The Tripod

Issue date: 12/12/06 Section: Opinions

Media Credit: Abi Moldover

What things can be done to improve Trinity's national reputation? 

School reputations are very amorphous, very intangible and subjective things. Schools carry their own histories for decades, as anyone who studies the American academy knows for certain. Many individuals will harbor ideas, positive or negative, about an institution because of the actions of one leader, the reputation of a group of faculty at some point in the institution's history, or the achievements of alumni.  Here is a pertinent example.  To this day, there are individuals who still think about the University of Chicago because of one president: Robert Maynard Hutchins.  Hutchins developed a very strong relationship with Chicago's primary benefactor, John D. Rockefeller. Hutchins began an experiment with a prep school located on campus, completely overhauled the undergraduate curriculum in the 1930s, started the project that some of our students' parents knew as "The Great Books," published by Encyclopedia Britannica, and hired some of the most brilliant scholars of his time.  The ethos of the "Hutchins College" as it was called extended even to the graffiti in the men's room of the library where on one stall was written, "Would the individual who took the Second Book of the Poetics from the library please return same immediately?"  The anecdote is both significant and humorous, since no one has seen the Second Book of Aristotle's Poetics at least since the sacking of the Library of Alexandria in ancient days.  And yet to this day, the aura of the "Hutchins College" still looms positively over the University of Chicago. And largely the school's reputation for excellence stems from actions taken there more than seventy years ago.

I have always thought about Trinity's reputation in fairly simple terms: a school's reputation can sometimes be based on the national reputation of that institution's leader, as in Hutchins's case, but most often a school's reputation is based primarily on the strength of the faculty, on the prowess of the students, and on the achievements of those students once they have left, formulated adult lives of their own, and once they have done everything they could possibly do to make a mark on the world.  And my relatively simple view of those bases upon which a school's reputation is best founded must be reflected in the choices one makes about where to spend the institution's money.  It is no secret to anyone at Trinity that we have been trying our best to grapple with some systemic budgetary issues lying underneath the surface for approximately ten years.  Here too, I think about these complicated matters in simple terms.  When we want to know where a family's most important priorities are, we need to look no further than our checkbooks to see what is important enough to be supported fully.

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