Mindfulness leader Jon Kabat-Zinn is quoted as saying, “You can’t stop the waves, but you can learn to surf.” I believe this captures our reality at MVCC — we are learning to surf, and surf well.
As I enter my 17th year as President of MVCC, I am continually inspired by the resilience, hard work, and caring manner of MVCC faculty and staff, and our collective ability to adapt. I feel like I’m just starting my third presidency — they all just happen to have been at MVCC.
The first period, from 2007 to 2014, was dominated by enrollment growth fueled by the Great Recession, strengthening systems, and building capacity. The second period, from 2015 to 2022, centered around increasing student success with our Guided Pathways reforms and, of course, navigating challenges of the COVID-19 pandemic. Now, it feels as though we are transitioning to a new era at the College — one likely filled with programs and services delivered at a speed and scale through partnerships we can hardly imagine today.
I find insight in Japanese novelist Haruki Murakami’s quote, “When you come out of the storm, you won't be the same person who walked in. That is what this storm is all about.” Similarly, as an organization, we have undergone significant changes through numerous Guided Pathways initiatives to transform the student experience — all while enduring the COVID-19 pandemic, processing millions of dollars in stimulus funds to make up for lost revenue, and redesigning workflows and job responsibilities across departments to absorb a 9% reduction in our full-time staffing pattern by eliminating 35 full-time positions and laying off three existing staff members.
We’ve had to surf the waves as they came.
It’s not easy navigating our environment when the economy of Upstate New York has a 3.3% unemployment rate and a shrinking number of high school graduates. This is compounded with public and private four-year colleges lowering their admissions standards and accepting students they wouldn’t have considered five years ago — students who otherwise would have attended a community college. And the State of New York, which is supposed to provide roughly one-third of our operational revenue, gave us only $350,000 more this year than they did in 2008. Despite being part of a “historic” $163M investment for public higher education in the recent state budget, community colleges received the same level of funding as last year and were told to be grateful. Read more in my May 2 blog post, “Against the Odds.”
How do I know we’re learning to surf at MVCC? Well, at a time when the Gallup organization publishes research on employee engagement and says that workers are “burned out” and “disengaged,” last spring’s employee survey showed that 89% of full-time employees feel proud to be a part of MVCC, and 80% look forward to coming to work each day. This pride and enthusiasm show up in our collaborative efforts with school district partners to reimagine the high school-to-college transition, as well as our ongoing efforts to redesign core programs and services to meet individualized needs and restore the promise of education with our FastTrack Career Programs, specifically designed to serve adults who have fallen through the cracks of our educational system. I will share a more detailed white paper on this “reimagine, redesign, and restore” framework in a future blog post.
As we pursue the “re-work” strategies mentioned above, we know artificial intelligence (AI) is a game changer — much like the internet was 30 years ago. We recognize this moment and stand ready to meet it at MVCC. AI will be the primary focus of our organizational learning in the coming year with webinars, workshops, and crowdsourcing opportunities for faculty and staff to learn together and do what MVCC does best — scan our environment, analyze best and emerging practices, and adapt what works into our culture in ways that make us better and stronger.
As punctuated as the change of the last several years has been, I believe the coming year may be one of relative equilibrium — the calm before another storm if you will. It will be a time for us to navigate the intensity of the daily crunch, but also a time to take a collective breath to take stock of how far we’ve come and consider the next strategic arc for the College. It will also be a time for us to ask ourselves important questions that need to be asked in ways that will better position us with a sense of readiness for whatever comes next.
With all this in mind, as I think about MVCC and the future, I’m reminded of this quote of unknown source: “Fate whispered to the warrior, you cannot withstand the storm. The warrior whispers back, I am the storm.”
If you have any questions or comments, please contact me directly at presblog@mvcc.edu.
