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| Letchworth Forest, my first day at work |
The flats here are symbolic of a Houghton that touched 1200 at one point. It was built for growth in an earlier era. 2008 and the Great Recession changed that trajectory. Dr. Mullen brought me here because of my reputation for innovation and with an ever-strengthening conviction that Houghton needs to make major changes in the current climate. Before COVID, everyone was talking about the coming demographic cliff in 2026. Of course the pandemic has changed everything overnight.
2. When I came, I was given an interesting collection of direct reports: enrollment, marketing, ministry resources, and "hospitality" (non-tuition revenue generation). There was a Dean of Enrollment, so I wasn't really expected to give micro-direction in that area. There was also a Director of Marketing and Communication, so my role was much more 30,000 feet, to engage them in relation to innovation.
I came in thinking of the long game. I wanted one big win my first year but mostly wanted to get acquainted with the people and story of the college. I love teaching. Teaching will always be a role I welcome. (In fact I ended up teaching five classes this year, four online and one on the residential campus--Science and Scripture, philosophy, and three Biblical Literature classes) Pastoring is something I have done in interim spaces and would be a privilege to do.
What about academic leadership? I was a Dean for six years at the starting of Wesley Seminary and another three years over the mostly undergraduate School of Theology and Ministry. Was this a direction for me? The work of academic innovation has always been like cat nip for me. A number of convergences made me feel like I needed to lean into that side of myself this year. In the chess of life, coming to Houghton helped some things fall into place at IWU and in my own life.
To be frank, I didn't feel there was much space at IWU for me to do the kind of innovation I saw as important to the future of higher education. I just wasn't in the right part of the university for that. Houghton seemed to me both to be a place where there was a wide open space for innovation and to be a place that was ready to do it.
3. "Change is the only constant in the universe." This has been a year of upheaval in higher education. But even before that, the stimulus for change at Houghton was heightened. In my first semester, the Director of Marketing and the Director of Online Education left, both leaving me more in the weeds but also giving opportunities to innovate.
The enrollment was also a little down from its goal when the semester started. My goal for one big win over the course of the year changed to "Let's get this party started." I started with what I knew best--ministry. Someone had suggested not to begin innovating in that area. "Show you can innovate in other areas too." Necessity seemed to say otherwise. Houghton already had an AAS in Christian Ministry on the books. I took ideas I had already been developing and applied them to this context.
The result was a multi-layered approach that 1) resulted in an associate's degree if you wanted one, 2) was done in situ, where you live--no need to move anywhere, 3) involved evening live sessions like Kingswood, 4) could be audited in a way that satisfied ordination requirements in an inexpensive way. The idea of auditing online classes was another idea I had tried to implement even in 2009. It doesn't make much sense with an asynchronous class but it is easy with one that has live sessions.
I am stressful on infrastructure people. It is the nature of innovation to bend things in ways they haven't bent before. The audit price point needed changed, for example. The webinar that is about to finish on Race and American Christianity was my first real success in auditing, with some 1700 participants. But the weeks leading up to the course wrought havoc with Houghton's infrastructure.
4. My time with Wayne Schmidt left me with a philosophy of academic growth--new programs, new venues. This is not the going philosophy in academia. Frankly, it doesn't really fit with Jim Collins' philosophy of the hedgehog. I will say that Wayne did keep Wesley Seminary in the lane of "practical," so he started new programs in new venues within the brand of practical ministry.
My instinct in this time of upheaval was "fire everything." Of course we can't fire everything because we don't have everything. I focused on "low hanging fruit" that is scalable. Low risk, low investment, with the highest possible yield. I tried some "boutique" courses--Science and Scripture, for example. I was going to teach Latin with a home school market primarily in mind. I tried a trick I had tried at IWU with philosophy, trying to market a Christian philosophy course to Christian students at secular universities.
We did generate some interest among home schoolers. We did generate some interest among life-long auditors. My AAS Biblical Literature class had a number of auditors in early summer wanting to expand their knowledge of the Bible. Going into my second year, we are likely to start offering certificates in areas like Business Administration and Missions Leadership, but possibly also Linguistics.
At first I avoided certificates because of previous rules requiring institutions to track gainful employment, something beyond our capacity at this point. But if no aid is offered, it is not necessary. An intermediate idea was to offer our minors as free-standing opportunities. I had never realized you could offer a minor without a major. This summer we tried to promote our Art Business and Political Science minors but without any takers. Nevertheless, the minor structure easily converts to a certificate structure.
