|
Category:
Published: July 2006
A few weeks ago, Skidmore College received its largest one-time donation in its history-estimated to be over $42 million. Success Magazine recently sat down with Phil A. Glotzbach, the current president of Skidmore College, to discuss the impact of the gift on their long-term planning as well as the place of a liberal arts education in an increasingly specialized world.
Success Magazine: What brought you here? And I don't mean that just in terms of Skidmore, but what made you decide to become an educator and later on an administrator in collegiate life?
President Phil A. Glotzbach: What led me to become an educator was my experience as an undergraduate with the discipline that I ended up studying, which was philosophy, and by going into education I had the opportunity to spend my days dealing with the subject matter more than anywhere else. The fact that I was teaching this was a wonderful bonus. I didn't learn until I got to graduate school and then afterwards how much I enjoyed teaching at a liberal arts institution and how integral that part of the life of an educator was. Initially, I was solely interested in the discipline, so I found those two things very, very satisfying and spent 15 years at Denison teaching philosophy and writing and so on. Along the way I became involved with shared governance and became a department chair. In doing this, my attention shifted from the satisfaction personally that I received in teaching students individually to the realization that through an administrative role I could make more of a difference in an institution and more of a difference in the student's lives and in the world. That led me to think about becoming an administrator full time, which I did for eleven years in California, and that experience as an administrator led to the thought that as a President I might be able to make an even greater contribution. So it really was a succession of realizations over time.
SM: What made you decide to take the presidential position at Skidmore instead of another institution?
PG: The thing that attracted me to Skidmore the most was the potential for possibility. This was a school that really had all the pieces in place. It had a wonderful faculty, the location was terrific, it had a heritage, it had a sense of tradition - it needed more funding, but it also had a strong and very interesting student body. It was really very well positioned to take a stronger roll as a leading liberal arts college. So, it was that sense of possibility, that sense of community that I felt when I got to know people from Skidmore, from the Board of Trustees down to people who work here at all levels as well as the commitment of faculty to education that seemed to be so integral to this place. So those factors really attracted me to Skidmore.
SM: You mentioned earlier that the focus your career has been on the liberal arts. Do you believe that a liberal arts education could be a possible hindrance in an increasingly specialized and technologically driven world?
PG: No, absolutely not. In fact, I believe it is to the contrary. The pace of the technological change, and the pace of change in general that we're seeing in the world are both facets that make a liberal education even more important today than it was perhaps 20 or 50 years ago. And the reason is that it's a liberal education that prepares one to deal with change. A narrow technical education may be the most useless kind of education today if it only prepares one to deal with the technology that's available right now, but not how to deal with the technology that will be available five to ten years from now. It is coping with that change and developing within oneself the capacity to learn new things that really are most valuable in the world today. It is this ability, coupled with the capacity to be imaginative, to develop creative solutions to problems to see things in new ways, that I believe are the attributes which are going to be at a premium in the coming years.
SM: What does Skidmore specifically have to offer that other liberal arts competitors cannot? What makes it unique in that sense?
PG: I think what Skidmore offers that's quite unique is first of all the heritage in the arts that places the concept of creativity higher on the awareness of Skidmore College than some other places and again I think creativity is one of the attributes that is going to be most important as we move into the twenty-first century. What we have done at Skidmore College is realize that creativity is an essential feature, not just for the arts, but for every human endeavor. Secondly, the absolutely unique aspect of Skidmore College that I believe most effects students is that we don't put students in small boxes when they come here-we encourage our students to develop interests that cut across disciplines and that combine different elements of knowledge, even some that may not seem obvious. We have people that major in Dance and also study Physics seriously, or start in Studio Arts and end up as a Biology major, we have had serious mathematicians that are also musicians. We encourage students to do that, and again I think what we are talking about is the encouragement of students to develop a breadth of interests and abilities that will make them better able to compete in complex, changing worlds that they will encounter for the rest of their lives. The third factor that I would stress as being unique to Skidmore is the sense of community that pervades this college and the way it affects students. We immerse students in a challenging environment where there is a need to be stretched, intellectually and otherwise, but we do it in a way that we support one another to achieve the most that we can and we don't make success a zero-sum game-your success does not have to come at the expense of my failure. And I believe that leads to an understanding of how people can work together, how they can be members of teams, and those abilities are again enormously important in the work force today and I would say in life.
SM: Skidmore College recently received the largest one time donation in the college's history of over $42 million from Arthur Zankel. The gift will obviously finance the new Zankel Music Center, but how will this sudden influx of money influence the planning of the college in the long term?
PG: Well, Arthur Zankel was a long-time friend of the college and he became so as a parent. He invested a Skidmore education in two of his sons. So Arthur's relationship with us goes back a number of years. He served on the board of trustees and he helped to craft a very successful investment philosophy for the college. His request is going to be transformative in a number of ways. Fifteen million dollars of it will go to the music building as a main part of his gift, but the construction cost of the building will be at least $30 million. So we are using his gift to attract other gifts to show that we have a major start on that project but we need help from other people. Ten million dollars of that gift will go to scholarship and again that was a very important interest of Mr. Zankel when he was alive and that was a very important interest of the college. A part of that will go towards a new program that we are working to develop in art management. The rest is going to go to our endowment. So all of these different dimensions of these gifts as we use it will go straight to the college and also we believe will encourage others who truly value what we are doing to follow his example and invest in our vision of what the college is on the road to becoming.
SM: Do you think Skidmore has difficulty branding its names to students nationally?
PG: I don't believe so, I think that nationally Skidmore is a very recognizable name and people have very positive associations with the college. Once you go past that initial thought that people have when they hear the name, sometimes people don't have additional detail to put behind it so they may not know exactly where the college is or exactly what it does, which is why we have been working very hard to provide that information. Skidmore is becoming better known nationally, it has always been a national college but there are some places which did not know it very well. We are working very hard in large part through our admission effort to spread the word of what we do and about the kind of college that we are. The phrase which I think we have used very successfully over the past few years, "Creative Thought Matters," is a phrase that does capture something very important about what we are and that phrase not only reflects what happens at Skidmore but it also resonates very well with people who again I think are coming increasing to appreciate the importance of creative thought in the environment of the twenty-first century.
SM: Alright, this last question brings us full circle back to you. What does success mean to you? Not the success of Skidmore College or success as the president of Skidmore College, but personally- what is Success to you?
PG: Success for me involves leaving the world better than I found it and I would like to believe that the work that we do as an educational institution does that in the most profound sense. Because we affect peoples' lives when they are younger and give them the foundation that they need to go out in turn and leave the world a better place than they found it. So, that is the best example of success that I can give-the best definition of it. I would like to think that when I am finished with my career, I can turn around and look and say because of the work that I have done and the work that I have done collaborating with others, since no one does anything substantial alone, that I believe that this world is a better place.
|
