Party with a Purpose
I love a good party as much as the next person. But more than the party itself, what I really love is the reason for the party.
I’ve had the privilege of planning a lot of “parties” with meaning, having spent most of my career as a communications leader in higher education. Colleges and universities typically celebrate major milestones in grand style, often building fundraising campaigns around them—and with good reason. Milestones, including significant anniversaries and leadership transitions, present singular opportunities to unite and inspire a community and to assert an institution’s identity, value, and relevance to the wider world. Today—when trust in institutions is at an all-time low, polarization is at an all-time high, and higher education is viewed mostly as an individual commodity rather than a public good—it is especially true that institutions should seize upon the opportunity provided by milestone occasions to declare and celebrate two powerful truths: Who you are and why you matter.
Build Pride
Reaching a milestone—a centennial or bicentennial of a college’s founding, or an anniversary of a significant moment or era in an institution’s history—is an achievement worthy of pride in itself. How many organizations or businesses endure for a century or more, after all? (Side note: Why is it that colleges are increasingly expected to “run like a business,” yet when one of those businesses fails, it somehow signals the impending demise and failed model of the entire sector?) But merely celebrating longevity barely scratches the surface in terms of the opportunity such a milestone provides to build pride among your community.
The milestone is your news peg. It’s your reason to tell your story from the beginning, showing its evolution and highlighting the ways in which it has made better individual lives, local communities, and whole societies. Think of it as your institution’s George Bailey moment. How different would the world be if your institution had never existed? Find the stories of impact—discoveries made, lives transformed—and make sure they are part of your narrative. Your community will share immense pride in that narrative, knowing the concrete and lasting contributions your institution has made and seeing themselves as part of carrying on that tradition.
Dartmouth’s “Points of Pride,” developed in celebration of its 250th birthday in 2019, did a good job of highlighting the college’s achievements and contributions to the world, especially those stories in the Discovery & Innovation collection.
Oregon State University won a CASE Circle of Excellence Award for its comprehensive, 15-monthlong 150th celebration, OSU150, which included four festivals, an hourlong documentary, an exhibit at the Oregon Historical Society, and a daylong symposium on artificial intelligence and robotics.
Of course, there are examples outside of higher education, too, such as IBM at 100, which included the exceptional “100X100” video that chronicled the company’s history and how it changed the world.
In sharing such a narrative, you are demonstrating to the wider world the enduring value and relevance of your mission. The need to do so is urgent in higher education, at a time when nearly two-thirds of Republicans in the U.S. say colleges have a negative effect on the country, and when pretty much every mainstream news organization does at least one “Is college worth it?” feature each year. Amid rising costs and intense competition for students, we have communicated the value of education largely in terms of the benefits a degree confers upon an individual. What’s lost is a focus on the universal purpose of higher education, which is no less than the advancement of humanity.
There is value and pride, as well, in confronting the parts of your institution’s history that are problematic (more on this in a coming blogpost). And there is no better time to face your history than during the commemoration of a milestone anniversary. The potential negative consequences of not doing so are enormous.
Bridge Divides
A second strategic value inherent in milestones is the opportunity to unite disparate and disconnected (even disaffected) parts of your community. In celebrating the occasion, you’re centering the institution as a cause or shared purpose, which can create connections from one generation to another, from campus to all parts of the globe, and from one side of the political aisle to the other. And you provide an opportunity for all of those parts of your community to feel seen, heard, and valued.
Historical perspective is critical to understanding the current moment and to bridging its divides. If you work in college advancement, you are undoubtedly very familiar with alumni dissatisfaction voiced as, “That’s not the college I remember.” Many alumni and retired faculty and staff may only get quick impressions of today’s campus, and those may be influenced or distorted by broader skepticism toward higher education (see above), which can exacerbate feelings of disconnect and disaffection. Highlighting stories from previous generations—and, importantly, showing how they paved the way for the college of today—can be powerful connectors and give today’s campus community members valuable perspective on the work they are doing to effect change.
