A Letter From the President

Dear Alumni and Friends, When the magazine committee and I determined the theme of this year’s Owl & Spade—Exploring Uncharted Territory—in October of 2019, it was months before the coronavirus barrelled through our world. The pandemic deeply affected Warren Wilson College and quite literally everyone in our extended community, thereby making this prescient theme even more resonant. And, as I write this letter in the middle of the summer of 2020, the murder of George Floyd by Minneapolis police has become a tragic and historic cultural reckoning point that inspired significantly more widespread support for the Black Lives Matter movement—not only adding pressure on police departments to dramatically improve their practices, but also calling on all of us to examine the systemic racism at our own institutions as well as our own individual biases.

I’m inspired by the renewed focus on racial justice work in our country and at our College. We have a long-standing commitment to diversity, equity, inclusion, and social justice; these values are explicitly named in our 2022 Strategic Plan. As a result of an important catalyst provided by our own Black Student Union (BSU) demanding that the administration move more quickly, we committed at the end of June to several programmatic plans and the hiring of two new positions: a Director of Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion (DEI) Initiatives working with faculty to complement our existing student-facing Director of Wilson Inclusion, Diversity, and Equity (WIDE), as well as a Chief Diversity Officer at the cabinet level. This is an evolving process. There have been starts and stops in the past, but I am committed to investing in the long-term sustainability of this work and our accountability as leaders supporting it.

In recent years, higher education has faced an uncertain future on many fronts. In early spring 2020, we had begun to leverage our strengths to prepare for the challenges ahead. As a result, we created the inaugural Blue Ocean Strategy Summit to bring together a room full of community innovators to explore partnership opportunities for the College. At the event, we discussed the thematic work of Harvard researchers who created the concept of the “Blue Ocean Strategy”—an approach in which businesses create new marketspaces and demand instead of fiercely competing in existing, densely competitive markets. While the ideas generated that day were all suggested in the context of what I’ll call the “old normal,” one of the benefits of having them as we began to tackle the health challenges of the coronavirus and resulting economic downturn was that the working groups we created to respond to the immediate crisis are also utilizing these new ideas to look to the future of our College and our world. I’m proud of our community for rising to meet the task at hand, as well as dreaming about—and working toward—an innovative future.

Warren Wilson has always explored uncharted territory. It’s in our DNA. The stories you’ll read and the images you’ll see in this magazine metaphorically represent the calculated risks we are willing to take to develop ourselves, our community, and our region through trying new things and supporting each other through difficult experiences.

The cover of this magazine, by Art Professor Lara Nguyen, incredibly represents who we are and where we are right now. We may be a small boat, but we will continue, as always, to embark on endeavors that match our lofty ambition much more than our actual size. We have had to make difficult decisions, but that will always be the case for institutions like ours. And we know that we’ll emerge from this time stronger than before because of the ethos of this community and the support of our alumni and friends.

In community,

Lynn M. Morton, President