New College President to Retire, Return to the Classroom

New College of Florida recently announced that Dr. Gordon E. “Mike” Michalson, Jr. will retire from his role as president to return to the classroom as a professor of religion, effective July 2012. At this time, he will have served as the college’s chief administrative officer for 16 of the past 20 years. Since Michalson took over as Dean and Warden in 1992, New College has become an independent member of the state university system, gained widespread recognition for academic excellence and maintained strong funding despite drastic cuts to higher education.

Patch: You were quoted on [New College’s website] as having said the institution stands to “benefit from fresh vision.” Tell me about what returning to the classroom means for you.

Gordon Michalson: It really is a fundamental matter of what I most enjoy doing. Plus the classroom reinforces my research and writing. It’s very hard to do that when you’re full-time administration, running around the state and the country. And I have a busy family life, a son who is entering high school. […]

Patch: What is the first thing that comes to your mind when you think of how much New College has changed in the past 20 years and all that you’ve presided over?

GM: It’s bigger and it’s now a freestanding independent member of the state university system. I think my role has been to lead us through the transition from being New College of the University of South Florida (USF) to being New College of Florida. When we first went independent in 2001, we did not have sufficient funding to stand on our own feet. We had some issues in state politics that threatened our continued existence as a freestanding place. Some of my colleagues in the presidential arena were taking bets on which large institution we’d be folded back into in a couple of years. So it was a fairly sobering environment. My commitment was, with the strong support from our Board of Trustees, to lead us to full freestanding position as the thriving 11th member of the system. And I think we’ve achieved that – in fact, the state is pretty quick to brag about us now.

Patch: Why it was so important that New College established independence?

GM: The first thing that comes to mind is that it puts us in a position to have a single message about our mission. […] In the pre-independence days, you drove on campus and you saw the USF’s name on buildings as well as New College’s. […] So by being freestanding and having a singular brand message, it’s been easier to convey our message about our undergraduate mission.

Patch: Is it just a matter of explanation, or are there also issues of institutional structure?

GM: You’re absolutely right, and the structure begins with having our own Board of Trustees [...] Despite the cuts in recent years, our state appropriations are up enormously since we went independent, and that’s been driven much by our Board of Trustees saying, 'Here’s the ambitious direction we’re going to go.' […]

Patch: What is behind the growth of New College? Is there a vision where it should get to a certain place, is it growth for its own sake, or is it just kind of a natural progression?

GM: It’s a little of all of those things. When I came here in 1992, we had 490 students. And that struck me and a whole lot of other people as too small and we developed a growth plan to go to 650. And the plan included the commitment of no drop in quality of the student body, which means you wouldn’t be growing by admitting students who wouldn't otherwise be qualified. And keeping the student-faculty ratio intact, which meant adding faculty as you grew. And thirdly, continue to house 75-80% of students on campus, which is why over the last 15 years or so, the biggest capital improvement projects on campus have been dormitories. […]

I think it’s interestingly taken the turn toward the question of what’s the optimum size for delivering the New College education?

I think 1,200 and I’ve been public about that in the past. I don’t think we should stop at 800, although we’ve taken a timeout because of the wider budgetary situation. But my first and foremost reason for thinking a little bigger than we are now is to have more faculty and a deeper, richer curriculum. Students have more choice of what they do, aren’t so dependent on simply succeeding and having a good personal relationship with the one or two people in their field.

The challenge here is that in more recent years, nobody can quite tell where the liberal arts curriculum is going. If you look at the positions we’ve added most recently, they’re in fields like bioinformatics. Who the hell would have known that five years ago? 

Patch: How has funding remained so strong?

GM: […] We’ve been able to convince [the Board of Governors] to persist in asking for budget enhancements for us at a time when everyone else is being cut. But we’re not immune to the cuts. […] We’re taking about a $1.2 million cut in appropriations.

We’ll make up some of that through tuition increases. In other words, we’re continuing the trend toward having students bear more and more of the cost of higher education, and you can imagine the debate that that creates. From the standpoint of students and their families, that might create outrage until you point out that Florida is 48 in the nation in the level of instate tuition. And shouldn’t Florida be a little bit closer to the middle of the pack – which would be almost twice what we’re charging now.

We’re in our fourth year of cuts in the state and as you know, the bigger schools have really taken a serious hit and had to close down some degree programs and eliminate some positions. We’re not in that position. 

Patch: What does it mean in this age to be as academically prestigious as New College, while also being a liberal arts college?

GM: It’s challenging to get the message across. […] As I sometimes semi-jokingly say when I’m out there working with the legislature or whatever, and I talk about a liberal arts education, all some people hear is the word liberal and it makes them jittery. […] You’ve got this kind of queasy, weird, vague notion of what a liberal arts college is, and people don’t hang around for the longer elevator speech about critical thinking, the ability to think across disciplinary lines, the ability to communicate clearly, problem-solving, the ability to design large projects.

And yet we’re so committed to the value of this kind of education is that we run the risk of becoming captive of our own rhetoric and forgetting that we need to interpret what we do to the outside world. 

If people are willing to stay around long enough to hear the really long speech, what strikes me as really important is you used to go to college to study to be a lawyer, a doctor, a businessperson, an educator. You and I and all of our 10 smartest friends together can’t name the careers that current college students will have 10 years from now, let alone 20 or 30 years. The fields have not been created. […] So what kind of college education is most important for that kind of world? I happen to think it’s a variation on what the liberal arts experience is all about. If you’re just preparing people for their first job, you’re not doing justice by them, because they’ll be obsolete in no time, and they won’t be able to adapt to the new changing circumstances.

Patch: Is there anything you’d like to touch on?

GM: Well, we haven’t talked about how honored I’ve been for the Board of Trustees and the campus community and the alums to entrust me with this position for so long. I think what most people want in a President is someone who can speak convincingly on behalf of the school’s mission and who kind of, if you will, embodies the mission. I’m not the world’s best manager. I’m not the world’s best administrator – in fact I’m a pretty weak administrator in some respects, because I lack a certain ruthlessness that is sometimes called for in this line of work. But I think I not only get the liberal arts deal, from first-hand professional experience, but I think I have a strong appreciation for what’s central to the ethos here. I’ve been here almost 20 years and I’ve stayed here on purpose. I’ve had multiple opportunities to go to bigger places, including when I was first named President and I was considering an offer from Brown University. So I think I’ve been fortunate in the response by the wider campus community to the sense of connectedness they see between me and the mission. And I’m just very honored that people have given that trust to me over the years.