The lack of such perspective is both self-centered and isolating, and colleges should work hard to combat it—as faculty surely do in the classroom. We should use every occasion we can, for example, to show today’s students what college campuses were actually like 50 years ago. Let’s connect today’s students directly with alumni from the early 1970s, when college campuses were the epicenters of protest against the Vietnam War, when many campuses were going co-ed and recruiting students of color and of diverse religious and socioeconomic backgrounds, and when student activism led to the expansion of curricula and brought attention to myriad systemic inequalities.
They may not have had to survive a pandemic, but students from that era faced great unrest, uncertainty, and tragedy. These two large generations have much in common and much to learn from one another. For others—alumni from the ’60s, ’80s, and ’90s, for instance—seeing that connection made may serve to remind them that student protest is a throughline, not a symptom of something new and rotten, just as continual evolution is a required condition for any institution that seeks to endure.
That’s one example. There are many other ways to bring together seemingly divergent audiences, and a milestone occasion can be the connective tissue.
Presidential inaugurations serve well in this regard, as was the case with the induction of Oberlin President Carmen Twillie Ambar back in 2018. As the college noted on its inauguration website, “Inauguration offers an opportunity to invest in the institution and embrace our mission, but more important, grabs hold of the opportunity to lead.” Ambar’s inaugural address drew on the college’s long history of change and the challenges that accompany it as a reminder that this work is difficult and messy, and that the tasks of leadership today are to carry on the tradition of bold evolution to be “who we need to be.”
When I led communications at Trinity College in Hartford, we celebrated the 50th anniversary of coeducation with a three-semester initiative that honored the past, considered the present, and contemplated the future of the coed liberal arts college. Current students, faculty, and administrators connected to those who pioneered the change. At a celebration in the spring highlighting 50 mostly younger women (including many students and early-career faculty) selected by the community as “50 for the Next 50,” the result of those connections was palpable joy. Many told me it was the single best event they’d ever experienced in their time at Trinity, whether that was a year or a half-century. They felt valued, they felt belonging, and they felt part of a mission that mattered.
Institutions can identify similar opportunities specific to their communities and invite diverse voices and active participation. Those who join in will, in turn, know that the college values them and their experiences and, importantly, move beyond caricatures and culture war labels to make meaningful connections.
Inspire Engagement and Support
A milestone occasion done right doesn’t only look back; it’s your single best opportunity to connect the past to the future and get everyone on board for the journey ahead. A commemoration steeped in purpose positions an institution to pose big questions about its future and ask its community to join in answering them. Conversely, an institution can’t begin to answer, “Who will we be in the future?” or “What difference will we make?” without first knowing its history and its core values.
Former Williams College President Jack Sawyer looms large in that institution’s story; as president from 1961 to 1973, he led a transformation of the college that included the elimination of fraternities and compulsory chapel; the admission of women and diversification of the student body, faculty, and trustees; the expansion of the curriculum—including the creation of a center for environmental studies, programs in African-American studies and women’s studies, and a graduate program in art history—and the building of a science center and completion of a fundraising campaign eight times the size of the one before it.
I had the pleasure of leading the communications operation as we approached the 50th anniversary of the Sawyer era. We designed a celebration of that transformational decade as a means of imagining its future. That program, Daring Change, was a highly collaborative series of campus-wide, public events that involved a whole lot of looking back and a great deal of looking forward, namely in a full day of TED-like talks by community members on their aspirations for the college. The big questions they explored—Who will we be? How will we teach and learn? What difference will we make?—became the narrative structure for the fundraising priorities of the $650-million comprehensive campaign that followed. The campaign began with a year of regional kickoff events, at which we demonstrated the relevance and value of a Williams education by showcasing the impact of its alumni in addressing some of the world’s most pressing issues (sustainability, education, justice and equity, and more). The campaign closed in 2019, having raised more than $700 million and engaged more than 85 percent of alumni.
Indeed, campaigns themselves are milestones in a way. Their aim is to raise money, but their greater purpose is to unite a community in taking up a shared cause. I learned a long time ago from Simon Sinek that leaders inspire action with their belief in a cause. “People don’t buy what you do, they buy why you do it,” Sinek says in one of my all-time favorite TED talks.
Start with why, Sinek reminds us. Anniversaries, inaugurations, and campaigns are ideal opportunities to do just that, and to inspire people to take up your institution as their cause.