In January 2020, we offered Introduction to Linguistics in a hybrid format. A student in South Asia participated in the class. Initially this was going to be via Zoom using an OWL that turned around to capture the conversation in the class. The time difference indicated that it would be better simply to video the class with a higher resolution camera. All of this foreshadowed what is going to happen this fall.
5. I met with a lot of people around campus in the fall. I worked especially closely with marketing, since they were understaffed and did not have a new permanent director until April. Very enjoyable and instructive, but the new Director shows what real expertise can do.
Our house moved fairly quickly once it was on the market, and Angie was soon with me in the house we have rented since the end of November. She finished out the semester in Marion and then fully moved here. Providentially, she was already teaching Chinese students English online when COVID shut New York down. That has been an outlet for her throughout this time. She will be teaching 6-7 grade at Houghton Academy this year.
I learned a lot about the enrollment process this year. One very interesting feature of the year was a financial aid packaging strategy put together by one of the math professors. Difficult to gauge its success because of the pandemic, but I was convinced. :-)
6. The pandemic will be like a ring on a tree in the year of a fire. It is not entirely clear what the long-standing impact will be but it is sure to be transformative in very significant ways. A number of colleges will probably close both in the short and long term. Colleges were already closing. Those adept at online education can adapt much more easily. Those who have banked on a residential future are in greater danger than ever.
My transition from in-person to Zoom class was business as usual for me. I've been doing Zoom for some time. For others it was something completely new. The standard for online teaching is asynchronous, so many are quick to argue that we did not really do online teaching in the spring but remote teaching. I have long wondered, however, if there was a market for live online classes, now that bandwidth is not a problem. People with experience in online often look at me as if I'm crazy at this point.
I feel like I was born for the pandemic crisis of 2020. I thrive in this sort of situation. I saw the opportunity of offering fall classes in hybrid form almost immediately, since I had already done it not only with Linguistics this spring but at IWU in 2009 with a Hebrews class. We would eventually decide in that direction.
"Fail early, fail often, but always fail forward" (John Maxwell). This is a motto I found myself saying increasingly this past year. This is difficult for the academy, which in general wants to have everything perfect before even trying something. One difficult thing for me is that I am intuitive. My intuitions are based on cumulative data from years of experience, but people need to see a chart. I work best when paired up with those who can bring the detail alongside my intuitions.
I might also say that it is difficult when you have the mind of a futurist. You think you see things when others don't see them. I'm speaking in general now of something that has been an increasing difficulty of mine for years. You learn to keep your mouth shut so people don't think you're crazy. You dole out your thoughts when the doors open. You get frustrated but have to keep your cool. Getting upset with people doesn't help anything. You go for lots of runs and start talking to yourself. You find someone to vent to.
7. "Never waste a crisis." This is the season to try things. You have an exigence. If they don't work, no problem. We currently have a two semester online biology class on offer especially to high school students. I don't remember ever hearing about such a thing. For one, it is an online lab science class, which is rare. Second, it's stretched out over the whole year.
I believe Houghton has risen to the challenge. But the challenge is only beginning. Ideas I had two years ago that were still a little innovative then are becoming common fare now, like using churches as co-curricular centers for online education. I've been hearing about competency based education for a long time but it's now coming into our back yard. I believe AI and gaming are the key to most future education. Now is the time to launch into them and it's already happening.
Colleges are connecting and you can see a musical chairs phenomenon where there are no more seats left. This year my work will focus on partnerships, and I will be working closely with Michael Jordan and J. L. Miller. I'm also still involved with online programs with Tammy Dunmire as the master of detail. I'll still be in contact with enrollment and marketing, but we've hired someone for whom those are actual areas of formal expertise. And I'll continue to work with the academic leadership of the college.
You can do general demographic study on curricular areas of interest, but what do Houghton's most natural partners specifically want? What is the need? What is the desire? My danger is always to design a great show, like P. T. Barnum's first attempt in The Greatest Showman, but for no one to show up but my family.
You can't predict what will go viral. You just have to be ready when it happens. I've developed a six-fold framework for expansion. We'll see what happens. Houghton is full of brilliant people. They are innovative people too. Should I say I didn't expect Houghton to be innovative, but there is a rich history of innovation here. I wrote about some of the many surprises when I first came here a year ago.
My motto remains what it was at Wesley Seminary--"If you come, we will build it!"
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