Dear Jimmy ...

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.

When we want to know where an institution's most important priorities are, we need to look no further than the budget. Ergo, if we look to Trinity's budget, despite the difficult decisions we have had to make, a number of critically important values stand out. First, we know that our students are the reason the institution exists; so we have increased financial aid for fiscal 2008 by 13.7 percent, and this on top of a 12 percent increase this year alone. Second, we know that we must compensate our faculty and staff as best we can; so we have instituted as high a compensation increase as we can for fiscal 2008 and have increased that projection by another percent going out five years. We have increased faculty research and development support to the highest levels in Trinity's history and intend to hold that support at these historic levels. And we have simultaneously increased funding for student research to all-time highs here at our College.

Reputations take years to build, and sometimes when negative things occur, those carefully wrought reputations can be harmed by the actions of administrators, faculty, or students. Each of us is a steward of Trinity's reputation, and there are certainly signs that external entities are looking upon our actions in positive ways. Just a few days ago, we learned from Standard and Poors, one of the two most important financial rating firms in the US if not the world, that they had removed a "negative outlook" for their financial rating of Trinity's present fiscal situation and replaced that less than positive rating with a "stable outlook." This may not seem to many important, but it is a critical sign that we are getting our financial house in order, thanks to Vice Presidents Reese and Joyce, and to the excellent work being done by their respective staffs. Another indication that Trinity is sailing into the right winds was the decision of a committee at the Mellon Foundation in New York City to recommend to their board of trustees that Trinity, along with only two other colleges in the entire country, receive a three million dollar endowment grant to support our urban-global initiative that came from the Cornerstones strategic planning exercise in the 2004-2005 academic year. Liberal arts colleges will simply have to have some sort of recognizable point of difference as the demographic cohorts begin to change, and Trinity's urban-global engagement probably cannot be replicated by any other major liberal arts college in the country. This should be the foundation for our reputation in the future.

My best guess is that Trinity is moving forward at a remarkable pace right now. The achievements of the Advancement division last year were historic, by anyone's measure. We are hiring wonderful faculty, and those faculty are doing exemplary work. As I am writing this article for the campus newspaper, Professor Craig Schneider's research has been singled out nationally. Every time a faculty member gives a paper or teaches a transformational class, every time one of our students does something noteworthy, every time one of our alumni is singled out, Trinity's flag flies proudly. And our reputation nationally will only improve as well continue to do everything we can to advance the College and not to harm it in any way.

Please send any questions for President Jimmy Jones to

tripod@trincoll.edu