Green’s View, Sewanee. A beautiful that adjoins the University’s golf course that you can walk to.

I have not been able to post blogs because of my travels during the last couple of weeks in June. First, I was at the annual meeting of Consortium of Liberal Arts Colleges (CLAC) at the University of the South at Sewanee, Tennessee. Then, my wife and I traveled in Scotland for a few days.

I really enjoy the CLAC meetings because it is a fairly small gathering of like minded colleagues from other small liberal arts colleges with plenty of time built in for networking. The keynotes and the presentations I went to were very interesting, including a keynote by the John M. McCardell, JR., Vice Chancellor of the University of the South, who provided a vigorous defense of liberal arts institutions. Of course, he was preaching to the choir and touched on many of the challenges we continue to face.

The talk by John McCardell quoted Steve Jobs saying ““It is in Apple’s DNA that technology alone is not enough—it’s technology married with liberal arts, married with the humanities, that yields us the results that make our heart sing.” It is so true. If I am not mistaken, the examples John provided as the ways in which technology can play an important part in supporting the University were all administrative uses, which I found to be a bit disappointing.

The best keynote was by Susan Metros who talked about leadership. I agreed with most of her observations and advice. You can read my tweets during her talk as well as all through the conference here. Her classification of leaders into “Aspiring”, “Inspiring” and “Expiring” leaders was very thoughtful and mentioned how a leader could be expiring in one area but is aspiring to do something totally different. I see this all the time amongst my friends and colleagues.

Heather Woods and I gave a talk on challenges of managing an organization like ours. It was well attended and I thought the presentation went well and the audience found it to be useful. There were a few questions and good discussion that followed. Since we are one of the attendees who have implemented Workday, several of the colleagues had a lot of questions for me regarding it, which I was more than happy to share.

The campus is beautiful and sprawling. On my way to the University from the Highway Exit, I was unable to locate pretty much anything! So I was curious to know where the faculty and staff who worked there lived and where they went shopping etc. A few live in Sewanee and others in surrounding areas and I found out that to do any serious shopping they need to go to Chattanooga, about an hour away.

All in all, it was yet another great meeting and I look forward to the next one in Swarthmore, PA. Once our facilities projects are over, we would like to host a CLAC annual conference at Wellesley.