatic, and I undertook to carefully restructure
the Ford’s Cairo office in ways that increased administrative capacity and, ultimately, the
quality of service to the Foundation’s grantees.
In 2001, the Foundation asked me to come to New York to head the unit
responsible for planning and monitoring the Program Division’s $55 mi [lion annual
operating budget and for ensuring the proficiency of its grant making and accountability
systems. In this current capacity as Director of the Office of Management Services, I co-
chair a Foundation task force charged with strengthening Ford’s accountability, .
compliance monitoring and learning and evaluation policies and practices. I very much
see my current role as building a stronger Ford Foundation; one that deploys its human
and financial resources in ways that are more likely to ensure realization of its mission of
improving human welfare around the world.
The leadership challenge: building a strong Antioch College
Let me in conclusion offer some summary reflections on what I believe to be the
relevance of my experience to Antioch College’s historical commitment to liberal
education grounded in experiential learning and dedicated to preparing young people for
rewarding lives in the arts, sciences and public service.
A liberal arts education provides students with the capacity to think critically and
with imagination about the world and about themselves. It is a deeply humanistic
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tradition that instills the intellectual tools and sound judgment essential to a rich and
rewarding personal and civic life. Antioch College has championed liberal and
experiential learning for over 150 years and in the process has helped build, through the
lives of its graduates, a more enlightened and humanistic world. Antioch’s distinctive
contribution to liberal arts education, experiential learning, must be protected and
strengthened. I believe my own experience and abilities can contribute to Antioch
College’s survival and success.
I have had a life-time intellectual engagement with some of the most difficult and
complex social problems facing societies around the world. Throughout my career, I
have sought to achieve important and realistic goals and have been successful in
mobilizing the creativity of others in pursuing them. I have worked effectively, often as a
presumed outsider, in complex and diverse social and cultural settings. I would bring this
rich and diverse cultural and intellectual experience to the leadership of Antioch.
I am a person of tested judgment, capable of characterizing and bringing attention
to the essential problems facing an institution, and building agreement and consensus
around appropriate courses of action. I am an institution bui Ider, and believe that
organizations that are strong in every dimension and that give fullest rein to the talents of
all members of the college community are more likely to be successful.
Building a strong institution is hard work and there are no short-cuts to the
achievement of this most basic and fundamental of goals. The Renewal Commission’s
report is admirable for its candor in characterizing the challenges facing Antioch College.
These challenges are most likely to be addressed successfully where the president and
leaders throughout Antioch College work in a determined and concerted fashion to build
a strong and intellectually rewarding educational experience, sustained by a strong
financial foundation. Antioch College’s distinctive mission must be protected and
strengthened. I would welcome the opportunity to lead this essential institution.
